|
The world according to
Francis
Bacon
After
50 years as an artist,
Bacon's
credo remains the same:
Realism
pushed to the edge
By
ALAN G. ARTNER | ARTS | THE
CHICAGO TRIBUNE | SUNDAY,
OCTOBER 29, 1989
"Head VI" (1949) is a composite of Velasquez'
1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X and a shot of the screaming nurse in
Sergei Eisenstein's "The Battleship Potemkin."
Eighteen years ago, an international
poll of curators and museum directors named British artist Francis Bacon the
world's finest living painter.
At the time, it was a questionable
choice, given that Bacon's earliest and strongest influence, Pablo Picasso,
was still alive. But Picasso had just reached 90, the re-evaluation of his
late work had not yet begun and many felt he had already had more than his
share of the limelight.
Now, with Bacon turned 80, the
phenomenon repeats itself. For while Europeans tend to canonize Grand Old
Men, Americans react differently, taking them down a peg or two, denying in
life precisely the honours that will be acknowledged at death.
So the retrospective exhibition of 58
Bacon paintings at Washington D.C.'s Hirshhorn Museum, may not be quite the
celebration its organizers intended. At the artist's last big show in an
American museum-36 paintings at the Metropolitan in 1975-critic Tom Hess
wrote that "Bacon's energy seems to flag" and artist Douglas
Davis found "a parade of predictable images, mottled and distorted
in predictable ways." The fangs already had been bared. Still, the
biggest problem with Bacon today is less his work than nearly a half-century
of its interpretation. After all, he was supposed to be the one painter who
consistently tried to sum up the agony of modern man. He looked into the
abyss and took away a tragic vision. He was the messenger who brought
depravity, decay and death.
What's more, his images were said to
have the strength of hammer blows. Crucifixions, screaming Popes, tormented
animals, bestial lovers-all this was in Bacon's painting. And there were few
artistic refinements. Critics told us he was the mid-century's most violent
nihilist.
But to those who asked the artist about
his art, the answers were markedly different:
"I have nothing to express about the human condition . . . ."
"I can't paint for other people. I can only paint to excite
myself."
"I have never tried to be horrific."
"I believe that reality in art is something profoundly artificial and
that it has to be re-created."
". . . 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."
In sum, here was an artist who thought like an artist, and that should
not have surprised anybody. But the fact that Bacon put aesthetics before
philosophy and was less involved with 'message' than with colour and form has
surprised people. And critics who saw his early paintings as existential
illustrations later turned sour upon finding his newer works ever more
concerned with the issues of art.
Admittedly, his view of life is
unusual, insofar as he accepts calmly what others might find terrifying. But
this way of seeing is an artist's way, and it shows extraordinary detachment.
Where viewers of his paintings may react strongly and rush to judge, Bacon
himself does not. He is the archetypally cool observer.
He also is a miraculous portraitist who
captures not only the subject's appearance but what Bacon calls
"the energy within the appearance." This he achieves through
radical abbreviations and distortions. As he has said, "What I want to
do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion
to bring it back to a recording of the appearance." Put another
way, he uses extreme artifice to reach verisimilitude.
Much of each painting Bacon attributes
to chance. Working directly on the canvas without preliminary drawings,
accidents often suggest new images, and so, what others again might see as a
calamity, Bacon accepts as fortuitous.
He has tried to explain how he got that
view, by recalling how his father caught him dressed in his mother's lingerie
and sent him from his home in provincial Ireland. The happy result was that
young Bacon ended up in Berlin in the 1920s, one of the most open cities in
the world.
He has cited, too, how he saw a Picasso
exhibition in Paris and, with no formal training or idea of his skills, knew
he would become a painter. Until then, Bacon had little schooling of any kind
and a distracting appetite for pleasure. But happening upon that exhibition
instantly gave him resolve. And nothwithstanding a brief, moderately
successful interlude as a furniture designer, his course remained fixed.
The results have fallen into three
distinct phases, only two of which are ever shown. Bacon destroyed nearly all
of the Picasso-inspired pieces from the '30s, and no museum exhibition has
ever brought the remaining ones together. Thus, his Three Studies for Figures at the
Base of a Crucifixion (1944),
which depicts mutants at once sorrowing and menacing, has often mistakenly
been seen as a product of the war instead of a world view the artist
developed long before it.
The chief influences of Bacon's second
phase were again other artists, though now through two specific works:
Velasquez' 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X and the shot of the screaming
nurse in The Battleship
Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein's film from 1925. These images together are
behind nearly a decade of Bacon's most famous works.
Then, in the late '50s, came the
impress of motion studies by American photographer Eadweard Muybridge and
Bacon's decision to make friends and lovers his primary subjects. This phase,
gradually becoming more seductive in colour and form, continues today. But in
the early '80s, Bacon also turned back to art, again taking inspiration from
older paintings-including, surprisingly, his own.
The show at the Hirshhorn begins with
the raw Figure in a
Landscape from 1945 and
ends with Second Version of
Triptych 1944, a refined reimagination of Three Studies for Figures at the
Base of a Crucifixion. It is just this progression-rawness to
refinement-that will once more disturb Bacon's sternest critics. For the
changes he has effected in scale, surface and colour make the grisly
biomorphic subjects of the Triptych more aesthetically satisfying but have
little to do with the images original power. Every painting on show is
powerful, but not always in the way commentators once thought. They are
powerful-and often quite beautiful-not as documents ripped from the psyche of
an Everyman but simply as examples of painting, the practice that makes
visible all sorts of accidents and deliberations.
For many, this will not be enough.
Generations of viewers may well prefer Bacon's works when the artist was
technically groping and his awkwardness enhanced an overall impression of
rawness. But one should remember that Bacon's view of the world was always
calm, distanced, matter of fact, and it was only natural that his formal
delivery should one day also carry that tone.
The newer works are wonderful precisely in
the degree that they intertwine beauty and ugliness without any great fuss
and absolutely no recoil. However, at this stage in the 20th Century,
everyone is anxious about the status of painting and its continued ability to
communicate. In fact, everyone has such nostalgia for the days when painting
was more central to life that it proves a terrible letdown to have to
acknowledge painting is now only painting and not an
agent of catharsis embedded in some incredibly far- reaching philosophical
tract.
Bacon has faced this like everything
else. He has said: ". . .all art has now become completely a game by
which man distracts himself." But he also has become awfully good at
playing that game, and more's the pity if viewers fail to see it.
Francis Bacon continues at the Hirshhorn Museum &
Sculpture Garden, Independence at Eighth Street, Washington, D.C., through
Jan. 7. Thereafter, it will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum (Feb.
11-April 29) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (May 24-Aug. 28).
Bacon
has always worked in an atmosphere of chaos, or as he describes it,
"gilded squalor."
BACON'S
SUBLIME SCREAMS
PAUL RICHARD | THE
WASHINGTON POST | OCTOBER
12, 1989
His canvases, worth millions each, hang
in frames of burnished gold. They smell of blood and vomit.
He is, as he set out to be, England's
greatest painter. He drinks the best champagne, competes with the old masters
- and works in utter squalor. His stroke is magisterial. The howling beings
he conjures - their faces smeared, their bodies flayed - writhe within
their cageslike men turned into meat.
Francis Bacon's paintings, with their
screamings and their crouchings, their towering ambitions and their
sordidness of subject, tear your soul in two. Sixty of the fiercest he has
made since World War II have been picked by James T. Demetrion for the
staggering retrospective that goes on view today at the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden. To see them is to shudder with amazement and disgust. The
tension they engender - between faith in art's transcendence and inconsolable
despair, between imagined flesh and real paint - is just about unbearable. No
master now alive - Bacon will be 80 on Oct. 28 - applies paint with such
lusciousness. Or portrays such lamentations.
He understands completely the power of
the paradox. When Bacon depicts love, he paints grapplings and grief. "If
life excites you," he has said, "its opposite, like a shadow,
death, must excite you, too." In everything he does, in his living, in
his painting, he pries opposites apart. You stare into the void before his
elegant yet awful, physically sublime, down-and-dirty art.
He might dwell in a mansion now. One of
Bacon's Triptychs was auctioned off in May for $6.27 million at Sotheby's New
York. Instead his life is lived in what he calls "gilded squalor."
He carries round a wad of bills, but wears the same black turtlenecks, and
drinks in the same seedy bars, and paints his costly pictures in a filthy
London studio, with paint smears on the wall and rags and refuse underfoot.
He has said, "I would like my
pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail,
leaving a trail of the human presence ... as the snail leaves its
slime."
And yet he puts the paint on with brio
and panache and absolute assurance. In his paintings, in his presence, one
senses in his sufferings something close to joy.
I met him only once, in New York in
1975, at a wet and costly lunch. He kept pouring the champagne. He said,
"Life is wholly futile." He said all his friends were dead.
"Wholly futile," he repeated, smiling at the waiter: "Another
dozen oysters, please."
When the painter, born in Dublin,
speaks about his life, he relates, with that same friendly grace, a tale
touched by horror.
"I never got on with either my
mother or my father," he once told David Sylvester. "They thought I
was just a drifter. ... As you know, {my father} was a trainer of racehorses.
And he just fought with people. He really had no friends at all. ... I
disliked him, but I was sexually attracted to him when I was young. When I
first sensed it, I hardly knew it was sexual. It was only later, through the
grooms and the people in the stable I had affairs with, that I realized it
was a sexual thing. ... {I} was brought up during the Sinn Fein movement. And
I lived for a time with my grandmother, who married the commissioner of
police for Kildare amongst her numerous marriages, and we lived in a
sandbagged house. ... And then, when I was 16 or 17, I went to Berlin, and of
course I saw the Berlin of 1927 and 1928 where there was a wide open city,
which was, in a way, very, very violent. ... And after Berlin I went to
Paris, and then I lived all those disturbed years between then and the war,
which started in 1939. So I could say, perhaps, I have been accustomed to
always living through forms of violence."
You see that in his art. Men knotted
like wrestlers copulate on Bacon's beds, or furtively, at night, on the grass
of public parks. The tortured souls that he portrays hug themselves in pain,
or plunge hypodermic needles deep into their arms. His popes scream silent
screams. His baboons raise their snouts to howl, his trotting dog (a strange
pastiche of an Eadweard Muybridge photograph and Giacomo Balla painting)
pauses at a grating as if to sniff the sewer rats scuttling below.
Love, in Bacon's pictures, is often
twinned with foulness and with death. He's said, "I've always thought of
friendship as where two people really tear each other apart." Though he
often portrays friends, he will not make his pictures with the sitter
present. He's said, "I don't want to practice before them the injury
that I do them in my work."
After George Dyer, the painter's friend
and model, killed himself in Paris, on Oct. 24, 1971 -- two days before a
major Bacon retrospective opened in that city at the Grand Palais -- Bacon
tore out of his grief his auction-record painting, a triptych here displayed.
At left, the dying Dyer, doubled up by cramps, squats upon a toilet; in the
panel at the right he's sick into the sink; at the center Dyer dies. The
darkness of his leaving, like the shadow of some devil-bat, flows out on the
floor, its surface touched by powdered glass so that its blackness glistens
like some peaceful starry night.
Looking at these pictures, one recalls
those pun-filled lines of Yeats:
For love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement
And nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.
The Hirshhorn's exhibition has a strange, compelling closure. The
newest painting in it, from 1988, is a second version of a triptych he
completed in 1944. Bacon's art has grown of late more stately and assured.
But since the dark days of the postwar years its spirit has hardly changed.
"Head VI, 1949," the first of
Bacon's screaming popes, with its borrowings from Velazquez, is among the
works displayed. "The shock of the picture," writes scholar
Lawrence Gowing in the exhibition catalogue, "when it was seen with a
whole series of heads in Bacon's exhibition a the Hanover Gallery in London
at Christmas 1949, was indescribable. ... It was everything unpardonable. The
paradoxical appearance at once of pastiche and iconoclasm was indeed one of
Bacon's most original strokes. The picture remains one of his masterpieces
and one of the least conventional, least foreseeable pictures of the
twentieth century."
Bacon is self-taught, and entirely
original. Nothing of his style was predicted by the earlier paintings of his
day. But something of his spirit can be heard, if only distantly, in his
contemporaries' words -- in Samuel Beckett's bleakness, in T.S. Eliot's mix
of the soaring and the low, in the Nausea of Sartre, and in the hymns to
criminality sung by Jean Genet.
Bacon's paintings, at first glance,
seem ready to tell stories. But as soon as one looks closer, the narrative
dissolves until one is left only with the echo of a howling -- and the beauty
of the paint.
In almost all his pictures, Bacon puts
the paint on in two completely different ways. One is flat and harsh. You see
it in his backgrounds, his toilets and his basins, and in the curving and
enclosing walls of his odd No Exit rooms. The other, near its opposite, is
apparent in his figures with their swoopings and their smearings, their
accurate, unseizable, fluid layerings of paint.
He works not just with brushes, but
with rags and rakes and sprays. He sometimes squeezes tubes of paint into his
palm, and flings the goo at the canvas with one gesture of his hand. Though
formalists detect here some aura of abstraction, Bacon loathes most abstract
painting. "With me," he's said, "it's nearly always a
person." His allegiance to the figure, to summoning in paint people he
has known, is central to his art.
Bacon has no predecessors, or imitators
either, but in one sense he has allies. His use of paint to summon human
souls, while dying in America, is still alive in English art. The Hirshhorn
in the past decade - and recently, with special force, under James Demetrion,
its excellent director - has helped to make that clear.
The museum has displayed the art of David Hockney, R.J. Kitaj and,
lately, Lucian Freud, all of whom, in some ways, owe, as does Frank Auerbach,
a special debt to the paintings in this show. While kind and friendly Hockney
has turned horrificness upside down, his gentle and affectionate portraits of
the men he loves return the mind to Bacon. So do Freud's compelling nudes.
Bacon's 1959 portrait of George Dyer - naked, vulnerable and boneless,
sleeping on a chaise longue that flows from midnight blue to black - somehow
holds the germ of all the wondrous portraiture that Freud has done since
then.
The English, since Chaucer's day,
through Shakespeare and through Dickens, through Alec Guinness and through
Benny Hill, have clothed their various messages in voices, postures, faces.
They give ideas personas.
Bacon does that too. His paintings (he
prefers to wall them off behind panes of glass) are more than just reports of
his own despair. They somehow throw you back onto a truth, and dreadfulness
that you already know. It is this that makes his art, with its savageries and
beauties, so completely unforgettable. To peer into his pictures is to find
within them the meat that writhes beneath our skins, the dying that awaits us
all, the toothed and tortured beast that cries somewhere within us.
Through the almost unbelievable beauty
of his paint, of his ragwork and his brushwork, Bacon, that Old Master, has
made the unbearable seem bearable. Without recourse to God, he's somehow made
us feel that art makes suffering transcendent. The reflections in his glazings
are easy to ignore. It is rather in his living paint, there behind the glass,
that Bacon has devised his mirrors for us all.
With Velazquez at the Met, Frans Hals
at the National Gallery and Bacon at the Hirshhorn, figure painting in
America may be freed at last of the flatness of the photograph and the
license of cartooning, may seem again alive.
Demetrion's Bacon retrospective is
exactly the right size. It would not have been possible without a grant from
the Smithsonian's Special Exhibitions Fund and a federal indemnity. It will
travel to the Los Angeles Museum of Art and to New York's Museum of Modern
Art after closing at the Hirshhorn on Jan. 7.
OUR BODIES, OUR HELLS
EDWARD PHILLIPS | THE
WASHINGTON POST | OCTOBER
13, 1989
There is a loosely connected group of
thinkers and artists who believe that it is salutary for us to take a peek at
our own shadow, however disturbing the experience may be. For those who share
this belief, Francis Bacon is an ideal painter. Bacon, whose work is on
exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum, is a painter of tragedy, the tragedy of the
body and the primal fear of those who inhabit it.
The exhibit is the first retrospective
of Bacon's work in the United States in 25 years and the 59 works on display
span his entire career up to the present. He is very popular and critically
acclaimed, but don't let that deter you from going to see his work. He is as
masterful a painter as all the hype suggests.
From the beginning of his career in the
1940s, Bacon found an articulation of the image which he continues to pursue
today. A kind of grammar of fear in paint, the oozing flesh, the gaping void
of the mouth, the threatening teeth were all present in his works in the mid
to late '40s, as was the odd choice of color. Bacon's work is strange, but
it's the way it is strange that makes it compelling. The beauty of his
handling of the paint plays off the gruesomeness of his subject matter,
creating a rhythm of attraction and repulsion. And this reverberation focuses
on the human figure, the figure in space and the insecurity of the figure in
that space. In Study for a
Crouching Nude, the figure is like a wild animal grabbing bars in a
boxed-in space, bent over, a ball of muscle pushing up against the relentless
pull of gravity.
Bacon's works hit you in the gut. His Reclining Figure of 1959 is reclining on a dark
couch and the pink flesh oozes and swashes all over. As your eye traces this
movement, your feeling shrinks away from the messiness of it. As tortured as
the figures are, the space that surrounds them is often serene. Sphinx II is an expression of the serenity and
the enigma of the space that enfolds our lives; a motionless statue rests on
a wide open plane beneath a sky of pure black. In Tryptich Inspired By T.S. Eliot's
Poem Sweeney Agonistes, Bacon juxtaposes what may be his most bloody
expression of the figure (the red paint gets as much as an inch thick) with
the serene and indifferent back drop of a black window and royal blue shade.
The serenity of space is scant comfort
if we are condemned to the fear-filled inhabitance of uncertain flesh. But in
Bacon's work there is a vitality if not a comfort in the embracing of the
ambiguities of life. The vitality that underlies Bacon's work may be most
simply expressed by Jet of
Water (1988). It is just a
splash of water suspended in space; indistinct and ephemeral, it crowds the
canvas. Like the flesh of his other works, the water breaks free of the
boundaries of boxed-in space to arc across the sky for one celebratory moment
of life.
Francis Bacon
celebrates
at 80 without
the pomp
Daniel Farson toasts his
painter friend's birthday
DANIEL FARSON | THE
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH | SUNDAY
OCTOBER 29, 1989
IN
MOST countries, the 80th birthday of their greatest painter would be the
cause of celebration and ceremony. With Francis Bacon, always the exception,
there is celebration but a welcome absence of ceremony.
Yesterday, reminding him of the scene
in Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Yale, when Edward Driffield, based on
Thomas Hardy, reaches 80 and the Prime Minister arrives at his home with the
Order of Merit, I asked if he expected Mrs Thatcher to come knocking on his
door.
"I think that's most unlikely," he
replied. Mrs Thatcher is alleged to have cried "not that dreadful
man!" when told he was considered England's leading painter.
As for the awards, he has been offered many
and has turned them down. "In a sense I would be cordoned off from
existence," he said.
His aversion to publicity allows him such
anonymity that when we went into a Soho pub and someone heard that Bacon was
a painter, the man said he was doing up an old house and offered him a job.
Bacon was flattered.
He has been described as a recluse, but it is
hard to imagine anyone who approaches his stature yet lives so freely. With
his extraordinary stamina he works hard in the early hours of the morning,
breaking off in the afternoon to visit the restaurants, pubs or clubs of Soho
ending up at Charlie Chester's Casino where he gambles with ferocious
intensity and frequently wins.
He enjoys parties, yet did not turn up at the
one held in his honour last Thursday by the Marlborough Gallery, which has
guided and guarded him so faithfully over the years. Formal occasions are not
his scene and he has earned the right to avoid them.
Instead, his presence was felt through the
powerful paintings on loan.
If anyone expects a gloomy, introspective
man, reflecting the despair which often features in his work, they are
surprised to find a man of great charm and simplicity.
"It's very nice," he said
yesterday, "but I'm in a terrible mess. People have sent me all these
flowers, but I haven't anything to put them in. I'm not the sort of person
who has vases."
Unable to afford a ton of caviare, I sent him
nothing, although I had taken him to the first night of Jeffrey Bernard
is Unwell, unaware that Bacon was depicted briefly on stage as a camp painter
in a smock, the negation of the truth. He had a convenient asthmatic attack
in the interval and left.
Apart from flowers and caviare, what present
can one give to a man who is so self-contained? A couple of birthdays ago,
the artist Peter Bradshaw asked me to deliver a present he had painted in
Bacon's honour, a picture of the nurse, her glasses shattered, from the film
still of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a subject which has
influenced Bacon.
Knowing Bacon's aversion to material
possessions and his detestation of contemporary paintings, I was relieved to
see Bacon tear off the wrapping with the glee of a child at Christmas. It
dawned on me that he rarely received presents because people assume he has
everything he wants.
I was surprised even further as he studied
the painting with such intensity that I dared not interrupt. After a minute's
silence, he exclaimed: "That's what I've always wanted to do. The mouth.
The colour of the tongue."
Telephoning him to wish him a happy birthday,
I was startled when he suggested meeting for lunch. I had assumed that a gala
lunch was being held in his honour somewhere, but that is not Bacon's style.
He is a free spirit.
Francis Bacon
Review/Art
Special
to The New York Times
The Master of the
Macabre, Francis Bacon
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN | THE ARTS
| THE NEW YORK TIMES | THURSDAY,
OCTOBER 26, 1989
WASHINGTON — Since
he exhibited Three Studies
for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London 44
years ago, Francis Bacon has remained master of the macabre. The writhing
half-human, half-animal forms he painted in that triptych may have owed
something to the German Expressionists and something to Picasso. But Mr. Bacon's
nightmare was fundamentally his own.
Coming as it did at the end of World War II,
in a city that had been devastated by bombings and spiritually enervated, the
display of Three Studies at Lefevre seemed to many of
those who saw it to epitomize the spirit of the time. Mr. Bacon had left his
home in Ireland at the age of 17 and spent the next 19 years drifting
throughout Europe and England. All at once, this show established him as the
pre-eminent painter of psychological and physical brutality. During the last
four and a half decades, Mr. Bacon has done nothing to shake that reputation.
Now he is the subject of a very handsome
retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum for his 80th birthday. The show remains
here through Jan. 7, after which it is to go to the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art (Feb. 11 to April 29) and to the Museum of Modern Art in New York (May
31 to Aug. 28). With nearly 60 works from public and private collections
around the world, this is the first major overview of the painter's achievements
held in the United States since 1963. The exhibition has been organized by
James T. Demetrion, the Hirshhorn's director, who obtained many of Mr.
Bacon's best-known paintings.
There is, for example, one of the startlingly
coloured works the artist based on van Gogh's Painter on the Road to Tarascon.
There are a handful of the Popes that the artist created by combining
elements of Velázquez's
portrait of Innocent X with the image of a screaming nurse from The Battleship Potemkin, the
Sergei Eisenstein film. The artist's arresting Man With Dog of 1953 can be seen here, and so
can at least one canvas, depicting a paralytic child walking on all fours,
that Mr. Bacon derived from Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century photographer
whose studies of figures in motion have had a profound impact on the painter.
There are a dozen or so small and strangely
beautiful portrait heads of friends and associates as well as a handful of
large triptychs from the 1960's and 70's, including a work from May to June
1973 that is Mr. Bacon's wrenching meditation on the death of a friend,
George Dyer. There is not, unfortunately, the Three Studies of Figures at the
Base of the Crucifixion from
the 40's, which was deemed too fragile to travel from the Tate Gallery in
London. But a second version of this work that Mr. Bacon completed last year
is on view, and to see it is to realize both how much the artist has changed
over the years and how much he has stayed the same.
Mr. Bacon has stayed the same in the sense
that his subjects have not really varied, nor have the essential elements of
his imagery. His focus remains on the human body. He continues to twist it,
mangle its features, X-ray it and make it evaporate, transmogrify and bleed.
His figures huddle and struggle in windowless rooms lighted only by a bare
bulb that dangles from the ceiling. They vomit into a sink, find themselves
pinned to the bed with a hypodermic needle or face to face with one of the
ancient Greeks' Furies.
When two men are engaged in sex, as they
sometimes are in his paintings, they seem to be wrestling each other to the
death. When the artist paints himself in a state of repose, it appears as if
he is recovering from a crippling hangover. Even when Mr. Bacon is creating
imaginary creatures, as in the second version of Three Figures, the references
to sex and violence cannot be missed. Mr. Bacon's images are rarely subtle.
But over the years they have been more
beautifully rendered. The encrusted paint and vibrating atmosphere of such
early works as Head I of 1948 and Study for Portrait (Man in a Blue Box) from 1949 have given way to a more
serene and fluent style. Mr. Bacon is one of the greatest painters of
voluptuous flesh. Few artists can make the body seem so palpable or transform
a man turning a bathroom faucet into a figure of Michelangelesque
proportions.
The artist has always imagined himself as
engaged in a dialogue with past masters, not only Michelangelo and Velazquez
and van Gogh but also Manet and Picasso and Ingres. At the same time, his
paintings make conspicuous references to the latest furniture and clothing
designs and they borrow freely from photographs in newspapers and magazines.
His figures even occasionally bring to mind Willem de Kooning's paintings of
women. But Mr. Bacon says he admires almost nothing contemporary in art.
Abstract painting is to him a version of wallpaper. He insists he is a
realist, that he re-creates the violence of everyday life.
There are times, of course, when Mr. Bacon
seems more like a Surrealist. And there are times, it must be said, when he
seems to have fallen back on tricks and melodramatic gestures. The images of
cricket pads, the arrows, the swinging light cords and the slabs of beef are
shallow devices to which the artist succumbs. The fact is that Mr. Bacon is
often most affecting when his work is least theatrical.
It is clear, for example, from paintings like Study of Figure in a Landscape that Mr. Bacon can depict the
outdoors vividly on those rare occasions when he puts himself to the task.
His portraits, which at first look merely contorted, capture perfectly a
likeness. They can also be witty. Several of the self-portraits are among the
more endearing paintings in the exhibition because Mr. Bacon presents himself
as charmingly ill at ease.
There are also striking images -like the
darkened figure entering an empty house from the triptych In Memory of George Dyer (1971) -that speak in an unusually
hushed tone. And there are a few works that seem to be the beneficiaries of
chance. Mr. Bacon is a believer in spontaneity, and several of his paintings
have been given a jolt of energy by a sudden splash of paint or a slip of the
brush.
One of the most memorable canvases in the
exhibition is also one of the artist's most recent works, his Study for Portrait of John
Edwards from 1988. Here Mr.
Bacon somehow manages to create a figure that looks at once fleshy and
spectral, ashen and roseate. There is, in some ways, more of Velazquez in
this austere portrait than there is in the early Popes. The work is neither
histrionic nor shocking. It is mysterious and introspective and it
underscores that, at the age of 80, Mr. Bacon has not missed a step. A
retrospective will visit New York next year.
A
1973 self-portrait by Francis Bacon from retrospective at Hirshhorn
Francis Bacon at 80
Unnerving Art
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN | THE
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE | SUNDAY,
AUGUST 20, 1989
The doorbell to Francis Bacon’s ramshackle mews house in South
Kensington, London, has not worked for some time. Visitors knock loudly and
then cling to a rope bannister while climbing the steep, narrow stairs that
lead to the kitchen, bedroom and studio.
Bacon cannot paint anything so large it won’t fit down the steps and
out the door. On those infrequent occasions when the artist permits someone
to see him at home, he must usher guests past the kitchen that includes a
bathtub to the cramped bedroom that doubles as a living room. He has lived in
this place for more than a quarter of a century. Widely regarded as perhaps
the greatest living figure painter, a man whose works have lately sold for
millions of dollars at auction, Bacon presumably could live anywhere in
London. A few years ago he set himself up in a handsome and spacious home on
the Thames, but he says the speckled light that reflected off the river and
into his studio’s windows proved too distracting, so he moved back here. Even
more than most people, Bacon is full of contradictions. He will turn 80 in
late October, yet his wide eyes, chubby cheeks, pouting mouth and hair
failing casually over his brow give him an astonishingly boyish look.
Although he moves gingerly nowadays, his step retains traces of the jaunty
side to sidespring that was a characteristic of his youth.
He can be intensely private yet disarmingly frank. With almost no
prompting he details his fondness for alcohol and for men, his kinship with
gangsters and drunks, his antipathy toward certain politicians, fashion
designers and fellow painters. If coaxed just a bit, Bacon tells wonderful
stories about being in Morocco with the novelist and composer Paul Bowles or
wandering through galleries with Giacometti (“He liked all the wrong
pictures,” Bacon recalls with a laugh). Friends know he can be ornery and unpredictable,
especially after a few drinks, but they also know him as a man of tremendous
generosity, wit and vulnerability. Although he has created some of the most
alarming and outrageous images ever painted, Bacon is in fact immensely
likeable and kind, a true gentleman.
He is especially eager to express opinions about art and literature. A
few days earlier, over a leisurely lunch of wine, oysters and deviled crab at
Bentley’s in London, Bacon talked about Velàzquez and Degas, Boulez and Freud
(“Does anyone go to analysis anymore?” he asked with apparent sincerity),
Proust and Yeats (whose productivity in old age particularly intrigues Bacon)
with the passion of the self educated. A recent exhibition of early works by
Cézanne prompted waves of enthusiastic commentary, although when the
conversation eventually turned to American painters, he became coy. “He does
those women, nice man, what was his name?” is the extent of Bacon’s remarks
about Willem de Kooning, and about Jackson Pollock he said: “I can’t see the
point of those drips, and I think he couldn’t do anything else particularly
well.” Subtly, Bacon manipulates a conversation so that it never strays from
subjects he is prepared to discuss, and it is almost impossible to get him to
talk about anything else.
He particularly dislikes analyzing his own work. “If you can talk
about it, why paint it?” is one of his favorite ripostes and he tends to fall
back on canned remarks as a way of sidestepping queries. Bacon hates
pretense, and he can be modest to the point of self deprecation. When
London’s National Gallery asked him four years ago to do the first of the
“Artist’s Eye” shows, in which prominent British painters juxtaposed their
works with favorites from the museum’s collection, Bacon refused to include
his own canvases.
He eschews almost all the trappings of success. Whennecessary, he
reaches into his pocket for a wad of cash to cover expenses, which may
include an elegant suit, gambling debts, medical costs for an ailing friend,
lunch at a swank restaurant or champagne for everyone at the Colony Room, the
rundown drinking club in Soho he has been going to for more than 40 years. In
an art scene that has become dominated by commercial excess and ironic
posturing, Bacon seems like a character from an altogether different time, a
genuinely serious painter, a survivor from the generation of post war
intellectuals for whom culture was not largely a matter of money.
Now he is the subject of a retrospective, on the occasion of his
upcoming birthday, that open in Oct. 12 at the Hirshhorn Museum in
Washington. The first Bacon exhibition in the United States since a modest
show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975, it travels to the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art in February 1990 and to the Museum of Modern Art in New
York in May 1990. e Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 1990.
Bacon settles himself behind a table next to the single window in his
bedroom where four bare bulbs hanging on wires from the ceiling provide most
of the illumination on a gray day. A cot is tucked at the far end of the room
behind two old couches and a couple of dressers. There is a space heater in
one corner. Years ago, Bacon owned paintings by the English artists W.R.
Sickert and Frank Auerbach, but he gave those away. Several tattered
photographs of his own works are now taped above the kitchen sink and around
his studio. Otherwise the walls are bare. “I cant live with pictures,” he
explains.
Only after a little while does the artist suggest taking a look at the
studio, and even so, he clearly feels some hesitation about it, as if fearful
of revealing one of his more intimate secrets. Bacon can appear very open and
jovial to strangers, but he can be extremely reticent when it comes to
certain aspects of his work, and this room is one of them.
The studio, on the other side of the kitchen, is shaped like the
bedroom but has a skylight that Bacon installed some years ago. It is a mess.
Aged paint tubes, discarded rags, brushes, papers and dust (he has
incorporated the dust in certain paintings to suggest sand dunes) have at
cumulated over the course of two decades and been swept into waist high piles
around the floor.
Bare bulbs dangle from the ceiling. “I once bought a beautiful studio
round the corner in Roland Gardens with the most perfect light, and I did it
up so well, with carpets and curtains and everything, that I absolutely
couldn’t work in it,” he once told an interviewer. “I was absolutely
castrated in the place. That was because I had done it up so well, and I
hadn’t got the chaos.”
Bacon has noted, only half in jest, that the closest he comes to
abstract painting is on the walls of his studio: he uses them as a palette,
and they are covered with multi. colored dabs of pigment. On one easel rests
a small portrait of Bacon’s friend and, for the last several years, favorite
subject, John Edwards, but all the other canvases have been turned to the
wall, and the artist declines to show them. “There’s nothing on them,” he
says. Bacon remains in the doorway throughout, anxious to leave.
He suggests a walk to the Victoria and Albert Museum before lunch. “If
you’d like, we can see the Constables,” he offers, and a minute or two later
slips a leather jacket over his turtleneck sweater and eases himself down the
front steps and toward the street.
In April 1945, Bacon exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in London a
triptych entitled Three Studies for figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion now at the Tate Gallery. Bacon’s trio of half-human, half
animal creatures, mutilated and eyeless, their necks elongated and teeth I,
were perched on tables or pedestals in rooms with disorienting fun house
proportions. They were roughly, angrily drawn, suggesting both Picasso’s and
Francis Picabia’s works from the 1920’s and something of German
Expressionism. But nothing precisely like the “Three Studies” had been seen
before. Bacon’s tortured and menacing figures seemed to capture perfectly the
anguished claustrophobic of war ravaged England. At a time when painting in
Britain, like so much else, had become enervated, these potent images were a
sign of renewed vitality. Those who went to the Lefevre Gallery may not have
liked Bacon’s work, but they surely wouldn’t forget it. Bacon had made his
mark.
During the next decades the artist developed his now famous repertory
of blurred figures, screaming popes, butchered carcasses and twisted
portraits images that continue to occupy his attention today. They have
inspired critics to classify him as a surrealist or an Expressionist, and
skeptics to describe s a sensationalist or a lunatic.
Bacon insists he is a realist, that he does not paint merely to shock.
“What is called Surrealism has gone through art at all times,” he says. “What
is more surreal than Aeschylus?”
Bacon maintains he is simply aiming to reproduce as immediately and directly
as possible, what his friend, the French anthropologist and poet Michel
Leiris, calls “the sheer fact of existence.” This can encompass, Bacon points
out, both violence and beauty, absurdity and romance. “You can’t be more
horrific than life itself,” he is fond of saying. Still, his paintings have
lost none of their power to unnerve.
In part for this reason, private collectors have not stood in
line to buy, and although the work has always been very popular in France,
Italy and Germany, it has engendered more respect than enthusiasm in the
United States and even in Britain. The poet Stephen Spender, one of Bacon’s
oldest friends, says, “I wanted to get a painting, but no one in my house really
wanted one.” Margaret Thatcher once described the artist as “that man who
paints those dreadful pictures.” And in the recent film “Batman,” the only
painting in Gotham City’s Flugelheim Museum that the Joker prevents his
henchmen from destroying is a Bacon.
“I think Americans have tended to measure him against de Kooning
and find him less good,” says David Sylvester, an English art historian,
author of a book of penetrating interviews with Bacon, and one of the
painter’s most devoted friends. Spender insists that “American artists
provide for Americans a foreground of activity that they can’t see beyond.”
Yet a third view is held by Lawrence Gowing, the English art
historian and painter who has been an admirer of Bacon for many years.
“Abstract Expressionist taste was buoyed up by a solid optimism and a feeling
that painting was getting better, that a way was opening to something
fruitful,” he states. “But Bacon’s painting is rather tragic, and his whole
work is an overt criticism of abstract art.”
There are, however, few important museums of 20th century art
that do not own, or at least covet, one of Bacon’s paintings, and his
canvases are prominently displayed in London’s Tate Gallery and the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Bacon’s work has increasingly
been so ambitious in scale and polished in execution that it looks
specifically designed for public exhibition, as if the artist were demanding
his place in the museum beside Manet, Picasso and the other modern masters.
Gowing describes these latest canvases, even the most violent, as
“classically serene”.
Consider, for example, one of his most recent works a second, much
larger and arguably more affecting rendition of the “Three Figures,” in which
Bacon has added an element of ambiguity to the gruff original by refining its
forms. The new version is like a memory of the earlier one, still vivid but
less tactile. After an initial reaction of horror or wariness, the viewer’s
attention almost invariably focuses on the strange lyricism and
meticulousness of the paintings. Bacon has a quirky and rather wonderful
sense of color, and there have been very few artists who have ever managed to
depict flesh in such a voluptuous way. The word “shocking” is still
constantly used to describe Bacon’s works, but in fact they can be
exceptionally beautiful and very moving.
The artist insists that his paintings be hung in gold frames and
protected by a sheet of glass, which he thinks imparts evenness and sheen to
his unvarnished surfaces. This style of presentation recalls the Old Master
pictures that Bacon so admires; it also heightens the tension that comes from
representing bizarre or subversive scenes in a highly formal, elegant way. He
may depict two Michelangelesque nudes thrashing on a bed, but he shrouds the
details behind seductive, titillating veils of paint. There is decorum to
Bacon’s impropriety a paradox that describes the artist himself: He talks
about sex and alcohol the way most people discuss the weather, but he also
exudes a natural courtliness and grace, as if he were a good boy trying to be
bad.
The son of a racehorse trainer (and a collateral descendant of the
great Elizabethan statesman and philosopher), Bacon moved with his family
between Dublin and London during the first years of his life. He was the
second of five children He never got along with his parents, who, in turn,
never supported the idea of his becoming a painter.
Asthma made school a problem, so he was tutored by clergymen at home,
where in general he was left to his own devices. These involved what his
heavy-gambling but strict father considered behavior so unacceptable-Bacon
had sex with some of the grooms at the stables and was once caught trying on
his mother’s underwear-that he banished the youngster. At the age of 16,
Bacon set out for London, and then Berlin.
There, in a city devoted to extravagance and excess Bacon could
indulge in sexual escapades and gambling sprees; he spent long nights in
transvestite bars and endless hours with the sort of rough-and tumble characters
who would always form a part of his social circle.
“Berlin was a very violent place emotionally violent not physically
and that certainly had its effect on me,’ Bacon says. But I wasn’t the
slightest bit interested in art until about 1930. 1 lived a very indolent
life. I was absolutely free. I drifted for years.” He smiles. “You know, when
you’re young, there are always people who want to help.”
He also spent time in Paris and although he says he was not interested
in art, Bacon remembers attending an exhibition of Picasso’s surreal,
biomorphic bathers painted in the 20’s. Over the years, he has given
different accounts of how significant this event was to his own development
but he certainly left Paris with a particular notion of artistic life properly
spent. Bacon has always cultivated an image of himself as an instinctive
painter, a loner, someone who is unconcerned with success qualities that make
him resemble more the French artist of the 20’s than the celebrity artist of
today.
He returned to London in 1929 and for a brief period deigned modernist
furniture producing works that earned him a reputation as innovative and
highly talented but that he now dismisses as “absolutely horrid” and “ghastly
stuff.” A Cubist inspired pattern for a rug suggests Bacon’s interest in
Picasso was not entirely casual. Unfortunately, Bacon came to consider the
paintings from these years “so awful” that he painted over most of the
canvases and bought back others in order to destroy them; virtually none
exist.
Bacon participated in group show in 1933, the same year that the
critic and historian Herbert Read reproduced the artist’s ghostly
“Crucifixion” in his book “Art Now.” The next year, Bacon organized a solo
show, and in 1937 his work was included in an exhibition at Agnew’s in
London.
But that was the last time Bacon put his paintings on public view
until 1945. More than lackadaisical about his career, he was totally
indifferent. Bacon had never had any formal art training, and when he began
to teach himself to paint during the 30’s it seems to have been little more
than a distraction from drinking, gambling and wandering around the edges of
London society. “Bacon before 1939,” writes John Russell in his monograph on
the artist was “Marginal Man personified.” When the Second World War began,
he tried to enlist but was turned down because of his asthma. He took a
variety of odd jobs, working, for a time as a house servant and a secretary.
It was not until 1944, when he began to work on “Three Studies for Figures at
the Base of a Crucifixion,” that Bacon says that his career as a painter
began in earnest. Yet the years spent in Dublin, Berlin and Paris, and in
London during some of its grimmest days, clearly left their mark. The
emotional turbulence of Bacon’s life, the restlessness, the sexual
indiscretions, the sense of frustration and claustrophobia he felt as a boy,
the offhand disregard for social mores and, importantly, the complete lack of
concern for what others might think all these became distinguishingly features
of his art. Only towards the end of the war, when he was already 35 years old
and just beginning to take himself seriously, did Bacon finally realize that
painting was the best way for him to bring order to the chaos of his life, to
translate what he calls his “obsessions” into concrete images.
Upon arriving at the Victoria and Albert, Bacon immediately marches
down one of the museum’s cavernous halls looking for an elevator to the floor
where Constable’s paintings are displayed. He quickly becomes lost, asks
directions from a guard, takes another wrong turn and again loses his way.
The circuitous routed leads him past some pottery, a display of raincoats,
medieval wood carvings and jewelry, and in every case the artist becomes
momentarily absorbed by what he sees. Just as he feels socially at ease with
both petty thieves and wealthy patrons, he can become deeply intrigued by a
Turner hanging at the National Gallery and also by a chair he glimpses in the
window of Conran’s on his way to lunch. Not surprisingly, Bacon’s paintings
are full of references to Ingres and the daily press, to Picasso-who, with
Duchamp, remains just about the only 20th century artist he admires-and the
latest fashion show.
Finally, Bacon stumbles upon the elevator and finds the Constables.
“These are pictures I could live with” he says enthusiastically, bounding
toward the great sketches for “The Hay Wain” and “The Leaping Horse.”
Although Bacon spent a good portion of his youth in the Irish countryside, he
has painted very few landscapes. Yet he feels a particular affinity with
these scenes and with many of the small sketches displayed in cases nearby
because, he explains, they exemplify Constable’s “free style, his tremendous
spontaneity.”
“I know that in my own work,” he continues, “the best things are the things
that just happened images that were suddenly caught and that I hadn’t
anticipated. We don’t know what the unconscious is, but every so often
something wells up in us. It sounds pompous nowadays to talk about the
unconscious, so maybe it’s better to say ‘chance.’ I believe in a deeply
ordered chaos and in the rules of chance.”
Bacon never makes preliminary drawings but works directly on unprimed
canvas, where a, wayward brush stroke cannot easily be disguised. Sometimes
he will toss a bucket of paint across the canvas in order to promote
spontaneity. “I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing,”
Bacon says, “because I can’t erase what I have done. And if I drew something
first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings.” Arriving at
another of his favorite phrases, he adds, “I want to create images that are a
shorthand of sensation.”
Photographs have always been a source of inspiration for Bacon.
Many of his ideas, and quirky compositional devices have originated in the
newspaper and magazine snapshots that he collects, and especially in the
famous sequential photographs of prancing animals and walking, running and
wrestling men that Eadweard Muybridge took during the last quarter of the
19th century.
In the twisted, awkward, even bizarre movements of Muybridge’s
figures, Bacon sees a potential repertory of images that are at once
startling and commonplace, and it is this impression of something sudden and
unposed, yet absolutely true to life, that the painter wants to convey in his
own work. In painting portraits, he dispenses with a sitter and relies solely
on photographs and memory. Bacon uses only intimate friends as subjects, and
he fears they might be offended to see him maneuvering and rearranging their
faces despite the unmistakable likeness that emerges.
Bacon has also based works on paintings by Van Gogh, films by Luis
Buñuel and poems by T.S. Eliot During the 50’s, he combined references to
Velázquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” and a still photograph of a
screaming nurse from Sergei Eisenstein’s film “The Battleship Potemkin” to
create his series of screaming popes, which have achieved a degree of fame he
now finds tedious. “Those references were just mental starting points,
armatures on which to hang the pictures,” Bacon says. “Actually, I hate those
popes. I think the Velázquez is such a superb image that it was silly of me
to use it.”
Bacon insists his paintings are not about anything in particular, that
nothing should be read into his borrowings from certain images, and that even
his triptychs, which might seem to, be recounting a tale in three scenes, are
in no ‘way narrative. He compares them to police mug shots of a suspect’s
face and profiles.. Nonetheless, his paintings often contain arrows, circles,
mirrors and boxes that seem to single out one or two elements as having
special significance. Bacon disagrees. “I’ve no story to tell,” he says.
It is early afternoon, and so far Bacon has had nothing to drink. Once,
when asked to sum up his life, he said it consisted of “going from bar to bar
and drinking and that kind of thing.” The walk is short from the museum to
Bibendum, the elegant restaurant in a former Michelin tire factory where
Bacon has made a lunch reservation and where he is greeted warmly as a
regular. He orders oysters and the first of what will be many glasses of
champagne. By the end of the meal he has also drunk the better part of two
bottles of wine. When the idea of a trip to the Colony Room comes up, Bacon
agrees, saying that he hasn’t been to the bar in months.
It is a small, oddly shaped and rather claustrophobic place not unlike
many of the rooms in Bacon’s paintings and it is almost impossible to find
the entrance from the street. Photographs and caricatures of the owners and
regular patrons hang haphazardly on the dark green walls. The dozen or so
people who are there getting drunk in the late afternoon seem very happy to
see the artist, and he seems utterly at home joking and laughing with them.
They are not part of the London art scene but clearly know he is a famous
painter and don’t seem to care. This especially pleases Bacon. He offers
drinks all around, then orders a bottle of champagne, then another. Most
people couldn’t stand up at this point, but Bacon is just getting started.
Nikos Stangos, an editor at the British publishing house Thames &
Hudson, who has edited books about Bacon and known the artist for many years,
notes that “Francis never expresses moral indignation about anything.” And in
fact, chatting easily over drinks, Bacon recalls without the least sense of
outrage or distress episodes like his arrest in 1970 for drug possession. “It
was obvious at the trial that the police had planted marijuana on me, because
I’m asthmatic and can’t smoke,” he says drily. “I wasn’t really worried
anyway, since I recognized some criminals on the jury.”
Still, a vein of deep compassion and sorrow runs just beneath the
surface of Bacon’s images. These feelings occasionally emerge in conversation,
as when the subject of George Dyer comes up. A heavy drinker, Dyer was the
artist’s closest friend throughout the last half of the 60’s; he died in a
hotel room in Paris in 1971 at the age of 37, just two days before a Bacon
retrospective opened at the Grand Palais.
Bacon did a series of three triptychs that, despite the artist’s
repeated statements about never painting narratives, are transparent
meditations on Dyer’s death. Dyer, naked or almost naked, is shown slumped on
the toilet, vomiting into a sink or slouching in a chair, either half asleep
or in a drunken stupor. Parts of his limbs and chest are invariably missing,
as if they had evaporated. In all the scenes Dyer is alone and in the sort of
bare, windowless room that is a trademark of Bacon’s work but in this case
specifically evokes the hotel in Paris. The flesh is both roseate and ashen
voluptuous and deathly and in several of the scenes Dyer casts a pink shadow
that does not conform precisely to the shape of his body but resembles a
thick pool of liquid or a spectral presence, like a shadowy version of the
beastly Furies Bacon later painted in a triptych based on the “Oresteia.”
Perhaps the most memorable of the scenes, the centerpiece of “Triptych
August 1972,” represents Dyer as hardly more than a lumpy, oozing form, his
face obliterated, his body prone across a blackened doorway. There is
something of Muybridge and of Michelangelo in this twisted, fleshy figure,
something, as well, of the Manet who painted “The Execution of Maximilian,” which
was among the works Bacon chose to include in his “Art¬ist’s Eye” exhibition
at the National Gallery.
To see figures that look at once corporeal and ghostly; sensual and
morbid, beautiful and horrific, is to understand why Bacon has come to be
regarded as one of the most distinctive and difficult figure painters of the
century. The triptychs of Dyer’s last hours demonstrate what the artist means
when he describes himself as a realist, as a painter devoted not to
Expressionism or Surrealism but to what he has called “the brutality of
fact.” During lunch at Bentley’s, Bacon had described old age as “a desert
because all of one’s friends die,” and the paintings of Dyer exude this
despair. The only faith they can be said to express is in the power of paint.
“I am an optimist, but about nothing,” Bacon says, repeating another
of his favorite phrases. “It’s just my nature to be optimistic.” He stops to
polish off the last drops from a glass of champagne. “We live, we die and
that’s it don’t you think?’
Unnerving Art: Reply
The New York Times,
September 17, 1989
Twice in his article on Francis Bacon,
described as ''perhaps the greatest living figure painter,'' Michael
Kimmelman reports that Bacon ''details his fondness for men,'' apparently
with some degree of pleasure and pride, yet no amplification of these
observations made it into print, even in euphemistic form (Unnerving Art,
Aug. 20). Given the hot debate over the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, another
gay artist who wasn't afraid to deal with his sexual preference in public,
Francis Bacon's forthright homosexuality, described in his own words and on
his own terms, would have been fascinating, as germane to his paintings as to
today's censorial climate.
ED SIKOV New York, N.Y.
An Interview with
Francis Bacon:
Provoking Accidents
Prompting Chance
by Michael Peppiatt
Art International, Number 8, Autumn 1989
The
following interview was recorded in Francis Bacon's London studio earlier
this year.
You told me that you'd been to the Science Museum and you'd been
looking at scientific images.
Yes, but that's nothing of any interest. You see, one has ideas, but
it's only what you make of them. Theories are no good, it's only what you
actually make. I had thought of doing a group of portraits, and I went there
thinking that, amongst various things, I might find something that would
provide a grid on which these portraits could be put, but I didn't find what
I wanted and I don't think it's going to come off at all.
Are there certain things that you go back to a great deal, for example
Egyptian images? You look at the same things a lot, don't you?
I look at the same things, I do think that Egyptian art is the
greatest thing that has happened so far. But I get a great deal from poems,
from the Greek tragedies, and those I find tremendously suggestive of all
kinds of things.
Do you find the word more suggestive than the actual image?
Not necessarily, but very often it is.
Do the Greek tragedies suggest new images when you reread them, or do
they just deepen the images that are already there?
They very often suggest new images. I don't think one can come down to
anything specific, one doesn't really know. I mean you could glance at an
advertisement or something and it could suggest just as much as reading
Aeschylus. Anything can suggest things to you.
For you, it's normally an image that is suggested though, it's not
sound, it's not words sparking off words. Words spark off images.
To a great extent. Great poets are remarkable in themselves and don't
necessarily spark off images, what they write is just very exciting in
itself.
You must be quite singular among contemporary artists to be moved in
that way by literature. Looking at, for example, Degas, doesn't affect you?
No, Degas is complete in himself. I like his pastels enormously,
particularly the nudes. They are formally remarkable, but they are very
complete in themselves, so they don't suggest as much.
Not so much as something less complete? Are there less complete things
which do? For example, I know you admire some of Michelangelo's unfinished
things. And recently you were talking about some engineering drawings by
Brunel and it sounded as though you were very excited by them.
In a certain mood, certain things start off a whole series of images
and ideas which keep changing all the time.
Is there a whole series of images that you find haunting? There are
specific images, aren't there, that have been very important to you?
Yes, but I don't think those are the things that I've been able to get
anything from. You see, the best images just come about.
So that's almost a different category of experience.
Yes, I think my paintings just come about. I couldn't say where any of
the elements come from.
Do you ever experiment with automatism?
No, I don't really believe in that. What I do believe is that chance
and accident are the most fertile things at any artist's disposal at the
present time. I'm trying to do some portraits now and I'm just hoping that
they'll come about by chance. I want to capture an appearance without it
being an illustrated appearance.
So it's something that you couldn't have planned consciously?
No. I wouldn't know it's what I wanted but it's what for me at the
time makes a reality. Reality, that is, that comes about in the actual way
the painting has been put down, which is a reality, but I'm also trying to
make the reality into the appearance of the person I'm painting.
It's a locking together of two things.
It's a locking together of a great number of things, and it will only
come about by chance. It's prompted chance because you have in the back of
your mind the image of the person whose portrait you are trying to paint. You
see, this is the point at which you absolutely cannot talk painting. It's in
the making.
You're trying to bring two unique elements together?
It has nothing to do with Surrealist idea, because that's bringing two
things together which has already made. This thing isn't made. It's got to be
made.
But I mean that there is the person's appearance, and then there are
all sorts of sensation about that particular person.
I don't know how much it's a question of sensation about the other
person. It's the sensations within yourself. It's to do with the shock of two
completely unillustrational things which come together and make an
appearance. But again it's all words, it's all an approximation. I feel
talking about painting is always superficial. We have lost our real
directness. We talk in such a dreary, bourgeois kind of way. Nothing is ever
directly said.
But are there things that really jolt you? I know you love Greek
tragedy, Shakespeare, Yeats, Eliot and so on, but do odd things, like
newspaper photographs, jolt you every now and then?
I don't think photographs do it so much, just very occasionally.
You used to look at photographs a lot. Do you still look at books of
photographs?
No. Dalí and Buñuel did something interesting with the Chien
andalou, but that is where film is interesting and it doesn't work with
single photographs in the same way. The slicing of the eyeball is interesting
because it's in movement...
But is your sensibility still "joltable"? Does one become
hardened to visual shock?
I don't think so, but not much that is produced now jolts one.
Everything that is made now is made for public consumption and it makes it
all so anodyne. It's rather like this ghastly government we have in this
country. The whole thing's a kind of anodyne way of making money.
I suppose one doesn't have to be jolted as such to be interested, to
be moved. One can be persuaded or convinced by something without it actually
shocking one's sensibility. And I am sure that people have come to accept
images that begin by seeming extremely violent, war pictures for instance.
They are violent, and yet it's not enough. Something much more
horrendous is the last line in Yeats' "The Second Coming," which is
a prophetic poem: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at
last,/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" That's stronger than any
war painting. It's more extraordinary than even one of the horrors of war
pictures, because that's just a literal horror, whereas the Yeats is a horror
which has a whole vibration, in its prophetic quality.
It's shocking too because it's been put into a memorable form.
Well, of course that's the reason. Things are not shocking if they
haven't been put into a memorable form. Otherwise, it's just blood spattered
against a wall. In the end, if you see that two or three times, it's no
longer shocking. It must be a form that has more than the implication of
blood splashed against a wall. It's when it has much wider implications. It's
something which reverberates within your psyche, it disturbs the whole life
cycle within a person. It affects the atmosphere in which you live. Most of
what is called art, your eye just flows over. It may be charming or nice, but
it doesn't change you.
Do you think about painting all the time, or do you just think about
things?
I think about things really, about images.
Do images keep dropping into your mind?
Images do drop in, constantly, but to crystallize all these phantoms
that drop into your mind is another thing. A phantom and an image are two
totally different things.
Do you dream, or remember your dreams? Do they affect you at all?
No. I'm sure I do dream but I've never remembered my dreams. About two
or three years ago I had a very vivid dream and I tried to write it down
because I thought I could use it. But it was a load of nonsense. When I
looked at what I'd written down the next day, it had no shape to it, it was
just nothing. I've never used dreams in my work. Anything that comes about
does so by accident in the actual working of the painting. Suddenly something
appears that I can grasp.
Do you often start blind?
No, I don't start blind. I have an idea of what I would like to do,
but, as I start working, that completely evaporates. If it goes at all well,
something will start to crystallize.
Do you make a sketch of some sort on the canvas, a basic structure?
Sometimes, a little bit. It never stays that way. It's just to get me
into the act of doing it. Often, you just put on paint almost without knowing
what you're doing. You've got to get some material on the canvas to begin
with. Then it may or may not begin to work. It doesn't often happen within
the first day or two. I just go on putting paint on, or wiping it out.
Sometimes the shadows left from this lead to another image. But, still, I
don't think those free marks that Henri Michaux used to make really work.
They're too arbitrary.
Are they not conscious enough, not willed enough?
Something is only willed when the unconscious thing has begun to arise
on which your will can be imposed.
You've got to have the feedback from the paint. It's a dialogue in a
strange sense.
It is a dialogue, yes.
The paint is doing as much as you are. It's suggesting things to you.
It's a constant exchange.
It is. And one's always hoping that the paint will do more for you.
It's like painting a wall. The very first brushstroke gives a sudden shock of
reality, which is cancelled out when you paint the whole wall.
And you find that when you start painting. That must be very
depressing.
Very.
Do you still destroy a lot?
Yes. Practice doesn't really help. It should make you slightly more
wily about realizing that something could come out of what you've done. But
if that happens...
You become like an artisan?
Well, you always are an artisan. Once you become what is called an
artist, there is nothing more awful, like those awful people who produce
those awful images, and you know more or less what they're going to be like.
But it doesn't become any easier to paint?
No. In a way, it becomes more difficult. You're more conscious of the
fact that nine-tenths of everything is inessential. What is called
"reality" becomes so much more acute. The few things that matter
become so much more concentrated and can be summed up with so much less.
THE BLEAK VISION OF BACON
IN HIS 60-YEAR CAREER, THE PAINTER HAS
BEEN GUIDED BY A RELENTLESS VIEW OF HUMAN FATE.
EDWARD J. SOZANSKI | THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER | NOVEMBER 12, 1989
Few
painters in this century have pursued an aesthetic agenda with the single-minded
intensity and persistence one finds in the work of Francis Bacon, who
turned 80 on Oct. 28.
In 60 years
of making paintings, Bacon has restricted himself to one theme, the
existential helplessness of human beings in the face of an incomprehensible
universe, and the agonies they suffer in trying to muddle through lives
that are, in his view, essentially meaningless.
The 58
paintings at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden that make up a
retrospective of Bacon's work over the last 45 years confirm his dedication
to this single grand investigation. His paintings from the mid-1940s, when
his mature style emerged, are much the same as those from the mid-'80s.
They aren't
precisely the same, of course - Bacon's imagery becomes more focused as he
grows older - but there aren't any digressions in content or style. Since
the end of World War II, Bacon has remained committed to the figure, to
symbol, and to his intuition and obsessions, of which death is perhaps the
most prominent.
His art is
about as stripped-down as painting can get. He rejects any suggestion of
narrative or context. He refuses to offer any insight into what his
paintings are supposed to mean, even assigning them bland or neutral titles
- Study for a Portrait,
for instance - that are obviously intended to deflect critical
interpretations.
"I'm
just trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system as I
can," he said in a 1973 interview. "I'm not saying anything.
Whether (I'm) saying anything for other people, I don't know."
With
disclaimers such as this, Bacon tries to portray himself as a kind of
passive communicator of truths that emanate from the collective human
experience. His deformed, distorted and sometimes grotesque figures
represent not what he sees but what he feels.
When those
feelings materialize as the large-format paintings that Hirshhorn director
James T. Demetrion has assembled in this retrospective, viewers are apt to
be startled, puzzled, disturbed or perhaps even repelled, for Bacon's art
is neither pretty nor facile.
On the
other hand, it's difficult to remain apathetic to Bacon. One is either
mesmerized by the individuality and primal force of his images or one
retires from the arena, for he offers neither emotional reassurance nor
decorative flair and fashion.
Bacon is a
loner; even though his painting has often been described as expressionistic
or surrealistic, he neither belongs to nor espouses any movement. He has
always worked by himself and within himself, avoiding the influences of
whatever style happened to be in vogue at the moment and the status of
celebrity artist.
One senses
this even from the several books about him that have been produced in the
last several years, including the catalogue for this exhibition. Bacon
refuses to be photographed while working, and one presumes that he isn't
crazy about being photographed under any circumstances, for the books
contain very few pictures of him.
As Bacon
moves into his 80s, he's being anointed as one of the most important
artists of the 20th century. Clearly, he's the premier British artist still
working. He already has had two retrospectives at the Tate Gallery in
London, the most recent in 1985, and the Tate rarely mounts more than one
such show for a living artist.
The
Hirshhorn exhibition is the first full-scale survey of his painting in the
United States since a show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1963.
After closing in Washington Jan. 7, it will travel to the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (Feb. 11 to April 29) and the Museum of Modern Art in
New York (May 31 to Aug. 28).
The angst
implicit in Bacon's often bizarre images - contorted bodies, screaming
heads, dissolving faces - reflects the mood in Europe in the aftermath of
World War II. It's the same mood that sculptor Alberto Giacometti expressed
in a more melancholy way in his attenuated figures.
Even after
45 years, Bacon hasn't softened his pessimism about man's condition or his
prospects. Yet although they're psychologically bleak, the paintings convey
a heroic eloquence through the way they're conceived and painted and in the
way that Bacon insists on presenting them in plain but substantial gold
frames.
Bacon is a
curious figure among 20th-century artists in that before 1944, when he
completed Three Studies
for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, there weren't many
indications that he was going to amount to very much.
He was born
in Dublin, Ireland, of English parents. His formal education was spotty,
and he left home when he was about 16 to live in London, where he supported
himself with various odd jobs. During his late teens and 20s he travelled
in Germany and France, working sporadically as an interior decorator and
furniture designer.
In 1927,
inspired by a Picasso exhibition in Paris, he began to draw and make
watercolours; two years later he began to paint in oils. As with his
decorative work, he's self-taught in art. Picasso appears to have been his
only influence, although he has drawn source material from other artists,
including Velazquez and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
The oddest
thing about Bacon's career, evident in this exhibition as in the one four
years ago at the Tate, is that it appears to begin at full throttle in
1944. Bacon destroyed most of his early work in 1943, so the retrospective
is incomplete in that it presents only his mature efforts.
Bacon's
life offers only one obvious clue, his early family existence, to the
genesis of his bizarre and occasionally horrific imagery. He told art
critic David Sylvester in 1984 that his relationship with his parents
"was never good. We never got on."
The
antipathy was strongest between Bacon and his father. "He didn't like
me and he didn't like the idea that I was going to be an artist,"
Bacon observed. He had two brothers, both of whom died young.
Because
Bacon had severe asthma, he was rejected for service in World War II. So he
didn't experience the boredom, terror and random killing of the
battlefield, which may be the ultimate existential experience.
One shouldn't
make too much of these circumstances, however, for belief in the absurdity
and pain of existence can be induced in many ways. However his philosophy
formed, Bacon has always expressed this belief through the figure; he
considers abstraction formalist decoration that's inadequate to the task.
He also has
relied extensively on art-historical tradition - in his fondness for the
triptych format, his references to mythological and religious themes such
as the crucifixion, his reliance on the conventions of portraiture, and his
custom of presenting his paintings as precious objects.
One of his
more sensational pictures combining several of these issues is his 1949
paraphrase of Velazquez's famous portrait of Pope Innocent X. Bacon
portrayed the Pope as a spectral figure who seems to be screaming in agony
or defiance. The bust-length Pope is framed by a box-like outline, a device
Bacon uses frequently to focus attention on the central figure of a
painting.
The primal scream is Bacon's essential
concern and message. A gaping mouth bristling with feral teeth and
sometimes planted in a hideous, alien skull is a frequent motif. But Bacon
uses other motifs that are equally unsettling - fantastically deformed
bodies, contorted faces and impolite situations, like a naked man
defecating.
Specific
paintings refer to the Greek myths of Orestes being pursued by the Furies
for murdering his mother, Clytemnestra, and of Oedipus murdering his father
and marrying his mother. The visual references to these sources are obscure
and distorted beyond recognition, but the agonized spirit of the paintings
is consistent with them.
Bacon's
aspiration to Old Master gravity is pronounced. It's evident not just in
his themes but in his use of large formats and human-scale figures, along
with his insistence on framing his paintings under glass to establish
distance between the image and the viewer.
If the
paintings were not so compelling, one might consider these tactics pretentious
and arrogant. But one accepts Bacon's strategy as reasonable because of his
extraordinary ability to capture one's attention and hold it, regardless of
how one responds to a particular image.
Part of
this is compositional; Bacon keeps his designs simple and devoid of
extraneous details. He highlights figures with the framing box or by
setting them against homogeneous black or pastel grounds.
The other
part is the balance he strikes between "realism" and
eccentricity; the pictures are recognizable and logical up to a point, but
their ultimate fascination and meaning derives from their ambiguities. If
the universe is the ultimate mystery, then Bacon's paintings represent an
intuitive leap into its infinite depths.
Their
fundamental nature is clear, however: These are images from hell, from the
deepest, darkest depths of the human psyche. If they fascinate, it's
because we recognize in them not just the soul of an individual artist but
the souls of each and every person on earth.
FRANCIS BACON AT EIGHTY
Francis Bacon,
sometimes described as "the greatest living painter" was 80 last
October. Peter Jenkins, political columnist for The Independent, visited the
current Bacon retrospective inWashington, for Modern Painters.
PETER JENKINS | BACON | MODERN PAINTERS | VOLUME 2 NUMBER 4 | WINTER
1989/90
Francis
Bacon has been the haunting presence of our age. Belonging to no school,
possessing no clear artistic antecedents, by no means quintessentially
English, un-explicit in meaning, he has been seen to embody, more than any
other painter, the spirit of his age. To have exerted so powerful a
fascination for so long is in itself a tribute to the immense power of his
imagery. The viewer may not like what he sees, sometimes may recoil in horror
or disgust, but seldom is unmoved by the experience. During his 45 active
years as a painter—a
late starter, Bacon is unbelievably, 80—he
has inspired successive generations of younger painters, not to paint like
him but to paint. Through his conversations about art, notably with David
Sylvester, he has opened many eyes to painting and painters. Laurence
Gowing in the catalogue to the American retrospective notes his ‘gift
of making sense of the original art of his time, a sense that escaped and
still largely escapes conventional taste’. As a result of Bacon there is
much that we see differently.
If art
history is, or should be, about artists, Bacon will make a fine subject. He
has lived the life of the romantic artist and his habits and predilections
are as well known as his imagery. When I first encountered him at a drunken
Soho party in 1960, I was convinced he had sold his soul to the devil. The
chubby baby-faced man, with his barrel-chest and strong muscular forearms
displayed from the short sleeves of a dark-knit shirt (the arms are the
most recognizable feature of his self-portraits), unsteadily swaying in
too-tight khaki trousers, looked not a day more than 30. Yet Bacon was then
past 50. Later, when coming across him on licensed premises, it was easy to
imagine Mephistopheles at his side, his companion in the lower depths of
Soho, guiding his hand occasionally at the roulette wheel, supping his
champagne. Bacon would buy even the devil a drink. I do not mean to
suggest, as some of his critics have, that his painting has a diabolical
quality, only that there seemed to be some kind of nefarious arrangement
between, on the one hand, his genius and apparent immortality of his liver
and, on the other, the horror which stalked him daily. And if Faustian pact
there were, it was of a twentieth century kind, involving the eternal
damnation—Bacon
doesn't believe in any of that—but
hell on earth in the here and now; this he does believe in, or so he told
John Rothenstein for the introduction to the catalogue for the 1962 Tate
show.
Bacons’ reputation as a major
painter was established in the short space between the display of the Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, and the
purchase by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948 of Painting,
1946, which will join will join the retrospective exhibition when it
reaches New York next year. Bursting upon the scene in the way that he did
at that time it was inevitable that he would be seen, as Gowing records, as
having ‘stated the case for post-war European despair with a vehemence and
originality that earned him a special place among contemporary Cassandras’.
His first and most famous triptych, the Three Studies, was a contemporary of
Camus’s The Outsider the bleak absurdity of which is echoed
in Bacon’s many utterances on the futility of life. ‘At what age did you
come to realise that death was going to happen to you too?’
I realised when
I was 17. I remember it very, very clearly. I
remember looking at a dog-shit on the pavement and I suddenly realised,
there it is, this is what life is like.
The vulgar
existentialism, exceeding even Sartre’s vituperative self-hared, positions
Bacon at a particular moment in the twentieth century when despair was all
the rage. Not without reason: Sartre was ‘obsessed by torture’, says Camus,
who saw Europe as a ‘charnel house’ (a Baconian image). The MOMA Painting,
1946, has a strong sniff of Paris, an echo of Juliette Greco or the broken
chords of be-bop. L’enfer, c’est les autres’, decided
Sartre. L’enfer, c’est moi’, was Bacons view.
Bacon was
born (in 1909) at about the moment when the young Arthur Koestler, his mind
filled with Freud and Einstein, concluded it to be a self evident truth
that reason was absurd. Bacon much later would say:
Man now realises
that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has
to play out the game with no reason.
He came of
age as a painter in that post-war moment when, for Sartre, abandoning
literature for politics, the birds had ceased to sing. Artists, said
Shelley, ‘reveal less their spirit than the spirit of their age’, but it is
probably a mistake to read too much of the times into Bacon’s images.
People have read into his early paintings Baconian evocations of Belsen and
Buchenwald, or the mass murderer Christie, who ran his own cottage
Bruchenwald in North London. Later, they credited Bacon with prefiguring
Eichmann’s glass cage (Study for Portrait [Man in a Blue Box],
1949), although, as he was to explain, his boxes and tubular frames (often
like a conductors podium) were intended only as technical devices for
concentrating the image.
At a time
when, no doubt, he saw pictures of the tangled and emaciated corpses of the
extermination camps, we know for certain that he as consulting medical books,
including his beloved volume of colour plates of disease of the mouth (in
conversation with John Russell he refers to a ‘beautiful wound’), and of
course, Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of animals and human beings in
motion. We know also that he had read accounts of the behaviour of animals
in slaughter houses and it would be characteristic of Bacon if he found
that as instructive as the behaviour of the creatures herded to the gas
chambers. Images are what interest him, he insists over and over again, not
stories or illustrations. Nor, he says, is he a preacher—‘I
have nothing to say about the human situation’.
The
twentieth century has been a manic-depressive affair with ups of great hope
and downs of deep despair. It had begun with high hopes of all-conquering
technology, of secular heavens on earth, and the grasping even of the
origins of the universe. But out of the knowledge sprang new
irrationalisms, out of technology instruments of war and mass destruction,
while from the pinnacle of high civilisation Europe plunged into new depths
of barbarism Yet from the ashes of hope rose new hope, prosperity, and new
flowerings. The mid-century mood which Bacon’s early paintings seemed to
exemplify was soon to pass while his own dog shit weltanshaung was
to persist. Shelley was wrong in Bacon’s case: his works reveal the spirit
of the artists, less the spirit of the times.
Two main
themes run through his own account of what he is about. One is the role of
accident, the other the impossibility of painting. About accident it is
necessary to be very clear. ‘All painting is accident’, he says, and the
best things are likely to happen when the artist is out of control,
conjuring new visions of reality from the subconscious. But the result is
disciplined accident, paint a ‘fight between accident and criticism’. ‘I
think that great art is deeply ordered.’ In other words, what happens with
paint by chance is subject to the painter’s decision, and what survives the
veto of the slashing palette knife is no accident. As to the difficulty, or
near impossibility, of painting, Bacon attributes this variously to to the
death of God, to surfeits of images and information, but especially,
to photography—the
consequent redundancy of the painter as a mere depicter. Velázquez is, for
him, the painter par excellence who, before photography,
had been able to ‘keep so near to what we call illustration
and, at the same time, to deeply unlock the deepest and greatest things
that men can feel’. Today, the painter works in constant peril of lapsing
into ‘description’ or ‘illustration’ when his task must be to ‘trap’
reality, to ‘reinvent realism’ in the face of all the media-competition, to
achieve in an image the essence of something.
How does he
succeed in capturing ‘the truth’, or ‘what used to ne called the truth?’
That life is not a bowl of cherries but a plate of dog shit? Is that all? A
major retrospective—50
canvases are on show in Washington —is
an opportunity to reconsider. The gathering of paintings together in one
place at a moment in time, and also their juxtapositions on the walls, can
cause familiar images to be seen differently. What struck me most about
this 80th birthday show was how unshocking Bacon has become, partly perhaps
through the familiarity of so many of his images—the
carcases, the defecating dogs, those ectoplasmic Eumenides, most of all the
screaming popes—but
chiefly, I suspect, because many of the stereotypes concerning his works
are false. For example, I could count only some half dozen paintings whose
subjects were explicitly shocking or repugnant—for
example, theDiptych, 1982-84, which seemed to owe more to
Thalidomide than Ingres. This maybe a somewhat sanitised Bacon show,
without the buggery scenes or anything as unpleasant as the Triptych,
August, 1972, which was part of Marlborough’s 80th
birthday show, or as silly and camp as his naked male figures in cricket
pads (of which there was also one at the Marlborough show). Some of the
most powerful images, it seemed to me, are the earlier ones—in
Washington Figure Study II, 1945-46 (which used to be known as
the Magdalene in which the umbrella of the great MOMA Picture,
1946, makes an earlier appearance) and its companion Figure Study I at
the Marlborough with the striking image of the draped hat and coat with or
without a man inside.
The shock
quality of Bacon is also diminished by his painterliness. The Washington
show reminds us what a traditional and conventional painter he is at hear,
mostly tonal, his palette mostly conservative (the more expressionist period
of the red-orange fields did not last long) and the formal structure of
many of the canvases, while concentrating the eye on the image, at the same
time sanitising it. Striving to avoid story-telling or illustration,
he quite often fails to avoid elegance. The repetitiveness of much of his
work, the familiar furniture of the paintings, the same flat backgrounds to
his figures, leads the eye to grow accustomed where, coming across a single
powerful image on a mixed gallery wall, it might be stunned. Finally, the
much discussed and explained glass and the traditional gilded frames he
insists upon in order to hold the viewer at greater arms-length from the
image, succeed all too well in giving gloss to what are ostensibly raw
images. At the Washington show Americans unfamiliar with Bacon’s work found
the paintings powerful and fascinating but showed few signs of shock-horror
at his imagery.
His best
work, on the evidence of the Washington show, are the portraits he painted,
mostly in the ’60s, of friends. It seems to me, although it may be
surprising, that Bacon paints women better than men; that may say something
about the kind of men he paints, but possibly has to do with a greater
detachment and curiosity on his part. Certainly one of hi great masterpieces
is the wonderful Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing
In a Street in Soho, 1967, but the 1967 head and shoulder portrait of
her is also very beautiful. Bacon exactly describes the success of these
paintings, but especially of the first, when talking of portraiture in
general he talks about ‘trapping’ the ‘pulsations’ or ‘emanation’ of a
person.
The way in
which the Washington show opened eyes afresh was, for me, as a chronicle of
the artist’s Odyssey. From the ‘exhilarated despair’ of the bold and provocative
images of his early work, through the mature portraits of the middle
period, through much personal agony on the way, we come in 1971 to the
suicide of his lover and model, George Dyer, on the eve of his
retrospective at the Grand Palais, one of the greatest honours available to
a living artist. A room at the Hirshborn is devoted to this painful
subject, featuring the wash basin over which Dyer failed to die and the
lavatory pan on which he succeeded. Here everything that Bacon says about
story-telling flies to the winds; it is impossible not to look at these
powerful images in terms of the story they tell about Bacon, most moving of
all of the artist stumped against a wash basin and clinging to it for
consolation.
From this
point, on the evidence of this show, Bacon was too often struggling for
effect, ay times as if going through a second enfant terribilism,
too often repeating himself or borrowing images from others, splashing
water from Hockney for example. Finally, we come to the 1988 version of his
1944 crucifixion triptych. The contrast is striking, although sadly the
first version is in no condition to travel from the Tate. The emotional,
blazing Van-Gogh-like orange-red has given way to a deep Rothko-like
purple-blood field. The whole work is more formalist, static, austere, and
even more sculptural than the earlier version; the expressive,
painterliness of the first version has given way to post-painterly spray
and stain, in one of the panels the canvas left bare in large part. In this
setting even the Eumenides have become house-trained, their fury cooled
What kind of comment is intended here, we may wonder? Surely not a
conscious mellowing, an old man’s scream, nor a repudiation of the early
work, perhaps some kind of monument to it or to its painter; or, perhaps,
the ‘accidents’ of 1988 were simply different to the ‘accidents’ of 1944,
less exciting ‘accidents’ in my view.
There is no
gainsaying Bacon’s power of image-making. He has become part of the visual
vocabulary of the age. As Gowing points out, he was alone in realising that
Picasso’s distortions of the 1920s offered an exciting and unexplored
figurative alternative to abstractionism. His relentless pursuit of the
‘real’, his aspiration to the duality of form and meaning which finds perfection
in Velázquez, combined with the seriousness and quality of his
thought on the subject of painting, make him something of an artist-hero,
if a tragic one. For the Faustian spree must be nearing its end. Eighty is
not a bad measure of eternal youth. One wishes only that Bacon had had a
better time of it, less of the dog shit. For the tawdry bleakness of his
vision does less than justice to the times, but, we must fear, paints the
true ortrait of the artist as young and old man.
A master of destruction?
PETER
FULLER cannot share the general enthusiasm for Francis Bacon, who is 80
today
PETER FULLER | THE ARTS
| WEEKEND TELEGRAPH | SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28,
1989
ACCORDING to Alan Bowness, former director of the Tate Gallery, Francis
Bacon’s work, “sets
the standard for our time, for he is surely the greatest living painter”.
Such is the accepted judgement on Bacon who is 80 today; but it is not one
I can share.
Bacon
is certainly an artist of considerable power who has shown an exemplary
contempt for fashion and trivia. No one can be indifferent to his work.
When his pictures are gathered in a major retrospective they exude what
theologians call kerygma,
or a “call
to decision”. Yet the response they demand is not so much admiration as a
moral refusal: for if Bacon is possessed by genius, it is of a
life-diminishing kind.
He
was born in Ireland, the son of a pugnacious race-horse trainer. He did not
like his father but was plagued by confused sexual feelings about him. Late
on, he described boxing and bull-fighting as suitable aperitifs to sex. He
left home after an incident in which he was discovered wearing his mother’s
clothing.
After
an uncertain beginning as a designer and a ne’er-do-well,
Bacon turned to painting. He was to destroy most of the pictures he made
before the war. Asthma exempted him from military service; but in 1945 he
painted Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, now in the Tate
Gallery. This triptych shows monstrous, amputated, bandaged, bleeding and
shrieking creatures, coarsely drawn against a background of livid orange.
Bacon had found himself.
In
the years that followed, he produced some pictures of figures in distressed
landscapes; but his heart was never in them. His imagination retreated
behind closed doors into a world of bestial heads, screaming popes (après
Velázquez),
hell-hounds, and scenes of violent embuggerment après Eadweard Muybridge, a
19th century photographer.
Bacon
said he wanted a feeling of “exhilerated
despair.” He
paints the world after the death of God. He has always tried to eschew
consoling aesthetic illusions and has preferred to numb his pain with
alcohol, gaming and what he once described as
“the sexual gymnasium”
of the modern city.
Even
so, the heavy presence of God’s
absence —
or
at least the ghost of the great tradition of European religious painting —
hangs
over much of what he produces, For him, Cimabue’s
Crucifixion
may
be no more than, as he once put it, an image of “a
worm crawling down the cross”; but in his own pictures, crucifixes and
triptychs abound.
In
the 1960s, however, Bacon’s
emphasis shifted: he began to focus much more on self-portraits and
portraits of a group of close friends, including his lover, George Dyer.
There were certainly no precedents for these works. Some critics have
argued they are really caricatures; but a caricaturist exaggerates
particular facial features to travesty character. That doesn’t
interest Bacon. Unlike most portrait painters, he is also indifferent to
his sitters’
“social
masks”
and psychological depth.
Whomsoever
Bacon paints, what he finds is always the same. The nearest parallel is
perhaps the 18th-century artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who also searched for
some universal aspects in everywhere: only where Reynolds idealised and
ennobled, Bacon denigrates and destroys. He once justified this saying: “If
I make people look unattractive, it’s
not because I want to. I’d
like them to look as attractive as they are”.
In
Bacon’s
more
recent works, the emphasis has shifted again towards more anonymous and
mythological subjects. The familiar themes persist; but something
stereotyped, repetitious and smooth enters into his forms. The lonely
figures still throw up in lavatory bowls beneath naked light bulbs;
occasionally, they hunch together on couches for some barbarous act of
congress, or lie sprawled disgorging their abdomens. But these gross scenes
are often displayed against sickly, sometimes lavendery, pastel backgrounds
—
the
sort of tones with which, I imagine, Cynthia Payne decorated the walls of
her suburban bordellos.
In
the interviews which, over the years, David Sylvester has recorded with
Bacon, the artist makes it clear how he wants his work to be seen. He
insists he has nothing to say about “the
nature of man”
or
“the
human condition”.
“I’m
just trying to makes images as accurately off my nervous system as I can.”
He claims that the violence which concerns him is not his own, but that
which is to be found in reality itself. “Perhaps,”
Bacon comments, “I
have from time to time been able to clear away one of two of the veils or
screens.”
And
so, he sees himself as an uncompromising realist.
But none of us is the best judge of our own work. For myself, I don’t
accept that Bacon is a “realist” at all. Perhaps it was unfair to visit his
current retrospective in Washington so soon after seeing the great Velázquez
show in New York; the experience certainly confirmed my prejudices about Bacon’s
art.
When the wicked and suspicious Pope
Innocent X first viewed his portrait by Velázquez he exclaimed “Troppo
Vero!” (“Too true”). Even today, we know what the Pope meant. Bacon, of
course, painted screaming travesties of
this picture, which he himself now rejects as “silly”. They
certainly have none of Velázquez’s devastating power to reveal truth, and
none of his sumptuous, scarlet beauty. Indeed, I doubt whether anyone who
looks at any Bacon portraits thinks anything except, “How very like Francis
Bacon!”
Even when Velázquez was painting freaks and
dwarfs, he did so in a way which celebrated their defiant human dignity. He
handled his paint and composed his pictures so as to bring about what I
like to call a “redemption through form”, But for much of his life Bacon
applied pigment as if he hated the stuff, dragging it acros raw, unsized
canvas which drains it of beauty and of all semblance of life.
Bacon’s technical inadequacies seem inseparable
from his spiritual dereliction. Psychologists describe certain individuals
who are driven to reunite themselves with a reality from which they have
lost emotional touch by perpetrating terrible acts of injury on others. Bacon’s
paintings seem to me to offer a pictorial equivalent of such behaviour,
They owe more to the violence and perversity of his imagination than to any
love of the facts, let alone of truth.
|
|
Francis Bacon, Master of Despair
At 80, Francis Bacon would seem to belong to another era;
Why do his paintings still take us off guard?
WILLIAM WILSON | LOS ANGELES TIMES |
FEBRUARY 11, 1990
In the mid-1950s, a UCLA exhibition
included a new British artist—Francis
Bacon. He was represented by Study
after Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Awed faculty dragged
their budding-genius students down to have a look. It wasn't surprising
that the kids had never seen anything quite like it, but neither had
grizzled art teachers, who had seen a good bit.
The sinister, crafty Pope was
pictured suddenly screaming. That seemed significant enough, but the
painting's technique was even more striking—the
Pope appeared flickeringly through vertical, thinly applied striations
that suddenly gave way to the crazy, free-brushed drapery of his gown and
then firmed up to an illusive but deftly realized rendering of his face
and purple cap. The image seemed less seen than hallucinated.
Anti-Establishment beatniks roamed
the campus in those days wearing black, drinking espresso and acting
cool. Cool was the colloquialization of Alienation. Everybody was still
learning about the Holocaust, Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism;
Giacometti and Dubuffet; Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter. Smart people were
learning that the Second World War had rendered the world Absurd.
In that ambiance, Francis Bacon had
a certain inevitability. Besides, it looked to conservative artists as if
this was the guy who would give new meaning to figurative painting in an
era dominated by abstraction. Even among the Abstract Expressionists,
there was a lot of talk that dribble-and-splash painting was washed up.
Now, some 35 years later, Samuel
Beckett has recently died and the County Museum of Art presents a 58-work
survey of Bacon's oeuvre—the
first in the United States in some 25 years. The occasion marks the 80th
birthday of the artist who has been called the world's greatest living
figurative painter. Notable parallels exist between Beckett and Bacon. Both
were born in Ireland but moved away - the playwright to Paris, the
painter to London. Although Bacon is technically English, he joins Joyce,
Beckett and Camus as either real or philosophical exiles. All startled
and shocked the world with radical, disturbing art. By now, Bacon would
seem to belong to a past era and thus in a neutral chronological slot
where his work can be sorted into the bin marked Modern Classic or that
labeled Period Piece.
Things about Bacon's art invite
dismissal. Formalists like to kiss him off as little more than a
juiced-up version of Picasso in his surrealist period. The art often
seems overly theatrical, calculating its effects like the curtain-line in
Pinter's The
Caretaker when—after
a long silence—a
character blurts out, "What's the game?"
Bacon's work is increasingly full of
empty, flat spaces punctuated by dramatically placed scumbles of figures.
A recent diptych of studies from the human body is little more than a
series of stagey red rectangles and risers bearing grotesque mutations of
torsos. It's all about effect and we remember that Bacon started his
career as a decorator and designer.
His art is intensely mannered and
has changed only in nuance over the decades. His stylization invites
impersonation and has affected a long string of artists from the now
half-forgotten James Gill to Bay Area Figurative Art in general and Ron
Kitaj, David Hockney and recent James Dine in particular. Bacon's
mannerism leaves observers with the impression that he has made a career
of impersonating himself. This effect is heightened by the character of
the art. It seems fair to ask how anyone as immensely successful—and
presumably wealthy—as
Bacon can go on making art about despair.
The quick answer to that is that the
rich and famous are not necessarily content and Bacon has been strange
and haunted all his life - an out-patient recluse, compulsive gambler,
serious boozer and a homosexual of sometimes self-destructive bent. Also—when
so inclined—almost
predictably viciously witty and charming.
Given all this, one approaches the
retrospective ready to snicker. At first, the once-haunting Pope looks
like the payoff of a Monty Python skit where mouse has just run up the
pontiff's skirt. The snarling succubus in the 1950 Fragment for a Crucifixion has long since been made cuddly
as E.T. Looking at a Bacon portrait where the skin of a face is peeling
off, we think of a spy in Mission:
Impossible pulling off
the mask of a latex disguise. A study for a portrait of Van Gogh
trudging the road begs for some such caption as, "Pardon me, madame,
can you direct me to Arles?"
Today, we view Bacon across a gulf
of time, with electronic culture on our side and modernist culture on
his. On our side is a detached art inspired by the media and on his, an
art that filters history through intense personal experience. His
modernist culture included appreciation for ancient classical literature
like the Oresteia of Aeschylus, which inspired one recent triptych, and
then-contemporary culture, which still included T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes.
Bacon's gang includes Rembrandt, lots of Goya, Muybridge, Eisenstein,
Bunel, Godard and Eric Rohmer. Our side stands four-square with MTV.
As you begin to wonder if you
haven't somehow gotten onto the wrong promontory, Bacon begins to get to
you again. Of course there is an element of humor in him as there is in
Beckett. Humor and muffled horror combine to produce Absurdity. I was
once in a head-on car crash I thought was going to kill me. I saw the
face of this perfectly nice chap in the other car and thought, "So
that's what death looks like." Dying felt, well, ridiculous.
Bacon's art still contrives to take
you off guard like an unexpected anxiety attack in familiar, comfortable surroundings.
Just as he rarely wanders far from his Chelsea studio, the paintings
rarely stray from homey street corners or dowdy apartments. A sudden rush
of Angst in such reassuring places peels back the armor of conventional
assumption and gives us a glimpse of cauterizing fact.
Bacon jolts us into remembering that
we are animals. There isn't a dime's worth of difference between the dog
he painted after one Muybridge photo and the paralytic child he took from
another, walking on all fours like his brother simians. All beasts are
subject to sudden and violent extinction at the hands of other beasts.
When he paints two nude men embracing in a field, they are like creatures
in a zoo. You can't tell if they are copulating or killing each other.
Maybe both.
The 1946 Painting is a charnel house where a
flailed carcass presides and a bloody-mouthed man grimaces. He hides
under the umbrella of middle-class convention. It is another version of
those invisible glass boxes where Bacon paints us imprisoned in
rationality, bellowing against its constraints.
The artist is exquisitely aware of
human vulnerability. If he weren't so tough about it, he might seem
sentimental or self-pitying. Actually he does sometimes, but not in
"Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle, "where he transforms
the innocent business of a nice peddle into a metaphor of life's
precarious balance. Dyer rides as if on a tightrope just as the Fool of
the Tarot gambols on the edge of a cliff.
Bacon is a master of the tentative.
Even his most finished paintings are called "studies." He has a
genius for the illusive, the not-quite-stated, the ominous. And he gets
at it through plastic means. Triptychs like Three Studies for a
Crucifixion do woozy
things with space. We are in a red, circular room. Two men look over
their shoulders at carrion lying in the foreground. In the next panel, we
see a grinning, suppurating corpse on a bed and finally another
dematerialized side of beef. It is never clear if the flailed meat is all
human or if it is all the same thing viewed from different angles, so we
seem to be floating around the room like a jerky balloon, a witness to
something as vague as it is awful.
He also has a talent for the telling
detail. In the midst of some hairy, unclear scene of muted violence our
attention is drawn to a pack of cigarettes, a light switch or porcelain
cabinet handle-- the kinds of small realities that keep us from
dismissing the unpleasant as just a bad dream.
Bacon's recent art is sometimes an unconvincing attempt
at getting up to his old tricks. He is more persuasive these days in a
mellower mood. There is subtlety and gravity in a triple self-portrait
that doesn't need to be anything but the thoughtful record of a man
thinking quietly about himself.
Significantly, the exhibition
(through April 29) runs concurrently with a retrospective devoted to the
pioneer New York stain painter Helen Frankenthaler, an artist sometimes
thought of as a maker of exceedingly pretty abstractions. Hearing of this
unlikely juxtaposition, one immediately wants to title the coincidental
pairing Beauty and the
Beast.
So much for our ideas about art. She
turns out to be much tougher than her reputation and he much more tender.
The coupling leaves a nice reminder that we can't experience art
according to our notions about it--only looking at it face to face.
|
Bacon’s Staying
Power
Steven Dornbusch
In a letter to the Editor, The
Los Angeles Times
February 25, 1990
Regarding William Wilson's Feb. 11 review of the Francis
Bacon exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:
I admit to snickering at a recent LACMA exhibition. Not at Francis
Bacon's paintings -I snickered at all the people fawning over Robert
Longo's superficiality.
So Bacon belongs to the era of Existentialists and beatniks. Fine. Kurt
Schwitters belongs to the era of Dadaists, revolutionaries and prophets.
Cezanne and Goya belong to their times. I do not snicker at art because it
belongs to another time.
Francis Bacon has not changed much over the decades. He paints the same
images. He chooses to refine, rather than add new techniques. His
subjects - death, alienation, violence and sex - remain unchanged.
Bacon
rescues the viewer from Western "sophistication" of not feeling
anything about much of anything. His paintings make us feel. Over and
over again.
While his art belongs to another era, his place in art will not pass like
so many fads. Wilson's confused opinions will soon be forgotten. Like his
MTV and "electronic culture."
Violence, sex and death do not bore me. Banality does.
|
Bacon's Visions of a
Violent, Disjointed Century
By JOHN RUSSELL | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | JUNE 1,
1990
The Francis Bacon exhibition that opens
Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art comprises 59 paintings. Most of them are
large, and some are made up of two or three canvases, each measuring 78 by
58 inches. They cover the years from 1945 to 1988. (Bacon was 80 years old
last October.) Many of the images in the show acquired classic status long
ago and have been regarded by enthusiasts as central to the concerns of our
day.
The Francis Bacon exhibition that opens Sunday at the Museum of
Modern Art comprises 59 paintings. Most of them are large, and some are
made up of two or three canvases, each measuring 78 by 58 inches. They
cover the years from 1945 to 1988. (Bacon was 80 years old last October.)
Many of the images in the show acquired classic status long ago and have
been regarded by enthusiasts as central to the concerns of our day. This
was already true when Bacon was believed, as the critic Sam Hunter writes
in the catalogue, to have echoed the ''paralyzing, affectless settings of
Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit of 1942 and Samuel Beckett's Endgame of 1957.'' And to this day, in a
sustained tracking shot that has been going for half a century, Bacon seems
to have prefigured many of the images that look out at us every day in the
news pages and on the television news.
We see men discarded like rotting meat. Behind what is presumably
bulletproof glass, we see other men preaching, talking, hallooing, ranting,
raving or prey to manic, uncontrollable laughter. (The primal human cry,
King Lear's ''Howl, howl, howl!,'' is a lifelong obsession with Bacon,
though we should not forget what he said in 1962 to his friend, the critic
David Sylvester: that often as he had painted the primal cry, he had always
wanted to paint the primal smile but had never succeeded in doing it.) In
the Bacons that everyone talks about, we see violence taken for granted,
and the bloodied messes that result from it. Voyeur and victim are set
before us in ways that suggest they may soon change places. Second-rank and
second-rate people stand around, just as they do in life, to see what will
come of it all.
In the windowless echo chamber that Bacon knew so well how to evoke,
(as in Study for a
Portrait, 1953), we see an archetypal C.E.O. revert to babyhood in his
single hotel room. We see prefigured the hideous ordinariness of Adolf
Eichmann, on trial in Jerusalem. Bacon could also (as in Fragment for a Crucifixion,
from 1950) give a new and sinister meaning to the phrase ''dog eat dog.''
These are one-shot images, and most of them date from 40 years ago,
but they still pack a formidable punch. Those who have grown up and grown
old with them would have trouble imagining a world in which they had played
no part. They are by now a permanent part of the furniture of the European
imagination, and the paintings as we see them in the Museum of Modern Art
come over again and again as grand formal statements in which order and
clarity have long ago won out over disquiet.
That is why, for this critic, the present show does not come over as
in any way sensational. Dreadful things are seen to be done, but they are
nothing to what is done routinely, day by day, in the world around us.
Besides, there is a whole other side to what Bacon does with paint. There
are paintings in this show in which no one does much of anything except
hang out, talk, ride a bicycle very, very slowly or sit bunched up as if in
readiness for some tremendous outburst of erotic energy.
Once or twice, as in the Double
Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, from 1964, we glimpse a duet
between two fellow painters and champion talkers that would be
unforgettable if only we could hear it. (The high-keyed colour and the
literally laid-back postures of both Freud and Auerbach leave an
unforgettable impression). An understated intimacy and a gift for direct
statement are the mark of Bacon's portraits of his old friend, the French
anthropologist and autobiographer Michel Leiris.
In the Portrait of
Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho, from 1967, we glimpse a
rare, unfettered and galvanic human being -the beloved at one time of Jacob
Epstein, Andre Derain and Alberto Giacometti among artists, and of Constant
Lambert and Alan Rawsthorne among composers - who has the world at her feet
and expects nothing less. As a record of an aspect of humankind that we
must hope will always be with us, that painting is an astonishing
achievement, and one powered by a boundless affection.
No less essential to any anthology of rare human beings is the portrait
of Muriel Belcher, the owner of a drinking club in London of which Bacon
was for many years a habitue. Mrs. Belcher was notable in life for her
piercing gaze, her almost unbelievably free speech and her sense of the
precipitous ups and downs of metropolitan life.
Bacon portrays her as a sphinx, with long, delicate forearms that
double as forelegs and feet. As no one was ever more ready than she with a
plain answer to a plain question, Mrs. Belcher could be said to set here a
new tone for sphinxes. But it is a glorious impersonation.
Images like these are not gratuitous violations of either the face,
the limbs or the dignity of the people portrayed. Nor did they seem to me
to deal with what Mr. Demetrion believes to be Bacon's ''real subject'':
''man as animal, stripped to his bestial nature - to his real nature.''
They have come to look, on the contrary, like the contemporary
equivalent of the ancestral portraits that we find in museums and palaces
and great country houses all over Europe. In psychological terms, they have
of course been pushed infinitely farther than the Old Masters would have
thought it either possible or appropriate to go.
Bacon's way of painting is, moreover, peculiar to himself, and to
our own time. Faces have been taken apart and reconstructed on an inspired
whim that flouts every known canon of likeness. But far from looking
battered or abused, the people in question are right there, and have never
looked more completely or irreducibly themselves.
The show also includes one of the most mysterious of all Bacon's
paintings: the Sand Dune of 1983, in which a huge shelving
area of sand would seem part indoors and part outdoors. When his longtime
friend Mr. Sylvester, the English critic, asked Bacon some years ago why he
had painted landscapes at one time in his career, he said simply,
''Inability to do the figure.'' But in his 70's he found a way of painting
a landscape in such a way that it reinvented the human figure.
Those shifting, heaving, rolling sands do a double duty, in other
words. Though perfectly convincing as one of the more precious features of
the foreshore, they can also be read in terms of human bodies that form and
reform themselves, half in and half out of the sand. Once we get the point,
we may consider this as one of the most voluptuous evocations of the nude
in 20th-century art.
Yet there are many observers - in the United States especially - who
think of Bacon's work as simply a freak show, a horror show, a gratuitous
monsterscape. Bacon himself is, of course, well aware of this. ''Who ever
bought a painting of mine because he liked it?'' he once said to a friend.
That is doubtless why the last full-career museum retrospective of
Bacon's work in this country was in 1966. ''Difficult'' is still the
American code word for them. It should surprise nobody that, in the words
of James T. Demetrion, who organized the show, ''traditional sources of
sponsorship have not generally been available.''
But Mr. Demetrion could count on the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington,
where he has been director since 1984; on the Smithsonian Special
Exhibition Fund and on an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts
and the Humanities. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art took the show, and
so did the Museum of Modern Art, which in 1946 was the first museum
anywhere to buy a Bacon for its permanent collection.
Mr. Demetrion could also count on John Elderfield, the Modern's
director of drawings since 1980. who has installed the show in a grave,
uncluttered and unhurrying style that allows the big paintings to ride the
wall at the height, and at the pace, that suits them best.
This, in short, is a very grand show, an affair of huge and often
shattered presences that are entirely of our own day and yet seem on
occasion to stretch back into antiquity. Bacon deserves a long second look
in New York, and this show makes it possible.
Francis Bacon remains
on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, through Aug. 28.
The New York showing has been made possible by a grant from IFI
International.
BAD
FEELING
“...Francis Bacon is a
one-note painter, an eccentric, who has achieved effects within a
claustrophobically small horizon...”
KAY LARSON | ART
|
NEW YORK MAGAZINE | JUNE 18, 1990
Francis
Bacon is the grand old man of British painting, and it might be expected
that his survival to an eighth decade (as though to spite the horrendous
vulnerability in his art) would prod someone to celebrate. So, even though
New Yorkers last saw his work in 1975, when Henry Geldzahler brought it to
the Metropolitan, we get another chance to see it this summer, in a show
(organized by the Hirshhorn Museum) at the Museum of Modern Art. I hadn't
noticed anyone waiting breathlessly or the sequel, but perhaps it's just me.
Bacon
is one of those lucky painters who have had the consensus of history on
their side from their first exhibition. One of the first pictures he sold
(in 1948, two years after it was panted) went straight to the Modern and
became everybody's image of postwar existential anguish. This is MOMA's
famous meat-rack painting of slabs of butchered beef and strings of
sausages draped like tinsel around a slack-jawed black-robed authority
figure whose eyes are shadowed by a black umbrella —
a blind judge, if you will. The
"judge" holds court in a sterile U.N.-style amphitheatre you
could associate with the Kafkaesque trials of individual and collective
guilt that preoccupied Europe after the Nazi fell. Modern life unfolds in a
panorama of sterility and butchery, ruled by the terrifying figure of an
eyeless justice who talks with bared teeth and who shields himself from the
rain of Heaven with a proper bureaucratic umbrella. As a primal cry out of
the crumbling London of the Blitz, this painting had no match in its time.
Because it holds pride of place in MOMA's collection, it has carried
Bacon's reputation locally for decades.
I can't buy it, unfortunately. On the basis of this
exhibition (which is better at winnowing duplicates and editing weak spots
than others I've seen), I'm more convinced than ever that he's a minor
master, with the emphasis on minor.
Bacon is now untouchable. You can gauge the grandeur
pegged to his name by noting who wrote the catalogue entries - Sir Lawrence
Gowing and Sam Hunter, two of the most eminent living art historians - and
adding up the superlatives that fall like snow. The English, Sir Lawrence
included, place him in the same camp as T.S. Eliot, who wastelands he populated
with squashed faces pulverised under modern boot heals.
What Bacon does best is suggest what it's like to have
your skin stripped off and your flayed nerves rubbed in the dirt. There is
no small talent in being able to irradiate a painting with feeling. In the
forties, Bacon proved himself in his fist show (and has adapted his style
only slightly since). He seemed at the time to have sprung out of nowhere,
an interior decorator turned painter who felt shattered as much by the
open-mouthed screaming nurse in Eisenstein's Potemkin as by Poussin.
To arrive at the state of painterly disintegration that
would express that primal scream, the looked for his model, not
surprisingly, from Picasso. (And in Surrealism and Hieronymous Bosch). In
taking the lesson to heart, Bacon steered himself in an unusual direction.
Most Picasso followers tried to extend and elaborate on the stunning
formalist possibilities suggested by Cubism's shattered viewpoint: Bacon
focused on the pychic consequences of Cubist disintegration. In his hands,
a profound formal invention an invention of the way we see — was dismantled
and reconstructed in order to convey his turbulance. Very early in his
career, he found a new path out of Picasso but one that led toward
illustration (of emotion).
In the forties, the distinction between formalism and
emotionalism was still new and crudely cut; it wouldn't carry the weight it
would acquire in the next decade, when the Americans (who also came out of
Cubism and Surrealism) would create Abstract Expressionism by pushing the
formal possibilities to the limit. Bacon's reputation in England, where the
British cast a glum eye on developments in America, continued to soar. He
means something more in his homeland, you could speculate, because Abstract
Expressionism and its descendants mean something less.
On
this side of the Atlantic, Bacon's achievements don't look so glossy. He is
undeniably a powerful illustrator of despair. On this bleak theme he
produces as many plot changes as Stephen King; his sense of the grotesque
is as developed as Salvador Dali's. Like Dali and King, he's a tactician of
emotion. But when you reach saturation (with me it happens fast) and you
look further, for evidence of painterly experiment and formal brilliance,
form becomes formula rather quickly. Like Balthus or Henri Rousseau, Bacon
is a one-note painter, an eccentric, who has achieved charmed effects
within a claustrophobically small horizon. As I said, a minor master.
Describing himself, he says, "I'm just trying to
make images as accurately as I can off my nervous system as I can."
The comment helps explains why he considers himself a realist. It all
depends on how you define what's real. Comparing him with that other grand
British gent, Lucian Freud, you can see both painters as the poles of a
continuum, a very British line of pragmatic observation. Freud screws his
microscope to the surface of flesh whose minutest bumps and hollows form a
topography of obsession. For Bacon, searching for catharsis, the ferocity
and ugliness lie beneath the surface, and he mangles skin and bone to
reveal it.
That the English buff him to such a golden
sheen is slightly perverse, considering that the undercurrent of these
paintings his homosexuality. The theme didn't openly declare itself until
Bacon began to let his figures roll in the grass together in the fifties.
But even in the beginning, these pictures were about nakedness and carnal
loathing, corruption, and the disease of humanness. The open-mouthed
screaming orifices mounted on long throats are receivers as well as
disseminators, attractors as well as repulsers. You're not sure whether the
gaping mouths aren't getting ready to suck you in. Bacon revels in the
ambiguities, surely, or he wouldn't keep returning there, much as Joseph Conrad
did in Heart of Darkness, mucking around in the horror within. Bacon, again
like Balthus or Rousseau, has proved nearly impossible to imitate, and his
spasms of conscience seemed dated and irrelevant for a long moment. But now
his timing coincides the AIDS specter. The thin, toxic atmosphere inside
Bacon's generic rooms reminds me of the phosphorescent gloom of Ross
Bleckner's paintings in memoriam to the dead. Bacon's pictures only work if
you care about the message than the means, but the world supplies enough
genuine horror to keep the message coming round again.
(11
West 53rd Street; through August 28.)
BLUE: Portrait
of Van Gogh III (study).
Francis Bacon
By ARTHUR C. DANTO | THE
NATION | VOLUME
251 | ISSUE
4 | JULY
30, 1990
Grammar makes certain sentences available
to us that are useless for any purpose other than philosophical jokes.
"I am screaming" for example, is what philosophers term
self-stultifying: The conditions under which it could be true are
inconsistent with its being uttered, so it cannot but be false if said or
even written. Thus the lie is transparent to all but the writer when the
hateful and ludicrous Fanny Squeers, in Nicholas Nickleby, puts into a
letter "I am screaming out loud all the time I write" as an
excuse for mistakes. One cannot scream and write letters at the same time,
in part because the circumstances that explain the scream rule out the
possibility of concurrent rational action. The scream ordinarily implies
some loss of will, something the screamer cannot help despite resolutions
of silence, as in the torture chamber or the pit in hell. But that does not
leave the will free for other pursuits. Or, if we can imagine someone
knitting and screaming, it would have to be someone mad, and the scream,
like the lunatic's laugh, disconnected from the network of circumstances in
which either expression has the meaning of terror, say, or mirth.
Much the same considerations apply to cases
in which an artist paints a scream. It is always a reasonable inference in
such cases that the scream cannot be the artist's own, for the mere fact
that the representation is clear enough to be recognized as of a scream is
inconsistent with that. Painting, in whatever way it facilitates the
expression of emotions, cannot be a kind of scream if it is in fact of a
kind of scream. This is an important truth to keep in mind when viewing the
painted screams of Francis Bacon.
Bacon's images of screaming popes are among
the great defining images of twentieth-century art, and certainly they were
taken, in the early postwar years when they first appeared, to be artistic
summations of an era of unspeakable agony and horror. And they affect us
even today, and against the body of Bacon's far less compelling subsequent
work, perhaps because we cannot be indifferent to screams-not even when we
know, for example, that someone is only practicing for a part that requires
him to scream, just because that particular sound, issued through a human
mouth, must trigger in us reflexes over which we have as little control as
screamers themselves are supposed to have at the moment of impulse. And a
painted scream comparably summons up associations through which it is
vested with moral meaning. This is especially so when, as with Bacon's
popes, there is no context, within the painting, to account for the scream.
When Poussin paints a woman screaming in his Massacre of the Innocents (a
painting frequently cited as among Bacon's early influences), her scream is
a natural response to the butchery of helpless children. When Eisenstein
shows the screaming nurse in Battleship Potemkin (another
source unfailingly cited for Bacon), there is, in the massacre on the
steps, all the explanation we need for the grimace of impotence and despair
and pain condensed in the shape of her mouth. Seen just as a frame, clipped
out of the film, the scream of Eisenstein's nurse still implies a narrative
which the shattered glasses and shot-out eye enable us to fill in. There is
no available narrative for Bacon's screaming pontiff, all the less so when
we appreciate that the painting is itself a modified appropriation of the
celebrated portrait by Velázquez of Innocent X. The occurrence of
the word "innocent" in two of Bacon's acknowledged sources is
possibly worth keeping in mind, though the papal name, in the case of this
particular bearer of it, was one of the great examples of ironic
nomenclature in the history of mislabeling. Velázquez's portrait simply
shows the wily churchman, in white lace and red silk, enthroned in a
curtained chamber, wearing an expression that rules out screams.
Everyone in fact admires the psychology of
Velázquez's portrait, and the larger meanings to which the psychology must
contribute. Innocent is looking up from some document held loosely in his
left hand, and looks out at us beaming authority, power, mercilessness,
guile, defiance, resolution and contempt from his terrifying eyes. It is
the look a shepherd might direct to his sheep only if his mind were fixed
on mutton. Innocent may have been indifferent to the expression Velazquez
gave him, or possibly he was pleased by it as an outward sign of a man
dangerous to trifle with, but one cannot, today at least, refrain from
drawing lessons from the fact that this highest position in the universal
church should have been occupied by a man whose character was so at odds
with the charity and love that ought to be emblemized physiognomically. It
is a tension not easily rationalized, though in its own right it may
express a deep truth of Catholicism. Bacon's pope has no psychology to
speak of, since the scream leaves no space for other expressions and is in
any case not really an expression of someones character. A scream implies
an absolute reduction of its emitter to whatever state it is that the
scream outwardly expresses. There are no wry screamers, no crafty
screamers. The scream is a momentary mask. Still, the fact that it is a
pope who screams raises some delicate questions of interpretation. In the
language of symbols, the image of the pope carries the obvious meanings
that flow from his position as Christ's surrogate on earth and intercessor
for the salvational needs of mankind. The question is why someone with the
extreme moral weight of a pope should be shown screaming when, within the
canvas, there is nothing that accounts for the act.
It must of course be decided whether the
pope is screaming at something whether there is an object-or whether, like the
screams of the damned and the tortured, he cannot help screaming because of
unendurable pain. There are screams of horror, after all, where the witness
is overcome by something seen or heard. The pope's scream cannot be
objectless, one feels, since he is seated in his throne or on his palanquin
(which is one way of reading the yellow curves in Bacon's painting), unless
he is supposed insane, like a crazy in the park. He could, if this were an
internal symbol for Christians, be screaming at Christ's agony, or in
grief, like one of the Marys so often shown at the base of the cross.
Whatever the object, it must be commensurate with the stature of the pope
as pope. Think, for contrast, of the famous screamer in Munch's The
Scream, of 1895. A woman (one assumes) is shown running toward us, over
a bridge, with a couple in the distance walking away, as if indifferent to
her anguish. The screamer's object (if there is one) must, one is certain,
be some fraught personal situation she finds unendurable: The image is a
depiction of personal extremity. And this fits with Munch's work-his themes
are sickness, jealousy, bereavement, madness, sexual torment-as well as
what we know of his character and his life. But none of this would fit with
the screamer's being a pope, all got up in ecclesiastical regalia. Neither,
in truth, does it fit with Bacon, from what we know of him as a person. And
the assumption would have been, in the postwar years, that the pope was
screaming as the only appropriate moral response to the fallenness of
mankind and the world as slaughter-bench. As such, it could not but be a
powerful image, even if somewhat crudely painted, save for the lavender
capelet. Somehow, if a message, it must have seemed too urgent to be
conveyed through a piece of elegant painting. The powdery white, the swipes
of yellow and the vertical slashes that are vestigial reminders of
Velazquez's drapes, though they also suggest a deluge, are secondary marks
of the moral lamentation of the howling prelate. One would have wanted to
scream in sympathy: And with that cry I have raised my cry," as Yeats
writes.
All of Bacon's work in those years, whether
or not of popes, appears to be of screams or to call for screams. In his,
painting, of 1946, an early acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art, which
is honouring Bacon with a retrospective exhibition (until August 28),
the screamer is in a business suit, a yellow boutonniere in his lapel and
the upper half of his face cast in shadow by his umbrella. He is surrounded
by butchered meat, including, behind him, an immense gutted carcass hung by
its legs. The carcass of beef, in Rembrandt's painting of one, seems to
connote helplessness of a nearly cosmic order and comes across as a symbol
of suffering, as it does in a bloody painting by Soutine. There is a harsh
contrast in Bacon's image between the regular rhythm of bones and teeth and
that of torn flesh and a world torn by the scream of the man, whose
umbrella is an affecting symbol of ineffective protection, certainly
against the forces that rend flesh, eviscerate bodies, consume in pain and
flame. Painting, in context, had to have conveyed some political message
and, to use the irrepressible word from those days, existential mood. And
there are several images of heads that bear out this heavy inescapable
reading, for they seem to have no discernible features other than toothed
cavities, as if their owners had died, beaten to some pulp, with a terminal
scream on their lips. In some cases, the screamer is seated, as the pope
is, but in such a way and in such a space that it could be the electric
chair they are in. And in all or most of these, the vertical lines rain
down, cleansing perhaps, purging, or just adding to the agony, having no
connection to the vertical fall of drapes from Velázquez.
So, if not strictly Bacon's screams, these
depicted screams seem to entitle us to some inference that they at least
express an attitude of despair or outrage or condemnation, and that in the
medium of extreme gesture the artist is registering a moral view toward the
conditions that account for scream upon scream upon scream. How profoundly
disillusioning it is then to read the artist saying, in a famous interview
he gave to David Sylvester for The Brutality of Fact.- Interviews
With Francis Bacon, " I've always hoped in a sense to be able to
paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset." As if, standing before
one of those canvases, Bacon were to say, "Well, there, I think, I
very nearly got a screaming mouth as it should be painted. Damned hard to
do." Or to read that "Horrible or not ... his pictures were not
supposed to mean a thing." So Cezanne painted apples, Renoir nudes,
Monet sunsets, Bacon screams. To paint a scream because it is a difficult
thing to paint, where the difficulty is not at all emotional but technical,
like doing a human figure in extreme foreshortening or capturing the
evanescent pinks of sunrise over misting water, is really a form of
perversion. As a perversion, it marks this strange artist's entire corpus.
It is like a rack maker who listens to the screams of the racked only as
evidence that he has done a fine job. It is inhuman. As humans, however, we
cannot be indifferent to screams. We are accordingly victims ourselves,
manipulated in our moral being by an art that has no such being, though it
looks as if it must. It is for this reason that I hate Bacon's art.
Bared teeth and exposed bones play a
referential role in some of Bacon's later works, particularly in two
triptychs, one of which, Three Studies for a Crucifixion, shows the victim
hung upside-down in the right panel, like an emptied carcass, with his head
lying in what one supposes must be his own spilled viscera. But by this
stage in his development, Bacon had begun to treat his figures virtually as
viscera, as lumps and gobbets and tubes of flesh, not easily identified
anatomically, pink and red and white, as if his subjects were what was left
when skin and bones were removed. So shapeless are they, as piles and
puddles of scraped and squeezed paint, that one is grateful at times for
the mouths, as dentated wounds, to serve as some point of orientation. In
the middle panel of this triptych, for example, a figure lies, like a pile
of guts, on an elegant chaise longue, blood splattering the pillowcase and
rising, like red bubbles, up past the black window shade in some piecemeal
ascension. The teeth locate us in the gore, so we can identify eye sockets
and a neat wound in one foot. In the left panel stand two uncrucified
figures-witnesses, perhaps, patrons, executioners-one of them in a business
suit, which could be Bacon himself, the other a blob in what
might be black leather. The three panels, paradoxically in view of their
content, are done in cheerful decorator colors, apart from the figures
themselves: flat planes of pompeian red and cadmium orange, with black
window panels. One cannot help thinking of Auden's great poem on art and
suffering, as the old masters showed it: "how it takes place/while
someone else is eating or opening a window or just/walking dully along:' Auden
went on, marvelously, "They never forgot that even the dreadful
martyrdom must run its course/anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/where
the dogs go on with their doggy life."
How appropriate, one thinks, that the
crucifixion should transpire in a tasteful salon, amidst the sort of fin
de siecle color scheme Odette de Crecy would have favored when
Swann at last found his way to her body. After all, the act of love,
thrashing bodies and flashing teeth and animal hoots, also takes place in
those ornamental spaces. (Bacon, who had some success as a decorator and
designer of Art Deco furniture, also likes to paint coupled figures smeared
against one another in damp intercourse.) Or one thinks of the crucifixion
as a metaphor for terrible interrogations that took place behind shuttered
windows on quiet boulevards that the screams couldn't reach. There is a
certain insight in Nietzsche that it is not suffering so much as
meaningless suffering to which the human mind is opposed, so that it was,
in Nietzsche's view, the genius of Christianity to have made all suffering
meaningful. Certainly, we stand before works Uke this-or the Triptych
Inspired by the Orestia of Aeschylus-compelled, despite our will, to cover
the brutalized bodies with a balm of interpretation, a redemptive coating
of allegory, if only to comfort ourselves. So again one feels oneself to
have been manipulated in some way when the artist disowns any meaning
whatever, and draws our attention, in his interviews, just to paint, almost
as if he were some sort of Abstract Expressionist with no antecedent view
of what he was going to do when he faced the canvas. Why is he then not an
abstract painter-why choose these charged images only to elicit, as
involutarily as a scream, an interpretation he rejects, categorically, as
beside the point? We cannot see gore as just so much scraped red pigment,
cannot disinterpret a writhing limb as simply a marvelous wipe of white
paint. And this stance is reinforced by the fact that we cannot succeed in
giving meaning to a lot of what Bacon does in his portraits and figure
studies, where the subjects are liable to distortions that ought to have an
explanation in the world to which the figures belong but which will
standardly be given an explanation from the world in which painting takes
place-as something that happens not in meaningful spaces but on meaningless
surfaces.
There is one absolutely marvelous painting
in the show, worth anyone's time to see. This is Study for Portrait
of Van Gogh III, of 1957. It shows us what Bacon could have done had he
given to the whole painting what he instead gives to isolated faces and
figures. He shows Van Gogh as Van Gogh might have shown himself in a world
that looks the way he represented it in paint-as if the world were made the
way paintings are-trees of black paint squirming up out of fields of red
paint, past fields of yellow paint and green paint. The artist stands on
heavy feet, the kind that belong in his famous shoes, in a field of pink
mud, casting blue shadows. He has a black all-purpose face; it could be the
face of a horse as well as a human, or even of a fish. The face does not
matter: It is the world according to Vincent, and we are seeing it from
within. For its allusiveness, its power, its brilliance, its total engagement
with its subject, it makes the rest of the show look like posters for some
avant-garde guignol of yesterday. The portrait of Van Gogh is an homage, a
celebration of the only values Bacon allows himself to mention, the values
of painting as painting. It shows what his deflected talent is capable of
when his heart is in his subject.
|
Eminent outrage
- British painter Francis Bacon
By JAMES GARDNER |
NATIONAL REVIEW |
AUGUST 6, 1990
IN HIS MOST recent avatar at the Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon
appears before us defanged and declawed. The primal rantings now sound like a
petulant whimper. The spastic gestures and maimed movements now savour almost
of balletic adroitness. And yet nothing has changed in the heart or mind of
this octogenarian artist, the elder statesman of the British art world. The
latest paintings in this retrospective manifest the same unyielding,
implacable anguish that has been his hallmark for almost fifty years.
Rather
it is we who have changed. For the past two generations at least, we have
been assailed on all sides by art works of such calculated grotesqueness that
we have lost all power to be genuinely shocked by anything. We analyze the
forms or assay the political correctness of the artifact, depending upon our
orientation. Sometimes we even go through the motions of outrage. But we know
that ultimately it is only art. Anything Bacon can pitch, we can catch.
Yet, by
any reasonable computation, Francis Bacon is as great an outrage as any
generation should have to endure. And if the eminent artist has a sense of
humour, as I suspect he does not, he must be chuckling heartily at the
public's eagerness to embrace each festering and deformed carcass he throws
at it.
Though
Bacon was born in 1909, he becomes relevant to us and to himself only after
1943. That was the year in which, through a negation verging on self-parody,
he studiously destroyed almost all of the art he had made up to that date.
That was the year in which he was reborn as the shrill, tormented sociopath
the art world loves. Since that time, Bacon has evolved remarkably little.
His art has consisted in endless variations upon a closely circumscribed
canon of themes and forms. Bacon was and remains a surrealist, an unrepentant
irrationalist. But whereas others of that strain turned to Freud and to the
dream world of the unconscious mind, Bacon reverts with a vengeance to Darwin
and to the jungles of instinct. Whereas the other surrealists never lost their
grounding in the man-made world, Bacon voids his paintings of most human
traces, filling them with shrieking gibbons, salivating dogs, and subhuman
apemen cast against a chillingly blank field.
His
earlier works, it is true, are busier than that, overladen as they are with
props: umbrellas and whole sides of beef, densely patterned Oriental rugs and
landscapes whose nervously thin lines reveal a lingering debt to British
modernists like Henry Moore and John Piper. A few later works, such
as Sphinx II and Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh III,
represent slight departures as well. But by the late Forties, with the
"Head" series, Bacon had defined the highly idiosyncratic style in
which he would work for the rest of his life. Emerging from a blackness
qualified only by those wiry perspectival lines that have become something of
the artist's signature, a massive, disembodied head appears. An ear floats
absurdly to the side, perhaps torn away. The ill-defined eyes are shut in
suspended rage; the mouth-like orifice is fixed in a noiseless ululation,
exposing molars and fang-like canines. Were is there an end of it/The
soundless wailing?" asks T. S. Eliot. For Bacon there is no end. That
wailing, bitter, gnashing, self-consuming is the sound of life itself. All
other sounds are lies.
Everything
Francis Bacon depicts he distorts. And yet every depiction, even if we cannot
describe or name the thing depicted, has the infallible ring of truth. An
indescribable biomorph hangs down from a wire cage. A boneless, quivering mass
of gelatinous flesh drowns in a sink or sits huddled over a toilet. Bacon is
obsessed with movement within suspension, and with the suspension of
movement. An expressionless face decomposes before our eyes into a psychotic
omelette. A violent jet of water is frozen and immobilized as it streaks
across the canvas.
To
glance even cursorily at these paintings is to understand why they have come
to seem the quintessential, unequivocal statement of the modem mood. But
precisely for this reason it is too early to tell how good they really are.
We shall need to be well out of the twentieth century before we can finally
say whether Bacon was ever really on to something, or was merely a
cantankerous, maladjusted misanthrope. Formally, his brilliant, stylish works
are closer to masterpieces than anything else being done today. If some of
the colouristic choices are of debatable merit, his way with a laden brush
comes very close to perfection. What is wrong with the larger, spiritual
dimensions of these sixty paintings at the Modern is their one-sidedness. To
Bacon's binary mind, man, because he is not an angel, can only be a beast. In
this belief Bacon is surely not alone in contemporary culture. Rather he is
the foremost embodiment of the prevailing trend, the regnant humbug of the
age. This is the wilful fallacy which, in an age more happy than our own, may
one day qualify the esteem in which we hold Francis Bacon and everyone like
him.
"Body Language"
By MICHAEL LEVEY | ART NEWS
| SUMMER 1990
En masse, the way [Francis] Bacon’s pictures are painted
takes visual priority over what they depict—which is what should always
happen, though we cannot help our conditioned impulse to look for what the
areas of paint are “about.” Bacon might be accused of being something of a
tease in this matter, for despite his understandable protests about his art
neither illustrating nor narrating, he frequently alludes to circumstances of
his own life that are bound to pique human curiosity.
But to enter a room of his pictures is to encounter paint
first. It is the large-scale areas of applied pigment, often semiabstract in
form, that make what can be a lasting impact: a curved
pink-and-biscuit-colored expanse of a blackish brown rectangle slotted,
half-Mondrian-like, into a far bigger rectangle of fawn. Such shapes have
their own tautness and vitality. Although it may be that they have been added
by the painter as backgrounds to his figures, they often appear fundamental
to the composition. The surfaces of his paint read as though they were
expanses of fabric stretched tightly over some invisible drum. In fact, they
are much less formal than anything in Mondrian. Nor do they have anything of
the sensuousness, in color and in shape, of Matisse. Color is altogether
where Bacon’s art is least sure. yet there is a clean-cut, clear-cut feel to
these sweeping fields of paint.
They may well be indications of austere
interiors, with bare floors and blank windows. Fashionable analogies hover,
prompting commentators to mention the constriction of urban modern life or
even of prisons. But looked at directly, without literary overtones, they
fail to be oppressive or claustrophobic. In much the same way, the paint in
the foreground crisply defining a complex human shape, can enchant the eye
before it resolves itself into the unpromising suggestions of mutilation and
pain.
The apparent paradox between form and content
brings one to the artist himself. It is difficult to think that he has
experienced any particular disgust at the style of images he has created, or
that he means his images to shock. There is neither horror nor pity in his
pictures. Bacon’s art is not likely to produce a Guernica. It is too
sealed in, within a narrow circle of self-reference merging into self-regard.
His work partly draws its power from that concentration. After all, an artist
is not necessarily a social commentator—or a social worker. There is no
guarantee that the good artist will be a good citizen. Bacon can be seen as
admirable in his refusal to be anything but an artist, refusing to let
society have claims on him and scrupulously refusing to make claims on it.
Such an uncompromising and isolated position has its romantic aspect. It may
encourage the idea that the resulting art is bleak, severe in its emphasis on
the individual, and finally pessimistic about the human condition.
Nevertheless, in what is perhaps the
clinching paradox at the heart of Bacon’s art, there is about his pictures a
sensation profoundly more positive than negative.
Francis Bacon
Museum of Modern Art
DONALD
KUSPIT | NEW YORK | ARTFORUM | VOLUME 29, NUMBER 3 | NOVEMBER
1990
The revelation of this carefully selected,
historically self-conscious retrospective of the work of Francis Bacon is the
progression over the course of the artist's career from a loaded, murky
painterliness, to a spare, even linear, handling. This evolution toward an
evanescent thinness, even when colour is boldly uniform, goes hand and hand
with his schematization of format and figures. Usually considered vitally and
uniquely individual, Bacon's grimacing faces and tortured bodies, his general
sense of the sickness of human existence, his ironic secularization
(profanation?) of the traditional format of the sacred triptych, his
spontaneous appropriation of high art and media images, guided by inner
necessity—which makes him look contemporary (if eccentrically
excited) in this age of studied appropriations—seem secondary
issues. Here Bacon's signature tortured subjects progressively reveal
themselves as tropes, even clichés, of stylized suffering.
Is the late economy of means successful? Certainly it is
another way of sustaining the expressionist attitude at a time
when its language of direct expression seems to betray it. There is the sense
that the dryness of the late works may not be the result of a diminution of
anguish—did Bacon become habituated to his own psyche, and thus
less overtly mad, more sane?—but simply the exhaustion of
artistic means with which to articulate it. Indeed, the late works look
redundant, as though Bacon is pedantically driving home the predictably
painful lesson life inflicts on those who expect comfort from it. The late
works seem less visionary, as though Bacon, having grown accustom to his
insanity, now saw it with mundane eyes. The least that can be said is that
Bacon seems tired—of himself? Of the habit of making pictures?
In contrast to the compulsive early works, in the last paintings he may be
taking himself, and art, for granted.
But perhaps his reduction of everything in
his oeuvre to a predictable pattern is the indication of a new compulsion.
With age, according to some theorists, one is supposed to see life less
experimentally and more abstractly, that is, to finalize and order it. There
is no sense, however, of a grand summing up in Bacon's last works, no sense
of wisdom—visual or existential—distilled from all the year of labor. At the
same time they hardly constitute the whimper that T. S. Eliot thought came
with the end. Rather, Bacon has become a mannerist of himself. His late works
index his earlier works, but they look like a table of contents to
paintings that were never made. That's the way an artist signals he's at the
end of his tether, has nothing more to say: his works begin to look like an
index to themselves, an index easily confused with a table of contents. Why,
one wonders, is there no living work to read, and only the denuded text?
—Donald Kuspit
Home thoughts from an incurable surrealist
Absorbed
by his art; he scorns decoration; in fear of death, he is fascinated by the
macabre.
Francis
Bacon, master of the incongruous, talks to Richard Cork. Photograph by Graham
Wood.
RICHARD
CORK | THE
ARTS | THE
TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW | MARCH
16 1991
Entering
Francis Bacon's surprisingly Spartan bedsitting room in an uncanny
experience, like finding yourself inside one of his own paintings. The walls
are bare, and dangling from the ceiling are the same naked light bulbs that
swing like demented pendulums in his pictures or bear down glaringly on a
nude sprawled across a bed. Bacon's preoccupation with reflections in many of
his paintings is also echoed, with a startling dash of he macabre, by a
wall-sized mirror. Its surface has been partially riven by a spectacular
crack, as if somebody had picked up the small electric fire perched on a near
by chair and hurled it straight at the glass. Rather than replacing the
mirror, Bacon has taped up the largest slivers to prevent them falling off.
The crack's explosive power has been preserved, almost as disturbingly as one
of the figures writhing in the immensity of a Bacon canvas.
When I remarked on the austerity of the room, with
its single bed flanked by an angle-poise lamp at the far end, Bacon replied:
"My surroundings simply don't interest me very much." In one sense,
his comment is understandable enough. The studiously neutral colour of the
walls implies an utter lack of concern for the niceties of decoration. Two sofas,
half-obscured by rows of clothes, likewise suggest that their owner has no
time for wardrobes. The interior looks like a student's digs, inhabited by
somebody who disdains bourgeois propriety and feels impatient with the whole
notion of possessions.
"I once had a very early Frank Auerbach,"
Bacon said, after I asked him about the absence of pictures. "At one
stage I also bought a Sickert of a woman lying on a bed with a man seated
next to her. But, like a fool, I gave it to Lucian Freud. I wish I had it
now." He spoke like a man who lacked the financial resources to remedy
his loss, and Bacon's home certainly seems untouched by his ability to
command millions of pounds for a single painting. "Earning vast amounts
of money doesn't affect me one bit," he said. "I'd be quite happy
going back to the income I had as a young man, when I worked as a cook and
general servant."
Looking round the room, I could see what he meant.
There is nothing fixed or settled about this interior, no hint of and
expenditure having been lavished on a place Bacon moved into 30 years ago. It
resembles the room of a man in transit, someone unshackled by any of the
conventional ties binding most people to their houses. Perhaps the truth is
that Bacon is so absorbed in thinking about his art, and reading the books
which festoon every available surface, that he has no time left for the
external details of life.
In another sense, though, the parallels between this
strange environment and his work indicate that it nourishes him as powerfully
as the life-mask of William Blake once did. He still keeps it, on a cupboard
next to an electric fan —
a very Baconian juxtaposition. Its blanched and enigmatic features inspired a
mesmerising sequence of paintings in the mid-Fifties. More recently, it also
prompted him to have his own life-mask taken, an experience he regretted as
soon as they started smothering his face with plaster. Now Blake's life-mask
presides over the room, mediating with stoicism on the inevitability of his
eventual demise.
What, I wondered, did Bacon feel about the prospect
of death of death? "Well, Picasso abhorred the thought of death: he
loathed being reminded of mortality so much that he didn't even want anyone
to mention his 75th birthday when it arrived." Bacon, who refers
to Picasso a great deal and regards him as by far the greatest artist of our
century, understands exactly why he felt that way. "I hate the thought
of death," he said. "I hate the thought of it all coming to an
end." He paused, stared out of the window for a moment, and then
brightened with a defiant rallying cry: "Shall we have some champagne?"
He leapt up with astonishing agility and, betraying
no sign of an 81-yea old's stiffness, disappeared into the kitchen. While he
was away, I reflected that anyone who retains o much energy is bound to
regard the whole notion of extinction as anathema. Within seconds he was
back, bearing a bottle which he uncorked with seasoned ease. The two stemmed
glasses he placed on the table were elegantly inscribed with the initials FB
in flowing script. They were the gift, apparently, of an admirer in Germany,
where his work is regarded with almost as much veneration as in France.
Did he think that his paintings are appreciated more
warmly over there than in Britain? "Oh, they don't like my work here at
all," he said bluntly. "Maybe it's the savagery they find in it, or
maybe it's the homosexuality which I suppose is in my work. I don't go about
shouting that I'm gay, but Aids has made it all much worse, you know. People
are very, very odd about it. The other day a telephone engineer came round,
so I offered him a drink. He looked at me strangely and said: 'You're gay,
aren't you?' "
With characteristic honesty, Bacon has never made any
attempt to hide his homosexuality. Some of his finest and most erotic
paintings depict male figures embracing or making love. Moreover, he is
intrigues by the fact that his distant ancestor, the celebrated Elizabethan
Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, was also homosexual. "It comes up in
Aubrey's Brief
Lives," he said, bounding up from
the table again and moving swiftly over to a pile of books on a cupboard near
the bed. The search proved fruitless: "Where is
it? What have
I done with it? I've thrown all my books away, you know, because I've got no
room for them."
I challenged his about the British perception of his
work. He is, after all, widely regarded as this country's most outstanding
living painter, and over the past 30 years the Tate Gallery has paid him the
unique honour of staging two great retrospectives. Now, in the Tate's latest
rehang, he has been given the accolade of a large room devoted solely to his
work. It is immensely powerful, and prompted me to telephone him on impulse
after I had visited the gallery. Bacon's line was engaged for almost an hour,
but then, quite suddenly, started ringing. He answered at once, and I told
him that I had been particularly impressed at the Tate by his loan of a grand
triptych, which he painted three years ago.
Bacon conceived it as a second version of a smaller
and far more rasping triptych called Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
Painted in 1944, it seemed at the time to encapsulate the horror of war, by
showing three monstrously deformed hybrids, half human and half beast,
yelling their despair against a vehement orange ground. This disconcerting
trio reappears in the 1988 version. But the two figures at the sides now
point inwards rather than outwards, seeming to direct their anguish towards a
blindfolded form with bared, vicious teeth in the centre. This time the extra
space around each figure intensifies their isolation, and Bacon exchanges the
parched, angry orange of the earlier triptych for a sumptuous deep crimson.
Having mentioned my fascination with these two
versions, I asked Bacon if we might meet. To my surprise he agreed, and the
next morning I went round to his mews home, in South Kensington, armed with
his warning that its entrance had no name-plate to identify it. Although his
work might suggest that Bacon is a reclusive and difficult man, he could not
have been more convivial. Unusually for an artist, he is also very frank in
his criticism of the work he had produced. "I did that second triptych
because I'd always wanted to do a large version of the earlier one," he
said. "I thought it might work, but I think the first one is the best. I
should have reiterated the orange to give it a kick, because the red
dissolves. But I may had been dissuaded by the boredom of putting it on,
because mixing that orange paint with pastel and spraying it was a terrible
lot of work."
Why, I asked, had he remained so obsessed with the
crucifixion theme? "Well, I'm not in the least religious," he said,
"even though I was brought up in the Protestant faith and went to church
as a child. At my age, I've known many people die or commit suicide and I've
never thought they were anything other than dead. I'm certain there's nothing
after that, and I like the finality of the American expression 'drop dead'.
But I am fascinated by the great crucifixions which have been painted in the
past by Cimabue and Grünewald."
Lying on the table beside
us, next to an assortment of bottles and a Linguaphone course, was W. B.
Stanford's book on Greek
Tragedy and the Emotions. It reminded me that Bacon's gruelling interpretation of
the crucifixion had been profoundly affected by his love of Aeschylus. One of
his most haunting late triptychs was "suggested by" the Oresteia plays, and although he can only read Aeschylus in translation, "the whole surrealism is
there". Picasso's paintings of bathers from the surrealist period
likewise influenced Bacon profoundly, to the extent of inspiring him to
start painting. "But I've been influenced by everything," he said,
"even the extraordinary colour photographs in medical text books, which
I get from a bookshop in Gower Street. I got one there recently on small
wounds."
He rose again and returned
this time with a well-thumbed, paint-smeared copy of A
Colour Atlas of Nursing Procedures in Accidents and Emergencies. I flinched from the pictures of syphilitic sores and
other excruciating painful afflictions inside, all reproduced with glistening
vividness. But Bacon seemed captivated rather than appalled as he leafed
through the pages Why did he never even shudder at them? "I suppose when
I look at these photographs, I think: 'My God, I'm lucky I don't have that," he replied, pointing at a particularly gruesome
wound. "But they don't alarm me in the way that they do other people.
Once I was driving through France with a friend, and we came across a
terribly bad motor accident. There was blood and glass all over the road. But
I remember thinking that there was a beauty about it. I didn't feel the
horror of it, because it was par of life."
Sensing that we were
approaching the central reason why some people still recoil from Bacon's art,
I pressed him to speculate on the origins of his preoccupation with the
normality of violence. "Well, you musn't forget that I was born in
Ireland," he said, "where my English father trained racehorses very
unsuccessfully. I grew up there at a time when Sinn Fein was going around.
All the houses in our neighbourhood were being attacked, and on all the
trees you'd see the green, white and gold of the Sinn Fein flags.."
Although Bacon's family
moved to London at the beginning of the the first world war, when he was
almost five, the atmosphere of fear did not abate. "We lived near Hyde
Park, in Westbourne Terrace, and after the bombing started they sprayed the
park with a phosphorescent substance from watering-cans. The idea was that
the zeppelins would identify this glow as the lights of the city, and drop
their bombs there. Then we went back to Ireland again, so I was brought up to
think of life having this violence."
Even today it remains a
powerful force driving his work. At an age when most men have mellowed and
lost some, at least, of their youthful fire, Bacon stays close to his old
obsessions. "I was planning this year to do a series of paintings about
places where murder has been committed," he said, describing how there
would have been, "one in a field, one on a pavement, and one in a room.
But I'm going to abandon the idea."
One of these canvases sat
half-finished on an easel in his studio, a modestly proportioned room reached
by passing through a kitchen lined with colour reproductions of his work. A
grey upper area in the painting led down to a central section spattered with
blood. It had the rudiments of an authentically chilling image. But Bacon, an
inveterate and ruthless destroyer of pictures he considers to be failures,
said it was no good. He seemed reluctant to show me any of the other
works-in-progress stacked against the wall.
Responding to my interest,
though, he did allow me to explore the rest of the studio. It was cold,
probably because his anxiety about the risk of fire prompts him to leave
unheated the rooms he is not currently not using. The walls, like the doors,
were gaudily covered with paint-splashes of every conceivable colour. As for
the floor, it was heaped to the point of outright congestion with books,
paint pots, squeezed-out tubes of pigment and smeared rags. How Bacon moves
around in such a cluttered space remains unfathomable, but I did manage to
bend down and retrieve a small canvas from the wreckage. The painted face it
once contained had been cut out with a few swift slashes of the knife,
leaving only a tantalizing vestige of a head behind.
In this cramped interior,
lit by a skylight window which Bacon inserted for the purpose, he manages
even to work on even the largest of his triptychs. When assembled, they must
stretch across virtually the full width of the room, but Bacon finds this
restriction oddly stimulating. "The best exhibition I've ever had was in
1977 at the Galerie Claude Bernard, in Paris, where the spaces are all small
and the paintings looked more intense." So here, hemmed in by detritus
in a studio which most artists would find claustrophobic, the indefatigable
octogenarian repairs every morning. Unlike Lucian Freud, who painted a
masterly little portrait of Bacon from nocturnal sittings almost 40 years
ago, he prefers working in daylight. "I get up very early and
paint in here until 1 pm. Then I'm finished, I've had it. I hate afternoons,
I think they're absolutely revolting, they're a wash-out. But I feel better
again in the evenings."
Hr looked spry enough as we
talked, and while walking to a nearby Italian restaurant for lunch his gait
seemed positively jaunty. The laced-up gym shoes, fawn pullover and corduroy
slacks only accentuated the inner vitality of a man whose enthusiasm for
work, and eagerness to talk about the artists and writers he admires most
keenly, remains undimmed.
"I've thought of doing
dozens of things which I've never done," he said, with an old man's
acute awareness of the role played by temporality and chance. "One's
energy fluctuates, and there's never enough time. With life passing so
quickly, you can never talk in ultimate terms, never plan for the future. It
just happens." But, judging by the paintings he continues to produce,
Bacon's ability to seize the moment is still as formidable as ever.
At home among the paintpots: "My surrounds
simply don't interest me."
Francis Bacon, genius of the violent style,
is dead
FIRST EDITION | FRONT
PAGE
| THE
EVENING STANDARD | WEDNESDAY,
APRIL 29, 1992
FRANCIS BACON died today of a heart
attack in a Madrid hospital after being taken ill on holiday.
The 82-year-old painter had been staying with friends in Spain. He had
complained of not feeling well and was admitted to hospital where he died
suddenly this morning, his London agent said. He had suffered from asthma
throughout his life.
His body will be flown back to England for a private funeral. Francis Bacon lived a life divided
between the gutter and the Ritz. Some said he was the greatest British artist
since Turner —
others considered his art obscene. All over the world sales of his work
attract top collectors and record prices. Yet Bacon lived for most of his
later life in a chaotic two-bedroom mews house in South Kensington.
Born in Dublin in 1909, his English father was a retired Army officer
and went to Ireland to train horses. Bacon's relationship with his parents was not good and they never really
supported his ambitions as an artist. At the age of 16 he was banished by his
father after he was found wearing his mother's underwear and caught having
sex with the grooms. First stop for Bacon was London and then Berlin, where he indulged in sexual escapades,
including nights in transvestite clubs, and gambling sprees.
He returned to London in 1923 and began to design modernistic furniture.
However, Bacon - who destroyed much
of his early work with a razor — himself dated the start of
his artistic career with the triptychs Three Studies for the Figures at the
Base of a Crucifixion.
His triptychs, which launched his career at the age of 35, followed the
European tradition of altar pieces but his strong exciting images
reinvigorated the British art scene and became a symbol of renewed life. At
the outbreak of the Second World War he tried to enlist, but was turned down
because of his asthma, so joined the ambulance rescue squad. Some critics
believe this experience with death helped mould his violent artistic style.
He had no formal training and used his fingers, scrubbing brushes and
rags, combining different images from different media to produce startling
images.
Inspiration came from poets, photographs and even medical books. Some of
his most famous and striking pictures are the Screaming Popes. Here he
combined references from a still photograph from Sergei Eisenstein's film
Battleship Potemkin and Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X to produce an
unforgettable image.
Aloof and alone when working, he could also be sociable, drinking in
Soho's Colony club where, as a struggling artist, the shrewd owner Mrs Muriel
Belcher paid him £10 a week to bring in 'good spenders'.
His famous love of champagne and oysters at Wheelers restaurant made him
legendary and he once agreed to a television interview provided it was filmed
there and his slate was cleared.
In 1971 he was given a retrospective in Paris's Grand Palais, an honour
rarely afforded British artists. Tragically his former lover and model George
Dyer committed suicide hours before the exhibition opened.
* CHANNEL 4 is screening a 1985 South Bank
Show on Francis Bacon at 9pm tonight.
MIRROR OF OUR VIOLENT TIMES
By BRIAN SEWELL | FIRST
EDITION |
THE EVENING STANDARD | WEDNESDAY,
APRIL 29, 1992
IT IS an irony that Francis Bacon should die in Madrid,
the city of Velasquez, whose heir he was as the last in the line of ancestral
European painting. He was heir too to the grandeurs of the Italian
Renaissance and the bloodstained violence of German art, ignoring the
aesthetic nonsenses of abstract art and other late 20th century fashion.
He took the Crucifixion, stripped it of all its Christian implications,
and invested it instead with the universal beastliness of man and abattoir,
running with blood, deafened with screams. As a portrait painter he was not
the friend with insight but the harsh interrogator, the man outside the ring
of light with lash and electrodes close at hand. His prisoners, presidents,
popes and old friends squirmed.
He used the ideas of the trap, the cell, the cage, the X-ray field and
the heavy fall of light to imprison and torment his subjects to distil the
violence, and to assault complacent senses with graceless nakedness on the
lavatory pan and vomit in the wash basin.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 but did not stay there long.
Ill-at-ease with his middle-class parents, Bacon's adolescence was spent
alone in Berlin and Paris, designing furniture and rugs, and it was only in
1929 that he turned to painting.
He was entirely self-taught, rejected by the English surrealists for not
being sufficiently surreal, and as no one else paid serious attention to his
early work, he destroyed it. After the war, the friendship and support of
Ruskin Spear and John Minton, and the use of a studio in the Royal College of
Art, gave his work new strength and impetus.
In 1945 he exhibited Three Studies for figures at the base of a
Crucifixion, now in the Tate Gallery, a benchmark for all subsequent work,
and in 1949 he was given a one-man exhibition in London. It was an immediate
success, and the first of many all over the world, for Bacon broke all the timid
rules of British art and forced it into the European tradition. His work was
eventually to be found in major galleries all over Europe, Japan and America
and was in such demand that prices paid by private collectors often exceeded
the £1 million mark.
He was held by Alan Bowness, former Director of the Tate Gallery and a
close friend, to be Europe's greatest living painter — others of us thought him
the greatest living painter in the world.
A very likeable man, a considerable drinker, he was in private life
unassuming, quick-witted and warm; he travelled by Tube as often as not, did
his own shopping, offered support to young painters whose work he liked and was
never formidable.
When interviewed by distinguished broadcasters and critics, he
invariably saved them from themselves, camouflaging the worst of their
idiocies with quick and reasonable answers to fumbling, incoherent questions.
Made into something of a guru by the media, his view of the future of
painting was deeply pessimistic.
Bacon took the vile, sexually and politically obscene, the shudderingly
visceral, and lifted them with paint so that we might contemplate ferociously
profane images of cruelty and despair and see in them an inheritance from the
great Renaissance themes of religious and temporal power.
Titian, Rembrandt and Velasquez might not have cared for Bacon's work but they would at
once have recognised kinship in his astonishing mastery of paint and the
profound pessimistic atheism of his images. He was the perfect mirror of the
spirit of our age.
Francis Bacon dies of a heart attack at 82
By
COLIN RANDALL | THE
TELEGRAPH | WEDNESDAY,
APRIL 29, 1992
FRANCIS BACON, the self-taught artist seen by
admirers as Britain's greatest 20th century painter but by Mrs Thatcher as
"that dreadful man who paints those horrible pictures", died
yesterday after suffering a heart attack while while on holiday in Spain. He
was 82.
The conflict aroused by his work was prompted by his
concentration on sex and death, often violently expressed. He also adopted a
colourful lifestyle and was openly homosexual.
Mr Bacon lived to see his work command to prices. A
1973 triptych fetched £3.75 million at Sotheby's in New York in 1989, and a
portrait was sold last December for almost £2 million at Sotheby's in London.
A
life between the gutter and the Ritz
Was
Francis Bacon, who died yesterday, Britain’s
greatest painter?
Daniel
Farson,
a friend for 40 years, traces his unconventional life and, right, Richard
Dorment assesses
his work
DANIEL
FARSON | THE
ARTS | THE
DAILY TELEGRAPH | WEDNESDAY,
APRIL 29, 1992
FRANCIS BACON, who has died in Spain ages 82,
was considered by many to be the most important and original British artist
of this century.
He was one of a few painters to receive
critical if not public acclaim during his life time. He was offered such honours
as a knighthood and the Order of Merit, but he quietly declined them.
Though constantly surprising, his work did
not change drastically over the years but but developed his theme of human
pain, despair and loneliness, depicted with a violence which may become
symbolic of the 20th century.
He was also one of the formidable figures of
his time, a man who divided his life, as he put it, "between the gutter
and the Ritz". His bohemian excesses are bound to make him legendary.
A heavy drinker and obsessive gambler, His
stamina was exceptional and he appeared 20 years younger than his age. He was
a brilliant conversationalist; his wit was spontaneous and his carefully
measured sentences and lilting intonation could make the mundane sound
hilarious.
His presence was equally welcome in the clubs
of Soho or the salons of smart society, and he was at his ease in both.
Certainly, he had not time for the trappings
of success and lived for the last 25 years in a small mews cottage near
South Kensington which looked as if it was waiting for the furniture to
arrive, with blackened windows and naked light-bulbs. "I feel at home in
chaos," he said.
Bacon directed his career with consummate
skill while appearing to ignore it, and he was careful not to be associated
with any artistic school or movement. He did not attempt to conceal his
homosexuality, but tended to his dislike of militant "gays"—though
he signed a petition against the Government's controversial Clause 28.
Increasingly, he resented Mrs Thatcher's
standards while admiring her strength. In her turn, when informed that Bacon
was regarded as Britain's greatest painter, she expressed dismay: "Not
that dreadful man who paints those horrible
pictures!"
When a historic exhibition of his work was
held in Moscow in 1988—an extraordinary honour of an artist who was
frequently accused of "decadence" in the Western world—he claimed
his asthma prevented him from attending, though privately he confided that he
felt he was being "manipulated".
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin of English
parents on October 28, 1909, and brought up in County Kildare where his
father (a distant kinsman of the late 16th early 17th-century essayist,
Francis Bacon) had a training stable. When the First World War broke out, the
family moved temporarily to London, where his father worked for the War
Office.
After
repeatedly running away, Bacon was removed from a minor public school in
Cheltenham after a year and given a weekly allowance of £3 by his mother at
the age of 16. This marked the end of his education and his family life,
which he admitted was unhappy. His father opposed his wish to become an
artist.
At the age of 18 he went to Berlin. One explanation
is that his father was exasperated by his son's indolence and habit of
dressing in his mother's clothes, and hoped too make a man of him by
entrusting him into the care of a sporting uncle, who, as it turned out,
shared his nephew's inclinations. Two months later he moved to Paris, where
he saw his first Picasso exhibition.
In the years that followed Bacon drifted between
menial jobs. Applying for a job as a "gentleman's gentleman", he
forged his references but was given his notice when his "gentleman"
saw him dining at the next table at the Ritz on his evening off.
With his usual candour, Bacon admitted that he lived
on his wits as well: "I used to steal money from my father whenever I
could and I was always taking rooms in London and then disappearing—not
paying the rent. What's called morality has grown on me with age."
At
the same time he experimented as a decorator—his
modernist furniture was illustrated in The Studio in 1930 and
even bought by R. A. Butler.
Self-taught, and never a draughtsman, he acknowledged
several images which helped him, such as the early photographs by Eadweard
Muybridge of The
Human Figure in Motion and
the film still of the screaming nurse on the Odessa Steps, her glasses
shattered, from Eisenstein's Battleship
Potemkin.
Why, I asked, had he remained so obsessed
with the crucifixion theme? "Well, I'm not in the least religious,"
he said, "even though I was brought up in the Protestant faith and went
to church as a child. At my age, I've known many people die or commit suicide
and I've never thought they were anything other than dead. I'm certain
there's nothing after that, and I like the finality of the American
expression 'drop dead'. But I am fascinated by the great crucifixions which
have been painted in the past by Cimabue and Grünewald."
Though he claimed
that nothing in his work mattered until 1945, Bacon was influenced by his
close friend, the Australian painter, Roy de Maistre, and particularly by
Graham Sutherland. As early as 1934 he held his own show in a Curzon Street
basement; his painting of a crucifixion (1933) was noticed by Herbert Read
and reproduced in his book Art
Now; the
publisher Sir Michael Sadleir bought it by telegram.
During the Second World War Bacon was exempt from
military service because of his asthma. Instead, he ran private gambling
parties in Millais's old studio in South Kensington, with his faithful nanny
looking after the hats and coats. It was now that he started to paint
seriously.
"I
do what I do to excite myself,"
he said, but claimed; "I have looked at everything in art." Among
the artists he admired were Rembrandt, Grunewald and Velázquez, whose
portraits of Pope Innocent X provided the inspiration for Bacon's early
series of Popes screaming in silence.
In
Monte Carlo immediately after the war, he resumed his friendship with the Sutherlands,
who witnessed a win at the Casino so large that Bacon was able to rent a
villa for a year and buy a year's supply at a delicatessen, before returning
to lose the rest. It seems undeniable, though he tended to deny it, that
Bacon gained from the encouragement of the more experienced artist.
In
1944 Bacon's of Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was
shown in a mixed exhibition at the Lefevre that included Henry Moore and
Graham Sutherland. The considerable influence of Picasso's abstract shapes in
the 1927 Paris exhibition in instantly apparent, but Bacon twisted them into
figures which were almost human. John Russell described their impact:
"Visitors were brought up short by images so unrelievedly awful that the
mind shut with a snap at the sight of them ... these figures had an
anatomy half-human, half-animal ... They caused total consternation."
This
was a turning pint and the studies were bought in 1953 by the Tate Gallery.
Though rivalry now entered their friendship and finally eclipsed it,
Sutherland remained supportive, introducing Bacon to such patrons as the
ship-owner Sir Colin Anderson, and to Kenneth Clark, who left the studio
murmuring "Interesting ... yes", whereupon Bacon explained;
"You see, you're surrounded by cretins."
That
night Clark told Sutherland: "You and I may be in a minority of two, but
will still be right in thinking that Francis Bacon has genius."
Clark
was proved correct. A period followed with some of Bacon's most memorable
paintings; Figures
in Lanscape,
hinting at assassination, and a series of Heads caught
in the act of screaming.
His
importance was recognised by fellow Soho artists: John Minton, Lucian Freud,
Rodrigo Moynihan, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews. They met in the Colony
Room, run by Muriel Belcher, who became one of his few intimate friends.
Outside
this circle he remained virtually unknown and in spite of his patrons he was
glad to sell his pictures for negligible sums.
Bacon's
life changed dramatically in 1958 when he joined the Marlborough
Gallery, whose initiative was instrumental in staging the first retrospective
at the Tate in 1962, when the critics accepted him as a painter of
extraordinary power.
This
was the first of three landmarks, followed by the exhibition at the Grand
Palais in Paris (1971), and the second retrospective at the Tate in 1985,
when he gained new respect as "Britain's greatest living painter",
though there were dissenters.
But
public triumph was accompanied by personal tragedy. After the first Tate exhibition
he opened a score of congratulatory telegrams, the last of which informed him
of the death of Peter Lacy, a friend whom he was about to join in Tangier.
Then
in Paris in 1971, as he waited at the Grand Palais to welcome President
Pompidou, word was brought to Bacon that George Dyer, his close friend and
model, had committed suicide.
But
in his final years Bacon had the support and companionship of a young East
Ender, John Edwards. These years were among his calmest, though his energy
seemed undiminished.
Benefiting
from the boom in the art world, Bacon became a rich man. In 1987 a million
pounds was paid at Christie's in New York for Study
for Portrait II,
painted in the 1950s. Ever disdainful of success, he recoiled when an
accountant advised him to live in Switzerland: "What a terrible
prospect. All those fucking views!"
For
a man who enjoyed the best of life—food,
drink and friendship—there
is no celebration of life as in the French Impressionists or Matisse. For a
man who will be remembered for his laughter, there is non of the zest of
Lautrec, and Bacon was adamant that humour has no place in art.
Like
the greatest artists, he compelled you to look again at life and see it
differently. People constantly misinterpreted his objective, finding
sensation when he saw a terrible beauty. His attraction to raw flesh was
simple: "You've only got to go into a butcher's shop, like Harrods food
hall. It's nothing to do with mortality but it's to do with the great beauty
of the colour of raw meat."
In
his first television interview in 1958, he told me: "Sometimes I have
used subject matter which people think is sensational because one of the
things I have wanted to do was record the human cry—the
whole coagulation of pain and despair—and
that in itself is something sensational."
Francis
Bacon at his spartan studio in 1984: 'I feel at home in chaos,' said the
artist whose work sold for up to a million pounds
THE
ART OF DESPAIR
RICHARD
DORMENT | THE
ARTS | THE
DAILY TELEGRAPH | WEDNESDAY,
APRIL 29, 1992
TO
HIS admirers, Francis Bacon was the most instinctive and visceral of
20-century British painters, the one who communicated most forcefully the
grossness of human appetites and the emptiness that lies at the bottom of
their gratification.
His
was a world in which the concepts either of hope, or of the spiritual life,
did not exist. Among his subjects were sodomy, drug addiction, anxiety and suicide.
Voyeurism and violent death figure largely in his oeuvre.
No artist painted so many toilets.
To
many, all this came perilously close to self-indulgence. And yet at the 1985
retrospective at the Tate Gallery one understood what Alan Bowness, then director,
meant when he described Bacon as the greatest living English artist. There
was a grandeur in Bacon's art because his theme was a terrible one: a
revulsion against his own humanity. He turned self-hatred into high art.
Indeed,
the Tate retrospective revealed a much greater artist than many had realised.
Visitors were stunned by Bacon's ravishing sense of colour.
At
times it almost seemed as though he had discovered an alternative rainbow
made up of rich purples, shocking oranges, and artichoke greens. Whether one
liked his subjects or not, Bacon emerged as a grand, dramatic painter with an
innate sense of design. He had, too, a wonderful feel for the sensual laying
on of paint to canvas.
In
British art he belongs to a line of painters that looks back to Edward Burra
and forward to Gilbert and George. He was an expressionist of extraordinary
power.
This
year he exhibited his reworking of his famous
Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,
using spray paint and considerably restricting and darkening the original
colour range.
The
result looked to me like a deliberate and measured summing up of his art,
comparable in a way to the late works of other artists who stood on the brink
of death, particularly Titian.
What
made Bacon's work so chilling was that there was no softening of the despair,
no diminution of the ferocious loathing for the human condition.
Francis Bacon
BRUCE
BERNARD | GAZETTE | THE
INDEPENDENT | WEDNESDAY
29 APRIL 1992
I FIRST came across the work of
Francis Bacon at school. I was just becoming interested in "modern
art" and was tremendously stimulated by Herbert Read's Art Now. I
don't know quite why the reproduction of Bacon's Crucifixion (1993) struck me
as forcefully as it did, looking stronger in a way that the Picasso 1929
Baigneuse that it faced, but I was captivated by the mysterious presence.
When I saw the 1944 triptych Study for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion that made him famous in the art world at
least, it confirmed my feeling that he was an entirely remarkable painter.
Moderate horror was expressed by the press at the time and Michael Ayrton
wrote a paragraph tying Bacon to Picasso's "Bone Period" and
patronising them both. But to others it was a miraculously energetic work,
uncompromising and offering great promise for the future.
It seemed that the confident radicalism of
early-twentieth-century European painting might have found a worthy exponent
in Britain for the first time. Graham Sutherland had been doing some of his
best work (and had actually been influenced by the entirely unknown Bacon in
the Thirties) but his pictures never gave one the confidence that they could
travel, while Bacon's have done so triumphantly.
The next masterpiece was, I thing, Painting,
1946. Picasso's work had made Bacon want to be a painter when he saw a show
in Paris in 1928 but, though always acknowledging his debt, he was, with
Painting, 1946, now entirely himself. From then on his career started its
inevitable upward progress. The Bacon "scream" was born (derived
mainly from the nurses on the Odessa Steps in Eisenstein's The Battleship
Potemkin) and it appeared, though much less frequently than is thought,
through ape-like heads, a series based on Velasquez's famous portrait of Pope
Innocent X and several desperately isolated men in suits. Bacon always
insisted that the Popes were a mistake but a few of them are, I'm sure, great
paintings.
In 1953 he painted an outrageous picture
which must surely be one of the great figure paintings of the century. Bacon
was, of course, homosexual and, although he must have certainly enjoyed
turning an Eadweard Muybridge photograph of two wrestlers on their mat into
Two Figures on a Bed, he made it a mordant allegory of flesh and futility.
Although latterly his male figures became more "voluptuous", the
earlier apparently coupling ones seem equivocal and mostly tormented
prisoners of their human incarnation.
Lucian Freud, who was a close friend of
Bacon's for some 30 years, though later their relations became very cool,
once told me that when he first met Bacon in 1944 that he seemed "the
wildest and wisest" person he had ever met.
He has had something like that effect on many
people. But when I met him in 1948, when I was 20, it was his marvellously
self-conscious charm that impressed me because it seemed at the same time to
be a natural expression of vitality. His famous courtesy also increased with
his sense of well-being, along with his overflowing humour which, whether
malicious or not, was only to do with high spirits (he hated
"jokes"). But on bad days his generosity became a defensive barrier
and good manners would come under threat, quite often turning into a daunting
asperity and more than that.
Afternoons out with him in Soho during the
Fifties and Sixties were mostly really exhilarating. To see him come into the
French Pub around 12.30 (after having probably worked for six hours that
morning) gave one, when not obliged to work oneself, a sense that one's banal
idleness might soon be redeemed by irresponsible pleasure and conversation.
The bar staff and Gaston Berlemont were pleased to see him for reasons only
very loosely connected to commerce and, if one did go on to Wheeler's for
lunch, often with several others, the greeting from the staff and management
there was equally pleased and expectant.
Nearly everyone likes being bought champagne
and lunch but the real pleasure of these occasions was the spectacle of
care being banished with such élan. Generally this feeling could be sustained
all afternoon and evening, but occasionally it crumbled, either slowly or
spectacularly, at Muriel Belcher's Colony Room. (Muriel, who had once paid
Bacon £10 a week to bring in affluent customers, was one of the few people he
really loved, and he made several paintings of her).
In the late Fifties, after producing at
lightening speed a sensational show at the Hanover Gallery of pictures based
on Van Gogh's The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, Bacon started painting
portraits of people he knew.
At first he tried working from the model, but
then found he was less distracted if he used photographs. (There is an
interesting exchange with David Sylvester and Bacon on this subject in that
essential book of conversations The Brutality of Fact.) The pictures were
nearly always taken by a brilliant photographer called John Deakin who was
one of the best British photographers of this century - if not quite
the most productive or consistent.
Bacon will be remembered for a large number
of single images and at least 20 of his large triptychs, but his portraits
will be considered as important as anything in his oeuvre, particularly those
involving George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne (as well as the
constant stream of self-portraits). Those of Lucian Freud are powerful
paintings but not so impressively "like" as the others. Isabel
Rawsthorne, who inspired several masterpieces conveying her extraordinary
looks and presence, said that, although they were done from photographs, she
felt she knew exactly "when and where" they were painted. And Frank
Auerbach has said that the best Bacon portraits seem "like risen
spirits".
The Seventies and Eighties brought Bacon new
triumphs on a world-wide scale. The great series of the triptychs started in
the Sixties was continued with some of the strongest images he ever made,
including the ruthlessly poignant re-enactment of the death of his friend
George Dyer.
For my taste the work of the Eighties is,
with certain notable exceptions, less convincing than that of earlier decades
as it seems done more for Bacon's private pleasure than the previous dramas
acted out on a larger and more public stage. His technical virtuosity however
was often as brilliant as ever. In 1988 a historic exhibition of Bacon's work
was mounted in Moscow and provoked tremendous interest. Opinion was as
polarised as ever, but the heroic element in the work was noted more than
usual by those in favour of it.
Bacon was a tormented person in many ways -
particularly because of his need for a kind of negative certainty about art
and the human life. But it must be always remembered that the artists he
revered mostly either possessed religious faith or embodied it in their work,
like Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Velasquez; or had abandoned it but preserved
a powerfully religious temperament, like Van Gogh; or had a strong sense of
social morality, like Seurat. Degas, Duchamp and Picasso were exceptions, but
perhaps in the end they have the least affinities with him. His favourite
poets, Eliot and Yeats, surely had very strong religious and metaphysical
leanings and Shakespeare of course had everything.
I am reluctant to believe that he chose the
iconography of the Crucifixion simply because it was an example of
"human behaviour". Bacon's depth of feeling needed the spiritual
intensity of the traditional image, though Nietzsche was his guide. The
critics who said he lacked a "truly tragic dimension" only betrayed
their limited notion of tragedy, and disappointed seekers after
"affirmation" failed to realise that it is present in all real art,
including Bacon's.
Bacon was a deeper and more driven man than
he would admit - and always determined to be the driver. Only he could have
stayed the course he took with such calculated recklessness. Apart from his
personal and intimate life, his gambling (and once the running of a
dangerously illegal gaming party) there was his drinking, which, together
with his work, continuously taxed his constitution. It all added up to near
total improvidence - unit age got as close as it could to catching up with
him. And writing as an agnostic I don't think that his "nihilism"
can harm anyone at all. I believe that his best work is testing in salutary
way and that it provides what all great art does - the sense of the
indispensible experience.
Francis could be a marvellously out going
person but would also conspire to make himself a lonely one. He was often
simply kind. All manner of people and surviving friends will miss his
presence in the world, and so will I.
Bruce
Bernard
An artist whose work has ravelled
triumphantly: Francis Bacon in the doorway of his studio, 1984
Photograph: Bruce Bernard
‘I would
say I tend to destroy all the better paintings’
Francis Bacon talks to David Sylvester:
from Sylvester's Interviews
with Francis Bacon, 1962-1979 (Thames
& Hudson)
‘When I was trying in despair the other day
to paint that head of a specific person, I used a very big brush and a great
deal of paint and I put it on very, very freely, and I simply didn’t know in
the end what I was doing, and suddenly this thing clicked, and became exactly
like this image I was trying to record. But not out of any conscious will,
nor was it anything to do with illustrational painting. What has never yet
been analysed is why this particular way of painting is more poignant than
illustration. I suppose because it has a life completely of its own. It lives
on its own, like the image one’s trying to trap; it lives on its own, and
therefore transfers the essence of the image more poignantly. So that the
artist may be able to open up or rather, should I say, unlock the valves of
feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently.
Sylvester: And
when you feel that the thing, as you say, has clicked, does this mean
it's given you what you initially wanted or that it's given you'd like to
have wanted?
Bacon: One
never, of course, I'm afraid, gets that. But there is a possibility that you
get through this accidental thing something much more profound than what you
really wanted.
Sylvester: When
you were talking earlier about this head you were doing the other day, you
said that you tried to take it further and lost it. Is this often the reason
for your destroying paintings? That's to say, do you tend to destroy
paintings early on or do you tend to destroy them precisely when they've been
good and you're trying to make them better?
Bacon: I
think I tend to destroy the better paintings, or those that have been better
to a certain extent. I try and take them further, and they lose all their
qualities, and they lose everything. I think I would say that I tend to
destroy all the better paintings.
Sylvester: Can
you never get it back once it's gone over the top?
Bacon: Not
now. And less and less. As the way I work is totally now, accidental, and
becomes more and more accidental, and doesn't seem to behave, as it were,
unless it is accidental, how can I recreate an accident? It's almost an
impossible thing to do.
Sylvester: But
you might get another accident on the same canvas?
Bacon: One
might get another accident, but it would never be quite the same. This is the
thing that can probably happen only in oil paint, because it is so subtle
that one tone, one piece of paint, that moves one thing into another
completely changes the implications of the image.
Sylvester: You
wouldn't get back what you'd lost, but you might get something else. Why,
then, do you tend to destroy rather than work on? Why do you prefer to begin
again on another canvas?
Bacon:
Because sometimes it disappears completely and the canvas becomes completely
clogged, and there's too much paint on it - just a technical thing, but too
much paint, and one just can't go on . . .
Sylvester If
people didn't come and take the away from you, I take it, nothing would ever
leave the studio; you'd go on till you'd destroyed them all.
Bacon: I
think so, yes.’
Francis Bacon in 1928
Obituary:
Francis Bacon
Genius formed in the blackness of the Blitz
TIM
HILTON | ARTS | THE
GUARDIAN | WEDNESDAY
APRIL 29, 1992
FRANCIS
BACON was the last of the major European expressionist painters who came to
prominence in the years after the war, and for nearly five decades was a
towering if somewhat remote figure in British art. He belongs to no school
and had no close followers. His pictures sat uneasily in group exhibitions
and often look out of place in museums. For many of his admirers - and those
who relished Bacon's art and company extended in the social range from
rent boys to minor royalty - he was a truly existentialist painter, scornful
of reward, convention and personal satisfaction.
He came
late to painting, abandoned work on canvas for years and had no training
whatsoever. Like his near contemporary Jean Dubuffet he was a more
challenging artist because he had never studied professional skills and
procedures. In the grand pomp of Bacon's most dramatic visions,
characteristically enclosed in the ornate old master frames that he and his
galleries preferred, there is always a trace of the amateur artist. Not that
he painted as a hobby, or to make a point or to earn his living: he was an
amateur because his work was the result of a personal compulsion.
Bacon was
born in Lower Baggot Street in Dublin in 1909, one of the five children of an
English racehorse trainer. His mother was well connected on both sides of the
Irish sea and during Bacon's childhood the family lived between England
and Ireland in a succession of grand, often dilapidated houses. He had little
formal education and later recalled that his teenage ambition was "to do
nothing". Thus he began the life of drifting in European capitals that
gave a cosmopolitan background to his paintings' painful interior scenes.
By 1928
he was in Berlin and witnesses the last days of the Weimar Republic. In Paris
he saw his first Picassos. In 1930 he returned to England and took a basement
flat in South Kensington. The SW10 area was Bacon's first home for the rest
of his life. However, he spent long periods in Monte Carlo and other places
in which he could indulge his passion for gambling, and made extended visits
to southern Africa, fascinated both by big game and the atmosphere of a
doomed white population. From the early seventies Bacon lived for part of
each year in Paris.
In
Kensington in the early thirties Bacon set up a desultory practice as a
designer of rugs and art deco furniture. His drawings seem very much of their
date, but the steel-and-glass furniture and bold black-outlined mirrors
lingered in his imagination for tears, and may be seen in many
paintings of crouching, naked, suffering figures. The short period when Bacon
practiced as an interior designer was also the time when he began to paint.
Like a gambler, he had immediate success followed by failure. A painting of a
crucifixion was reproduced by Herbert Read in his 1933 book Art Now and was
bought by the connoisseur Sir Michael Sadler. In the next year Bacon put on a
private exhibition of his painting in a house in Curzon Street. The show
flopped and with the exception of three canvases in a mixed exhibition in
1937, Bacon did not exhibit again until 1945.
An
asthmatic, Bacon did not serve in the war apart from a brief enrolment in the
ARP rescue service. He remained in London and had a kind of relish for the
darkness and violence of the Blitz. As he later said, "We all needed to
be aware of the potential disaster which stalks us at every moment of the
day." It is a neat encapsulation of his personal muse, born as he
stalked bombarded London in search of places to gamble. Bacon now began to
paint again, and most accounts agree that at some point between 1940 and 1945
his work at the easel became obsessive. He is the pre-eminent artist of
post-war German angst and disillusion, so it is appropriate that his real
career as a painter should have begun in fear, destruction - and lawlessness
- of the blackout.
In every
aspect of his temperament (though both men were united in assurance of their
personal greatness) Bacon was the opposite of that other second world war
artist, Henry Moore. Bacon's art is about risk, catastrophe, murder and an
abandoned but private sexuality. If Moore was a humanist and a guardian of
tradition in the modern world, Bacon was the desperate maestro of
immoderation and despair. Asked recently whether he was going to celebrate
his 80th birthday, he replied "I celebrate every day". It was as
though his daily intake of champagne were the thin ice above deep seas of
horror.
His
exhibitions at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945 and 1946 established Bacon as an
individual, authoritative and notorious painter. The shows also demonstrated
the leading principle of his style, a manner that was pretty much constant
for years afterwards. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
(1944), now in the Tate Gallery, mingles Picasso with a use of photography as
a source.
HISTORIANS
will regard Bacon as one of the first important figurative painters whose
inspiration came primarily from photographs rather than from human contact or
close acquaintance with paintings by old or modern masters. Of course his
disregard for other art helped Bacon towards an extraordinary personal
licence: those vile background colours, slurred or slovenly brushwork and feigned
nobility. And photography also helped him to be competitive. He could hardly
have embarked on the series of Screaming Popes, perhaps now his most famous
work, had he studied their source, Velasquez's 1650 Portrait of Pope Innocent
X in the original.
While
Bacon's public career is pretty accurately documented, his personal life is
often a matter of legend. His adolescent desire to "do nothing"
came true for years at a time. Nobody quite knows how he spent his time in
Monte Carlo, when he wasn't at the tables or in bed. Most recent reports of
Bacon's life stress his fondness for Soho, the French Pub, the Caves de
France and the Colony Club. This was the standard Bohemian London of the late
fifties and beyond, in which Bacon was indeed a leading figure; but there
were other aspects of his life that seem, in retrospect, to have a faded
Edwardian grandeur - grandeur despite the police around the corner, as often
they were.
At one
time Bacon had a Cromwell Place flat in a house that had belonged to a grandee
of Victorian painting, Millais. The chintz, the velvet, the sofas were all
faded and stained. The carpet was covered with paint. Bacon's old nanny
lived with him, muttering all the time of her obsession, capital punishment.
She slept on the table. Bacon - like many generous grandees - was often
surrounded by retainers with no obvious function. Yet this nanny had a
particular job. She was the hat-check girl while Bacon gave his nightly,
all-night gaming parties.
Nobody
ever told him what to do. He liked discussion but never took advice,
especially about painting. Little wonder that the quality of his art was so
varied. Bacon was not a sensible judge of his own work. A wretched
performance might mean as much to him as a far better canvas, presumably
because of some personal association. His great fault was always the
assumption of a high style. I suppose that he should have painted smaller -
but then we would not have known the vulgar immodesty of those pictures that
really did have something to say about modern times. Not for nothing was
Eichmann in his box compared o the composition of a Bacon painting.
Two
sudden yet horribly complementary private griefs accompanied Bacon's largest
public triumphs. His boyfriend Peter Lacey, a country gentleman character who
played the piano in Dean's Bar, Tangier, died on the opening day of his 1962
Tate Gallery retrospective. Lacey's successor, George Dyer, of whom there are
many living and posthumous portraits, died on the day of Bacon's largest
retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1975. In truth Bacon cared
nothing for such official art-world occasions and did little to assist the
preparations of further retrospectives at the Tate in 1985 and Moscow in 1988
where, somewhat surprisingly, he was presented as evidence of health in
modern western culture. The enclosed world of his friendships was most
important to him. Observing this, mainly from afar, I was often struck by an
expression of delight on Bacon's face as he came into some drinking club or
private view and saw a friend. Both faces would light up - I know it's a
cliché, but it's true - with some kind of happy love. I got him to his feet
once, when he had fallen down insensible. His face was all white and I
thought he was dead before I realised it was make-up. It's the smile I
remember most. Winning or losing, a great human smile.
Tim
Hilton
Female nude (1966) ... Bacon was the pre-eminent artist of angst and
disillusion
Obituary:
Francis Bacon
Genius formed in the blackness of the Blitz
BRYAN
ROBERTSON | ARTS | THE
GUARDIAN | WEDNESDAY
APRIL 29, 1992
WHEN
the Guardian printed a tribute to Francis Bacon from myself among several
others on the occasion of his 80th birthday, I hope he would live for many
more years to exemplify the truth of my opening lines. I said that Francis's
long and productive life was an excellent precept for us all and the perfect
example for any aspiring young painter. For Francis had never attended art
school, screwed about a good deal, drank champagne as a fundamental daily
amenity and treated all patrons with courteous indifference - whether though
aborted commissions or portraits that reduced their sitters to a deformed and
grimacing lump of matter. And he never had an Arts Council hand-out or indeed
any kind of scholarship or bursary.
The was in which Francis Bacon conducted his
life presupposes a fundamental measure of talent - in his case, genius - or
the frequent waywardness, mostly the drunkenness, would have been less easy
to bear. Lie his two near-contemporaries and late - or neo - Edwardians,
Sutherland and Moore, Bacon had come to professional maturity before the
ameliorative and propagating work of the Arts Council and British Council
came into being, and had learnt how to survive financially long before
public commissions and grants for artists were established.
All three artists had hard years when young.
Moore and Sutherland, like Piper, Pasmore and many others, eventually were
helped tremendously by the patronage of Kenneth Clark. Bacon painted,
designed screens, interiors and furniture, ran a gambling club briefly, and
was more adventurous so far as patronage was concerned. Bacon enjoyed
something like patronage in his stable relationship with a mildly well-off
civil servant, Eric Hall, whose death not long after the 1939-45 war was a
great blow for Bacon. But the point I want to make here is that, like Moore
and Sutherland, Bacon had grown-up in a totally different artistic climate to
those artists born during or after the 1939-45 war, in the sense that hard
work and resourceful self-sufficiency were the order of the day and to be an
artist for this earlier generation was to follow a vocation and not a highly
publicised profession. Compared with an older generation, artists today often
sound and behave like upwardly mobile dentists.
I became very friendly with the painter, Roy
de Maistre, not long after I was appointed director of the Whitechapel
Gallery in 1953. Before the war, in the thirties, Francis had lived near Roy
de Maistre's studio just off Ebury Street, and the two painters had become
close friends, Roy acting as a kind of uncle or father figure to the much
younger Francis, often trouble by one or other of the three usual
problems: health, love or money. The third ember of what became a trio of
close friends living round Ebury Street was the young and equally remarkable
Patrick White, like Roy, coming from a cultivated background in Australia.
Listening to Roy's reminiscences, always absorbing, I often sat on a vast
couch designed by Francis, backed by one of his screens. And Francis was
sometimes a fellow guest at dinner, his affection and regard for de Maistre
unchanged. I had met Francis first in 1948, when he had just returned from a
long spell in the south of France, and the Lefevre Gallery and then
Erika Brausen's Hanover Gallery were becoming interested in his work. Francis
took me out to many splendid dinners at the old Carlton Grill. He was a
terrific companion, lively, well informed, well read and wholly irreverent
about the art world. My only problem then, as always, was that although my
love for drink was second to no man's, Francis could drink me under the table
and sometimes did.
ALL THE same, I braved the boozy stronghold
of the Colony Club one spring day in 1951 to meet Francis and secure the
location of a villa in the south of France that I wanted to rent for myself
and some friends on holiday together. Francis arrived and told me how to rent
his favourite villa on the heights above Monaco which he had taken for many
winters as a place for himself and his old nurse. Francis painted all day,
gambled all night, and the nurse knitted in the sun. That involuntary
revelation of Francis's kindness touched me, and the villa turned out to be
delightful, secluded and spacious. It was amusing to find that the furnishings
included the most comprehensive library of literature on sexual perversions
imaginable, which added a certain zing to hot afternoon siestas, as well as a
cupboard off my own bedroom filled with intensely alarming images on canvas
left by Francis in various stages of abandonment.
I kept in touch with Francis over the years
and cannot remember anything beyond mutual amusement at the follies of the
art world and immense and unfailing kindness to those in need. Most recently,
I asked him to help a hospice for Aids victims for which I was fund-raising
among artists, asking for works for auction. Francis sent a conspicuously
large cheque at once. We were fellow asthmatics and often compared notes over
treatments and perhaps that bond of affliction inhibited Francis from running
down, beyond the occasional flouncy bit of derision, the work of the
abstract painters and sculptors that I exhibited and supported with much
enthusiasm. He made an exception of Mark Rothko, whose work toughed him, but
derided all the others.
That side of Francis rather bored me,
particularly when I saw how swiftly he lifted and made use of abstract
devices in his own work. I remember a man sitting and yelling his head off
sitting on a long flight of steps which could not have been painted without
the incongruous example of Noland's tripe paintings. And of course the crux
of all Bacon's works was the abstract space-frame on which the figure stands
in Giacometti's pivotal Hands Holding The Void and through which the
long phallic shape extrudes in the same sculptor's The Nose. All that in turn
comes from Picasso's rediscovery of Grunewald's painful Isenheim altarpiece
in the 1930s, before Guernica, and from which so much in the work of Matta,
Sutherland, and many others depended.
There was some justice in the caustic verdict
of my friend, Colin Colin MacInnes: "The Norman Hartnell of the horror
movement." I too sometimes thought that there was something repellent
about the imagery of something like Belsen being presented as a chic cabaret
turn. Bur Colin's put-down perhaps came from shewing the floor, as it were,
in the Colony bar, where Francis would not always stand for a tutorial from
the erudite, often brilliant, but implacably centre-stage MacInnes. More
particularly, I have always objected to the silliness of Bacon's adulators,
who would have us believe that Francis painted the entire human condition,
you, me, all of us. Well, old men and women die alone in poverty, many live
painfully and in despair with disease, the bombers and machine-gunners are
hard at it everywhere. A man screaming his head off sitting on a bed in a
rather expensive hotel bedroom seems rather too special a case to stand in
for universal suffering.
But Bacon was unquestionably a marvellous
painter; he caught a nerve in painting a no artist has ever done before and
he created, despite some mechanically contrived triptychs and a few other
weaker works, some of the strongest images of the century. Acutely sensitive
to surface, he had little gift for psychological probity compared with early
Kokoschka portraits, but he had a fantastic feeling for the figure in space:
trapped, pinned down or imperilled like a moth or a hunk of meat.
Bryan Robertson
Francis Bacon, born October 28, 1909; died April 28. 1992.
Homage
to work and love
GREY
GOWRIE | ARTS | THE
GUARDIAN | WEDNESDAY
APRIL 29, 1992
FRANCIS BACON was, until yesterday,
the greatest living painter and the greatest British painter since Turner.
These are high claims. You can make a case against them. Bacon had no formal
training and it shows. He was an action painter; he attacked the canvas
physically until it was finished, and usually denied himself oil painter's
architectural possibilities, which allow painters to build a painting and
strip it down again and rebuild it until it comes right. Inevitably, there
were bosh shots.
Bacon should have obeyed his early instincts
and destroyed more of his work. Then he relied sometimes, though not as often
as people think, on the aesthetics of shock: a figure crapping or throwing
up; a nude on a bed with a hypodermic syringe.
These and other criticisms pale if you spend
time with is best work. He was a very grand man, in the old and aristocratic
sense of the word, and he brought grandeur back to modern painting. His
handling of paint can be sumptuous. These are not the kind of words which it
is easy to use in the context of modern art, but you can use them with Bacon
as you can with Picasso, Van Gogh and Cezanne. I sometimes visit a collection
in Lausanne where he hangs beside these masters. In the end, that is the way
to decide things.
I was an acquaintance of Bacon for the last
10 years of his life. He had ceased to be the waspish, terrifying figure of
the Colony Club days in fifties and sixties Soho. As Freud said we should, he
reduced things to work and love. After a fraught life, though not one I can
imagine him conducting differently, he combined the two. I suspect he was as
happy towards the end of his life as he had ever been. Bu the allowed some
time foe peripheral affection and for that I will always be grateful.
We met through a mutual friend, David
Sylvester, whose Conversations With Bacon is one of the classic texts of
modern art. Bacon liked an essay I had written about him. Since he was
famously hard to please in this regard I pushed my luck and asked if I could
write a life. I told him I was the only person who understood his background.
Quite fortuitously, we shared the same roots, indeed the same village, in Co.
Kildare, where Bacon's father was a racehorse trainer. He admitted that the
memory of Ireland was both important and traumatic for him and that it did
affect the paintings. He told me that if he co-operated with anyone it would
be with me. But he did not want a life written. "It will happen in any
case, Francis." "Yes, but I shall be dead and I shan't of helped
and I shan't care."
I asked him if it was his love life that was
the trouble, and gave him my view that all love lifes are at once crucial and
banal. I was interested in writing about the paintings as if they were
battles: you need to know what the general is up to only insofar as it
affects strategy and tactics.
He told me that he had come to the view that
homosexuality was an affliction, that it had turned him, at one point in his
life, into a crook. The crookishness, not the sex, was a source of shame and
if he talked at all, it was his nature to tell everything. We both liked
Proust and agreed that the beginning of Cities Of The Plain said all that
needed to be said about being homosexual. He told me that a centre of his
being was that he had disliked his father greatly and liked his mother, but
that it was the father for whom he felt attraction. He suffered always from
asthma; he could not visit Ireland without it becoming acute. He thought
Yeats and Picasso the great artists of the century.
These and like conversations would take place
over first-class claret. Taking Francis out was, financially, like buying one
of his paintings. He could be polite about anything other than Petrus,
Mouton, Cheval, Blanc, Margaux, Lafite, but only just. He liked politics in
short bursts and worked under a star system. Mrs Thatcher was in favour for
quite a while but yielded in time to Dr Owen. As a minister I felt obliged to
point out that "Clause 28" was designed to discourage homosexual
propaganda and fell well short of a pogrom. He suffered through the breakdown
of his friendship with Lucian Freud, whom he missed. He though Lucian thought
him boring, and when you think that, you often are.
He lived at home like a student, out of doors
like a prince. The three-roomed Kensington studio, up a ladder rather than a
stairs, is more important for the nation than any Canaletto. We must work to
preserve it. He gambled his money and gave money and paintings away. He had
aristocratic indifference without aristocratic disdain. I am glad he died in
Madrid, surronded by great paintings and with someone who had made him happy.
Nothing will ever taste quite as good again as Francis talking in his intense
physical way about paintings. He has left a dozen or so of his own which will
live with the art.
Grey
Gowrie
FRANCIS BACON DIES AT 82
THE
WASHINGTON POST | APRIL
29, 1992
LONDON —
Francis Bacon, 82, the British artist whose large paintings of
misshapen or screaming figures explored human misery and isolation and gave
the contemporary art world some of its most disturbing images, died April 28
at a hospital in Madrid after a heart attack.
Mr. Bacon, who had asthma, was stricken while on vacation. He lived in
London.
He had been hailed as one of the most influential figure painters of
the postwar period and as one of the world's greatest contemporary painters.
A Bacon triptych recently sold in New York for almost $7 million. Last year,
Mr. Bacon gave one of his major paintings, worth more than $5 million, to
London's Tate Gallery. He became the first living British painter to be given
a one-man show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1988 received
an exhibition in Moscow -- a first-time honor for a living Westerner.
British contemporary
painter Howard Hodgkin called him "the greatest English painter since
Turner." At least one other noted figure was not so kind. Former British
prime minister Margaret Thatcher outraged London's artistic community when
she once described him as "that man who paints those dreadful pictures."
Mr. Bacon was best known
for his biomorphic abstractions and representations of the male human form,
often twisted or distorted shapes in a stark setting such as a bare room or
on a platform-like arena. Sometimes his figures were surrounded by lines
suggesting a cage or prison and a spirit locked in a private hell.
He often used contemporary
images as a starting point for his work, including news photos and movie
stills. Other of his works were based on old and classic works. These
included his portrait of Pope Innocent X, which was based on a famous
portrait by the Spanish artist Diego Velazquez —
and shows the 17th century pontiff caged in plate glass and screaming. The
picture is known as "The Screaming Pope."
If the works were violent
and shocking, and often based on a contemporary theme, they also featured a
kind of epic grandeur of style, with what one critic called rich, sensuous
handling of paint reminiscent of the 16th and early 17th century Venetian and
Spanish painting.
Mr. Bacon, who was
descended from the philosopher of the same name, was born in Dublin, the son
of a former British Army officer and a race horse trainer. His father
banished him from home at the age of 16 after he was found having sexual
relations with the grooms. The future artist traveled to Berlin, where he
threw himself into the life of a city renowned for its excesses in the 1920s
and 1930s. He went on gambling sprees and spent nights in transvestite clubs.
He started to paint in 1930
after working as an interior decorator. A completely self-taught artist, he
often said he had virtually no education as a youth. He told a biographer
that he was "scarcely aware pictures existed" until he left
Ireland. He said that he disliked his early work and destroyed much of it.
The gruesome nature of Mr.
Bacon's art raised questions about the purpose of art: Is it to be
pleasurably enjoyed or must it confront the viewer with stark reality?
His first major surviving
painting, "Crucifixion," appeared in a British art journal in 1933.
His first show, in 1945, featured the triptych "Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion" —
which showed carcass-like forms on crosses.
In the 1940s, he
concentrated more on the human form and male nudes, painting a series based
on his friend Eric Hall as well as self-portraits.
The central figures
increasingly became abstract during the 1950s and 1960s —
sometimes merging human and animal forms. He sometimes flanked the forms with
depictions of raw meat or paint splashed on the canvas.
"Animal
movement and human movement are certainly linked in my images," he told
an interviewer in the 1950s.
He frequently returned to
the crucifixion theme, including another triptych done during the mid-1980s.
He demanded that all his paintings be covered by glass and they often had
ornate frames.
In interviews, Mr. Bacon
cited one of his major influences as Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film
"Battleship Potemkin," particularly a closeup shot of a screaming
nurse. He also closely studied the early photography of Eadweard Muybridge,
who made sequences of human and animal movement.
"What I want is to
distort the figure far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring
it back to a recording of the appearance," he said in an interview in
the 1950s.
In a jamb
PETERBOROUGH | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | WEDNESDAY 29
April 1992
WHO gets
Francis Bacon's palette? Bacon, who died yesterday, spurned the conventional
palette which artists normally stick their thumbs through. Instead, he used
his brightly daubed studio door.
It will probably go to
Michael Leventis, a London-based Greek Cypriot artist whom Bacon encouraged
after a chance encounter in a Soho restaurant eight years ago. "I
admired the door and he indicated that I might have it," said Leventis.
"I already have one of
Francis's easels and a couple of signed prints. The easel means a lot to me.
It has all the colours he used on some of his best-known paintings. I would
never dream of using it."
There was a subdued air
last night around Bacon's favourite drinking haunts in Soho, London. Sandy
Fawkes, an old friend, said: "He once told me the only cure for a
hangover was suicide. When he died he was in love again."
Leventis had a different
view. He said: "Francis had a hard winter, couldn't paint, and without
his work I don't think he wanted to go on."
FRANCIS BACON, PAINTER DRIVEN BY MORTALITY
By ANDREW GRAHAM-DIXON | THE INDEPENDENT | 29 APRIL 1992
The painter Francis Bacon died yesterday. He was 82
“I have often thought upon death and I find it the least of all evils,” wrote
Francis Bacon’s namesake and ancestor, the Elizabethan philosopher.
For Bacon the painter, the opposite was true. Death was the
greatest of evils: “I have a feeling of mortality all the time,” he once
said. “Because, if life excites you, its opposite, like a shadow, death, must
excite you. Perhaps not excite you, but you are aware of it in the same way
as you are aware of life, you are aware of life, you’re aware of It like the
turn of a coin between life and death… I’m always very surprised when I wake
up in the morning.”
Mortality was Bacon’s great theme, his keen sense of his
own mortality, the driving force behind his art. His paintings are not
pleasant, embodying a singularly bleak view of human existence, but they have
a power born of obsession that is unique in British post war art.
Storyless, enigmatic compositions, characteristically
painted in triptych format, they place the emphasis on prime biological fact,
figures usually male scream, couple bestially, vomit or defecate, depicted as
lurid agglomerations of bodily matter, raw flesh that seems on the point of
putrefaction. Their beauty is the beauty of rottenness.
“I’ve always been very moved by pictures about
slaughter-houses,” he said and Bacon’s figures, frequently isolated on the
flattest and most uninflected areas of pure colour, almost like clinical
specimen, have something of the slaughterhouse about them. “We are meat, we
are potential carcasses,” he said, and painted the fact.
Bacon’s place in art history is assured, yet it is also true
that art historians have never known quite what to make of him. He distrusted
interpretation of his paintings and when pressed on the possible symbolic
significance of his work, insisted: “I’m not saying anything.” He was never
the member of a school or movement in painting and neither did he found any.
Bacon was singular-an artist for whose work there are few
if any precedents in modern art, an artist whose work has had little issue in
subsequent painting – but he was also one of those rare artists who give
visual expression to the mood of their times. His art, despite his
protestations, has taken on the status of symbol, and that, in the end, is
the source of its significance.
Bacon’s subject is twentieth century man, unaccommodated
man, living in a world that has been voided of spiritual significance. His
subject matter has often been, in one sense, traditional he is the only
twentieth century painter, to have made a significant contribution to the
tradition of crucifixion imagery yet in Bacon’s case that has tended to
emphasise his originality the gap that separates him from the art of the
past. Bacon’s crucifixions are bloody, thoroughly untranscendental paintings,
his Christ a joint of raw meat or (as he once put it) “a worm crawling down
the cross”.
They are not, strictly speaking, sacrilegious paintings;
but they are profoundly pessimistic. Man, in Bacon’s world, Is an
unregenerate, bestial creature, a secular being for whom “religious
possibilities have been cancelled”. Among Bacon’s most famous paintings are
the series of screaming heads he painted from the late Forties on. Questioned
about the violence of his paintings, Bacon answered that he had lived in
violent times. He spent the years of the First World War in London, and then
lived in Ireland in the early years of the Sinn Fein movement; he was in
Berlin in 1927-28 and then in Paris until the outbreak of the Second World
War. It was this, perhaps that made possible for him to paint the crucifixion
as “just an act of man’s behaviour, a way of behaviour to another.”
It is probably significant that Bacon came to his maturity
at a time when the various utopias projected by the art of early modernism
were coming to seem sad, unrealistic fantasies.
It is one of the paradoxes of Bacon’s career that he should have managed to
conjure images of such majesty and grandeur from such pessimism; it is the
miracle of his career that Bacon’s sense of pointlessness, his nihilism,
should have kept him painting with such vitality and such fervour into his
old age.
He once said that the most exciting person is one “totally
without belief, but totally dedicated to futility”. He was describing
himself.
British Painter
Francis Bacon Dies
At
82, he remained a figure of controversy whose powerful, boldly painted
canvases divided critics and viewers alike.
WILLIAM TUOHY | TIMES
STAFF WRITER |
ART |
LOS ANGELES TIMES |
APRIL 29,
1992
LONDON — Francis
Bacon, widely regarded as Britain's greatest contemporary painter, died of a
heart attack in a Madrid hospital Tuesday.
Bacon, who had suffered from asthma, became ill while visiting friends
in Spain.
The 82-year-old painter was highly controversial in traditional artistic
circles, since his powerful canvases, executed with splashing brush strokes,
were often concerned with the themes of sex, suffering and death. Many
regarded his paintings as obscene.
But his work commanded high prices — a Bacon triptych recently sold in New York for $7 million —
and in 1975 he was the first living British artist to rate a one-man
show at New York's Metropolitan Museum.
Bacon reportedly turned down a knighthood and other honors on the
grounds, as he once said with a shrug, that "they cordon you off from
existence".
In 1962, his large retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery
received considerable public and critical acclaim. Additional attention
focused on his paintings in 1971, when he was given a rare retrospective at
Paris' Grand Palais that opened only hours after his model and lover, George
Dyer, had committed suicide.
Bacon later memorialized Dyer's death in a famous triptych of
tormented paintings. It was reminiscent of one of his first works to draw
international attention--a triptych called "Three Studies for the
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
His paintings often depicted people such as Dyer in the throes of drug
addiction and other agonies, and his "Screaming Pope" series was an
unsettling reference to Diego Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X.
Bacon was an avowed homosexual who lived in a paint can-cluttered
apartment and hung around the bars of London's raffish Soho district.
While reticent about his work, he was personable and charming outside
his studio. Bacon often said that his life was divided between "the
gutter and the Ritz".
He normally consumed at least a bottle of champagne and a dozen oysters
for lunch, and when not working he would pub-crawl through the day in Soho,
often ending in fashionable South Kensington, where he lived and worked in a
simple two-bedroom townhouse.
He wandered the streets in a dark leather jacket, looking at least 10
years younger than his age and seldom recognize.
Bacon seemed to care little about money, deploring the astronomical
prices of paintings — including his own — with the comment, "Prices are so ridiculous that people go to
galleries because they are obsessed by the money
He was born in Ireland in 1909, reportedly descended from the
16th-Century English philosopher and essayist whose name he bore.
His English father was a retired army officer who banished him from home
when Bacon was caught having sex with a stable hand.
The teen-ager struck out for London and then Berlin, where he quickly
began indulging in sexual escapades, gambling and nights in transvestite
clubs.
He returned to London in 1923 and designed modernistic furniture. It was
not until 1929 that he turned to painting.
In the 1930s, his supporters claimed that his work was revitalizing the
British art scene. At the outbreak of the war, he tried to enlist but,
rejected because of his longstanding asthma, joined the ambulance rescue
squad instead.
It was about this time that he decided his early work displeased him,
and he destroyed much of it with a razor.
In his work, Bacon broke all the staid rules of traditional English art
and followed a more European tradition. With no formal art training, he
sometimes painted with his fingers, scrubbing brushes and rags, combining
different images from different mediums to produce startling picture.
To those who abhorred his depiction of flesh — animal, human, and sometimes indeterminate — he once said: "You've only got to go into a butcher's shop. . . .
It's nothing to do with mortality, but it's to do with the great color of the
meat.
Times art critic William Wilson, writing of a Bacon exhibit at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art two years ago, likened the artist to an Irish
countryman, the playwright Samuel Beckett.
Both men were philosophical exiles, Wilson said, "and (both)
shocked the world with radical, disturbing art . . . which has changed only
in nuance over the decades. . . .
"It seems fair to ask how anyone as immensely successful--and
presumably wealthy--as Bacon can go on making art about despair. The quick
answer to that is that the rich and famous are still not necessarily content,
and Bacon has been strange and haunted all his life. . . .
Bacon was once asked about the hostility that his paintings created
among some viewers and answered, "If I thought about what the critics
said, I shouldn't have gone on painting.
He did not explain his obsession with sex and death in his paintings,
but said, "If you really love life you're constantly walking in the
shadow of death.
"I don't emphasize death," he continued. "I accept it as
part of one's existence. One is always aware of mortality in life, even in a
rose that blooms and then dies.
PRIVATE
TORMENT: Times critic William Wilson reviews
artist's tortured life.
Francis Bacon, 82,
Artist of the Macabre, Dies
By MICHAEL
KIMMELMAN | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | APRIL
29, 1992
Francis Bacon, the Irish-born painter whose
abstract images of psychological and physical brutality made him one of the
most exalted, and most disliked, artists of the postwar era, died yesterday
at a hospital in Madrid. He was 82 years old and lived in London.
He died of a heart attack while vacationing
in Spain, according to a statement from his London dealer, Marlborough Fine
Art.
Mr. Bacon first gained acclaim in 1945, when
he exhibited Three Studies
for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London.
His angrily drawn image of writhing half-human, half-animal forms, perched
atop pedestals and set in claustrophobic spaces, seemed to epitomize the grim
spirit of postwar England and established the painter immediately as a master
of the macabre.
That reputation was to be reinforced time and
again by the screaming popes, butchered carcasses and distorted portraits
that Mr. Bacon turned out over the next four and a half decades. Critics
noted his links with, among other things, the Surrealist art of Picasso and
with German Expressionism. Detractors - and there were always many of them,
especially in the United States, where he seemed so out of step with the
Abstract Expressionists of his generation - dismissed his art as
sensationalistic and slick. Museums around the world bought his work, but
private collectors were often loath to decorate their homes with it. The
former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once called him "that
man who paints those dreadful pictures."
But Mr. Bacon maintained that he was simply a
realist and did not aim to shock. "You can't be more horrific than life
itself," he was fond of saying.
Until his death, he continued to work in his
cramped, cluttered studio in a small ramshackle mews house in South
Kensington, with its bare bulbs, tattered photographs taped to the wall, and
bathtub in the kitchen. Although his paintings sold for millions of dollars,
Mr. Bacon eschewed most of the trappings of success. He would reach into his
pocket and pull out a wad of cash whenever he wanted to indulge in lunches in
swank restaurants or Champagne for the crowd at the Colony Room, the run-down
drinking club in the Soho district of London, where he was a regular for more
than 40 years. A Raffish Youth
A man of striking contradictions, he
cultivated a bad-boy reputation, speaking freely about his fondness for alcohol,
his homosexuality and his kinship with gangsters. Friends knew he could be
ornery and unpredictable, especially after a few drinks. But they also
admired him for his generosity, wit and kindness, qualities that clashed so
dramatically with the paintings for which he was famous.
The son of a hard-drinking racehorse trainer
(and a collateral descendant of the great Elizabethan statesman and
philosopher of the same name), Mr. Bacon spent his first years moving with
his family between Dublin and London. Asthma made school a problem, so he was
tutored by clergymen at home. He never got along with his mother and father.
When, at the age of 16, he was discovered to have had sex with some of the
grooms at the stables and was caught trying on his mother's underwear, his
parents banished him.
Mr. Bacon traveled to Berlin, where he spent
long nights in transvestite bars and endless hours with the sorts of rough
characters who would be no less a part of his social circle than
intellectuals like the poets Michel Leiris and Stephen Spender. He stopped in
Paris, where he saw an exhibition of Picasso's surreal paintings of the 20's,
although he later said it had little impact on him.
In 1929, he settled in London, working
briefly as a designer of modernist furniture, for which he achieved a modest
reputation. Almost casually, and without any formal training, he took up
painting, but he came to consider these earliest canvases "so
awful" that he subsequently painted over or destroyed almost all of
them. In 1933, he participated in a group show and was mentioned in a book
called Art Now, by the
critic and historian Herbert Read. Over the next few years he exhibited his
work a little, but he treated art less as a career than as a distraction from
the drinking, gambling and wandering around London that were his main
preoccupations.
When World War II started, Mr. Bacon tried to
enlist but was rejected because of his asthma. He supported himself through a
string of odd jobs. The restlessness he recounted feeling during these years,
his sexual indiscretions, his mood of frustration and claustrophobia, and his
casual disregard for social mores and the opinions of others, would become
characteristics of his art. But only as the war was ending did he begin to
take painting seriously as an occupation.
The sources for his art were eclectic. He
looked at the work of Old Masters like Velazquez, whose Portrait of Pope Innocent X he combined with a still photograph
from Sergei Eisenstein's film The
Battleship Potemkin to
contrive his series of screaming popes. Mr. Bacon derived images from the
newspaper and magazine photographs that he collected, and from the famous
sequential photographs of moving figures and animals that Eadweard Muybridge made
in the late 19th century. References to the latest designs in furniture and
clothing regularly appeared in his art. He based one series of paintings on
van Gogh; another series was inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus. "What is called
Surrealism has gone through art at all times," he once said. "What
is more surreal than Aeschylus?"
And he was an extraordinary portraitist of
his friends, somehow managing, despite the blurred and mangled features, to
convey an unmistakable likeness and very often the attributes of beauty, wit
and affection.
Although Mr. Bacon made a handful of
landscapes over the course of his career, he was first and last a painter of
the human body. His images twisted it, X-rayed it, made it bleed,
transmogrify and unravel. The body became an expression of longing,
exhaustion, illness and also lust. Few artists could render flesh so palpably
and voluptuously, or endow even so mundane a subject as a man turning a
bathroom faucet with Michelangelesque aspirations.
Often his figures were represented in what
looked like cages or enclosures or in bleak rooms. In time, he came to favor
gold frames and glass protection for his paintings, extravagant touches that
intentionally contrasted with the shocking content of the pictures and
underscored his desire to have his art considered in the company of museum
masterpieces. An Evolving Style
He consistently said his art was not about
anything in particular, that his paintings conveyed no narrative. "I've
no story to tell," he said. Over the years, he was criticized for
recycling a small repertory of images and devices. But if his subjects did
not change, his style did. Increasingly, his paintings were characterized by
a refinement of touch that made his startling subject matter all the more
unexpected. In 1988, he made a second version of Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion , in which
rawness has been replaced by an almost lyrical handling of paint and the
figures seem less gruff, more incorporeal, as if they were memories of the earlier
ones.
Mr. Bacon's paintings have connections with
the work of divergent postwar artists without belonging to any specific
movement. He is part of the tradition of English figure painting to which
Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kosoff and others belong. At the same
time, like Alberto Giacometti, he explored the spirit of Existential anguish
that pervaded European postwar culture. (He admired the writings of Samuel
Beckett and Harold Pinter). Although he denied any interest in the American
Abstract Expressionists, and although his art was generally thought to be in
opposition to theirs, Mr. Bacon's work invariably brings to mind the violent
and distorted paintings of women by Willem de Kooning.
Through Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual art and
every other movement of the 1960's and early 70's, Mr. Bacon stuck to his
path, shunning fashion. But in the late 70's and early 80's, he was taken up
by the young Neo-Expressionists, who felt an affinity with his emphasis on
the figure and the emotionalism of his imagery. In the last decades of his
life, he was the subject of retrospectives at the Grand Palais in Paris, the
Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Tokyo and the
Metropolitan Museum in New York. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, a
traveling exhibition of his work was presented at the Hirshhorn Museum in
Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art
in New York.
Around the time of that exhibition, Mr.
Bacon, who is survived only by a sister in South Africa, lamented that old
age was "a desert because all of one's friends die." Yet he
described himself as eternally "an optimist, but about nothing."
"We live, we die and that's it," he
said.
Francis Bacon in London in 1985 with his 1979
painting "Triptych: Studies of the Hunan Body."
OBITUARIES, FRANCIS BACON
WILLIAM PACKER | FINANCIAL
TIMES | APRIL 29 1992
FRANCIS BACON, who
died yesterday at the age of 82, remained to the last what he had been
throughout his long and active career never so much the enfant as the vieux
terrible of ‘contemporary
British art. As uncompromising and unabashed in his private life as he was in
his work which to him was ever a matter of the utmost seriousness – there was
nothing, of the Grand Old Man about him.
Yet was a towering figure in his creative reputation,
which was matched only by, that of the somewhat older and oddly
complementary, figure of Henry Moore: both profoundly humane in their
preoccupations, but the one dark, the other light; serene optimism against a
bleaker pessimism.
The difference was that Bacon was to find
himself almost alone the only British painter in his time to be accepted, at
home and abroad, as standing by right in the first rank with his
contemporaries in the world at large. It is a paradox that he should have
achieved such standing with work which, even as it was being produced, was
seen to be at odds with the trend of the contemporary avant garde: surreal
expressionism, darkly romantic, above all, figurative, in the time of
formalist abstraction.
He was accorded two full scale retrospectives
at the Tate. At the first, in 1962, he stood alone: sui
generis. By the time of the second show, in 1985. the world had
come round to him again. If, by then, the critic might enter certain
reservations concerning his later work on its own terms, seen in the context
of figurative expressionism revived – Baselitz, Clemente, Schnabel – clearly
he remained a singular and towering figure.
But that first retrospective in 1962 was the
more significant; it came after a career of barely 18 years as a painter.
From the distance of the second show it could be seen to mark a watershed in
that career, celebrating the substantive and astonishing achievement which
would he enough to sustain his reputation undiminished.
Francis. Bacon was born in Dublin in October
1909, of English parents. He submitted himself to no formal training as an
artist, and as a young man practised for a time as an interior decorator and
designer. He continued to paint, even, to exhibit, through the 1930s, but he
destroyed most of this early work; it was not until 1944 that he again began
to paint in earnest.
The mature achievement was almost Byronic in
its instantaneity. Two magisterial works of this first period, a sinister
lurking Figure in a
Landscape (1945), and the
triptych, Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion(1944), have rightly been in the Tate
the past 40 years.
The next dozen years or so saw the production
of the screaming Popes, the dogs, baboons and chimpanzees, the early
portraits, the figures after Muybridge and, at last, the extended sequence of
portraits of Van Gogh on the road to Tarascon. By, 1962, the full range of
his imagery was established and thoroughly explored, in particular the
compositional device of the figure encapsulated by an open, unspecific
structure.
In the years following, Bacon’s interest
settled principally on the figure. The scale was amplified, the image subject
to all manner of formal variations, but in essence nothing further was
introduced. And as the imagery settled into a certain predictability, so the
old shock and impact lessened. Attention fell more reality on the surface,
and on the speed and subtle dexterity of Bacon’s handling of his material. It
was what he had said all along: what interested him was not the image for
itself, not the message nor the content as such, but only the painting as
painting getting it right, making it real.
The problem with Francis Bacon and his work,
was never of Bacon’s making; rather it was always the viewer’s. Arrested by
the image, viewers found it hard to move beyond it into the work itself.
Perhaps it still seems strange to speak of the physical beauty of Bacon’s
work, but with time it becomes easier.
Bacon’s
house
LONDONER'S DIARY | EVENING STANDARD | WEDNESDAY,
29 APRIL, 1992
AS
the world of art comes to terms with the sad loss of Francis Bacon,
many wonder what will happen to Bacon's anarchic mews cottage-cum-studio in
South Kensington where he worked virtually until the end of his life.
With paint and doodles all over the walls,
and books, papers and photographs covered in Bacon's sketches and comments
scattered everywhere, the property in itself could be worth millions as a
monument to Bacon's swirling vitality. As it stands, it is susceptible to
burglary or vandalism and many in the art world believe it should be securely
preserved as a museum.
An English Heritage spokesman says: "We
are acutely aware of the risk of burglary, especially when there are
compelling features of interest. We would like to look into the possibility
of converting it into a museum."
Artist Patrick Procktor tells me: "It
should be kept absolutely as it is like El Greco's in Toledo, with a picture
left on the easel and brushes in tins. I was very shocked and saddened at his
death." Roger de Grey, President of the Royal Academy adds:
"I am all in favour of careful consideration being given to the
conservation of artists' houses such as Francis Bacon's."
Life
as art
EDITORIAL | EVENING
STANDARD | WEDNESDAY,
29 APRIL, 1992
WHATEVER
one thought of Francis Bacon's art, his life was a modern masterpiece.
Banished by his rich father at 16 for trying on his mother's underwear, Mr
Bacon drove a field ambulance in World War I, gallivanted in 1930s Berlin
transvestite clubs, spent heavily on gambling, drank Soho dry every day,
spurned a knighthood as being too common and died, aged 82, enjoying himself
in Spain. Never mind the pictures: feel the life.
The
artist as a beloved adventurer
Francis Bacon
will be mourned in Soho pubs as much as in the world of high art.
David Lister
traces an extraordinary life
DAVID LISTER | THE
INDEPENDENT | WEDNESDAY
29 APRIL 1992
FRANCIS
BACON was being mourned yesterday not jus in the great art galleries and
salons of the world but in the Soho pubs and drinking clubs that he
frequented for more than 40 years.
Bacon, in his prime a homosexual adventurer
who once summarised his life as "going from bar to bar and
drinking and that kind of thing", flitted between what was once the demi-monde
of the now well-known Soho drinking clubs and the gaming tables of
Monte Carlo.
The artist largely retained his anonymity in
London, and was delighted, on going into a pub in Soho, to be offered a job
doing up an old house by someone who had heard he was a painter.
Though long since a multi-millionaire with a
penchant for champagne and oysters at Wheeler's restaurant, Bacon occupied a
corner seat in the Colony Room, a Soho drinking club, whenever he was in
London and lobbied Westminster City Council last year when the building was
threatened.
When he first went to the Colony in the late
Forties, the then owner, whom he adored, Muriel Belcher, paid him £10 a week
to bring in "good spenders".
Ian Board, his long-time friend, who now runs
the Colony Room and spoke with Bacon only last week, said yesterday: "He
was generous, marvellous, witty and bitchy. I will miss his viper's tongue. I
loved him even though he would call me a thieving, conniving bitch.
"He wasn't fond of talking about art
after the early days. Way back he would have a fling or two with Lucien Freud
but they fell out because Lucien went common and took a title from the Queen.
Francis refused two titles. He said he wanted to leave this world as he came
in."
In the main, though, tributes focused on the
supreme place that Bacon occupied in the history of modern art. David Mellor,
Secretary of State for National Heritage, said: "Britain has been one of
the great centres of modern art with a tremendously successful group of
artists. Most people would accept Bacon as either leader of that group or
certainly one of the two or three most precious figures."
Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate
Gallery, to which the artist donated his Second
Version of Triptych 1944, said last night: "Francis
Bacon was not only the greatest British painter of his generation, but was
also internationally recognised as one of the outstanding artists of the
post-war era. His art stand in the great tradition of Western painting,
addressing central themes of human existence in compositions grand in
conception, rich in colour and powerful in presence."
Bacon did have his critics in Britain,
including the former Prime Minister, Margret Thatcher. She once described him
as "that man who paints those dreadful".
The late Peter Fuller wrote when he was
editor of the magazine Modern
Painter of Bacon's "spiritual dereliction",
saying his paintings owed more "to the violence and perversity of his
imagination than to any love of the facts, let alone truth".
But these were rare voices. The description
of Bacon by the former Tate director Sir Alan Bowness as "setting the
standard for our time" was the one that found most echoes yesterday.
Bacon dies of a heart attack while staying
with friends in Madrid. He suffered from asthma but always looked younger
than his years. Born in Dublin, he began painting in 1929 but destroyed
nearly all of his earlier works. His English father was a retired Army
officer who went to Ireland to train horses.
Bacon's relationship with his parents was not
good and they never really supported his ambitions as an artist.
At the age of 16, Bacon was banished by his
father after he was found wearing his mother's underwear and was caught
having sex with the grooms.
Bacon moved to London and then Berlin. In
this city devoted to excess he indulged in all kinds of sexual escapades. He
went on gambling sprees and spent nights in transvestite clubs.
At the outbreak of the Second World War he
tried to enlist, but was turned down because of his asthma, so joined the
ambulance rescue squad. Some critics believe this experience with death and
bodies helped mould his artistic style.
In 1971 he was given a retrospective in Paris's
Grand Palais, an honour rarely afforded British artists. His former lover and
model George Dyer committed suicide hours before the exhibition opened. Only
months before Bacon had been acquitted on a drugs charge, brought after Dyer
reported him to the police. To remember his friend, Bacon did a series of
three paintings depicting Dyer's death.
Bacon with one of his paintings. (Photograph:
Terence Spencer)
Fate
of the painter’s
fortune is unclear
DALYA ALBERGE | THE
INDEPENDENT | WEDNESDAY
29 APRIL 1992
THERE
was endless speculation within the art world yesterday about who would
benefit from the fortune of a man who had been Britain's most expensive
living artist. With one of his paintings, Triptych;
May-June, 1973,
he became the most expensive living British artist; it sold for £3.53m at
Sotheby's New York in 1989.
But
Francis Bacon once said he preferred to be "surrounded by blank walls
rather than paintings." Apart from works in progress, the few works to
be found in his ramshackle mews were mostly reproductions. Some say he used
to sell a canvas to his dealers, Marlborough Fine Art, as soon a the paint
dried.
And just as he was unsentimental about his
art, he cared little about the millions it made him. Money was there to be
spent on gambling, drink and friends.
One former friend said yesterday that Bacon
"cannot have spent it all and must have been worth a few million at his
death".
But as another of them put it, "knowing
Francis, he would not have even written a will".
It seems likely that Marlborough Fine Art
will handle the Bacon estate. One art world source said that if there were
any works that Bacon had not sold, he was unlikely to have left them to an
institution. "He is more likely to have wanted friends and family to
have them. He led a very private life, and didn't particularly identify with
any museums".
Bacon was not particularly prolific, and only
a handful of his works are brought to auction each year. Bacon is one of the
few British painters with an international following among collectors, but as
one auctioneer said, "it will take perhaps two or three years for the
art world to revalue and evaluate Bacon's art in the light of twentieth
century painting. Even then, it is the art market in general that seems to be
the overriding factor, rather than the death of an artist".
The first test will come in July, when
Christie's brings a small portrait by him to auction.
World of art
pays tribute to Bacon
NICHOLAS WATT | THE
TIMES | WEDNESDAY
APRIL 29, 1992
Francis Bacon, hailed as one of Britain’s
greatest painters, died yesterday morning in a Madrid hospital after a heart
attack. His London agent said his body would be flown to Britain for burial.
Bacon, 82, was described yesterday as the
finest British painter since Turner. Born in Dublin in 1909 he started
painting in 1929 and was entirely self-taught. He destroyed nearly all of his
earlier works but by the end of his career his paintings commanded some of
the highest prices on the world art market. A triptych recently sold in New
York for £3.9 million.
The first test of the value of his works,
which are certain to rise following his death, will come at a Christies sale
in London on July 2, when a portrait of one of Bacon’s regular models comes
up for auction. It has been valued at between £180,000 and £220,000 and Christies
anticipate strong interest.
Bacon, who turned down a knighthood, usually
focused his art on the themes of sex and death. His work could be shocking
and some regarded it as obscene.
David Hockney paid warm tribute to Bacon from
his home in Los Angeles. “I first met Francis 30 years ago and met him again
in Paris in the 1970s. He was a wonderful artist. He had quite a narrow way
of looking at the world but this was very powerful.
“He was also a powerful person and I’ll never
forget meeting him in Paris when his friend George Dyer died on the opening
night ofhis big exhibition at the Grand Palais. We met in La Coupole and I
said I was very sorry. He took out a large handkerchief and let out a big
scream. He said all he could do was laugh or cry. During his life people
thought Francis looked drunk, but he was very fit and looked after himself.”
Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate
Gallery, which presented Bacon’s retrospective exhibitions of 1962 and 1985,
said: “Francis Bacon was not only the greatest British painter of his
generation, he was also internationally recognised as one of the outstanding
artists of the post-war era. His art stands in the great tradition of Western
painting, addressing central themes of human existence in compositions grand
in conception, rich in colour and powerful in presence.” From today the
gallery is displaying Bacon’s Second
Version of Triptych 1944, painted in 1988, which he gave to the gallery.
The original triptych of 1944 will be shown at the same time.
Lord Gowrie, the former arts minister and
chairman of Sotheby’s said: “He was the greatest living painter and the
greatest British painter since Turner.”
The artist Howard Hodgkin said: “He was a
hero of English painting and there have been few of them.”
Bridget Riley said: “I admired Francis
enormously and his death is a great loss. I saw his retrospective at the Tate
and I think he had fulfilled his particular vision.”
Rober Hugues, art critic of Time magazine, said: “Francis
Bacon went into areas of the human psyche that other modern painters didn’t
touch. Because he had been around for so long many people felt that he was a
bit of a living cliché. But his work went much further than the deployment of
shock tactics.”
Melvyn Bragg, who produced a South Bank Show
on Bacon in 1985, remembered visiting him at his messy mews house in South
Kensington. “He was a man who went his own way and he lived as an
old-fashioned bohemian. His flat was unbelievably tatty and should be
preserved for the nation. He had a small room that was covered in paint
because he mixed colours on the walls, a galley kitchen and his bedroom.
“He painted every day, starting in the
morning, and then he went out and drank an immense amount of champagne. He
was one of the world’s greatest painters in the second half of the twentieth
century. He found his style and subjects in the mid 1940s and he never really
changed from that.” Bacon will be sorely missed at the Colony Club where he
drank his famous quantities of champagne. Ian Board, the club’s proprietor,
said: “The club has lost its greatest member”.
Nicholas Watt
Painter
bursting with exhilarated despair
With
the death of Francis Bacon, Britain's finest painter of his time, art suffers
a grievous loss, writes Richard Cork
RICHARD
CORK | THE
TIMES | WEDNESDAY
APRIL 29, 1992
THE first time I met Francis Bacon for an
interview in the early 1970s, I approached him his South Kensington mews with
trepidation. Would I be greeted by a writhing, turbulent figure, so obsessed
with his own neuroses that conversation proved impossible to sustain?
My anxiety could hardly have been more
misplaced. Charming, convivial and wonderfully eager to talk, he greeted me
enthusiastically at the top of his steep, narrow stairs. Preparing at the
time for his immense retrospective exhibitions at the Grand Palais in Paris,
he was prepared nevertheless to spend the whole morning ranging inexhaustibly
over art and literature, from Velazquez and Proust to Rembrandt, Greet
tragedy and T.S. Eliot. Stimulating, often provocative and above all
intensely energetic, the conversation continued over a bibulous Soho lunch
and terminated tipsily in the ramshackle Colony Club.
I realised, on that bacchanalian day, just
how much this animated man relished life. Far from viewing it with depressive
morbidity, he savoured his defiantly unconventional existence with boundless
zest. The same gusto animates his paintings. Isolated the figures may often
be, but they are far from limp or defeated. At their most dynamic, they fill
the entire canvas with protesting howls. But even when simply sitting on a
chair, accompanied by one of the sinister shadows Bacon favoured, these
solitary men have a tense, coiled dynamism that counters their awareness that
each of us is, in the end, alone.
Bacon himself claimed that he looked on life
with “exhilarated despair”. The horror is that all right, as well as the
violence that erupted in the world on so many occasions during his lifetime.
But Bacon’s awareness of man’s capacity for bestiality is offset by his
stubborn belief in grandeur.
Viewers who recoil from Bacon in disgust are
unable to grasp the more positive aspects of his art. But they are a vital
part of his towering achievement. Bacon set great store by accident when
painting, and his finest work is galvanised by an exuberant sense of risk. An
inveterate gambler, he loved to surprise himself in painting as in life. The
many canvases he destroyed throughout his career testify to his impatience
with predictability. In Bacon’s greatest canvases his impulsive handling of
paint has an astonishing eloquence as he pummels, caresses, obliterates and
coaxes the pigment at will.
At the same time though, Bacon has a passion
for order. His compositions are always calculated and refined, playing off
the convulsive figures against areas of flat, semi-abstract colour. He liked
immaculate painting and the tormented passages in his work gain enormously
from their contrast with the clean, plain areas surrounding them. Bacon’s
superb finesse, coupled with an instinctive monumentality, counteracts the
depressing aspects of his world. Indeed his exhilaration seems all the more
persuasive precisely because it is pitched against the confinement and
vulnerability of the human condition. Bacon’s assertion of a resilient vigour
could not be more hard won. And in some of his most impressive pictures naked
figures close on one another with extraordinary erotic forcefulness, as if
trying to combat their former isolation.
Bacon will be remembered, not only as the
finest British painter of his time, but one of the most outstanding artists
anywhere in the late 20th century world. With his death, painting suffers an
incalculable loss. When we met for the last time a few months ago he told me
that he hated the thought of death, before pausing and then brightening with
a defiant cry: “ Shall we have some champagne?”
Painted
into a corner
DIARY | THE
TIMES | WEDNESDAY
APRIL 29, 1992
THE DEATH of Francis Bacon was met with
surprise in some quarters yesterday. Such was the legendary status of the 82
year-old artist —
once described by Mrs Thatcher as "that man who paints those dreadful
pictures" —
that a few people assumed he had been dead for years.
One one occasion Andrew Billen, now deputy editor of The
Observer Magazine but then arts correspondent on this paper, was
instructed by the news editor to phone Bacon to find out whether or not he
was still alive.
"We had received copy from a foreign
agency describing Bacon in the past tense," says Billen. "As soon
as he answered the phone I felt the story slipping away". Rivalling Mark
Twain's sang
froid about reports of his death, Bacon responded to
the enquiry by saying: "I am sorry not to be able to help on this
occasion."
FRANCIS
BACON
Francis
Bacon, the internationally-renowned British painter, died yesterday in Madrid
aged 82.
He
was born in Dublin on October 28, 1909.
OBITUARIES | THE
TIMES | WEDNESDAY
APRIL 29 1992
NO OTHER post-war painter transformed British
art with as much energy, flair and obsessive conviction as Francis Bacon.
After a surprisingly tentative beginning, when he wavered between painting
and designing furniture and rugs, the self-taught Bacon vision arrived
fully-formed in 1944. And it already had the ability to unnerve. In a searing
orange triptych, he painted three alarmingly distorted figures at the base of
a crucifix. Half-human, half-animal, they writhe, push their distended necks
forward and open their mouths in desolate howls.
When this excoriating triptych was exhibited
at the Lefevre Gallery, it announced a new post-war mood of uncompromising
anxiety. The advent of the cold war, combined with the horror of
Hiroshima, confirmed Bacon's preoccupations. He returned, time and again, to
the image of a male solitary figure enclosed in a bare interior.
During the 1950s this anguished presence
often gave vent to his disquiet with a scream, nowhere more vehemently than
in an extended series of paintings based on Velasquez's celebrated portrait
of Pope Innocent X. In the original canvas, which Bacon never went to inspect
in Rome, the Pope looks masterful and shrewd. But Bacon transforms him into a
screaming grotesque, trapped like a prisoner in an electric chair, rather
than a Pontiff's throne.
In later life, Bacon himself came to regret
spending so much time on the Pope images. He thought they were too
sensational, and went on too long. But they were certainly instrumental in
establishing him with a formidable international reputation. Another series,
smaller in number and on the whole more powerful, took as its inspiration a
Van Gogh painting of the artist walking through the French countryside on his
way to work. Once again, Bacon changed the original image into a turbulent,
troubled expression of his own ominous vision.
On the whole, though, Bacon's figures remain
indoors rather than out in the open. Landscapes were rare in his work, and
the paintings of recent decades concentrate, with remarkable consistency, on
clothed or naked figures in the archetypal Bacon room. As if to stress how
little his art had changed, he embarked in 1988 on a second, larger version
of his 1944 triptych. The lacerating orange became a more sumptuous red and
the three figures are surrounded by more space than in the earlier version.
But they twist and yell as hideously as before, and Bacon demonstrated his
regard for the new triptych by presenting it to the Tate Gallery.
Francis Bacon was born of English parents.
His father trained horses in Ireland. Bacon had little formal education
except for a brief period at boarding school in Cheltenham. He left home
early and spent some years in Paris and Berlin. By 1930 he was in London
earning a precarious living as a designer of furniture and rugs.
He had already begun to paint, but of his
first experiments very little remains. There were some abstract paintings —
they are seen in a picture of the corner of his studio painted by a great
friend of that time, Roy de Maistre. There are one or two pictures which
found their way into private collections —
the best know is a Crucifixion
which was reproduced in Herbert Read's Art
Now (1933) —
but everything else Bacon destroyed.
There was nothing tentative about his
re-appearance in the closing years of the war. From 1945 onwards he began to
show pictures of great technical assurance and startling originality.
The crucial moment was his first one-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in
1949 which thrust him to the forefront of contemporary painting.
Just as the name Kafka has passed into the
language as evocative of a certain kind of anxiety-ridden impasse,
so Bacon's name now began to be used descriptively. This is an indication of
the way in which these pictures reflected a recognisable range of feelings.
They were of men's heads set against thick curtains or enclosed in glass
boxes, their eyes often obliterated and their mouths stretched open as if to
scream. Melodramatic, they were also contemplative and the mood of extreme,
yet stoical, despair seemed of a piece with the mood of Sartre's Huis
Clos and the early Beckett novels.
It was perhaps this literary side to them
which first captured the imagination of the public. Not since Fuseli had the
horrific been the overt subject-matter of painting, and the novelty was both
shocking and absorbing. There were other equally disturbing features. His
painting was, for instance, the very antithesis of abstract at a moment when
the general drift of painting seemed to be inexorably in an abstract
direction. It was illusionistic, although in a novel and non-academic
way; it drew upon the Old Masters, on Velasquez in particular, and equally on
photography, not only for its imagery but for its surface appearance too.
It was impossible to place him comfortably
within any existing framework. Certain critics, notably Robert Melville and
David Sylvester, wrote about him brilliantly and with deep partisanship.
Others tended to dismiss him as a morbid sensationalist and a light-weight, a
view in which they were strengthened when in 1953, on the occasion of a
retrospective exhibition of Matthew Smith at the Tate, Bacon contributed a
short tribute to the catalogue in which he said: "I think that painting
today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when
you splash the stuff down..." However, within a year or two London was
to become familiar with the achievements of the American painters of Bacon's
generations. Chance and intuition with paint had begun to take on wider
meanings and Bacon looked less isolated, more profound and even more original
than before.
His painting was shown in the British
Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and from now onwards his reputation
rose steadily in Europe and America; indeed it could be said that as far as
the international standing of British art went, Bacon did for painting what
Henry Moore had done for sculpture a few years earlier. There was a major
retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1962, which later toured
Europe, and from this point onwards hardly a year passed without some
important showing somewhere in the world. He was the first English painter of
this century to be taken seriously in Paris, where queues formed to see his
retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971-72. He was shown at the
Metropolitan in New York in 1975.
In one of his first statements about his work
Bacon had said: "Painting is the pattern of one's nervous system being
projected on the canvas." It was always to have for him this quality of
naked attack. It was able, as nothing else, to convey feeling directly, to
"come immediately onto the nervous system". Above all it was able
to do so through the mysterious equivalence of paint and flesh. He saw this
power as an unbroken inheritance from the past, continually to be revived by
the risks and intuitions of the present. He had little regard for abstract
art, which in his view avoided the challenge that made painting worthwhile.
For him the proper subject for art was the
human figure, and specifically the portrait. As his work matured he dropped
much of the menacing mise-en-scène of
the earlier pictures, and his figures became more particular portraits. He
painted the same close friends over and over, working from photographs and
memory, placing them in simple modern interiors, naked or clothed and
concentrating on their faces with what to many observers seemed to be
sadistic violence. Bacon would always deny this reading.
Neither his international reputation nor the
success that went with it made Bacon a conformist figure. He sat on no
committees and accepted no honours. He was indifferent to officialdom. Robert
Melville once wrote of him: "He is at home in the complicated night life
of big cities, interested in the exhibitionism and instability of the people
he chooses to mix with and absorbed by extreme situations." His art was
very close indeed to his life, and his life was lived on the very fringes of
normality.
He was a man of infinite charm and generosity
with a great gift for friendship. A prodigious host, his life was uncluttered
by possessions. His appearance was ageless. His influence on younger artists
during the 1950s and 1960s was very considerable —
not stylistically, for he had few imitators —
but through his attitude to his work and the sense he gave of the ultimate
seriousness of art.
Bacon's outstanding reputation was
recognised, in 1985, by a second retrospective exhibition at the Tate
Gallery. Until then, no living British artist had been granted such an
honour, and in his forward to the catalogue the then director, Sir Alan
Bowness, categorically declared that Bacon's "work sets the standard for
our time, for he is surely the greatest living painter; no artist in our
century has presented the human predicament with such insight and feeling.
The paintings have the inescapable mark of the present; I am tempted to add
the world alas, but for Bacon the virtues of truth and honesty transcend the
tasteful. They give to his paintings a terrible beauty that has placed them
among the most memorable images in the entire history of art. And these
paintings have a timeless quality that allows them to hang naturally in our
museums beside those of Van Gogh and Rembrandt."
FRANCIS BACON
CONTROVERSIAL ABSTRACT PAINTER DIES AT 82
EDITORIAL | FORT
WAYNE | THE
JOURNAL GAZETTE | APRIL
29, 1992
Francis Bacon, the Irish-born
painter whose abstract images of psychological and physical brutality made
him one of the most exalted and most disliked artists of the post-war era,
died Tuesday at a hospital in Madrid, Spain.
He was 82 and lived in London. He died
of a heart attack while vacationing, according to a statement from his
London dealer, Marlborough Fine Art.
Mr. Bacon first gained acclaim in
1945, when he exhibited Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 at the Lefevre
Gallery in London. Mr. Bacon's angrily drawn image of writhing half-human,
half- animal forms, perched atop pedestals and set in claustrophobic
spaces, seemed to epitomize the grim spirit of post-war England and
established him as a master of the macabre.
That reputation was reinforced time
and again by the screaming popes, butchered carcasses and distorted
portraits that Mr. Bacon turned out over the next 45 years. Until his
death, he continued to work in his cramped, cluttered studio in a small
ramshackle house in South Kensington, London.
Although his paintings sold for
millions of dollars, Mr. Bacon eschewed most of the trappings of success.
He kept no bank account, but would reach into his pocket and pull out a wad
of cash whenever he wanted to indulge.
Mr. Bacon cultivated a bad-boy
reputation, speaking freely about his fondness for alcohol, his
homosexuality and his kinship with gangsters.
|
FEROCITY
OF PAINTINGS EARNED BACON REPUTATION AS BRITAIN'S TOP ARTIST
DEATH
NOTICE
GRAHAM HEATHCOTE | ASSOCIATED
PRESS | APRIL
29, 1992
Francis Bacon, whose disturbing paintings of humanity in
despair screamed across huge canvases, fetched millions and ranked him among
Britain's greatest 20th-century artists, died Tuesday, at the age of 82.
Bacon died of a heart attack while on
holiday, in Madrid, said his agent, Mary Miller. He had been hospitalized,
but was thought to be recovering and died unexpectedly. Bacon turned down a
knighthood, had little regard for money and could be abrupt and difficult.
But in his work, he insisted, he didn't set out to shock. "You see, just
the very fact of being born is a very ferocious thing," he explained in
a 1980 interview with London's Observer newspaper.
"Life........ is just filled, really, with suffering and despair."
On his 80th birthday, he told the Associated
Press, "I'm not celebrating it. I'm not going anywhere and I don't want
any presents." Then he hung up.
His paintings of violently distorted people
and animals on garishly coloured backgrounds were regarded by some as
obscene. But they hang in the great museums of London, New York, Chicago,
Detroit and Ottawa. "He was not only the greatest British painter of his
generation, but was also internationally recognized as one of the outstanding
artists of the postwar era," said Nicholas Serota, director of London's
Tate Gallery.
Sotheby's Chairman Lord Gowrie said Bacon was
Britain's finest painter since 19th-century landscape artist J.M.W. Turner.
In November, Bacon gave the Tate Gallery a
painting that he could have sold for around 3 million pounds (then $5.3
million). Sotheby's set the Bacon auction record of $6.27 million to an
anonymous buyer in New York in May 1990 for Triptych
May-June. His Study of a
Pope had sold six months earlier at Christie's in New York for $5.72 million.
Bacon's haunting paintings of the 17th-century
Pope Innocent X - a series depicting the pope caged in plate glass and
screaming - made Bacon world famous.
Bacon had lived alone since his long time
companion, George Dyer, committed suicide in 1971. A completely self-taught
artist, the Irish-born Bacon began painting in London in 1929, but destroyed
most of his earlier work with a razor. In World War II, he joined an
ambulance rescue squad. Witnessing violent death helped inspire his style,
especially the triptych form of three canvases linked together like a
medieval altarpiece.
The Tortured Vision of Francis Bacon
WILLIAM WILSON | TIMES
ART CRITIC | LOS ANGELES TIMES | APRIL 29, 1992
Francis Bacon was inarguably the
greatest British figurative painter of the 20th Century, one of those
typical stand-alone artists that England produces - Gainsborough, Turner,
Blake. He died of a heart attack Tuesday in a Madrid hospital while
vacationing in Spain. He was 82.
He burst insidiously on the world in
the mid-1950s with strange paintings like Study
After Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. The pontiff is seen as a
screaming hallucination, as if overcome by a traumatic understanding that
all the pomp, ceremony and benign authority attached to church and
government was a hollow fiction.
Europe was still reeling from World
War II. In England, the pace of recovery was particularly slow. The world
was still absorbing the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust. In Paris,
Jean-Paul Sartre posited the dark dilemma of Existentialism: Life offers no
rules or precedents to guide us; we must make it up as we go along; we find
our being in nothingness.
Bacon's work reflected this mood. He
painted figures for a crucifixion scene like gelatinous succubi, all teeth,
sucking mouths and blind eyes against a vibrating red backdrop. The artist
was actually Irish like his contemporary, the great genius of absurdist
theater, Samuel Beckett. Bacon's images of grimacing men in glass boxes
live in the same spirit as Beckett characters who inhabit garbage cans.
Bacon had come to London as a youth to be a decorator but his inner demons
goaded him out of an easy life. He was a dedicated tosspot, compulsive
gambler and tortured homosexual who haunted the low-life demimonde of
Berlin and Paris before he settled in Chelsea. He started painting
seriously during the war. He was, by turns, recluse, seductive charmer and
vicious wit.
"I serve champagne to my real
friends and real pain to my sham friends," he remarked.
Technically he was a virtuoso but his
vision of life was unremittingly edged with violence and madness. "Man
now realizes he is an accident," he once said, "that he is a
completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. I
think of life as meaningless; we create certain attitudes which give it
meaning while we exist, though they in themselves are meaningless."
Visually he expressed all this in
images often drawn from photographs. He borrowed the face of a screaming
woman from Sergei Eisenstein's film The
Battleship Potemkin. He mined the serial photographs of Eadweard
Muybridge, transforming a photograph of nude men wrestling into a troubled
sexual coupling. He often painted his companion George Dyer and his friend
Isabel Rawsthorne in radically distorted portraits that made them seem like
lonely souls going insane in barren bed-sitters.
His style can be described in
shorthand as a combination of Picasso's distortions and Rembrandt's
fleshiness. But such a formula leaves out the galvanic effect of the work,
the way it captures the sense of inner contortion brought on by anxiety,
the feeling of physical flagellation induced by masochistic worry.
Bacon was a singular stylist who both
mirrored and molded his epoch. He was one of the last artists easily
attached to the larger culture. He found kindred spirits in artists like
Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet. In the theater the plays of Harold
Pinter, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet echoed Bacon's dark, absurdist
spirit. The fruitlessness of conventional culture and life lived on the run
turns up in the American Beat generation in Ginsberg and Kerouac.
California figurative painting of the '50s owes something to Bacon. There
are hints of it in Richard Diebenkorn's "Girl on Terrace"
paintings, in Nathan Oliveira's specters. In Los Angeles, the art of Rico
Lebrun and Howard Warshaw mirrored Bacon's tragic vision.
Like many who endure a long life,
Bacon at a certain point seemed to have outlived his moment. In the cool
'60s, dominated by ironic Pop and exquisite Minimalism, Bacon seemed
overblown, operatically self-indulgent and inclined to impersonate himself.
He came to represent a pessimistic humanism that represented the tattered
survival of a great cultural tradition that admits of pain and suffering
and implies the need for heroism in the face of the abyss. Bacon had but a
small progeny—painters like Lucian Freud, Ron Kitaj, Jim
Dine. Nobody wanted to think about poets of loneliness in the go-go '60s or
the narcissistic '80s.
But when the County Museum presented
a survey of his work in 1990, we were reminded of his striking images. And
now that times are tough again and Bacon is gone, we see him afresh. He
managed to do something relevant with the legacy of the very culture his
generation thought bankrupt, its traditions of art, philosophy and
literature. He talked straight about the phantom maze of our inner life and
heeded to the worth of the outsider's soul.
|
Bacon
the low-life art genius dies
By PATRICK HENNESSY | DAILY
EXPRESS | WEDNESDAY APRIL 29 1992
PAIN AND FAME: Bacon
with one of his paintings at the Tate in 1985.
HARD-DRINKING, fast-living artist
Francis Bacon died from a heart attack yesterday while on holiday in Spain.
Last night tributes poured in for the 82-year-old genius,
believed by some critics to have been the greatest British artist since
Turner.
Many of his pictures have been labelled obscene — but they
are sold for record sums worldwide.
His detractors included former Premier Margaret Thatcher,
who described him as "that man who paints those dreadful pictures".
A self-confessed homosexual, Bacon was fascinated by sex
and death, which provided most of the shocking imagery that is shot through
his work.
A typical working day for him consisted of painting from
dawn until lunchtime, then downing bottles of champagne with journalist
Jeffrey Bernard in seedy Soho drinking clubs until late into the night.
His death came while staying with friends on holiday.
Bacon, an asthma sufferer, complained of not feeling well
yesterday and was taken to hospital, where he died suddenly.
His body will be flown back to
England for a private funeral.
In an interview last year Bacon spoke frankly
about his homosexuality.
"I don't go about shouting that I'm gay
but AIDS has made it all much worse, you know. People are
very odd about it," he said.
Bacon, the son of a British Army officer, was
born in Ireland in 1909.
As a youth he ran wild and at 16 was banished
by his father after being caught wearing his mothers underwear and having sex
with one of the grooms.
During the war he joined an ambulance squad —
and his exposure to corpses had a profound effect on his work.
A year ago he gave a £3 million painting
dating from 1944 to London's Tate Gallery.
Last night Mark Fisher, shadow arts minister,
said: "There is no doubt that his work is going to survive. It said
something about the pain of the human condition."
Homage
to a slice of Bacon
MARTYN HARRIS | ODD MAN OUT |
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | SATURDAY, MAY 2, 1992
Francis
Bacon's body lay a moulderin' in Madrid, but in London the Tate Gallery had
already created what will doubtless be the first of many memorials. In Room
25 they have hung his last major triptych, Three Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, which he gave to the gallery in 1991, and which is now flanked on
one side with a vase of roses on a tasteful grey plinth —
made
of plywood, but trying hard to be stone.
Bacon, who sneered equally at sentiment and kitsch, would
have laughed at this, but already the public are arriving to pay homage,
pausing respectfully to read the inscription, or sitting to meditate on the
bench before the great painting. And so begins that mysterious translation
from semi-ignored outsider to pillar of culture. Not so long ago, in a Soho
pub, a man who had heard Bacon was a painter offered him a job doing up his
house. This week Bacon takes full-page obituaries in every serious paper in
the land.
Most of the people passing by know he is dead, and some
even know other Bacon paintings. "He did Screaming Popes."
"and Mick Jagger", "sides of meat," "and men having
it off". Asked for the first adjective that comes to mind in front of
the crucifixion triptych they say, "nightmare", "scary",
"slasher movie", "alien", "warped" and
"weird".
The triptych is actually a retread of a 1944 Bacon which
hangs two rooms away. This shows three animal forms with lumpen greyish
bodies, elongated necks and tiny snarling heads, set in windowless interiors
painted a garish tomato soup colour. In the modern version the background is
a more restful imperial purple, and the figures less agitated, more
monumental.
Alexander, an art student from Nice, says the faces seem to
be trying to escape from the bodies, like the threshing heads of
straitjacketed lunatics. "But I don't like to read meaning into painting
you know. Proust says 'a work of art which contains theories is like a
present with the price tag still on'." All the same there is a
sense of revulsion here, from the flesh and mortality. I think of Yeats's
terror, ay being a creative intelligence "chained to a dying
animal".
Quite a little seminar group is gathering now, in front of
the painting. There are American couples in Burberries, filling in time
before Starlight Express; French/Spanish students with Day-Glo bumbags full
of postcards; and soi-distant "practicing artists" in black Levis
and torn vests. Everyone looks at the label before the painting.
Burberries like to imagine messages behind the picture:
"For me this is a feminist image on the left of the woman armless and
bound..." Bumbags, on the other hand, prefer to find popular parallels;
"Zis reminds me vair much of zis punk band album cover. I sink ze
Ramones..." The black Levis lot are opposed to all attempts at
interpretation and prefer words like "strong", "sensual"
and "interesting".
They do all seem to like Bacon though, which, given his
unpleasant material and limited range, seems strange. Looking through Michel
Leiris's book on the artist, there is hardly any development over the years
in the pictures of flayed faces, doglike couplings, grungy rooms and
screaming mouths - except that in the later paintings the distortions
of bodies and faces look more wilful than pathological; colours are cleaner,
edges neater, and the expression of disgust seems more factitious than felt.
Though his boozing and gambling friends like to
portray him as a desperate character, Bacon actually had a remarkably placid
and healthy life, from his comfortable home background to the cosy clubs of
his declining years. The nearest he came to real horror was conscription to
the Army in 1939, which he avoided by hiring an Alsatian dog from Harrods and
sleeping beside it overnight. As he suffered from asthma and was allergic to
dogs he was gasping for breath when he reported for his medical, and was
rejected as unfit.
The British artist Alfred Stevens once remarked: "The
artist who always paints the same scene pleases the public for the sole
reason that it recognises him with ease and thinks itself a connoisseur."
Perhaps that is all it is. Bacon did the same kind of
painting for 50 years, and anyone who goes on for that long must have
something to say, mustn't he? Sheer persistence will finally wear away
scepticism, and in any case Bacon did have something to say, though as years
went by he said it with less venom and less real horror, until in the end it
felt like a tic of style rather than genuine terror.
Francis Bacon
Out of decay, immortality
Giles Auty
By GILES AUTY | THE SPECTATOR | 2 MAY 1992
I was having lunch this Tuesday
with a painter friend when news of Francis Bacon's death reached us. Bacon
was in his 83rd year and was felt by many who knew him well to have been
lucky to have got so far. My friend celebrated him for another reason:
'You've got to be grateful to old Francis for keeping the idea of figurative
painting alive during those awful years of Pop and abstract expressionism.'
Francis Bacon outlived many more art movements than these and in a sense
reaffirmed belief in the continuity of art rather than sharing in the idea of
modernist schism.
I first met the artist in the closing months of
1959 when we rented almost adjacent dwellings in St Ives. I remember
especially talking with him during a long, sunlit after- noon largely on the
subject of Bonnard. The artist was charming, considerate and well-informed.
As dusk drew in a male companion of the artist who seemed to me none of these
things made his return and I made polite excuses to depart.
I encountered the artist intermittently
over succeeding years, once in the restaurant car of a train. In days when
Britain was less affluent, I suspect many users of restaurant cars seldom
dined out other than when travelling. There was a subdued hush in the dining
car broken only by the tinkle of cutlery and whispered discussions between
long-married couples as to whether to order a half-bottle of Beaujolais. The
waiter motioned me to an unoccupied seat at a table . . . 'If you wouldn't
mind joining the other gentlemen, sir.' Almost as I did so, Mr Bacon's new
companion, a brawny young man sporting a bright ginger crew-cut, complained
very loudly of the heat: 'Cor, Francis, it ain't 'alf fuckin' 'ot in 'ere.'
Throwing off his coat, he revealed a short-sleeved shirt, impressive musculature
and brilliant braces. Several delicately poised fish knives clattered to the
floor.
The artist resisted the idea of a biography
which would probably centre more on his private social habits — notably
drinking, gambling and intense physical attachments — than on his art. A good
deal of nonsense has been written about the latter, too, and I expect we must
now fear the excesses, also, of his obituarists. Thus I do not share Sir Roy
Strong's view, already stated, that Bacon was the greatest British artist
since Turner. The artist's unusual life and background probably explain much
more in his art than is commonly realised — but it would be strange if they
did not do so. Bacon was a weak and asthmatic child sired by a domineering
racehorse trainer in Ireland. He had little convention- al schooling and no
art training at all. He left home at 16 following a reputed incident of
trying on his mother's clothes. Unsurprisingly, his natural milieu became
that of Bohemia and the demimonde in Berlin, Paris and London, where he
worked before the last war as a designer of rugs and furniture. At the time I
first met Bacon, his rise to artistic fame and fortune had merely begun. I
believe the critic David Sylvester was as responsible as anyone for its
subsequent acceleration. For years, whenever I remarked on the low standard
of coverage on television of the visual arts, colleagues would refer me to a
most illuminating interview between Bacon and Sylvester ... 'if only you had
seen that'. Not many years ago I did so and was acutely disappointed. Little
doubt this footage will be re-run many times in the months to come.
Bacon learned the craft of painting slowly
but developed subsequent techniques which made his technical shortcomings
difficult for most critics to comment upon. At the end of his life he was
accused by former admirers of becoming almost too accomplished for his own
good: of producing pastiches of his own mannerisms, in fact. For me, perhaps
the greatest virtue of Bacon's painting lay in his commitment to the activity
itself. To the best of my knowledge he never complained of the inadequacy of
the medium, recognising rightly that if the activity of painting were good
enough for anyone from Rembrandt to Grünewald or Ingres to Goya
there was no particular need to look elsewhere.
Bacon's often remarkable painting struck me
always as a far more urgent reflection of his own, driven condition than that
of humanity at large. His supposed assault on 'reality' accords more with
vulgar conceptions of such matters than with the profound or philosophical.
Paradoxically, there is often a taint of melodrama and sentimentality about
visions of remorselessness, whether written or painted. Bacon's
over-insistence on decay and futility may have been an unintended argument
for immortality. Though his friends may deny this, perhaps he was not such an
old, existential romantic after all.
PORTRAYING MAN'S AGONY
To Francis Bacon, Life was the horror, not
his paintings
ALAN
G. ARTNER | CHICAGO TRIBUNE | MAY 1, 1992
The death of Francis Bacon on Tuesday
at age 82 brought to an end one of the most individual careers in the history
of 20th Century painting.
His vision was grisly, but he always
maintained, realistic. He had few antecedents and attracted fewer disciples.
Yet the strength of that vision indelibly impressed itself on art of our time
and, contrary to his many statements, came to stand for a particular moment
in Western cultural history. Nearly a half-century of interpreters have seen
Bacon as the one artist who consistently tried to sum up the agony of modern
man. They said his outlook was shaped by World War II and inevitably
represented extreme states of feeling.
Bacon himself was cooler, repeating
again and again that he had nothing to express about the human condition.
Life was the horror and his paintings were no match for it.
Sometimes they captured a little bit of
truth. But they did it in an intense and curtailed way, distorting beyond
appearance yet working into the distortions something still recognizable.
In short, Bacon was more concerned with
the act of painting than the philosophy everyone said lay behind it. He was
not in any sense a philosopher. As a young man, he merely had seen a dog
defecate on the street and had accepted it as the most accurate
representation of life. This viewpoint allowed him to look at every
conceivable human act without surprise, disappointment, judgment or recoil.
What was normal to Bacon was terrible
to others, and, paradoxically, the extent of the terror accounted for his
success. He often said he could not imagine anyone who really liked his
paintings, but museums and collectors around the world acquired them, and
they entered even the popular imagination through use on the opening credits
of Bernardo Bertolucci's film Last
Tango in Paris.
American critics frequently dismissed
his work as "automatic angst" that, over the years, had become
decorative in their composition and colour. Some gave him credit for being a
great image maker, but denied him the status of great painter. This was
transparent. Bacon rankled American critics only because he did not need
them.
Bacon never claimed to have brought
anything new to painting and, in truth, he did not. Though self-taught, he
recognized the value of history and freely approached it as a storehouse of
images that might trigger his imagination.
The most famous image he used was that
of Velasquez's 1650 portrait of Pope
Innocent X , but there were
many others, most notably from paintings by Picasso, Cimabue, Ingres and Van
Gogh, and from photographs by Edweard Muybridge.
Bacon was acutely aware of the predicament of the 20th Century painter
who tried to record life, acknowledging that mechanical means could do it
better. So he sought an intensity that came in part from the risk-taking of
the artist, and he often ruined paintings by throwing pigment at them or by
deliberately causing accidents upon which he hoped to capitalize.
In 1988, a year before the 80th
birthday exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in
Washington, D.C., Bacon returned to the work that first brought him
notoriety, his Studies
for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. This time, he did
not rework the original but created a new triptych marked by telling
refinements in composition, colour and touch. The piece reaffirmed that
Bacon's primary concern long had been painting, not subject matter. And it
should have surprised no one. His words and deeds were consistent throughout
his career and, decades before, while looking through a book on mouth
diseases, he had said he wanted to paint the inside of a screaming mouth as
beautifully as a Claude Monet sunset.
That linkage between beauty and horror came
naturally to Bacon, and it kept him from ever appearing sentimental about
anything, including art.
If not especially appealing, it is
nonetheless extraordinary that a world-famous artist would say, simply and
without guile: "I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had
passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and
memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime."
Just a pile of paint and a nightmare of chic
thrills
Michael McNay takes a dissenting view of a
'genius'
MICHAEL McNAY | THE GUARDIAN
WEEKEND | 2-3 MAY, 1992
All the world loves a picture. A picture with a story is even better.
Ulysses Deridibg Polyphenus before Symphony in Grey and Black;
The Last of England or the Hireling Shepherd before Dedham Vale. Better still
- halcyon days of the Royal Academy when Munnings ruled and God was his
heaven? - the puzzle pictures, a canvas that hinted at a story but which left
the viewer guessing.
Francis Bacon bestrides this honourable tradition. Pictures, no
paintings. Best of all, English narrative pictures. One must be careful here:
he is of course "painterly" picture maker. His legions of admirers
say so. Many of his admirers are painters themselves', some very good
painters; though Bacon himself, we keep hearing, was the greatest living
artist, the best British artist since Turner. But Bacon's paint is in the
service of pictorial effect. The surface itself should not be scrutinised too
carefully. Too often in doesn't describe what it purports to be describing.
Bacon can't paint a foot or an ear or a hand. Some of the curves he used to
describe physical forms are so slack they would have got him fired from a
Disney workshop.
So Bacon smudged and threw paint and turned forms back in on
themselves and disrupted their logic, instinctively hiding his own
deficiencies. These smears of paint describing swollen and distended shapes,
especially in the portrait, seize attention and distract the eye from what
lies between. Which is nothing.
Nothing will come of nothing. And Bacon's nothing isn't even a black
hole, it is a break down in communication. The painting stops dead between
the smears of pigment. There is nothing there because it hasn't been
described or constructed or placed.
Bacon lived the life of Riley, but despite the boozing and gambling
and promiscuity he lived to a fine old age. That style of life must have made
him sense that he was a man in a hurry, and he worked obsessively. But unlike
Picasso painting in a hurry in his last days, Bacon's talent was not
underpinned by training. He gambled and quite often won. Often, too, he lost,
and because he had a painter's eye he could pick the losers.
This is no secret. Bacon groupies who fill the columns of the art
press and who have been taking up radio time since the artist's death have
described with suppressed excitement the way Bacon destroyed work that
dissatisfied him, cut the heads out of portraits and left the canvases with
gapping holes. They are like Nosey in Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth,
stuttering excitement over every manifestation of the painter's genius, even
the recognition of failure. Bacon himself was quite open about his methods.
His conversations with David Sylvester, published in the 1970s, are
quite explicit. Bacon worked fast, and with a lot of paint, pushing it around
the surface, waiting for the controlled accident to erupt. It it got out of
hand, there was no going back. The canvas had to be abandoned.
The process, an eruption, sounds unpleasant, and it was; because the
secret of bacon's successful work was the paint, like a gigantic eructation
of pus. The Grand Guignol apparatus of screaming heads, the sides of raw
meat, the smeared visages underpinned this visceral sense of horror. Bacon
was the last and most extreme of the line of painters who followed van Gogh.
But Bacon was self-taught, and unlike Van Gogh, never overcame his technical
deficiencies. He borrowed motifs, fair enough, but imposed sketchily realised
pictorial devices, like the frame crudely articulated to impose some sense of
control over the central images sprawling like something from under a stone.
Given the shortcomings of imagination and technique, Bacon's success
is singular. He caught a nerve, as Bryan Robertson put it in his Guardian tribute.
The risk taking, the throw of the dice that characterised his encounter with
the canvas, had its own excitement.
The nastiness of the images, the grandeur of the nightmare as some
would have it, help to assuage a western civilisation that can't cope with
its own darker compulsions. A bad dream by Bacon is the ultimate adjunct to
any truly-chic boardroom. Which is why the front page of the Times was able
to report: "The first test of the value of his works, which are (sic)
certain to rise following his death, will come at a Christie's sale in London
on July 2." As Wilde would have said, there's a reporter who knows
the price of everything and the value of nothing. No doubt the market will
bear him out. But as for being the "best living painter",
Bacon wasn't even the best painter living in North London.
The
horror of Francis Bacon
THE
ECONOMIST | OBITUARY | THE
ECONOMIST | MAY
2, 1992
THE trauma of our age,
after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, haunts so many of his pictures. Francis
Bacon, who died aged 82 on April 28th, was the greatest British painter since
Turner but also something more. His works, like Picasso's, have left their
mark on everyman, not just the art public.
He nearly always painted
the human face and figure, stripped bare of civilised niceties, set against
backgrounds of stark colour and a terrifying clinical vacancy. "I hate a
homely atmosphere," he once said, and there is nothing cosy or
illustrative about his figures: screaming
prelates;manically grimacing businessmen; naked men vomiting, defecating,
wrestling (or making love) with each other. He compressed reality to the
claustrophobia of the interrogation chamber, the screaming cell, the
slaughterhouse.
Nothing about
Bacon,, a descendent of the Elizabethan English philosopher of the same name,
was conventional. He suffered from asthma in his childhood in Dublin and had
little schooling. Despaired of by his family, the adolescent Bacon set
off for London, then to Paris and Berlin. During the wandering years that
followed, he worked sometimes in nightclubs, and was always a keen gambler.
He never attended art school, in his case a saving grace. A 1927 Picasso
exhibition opened his eyes to the imaginative possibilities of distorting the
human face.
In 1944 he painted
"Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixon", in which
humanoid creatures, grotesquely phallic in proportion, emit ineffable primal
screams. The human cry, inspired by images such as that of the blooded nruse
in Eisenstein's 1925 film 2Battleship Potemkin", obsessed him. He always
denied, however, being a visual terrorist out to shock gratuitously.
"I've always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet
painted a sunset."
His first London exhibition
in 1949 a shocked and riveted the art public. Its iconoclasm and gallows
humour broke ever taboo, but, as always, with tremendous assurance of
composition, acute sense of the figure in space and beautiful qualities of
paint. Figures were depicted mid-howl; a pope in a transparent box, like a
hunted specimen; a monstrous man with opened umbrella under suspended animal
carcasses.
By the late 1950s Bacon was
internationally famous. In 1962 and 1985, he had retrospectives at London's
Tate Gallery. His 1988 Moscow retrospective was the first of a living,
western artist to be held in the Soviet Union. His pictures commanded prices
in seven figures.
But he remained an elusive
figure, avoiding interviews, parrying critics. "I'm just rying to make
images as accurately off my nervous system as I can. I don't even know what
half of them mean. I'm not saying anything. Yet as Cecil Beaton, a famous
society photographer described him in 1960, Bacon provided lively, humorous
company for his friends, gay and straight. His studio was incredibly
dishevelled; he enjoyed heavy late-night drinking in London clubs; he was
indifferent to the opinions of others.
He lived and worked like
this almost o the end. In his art, he desperately exorcised the ravaging
tensions within. He described his portraiture as a kind of injury inflicted
on the subject, and spontaneously applied paint almost as a physical assault
on the viewer's sensibilities. A flayed human body on a bed under a rude electric
light bulb: this is Bacon's tragic view of man. His are 20th-century icons,
without a glimmer of redemption or release from horror.
THE BOOK THAT BACON
BANNED
Francis Bacon died on Tuesday
morning aged 82.
BRUCE BERNARD, visual arts editor of The Independent Magazine and a
longtime friend of Bacon’s, recalls the revealing saga of ‘About Francis
Bacon a book approved by Bacon, monitored by Bacon, and – at the last minute
– blocked by Bacon.
BRUCE BERNARD | THE INDEPENDENT
MAGAZINE | 2 MAY
1992
About five years ago, an art director at Macdonald Orbis,
the publishers for whom I had compiled three books about painting, suggested
that I should “do a book” about Francis Bacon. At first I thought that there
was nothing I could contrive that would supersede or add anything significant
to the books already published, but within a very short time I had an idea.
Why not make the best possible picture book of Bacon’s work, with a text
consisting mostly of extracts from press criticism of it from the very
beginning (which turned out to be 1931)? One would break into this
occasionally with a biographical narrative, and use documentary photographs
of Bacon, his friends and models, and reproductions of magazine spreads and books
such as Herbert Read’s Art
Now of 1937, which showed a
Bacon opposite a Picasso and had first aroused my interest in him when I was
still at school.
I naturally went first to the designer Derek Birdsall, who
had designed two of my compilations, earning universal approval for his work
on them, and he immediately bettered my proposed title with About Francis
Bacon, and made a splendid dummy. He chose a squarish landscape format so
that the numerous triptychs could be shown without resort to fold outs.
Francis, whom I had known since 1949, and always been on friendly terms with,
thought it looked “marvellous” (“like a scrapbook”, he said approvingly).
Everyone else was equally enthusiastic, and the book was commissioned without
delay. Bacon’s agents, Marlborough Fine Art, offered bill co operation and
gave me access to their several tomes of press cuttings: I also found
invaluable the bibliography prepared by Krzysztof Cieszkowski of the Tate
Gallery. I commissioned translations of what three intelligent linguists
thought the most interesting foreign language cuttings in the Marlborough
books, and sent a patient assistant to Colindale Newspaper Library and the V
& A to get copies of the most interesting looking pieces on the Tate
list. It added up to a fascinating, if predictable, mixture of vilification,
bewilderment, recognition of a remarkable talent, and the acknowledgement of
greatness (the favourable notices perhaps too numerous for Francis’s taste).
Comments such as Bernard Levin’s 1984 prediction that the paintings would be
sold as scrap in 20 years or so have always been balanced by Lawrence Gowing,
Andrew Forge, David Sylvester and others, carrying torches that illuminate,
with all possible mixtures of feeling in between.
I wrote a biographical narrative with personal comments on
a few paintings which I believe to be among Bacon’s greatest, and showed it
to him after one of the many dinners he gave me as the book progressed. He
took my words home with him, and rang me early the next morning to say that
owing to insomnia he had read it that night, and “rather liked it”. Later on
he asked me to take out an anecdote that would cause someone embarrassment,
and kept on insisting that I must declare that my “interpretations” of the
works I mentioned were mine alone. I agreed, though this was perfectly
obvious and needed no underlining. There were other minor objections, such as
my use of the word “incarnation”, which he thought had unwelcome religious
connotations, but he made no fundamental objection to the uneven text, which
I admit might possibly have seemed presumptuous in parts. (I did not think a
distinguished piece of art writing appropriate, and would have asked someone
else to provide it if I had.) In view of his later objection to anything biographical
in words or photographs, it should be borne in mind that Francis was
particularly anxious that all the staff at Wheeler’s restaurant in Old
Compton Street were fully named in my account of his very friendly
relationship with them, and was pleased that I had found photographs of other
friends. Many of the pictures had been taken by John Deakin, the remarkable
photographer who had provided numerous portraits for Bacon to work from.
Derek Birdsail soon produced layouts and Francis came to
his workshop in Islington to look at them. He professed himself very pleased,
using the word “marvellous” many times and voicing very few reservations. He
then took me, Derek, and most of the Birdsall family out to lunch, and
charmed us all with his generosity and customary enjoyment of such occasions.
When the colour proofs arrived and were pasted down quite
soon after this, he came to the workshop again. A lot of the colour was, as
it so often is at this stage, depressingly inaccurate, and this seemed to
worry him. I felt that it triggered other unspoken doubts, but we then had
another lunch with family, scarcely less enjoyable than the first. The book
was due to go to the printers within a fortnight.
Two days later he phoned me, saying that he wanted to see
me urgently, and his tone of voice was ominous. I went along to his place
early the following morning, and after offering me tea in his usual
hospitable way, he told me that he was insisting that all the photographs and
my text (apart from the short introduction) should be removed, and that no
work before the famous 1944 Tate triptych, Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, should be reproduced.
This seemed to me quite unacceptable, and although I was prepared to bargain
to some extent about my text, which I considered the least of the book’s
components, I was not prepared to surrender the idea of some kind of
biographical narrative or illustration, or endure the embargo on his earliest
work. The package of demands being so destructive of my own and Derek’s
notion of the book, I did not stay to argue.
Francis then asked for a meeting with the publishers, to
whom he spelled out the same conditions. They declined to accept them,
deciding quite rightly that the book would not arouse half the interest either
here or abroad if they did. I sent him a letter pointing out his earlier co
operation with the biographical aspect, his loans of personal photographs,
and his general approval of my text when he first saw it. I also stated my
belief that the elements he wanted removed in no way detracted from the
impact of his work (I considered the sequence and juxtaposition of the
paintings to be the best ever made). I never had an answer to my letter
perhaps because it was unanswerable, though I can now see that several things
I wrote in the book were unwise, and also that he couldn’t be expected to
like the unavoidable sense of valediction at the end. If I had possessed a
written agreement with his gallery concerning the use of the paintings we
could, it seems, have printed the book with little fear of an injunction. But
friendly agreements are, by their nature, vulnerable.
If our friendship was a little dented by this episode, my
regard and admiration for the best he did and was will never change. I feel
honoured to have known him.
Terrible beauty or dirty mac decadence?
John
McEwen recalls his meetings with Francis Bacon, the wild card of English art
and epitome of dandyism, who died last Tuesday
JOHN MCEWEN | THE ARTS | THE SUNDAY
TELEGRAPH | MAY 3 1992
THE
WORD "dandy" to describe a person is rarely used today. Baudelaire
lamented his passing 150 years ago, but dandyism has survived into our own
time - no doubt it will never be quite snuffed out - and in art its epitome
was Francis Bacon.
Bacon as a man devoted to what Baudelaire
defined as "the cult of the self" was the real Regency McCoy. This
Byronic aspect to his nature had something to do with a complete absence of
sentimentality, a recklessness, a bleak rationality, an awareness that his
lack of religious faith was in itself despair, and also an intense animalism.
The animalism was the first thing one felt on
meeting him, a palpable magnetic field. It gave one some inkling of what he
meant when he rather mystifyingly described his art as trying to record his
feelings about things as closely to his "own nervous system" as he
could. He wanted to conduct this nervous energy into his painting, to vent
its expressive power.
On one occasion I was standing close behind
him when an artist he disliked entered the room. Immediately he stiffened,
bristled, became alert as a dog. It was the only time I have witnessed the
hairs stand up on the back of a human neck. No fight ensued, or hostile
conversation. It was more menacing than that. As a younger man he must have
been capable of being quite terrifying.
The electricity showed itself in other ways.
It preserved his youth to a Dorian Gray extent. Right till the end, into his
eighties, he still looked 10 to 20 years younger than he was. There was no
sense of that collapse which most of us suffer in ripe middle age. He walked
with a spring in a step, a semi-tiptoe effect well described by the sobriquet
of "Lightfoot", which he had chosen for himself when he worked for
a short time as a butler.
In old age he defiantly wore tight trousers,
the better to show off his figure. He was dapper and had settled on a late
1950s "mod" taste for leather jackets and pastel slip-on shoes. His
face was soft and pink and he was shamelessly vain, admiring himself in the
nearest mirror and combing his hair even when carrying on a conversations. He
was made for an age of blades and beaux. His conversation was always
conducted with courteous attention to whoever he was talking to. Since he
knew he was the most splendid person in the room, there was no need of him to
scan the crowd.
His patrician cockney is well preserved on
film interviews, his favourite of which was "with that Yorkshire chap,
can't remember his name" (Melvyn Bragg), where he answers questions
during the course of a long well-oiled lunch: "I've made images that the
intellect would never make. I make images of realism. The violence of life,
of sensation. I believe in nothing, except the sensation of the moment. I
drift."
What is missing from the official record is
his wit and asperity. He spoke French as might have been expected, fluently
but with no attempt at an accent. Conversation was his forte; interviewing
was sticky - perhaps always the case when the interviewee has answered every
question a hundred times before; and Bacon has been exhaustively and famously
interviewed.
Subjecting himself to my interrogation in the
basement of the Marlborough Galley, he gave little away. Why did he paint
those little arrows? He couldn't think. And the bits and pieces of newsprint?
"You don't like it? No one likes my
pictures, you know. They buy them for some reason, but nobody likes
them." He said it with an air of resignation. "Fame? I now nothing
about that. It's all done in here by the Marlborough."
What Bernard Levin regarded as "dirty
mac" decadence, he saw as Yeats's "terrible beauty". Life was
at its most intense at its most extreme, and only in the extreme did reality
fully reveal itself, which was why he gambled in casinos, saw life as a
gamble, and treated painting as a game of chance.
I suggested, in Baconian fashion, that we
have a drink at the near by Ritz. After all, he reckoned to have divided his
life "between the gutter and the Ritz" - a metaphor he continued in
his art by insisting on those ritzy gilded frames, however squalid the
subject they enclosed.
And once there, of course, it had to be
champagne with which to drink good fortune to our true friends and pain to
our sham ones. Conversation became general and easier. I asked if he thought
someone we both new actually had got chucked out of the navy in the war for
murdering the ship's cook.
"I think you'd have to do something much
worse than murder the cook to get drummed out of the merchant navy - don't
you think?"
We got on to his love of low, not to say
criminal, life. The Kray twins had been wished upon him in Tangier by Stanley
Baker. They came round his studio one Sunday morning - Ronnie and two cronies
- when there was talk of him suing a friend of theirs for some paintings they
hadn't paid for.
His homosexuality he regarded as "an
affliction", but at least it had been fun until it was made legal. The
best grass in London was in the foreground of Seurat's La Grande Jatte
in the National Gallery. He had just been to look again at Velázquez's Las
Meninas in the Prado: "It was so nice to see it without any Japanese
mice in the way."
At a late stage in the proceedings I
disappeared to the cloakroom. On my return I called for the bill. With
customary grace he had already paid it. As Baudelaire says: " ... money
is indispensible to those who make a cult of their emotions; but the dandy
does not aspire to money as to something essential; this crude passions he
leaves to vulgar mortals; he would be perfectly content with a limitless
credit at the bank.
Bacon once approvingly described a mutual
friend as someone who seemed, "to have cut out all that nonsense that most
people have"; and he meant much the same when he said that no one over
30 could be shy. He had certainly cut the nonsense out of his own life - no
tiresome distractions or keeping up with the Joneses for him.
His favourite photograph of himself was taken
secretly on the Underground by John Stiletto; and to travel by public
transport and then to pick up the tab for the most expensive lunch in town
was just another expression of his delight in living a life of "gilded
squalor".
But then, as a born aristocrat, he had no
need of airs and graces - he had a claim to the vacant barony of Oxford,
which would have entitled him to a seat in the Lords, but he disdained it, as
his father had before him. As for official honours, he was not interested.
No vignette of his attitude could have been
more precise than his refusal to go to lunch with Frank Lloyd, the art
dealer, when they met one day by chance in the Marlborough front entrance for
the first time since Lloyd's disgrace and American exile. "My dear boy,
let me give you lunch. We've got so much to talk about." But Bacon, at
his most assiduously Lightfooted - head cocked eyelids a-flutter - was not to
be moved.
It is fitting that he died in Spain. The
world had long been his oyster, but Spain for him was the pearl of it. His
favourite art was ancient Egyptian, his preferred reading Racine or the Greek
tragedies; but his favourite artist was Velázquez, and one of his own
masterpieces is of the bullfight. He is the wild card of English art; the
wildest it has surely ever thrown.
High
art underground, in Bacon's favourite photograph of himself. 'I
make images of realism. I believe in nothing, except the sensation of the
moment. I drift."
Myth of the modern
Francis Bacon could not draw, but the
tyrannical Modern Art Industry took him up, argues Paul Johnson
PAUL JOHNSON | SUNDAY COMMENT | THE
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH | May 3 1992
"The greatest British painter since Turner"
"The heir to Velasquez" These were just two of the accolades
repeatedly lavished on Francis Bacon over the past few days. The mind reels.
One looks again at his works and the mind reels further. Bacon was an amiable
and much-loved man, generous to the point of mania, much exploited by the
sharks and hyenas of the bohemian work he inhabited, unassuming about his
paintings and certainly incapable of the conscious fraudulence of a man like
Picasso. But to hail him as a Great Master not only reveals the bankruptcy of
Modern Art - we knew all about that already - but flings a dismally revealing
beam into the moral and aesthetic decay of our culture. Having long since
lost our standards, are we beginning to lose our senses too?
Bacon was almost entirely a creation of the Modern Art
Industry. Working in a discipline that once demanded many years of the
strictest studio apprenticeship, he had no training of any significance. That
need not matter but he had little natural aptitude either. He could not draw.
His ability to paint was limited and the way he laid the pigments on the
canvas was often barbarous. He had no ideas, other than one or two morbid
fancies arising from his homosexuality, chaotic way of life, and Irish fear
of death. What he did have was a gimmick, something resembling an advertising-designer's
logo. In his case it was a knack of portraying the human face or body not so
much twisted as smeared our of shape. It was enough. Such a logo could easily
be dressed up by the scriptwriters of the Industry into an image of "our
despairing century"; it fitted their favourite words:
"disquieting", "disturbing".
Of course there was luck in it. The essence of painting is
in the hand portraying what the eyes see, the imaginative rendering of
nature. The Impressionists still paid the closest attention to nature and
endeavoured to reproduce it with inspired fidelity. From the
Post-Impressionists onwards the divorce from nature began, until painting
ceased to be anchored in the visual world of people and landscapes and became
man-centred.
As decade succeeded decade, the divorce widened, nature was
increasingly dismissed as irrelevant, the internal visual notions, or rather
whims, of man took over. The canonical traditions of centuries were brushed
aside. Skills acquired with infinite pain over many generations ceased to be
used, thus ceased to be taught, and so were lost. For an entire generation,
until recently, most art schools did not even attempt to train students in
the fundamental grammar and syntax of drawing - lacked, indeed, the staff competent
to do so - and in painting merely encouraged all to "do their own
thing". The Royal Academy, which had a glorious opportunity to uphold
truth to nature amid this aesthetic anarchy, pusillanimously sold the pass,
and so became a comic hybrid. With the collapse of any objective standards of
how to judge skill, talent and merit, the way was wide open for art to be
replaced by fashion.
Yet the schools continued to turn out thousands of would-be
artists, joined by thousands more who lacked, and no longer needed, any
training at all. Such neophytes were keen for fame and money, and sharply
observant of the way the world was run. They saw that a gimmick was needed, a
little trick of their own to catch the eye of fashion, and feverishly sought
to manufacture one. But how to choose the lucky few among so many?
The arbiters of the lottery were the critics, dealers and
gallery owners, and ultimately the directors of public institutions.
Themselves lacking any agreed criteria of worth, other than a willingness to
worship fashionable success, each chose by caprice, though looking
suspiciously over his shoulder at the others. Thus an apostolic succession of
Great Modern Masters was anointed by the pontiffs of the Industry, exactly as
the hard-faced men of pop-music select the next synthetic superstar from
among the clamorous multitude of youngsters.
That, more or less, was how Francis Bacon became our
greatest painter since Turner, the heir to Velasquez. Told to go out into the
world, as Turner did, and paint a landscape with truth and imagination, he
could not have done it. The role of the humblest court portraitist - let
alone the audacious subtleties and complexities of Velasquez - was beyond
him. To ask him to give a truthful rendering of a real pope (or cardinal),
instead of his logo-esque screaming one, would be like asking the average pop
singer to perform the lead role in Otello.
The notion that a painter is and ought to be in some way at the service of
the public and society, instead of his own ego, died the moment the Modern
Art Industry established its visual dictatorship and began to select the
artistic idols we are supposed to worship. No political dictatorship has ever
been more ruthless and totalitarian or more anxious to suppress dissent.
For dissent can cost money - lots of it. Once an artistic
reputation is inflated, however artificially, canvases can fetch millions.
Having paid them, museum directors and trend-setting private collectors are
anxious to conserve, and indeed increase their capital, and stand
shoulder-to-shoulder with dealers, galleries and auction houses to deflect
any challenge to their verdicts. Thus the labels of fake masters are engraved
in stone, and genuine ones, like Rembrandt and Goya, are dragged unwillingly
from their honoured graves for purposes of promotion. Bacon was a
comparatively minor player in this big league. Billions are now invested in
the Picasso Trade, and to defend them it has been equipped with a whole
apparatus of functionaries, including scholars and hagiographers.
The Modern Art Industry is only one example of the way in
which cultural dictatorships, ultimately propelled by the quest for money or
power or both, impose their arbitrary wills on the public, in letters as well
as the arts. Their ravages are all around us. Modernism in architecture has
filled our cities with enormous buildings of unspeakable ugliness, many of
them put up with our own money, which will depress us for decades. In public
galleries, paintings and sculpture of great beauty have been cynically
trundled into basements to make space for collections of scrap-iron, bricks,
weird wire cobwebs and inch-thick daubs of paint. Pop singers replace
Beethoven and Brahms on music syllabuses, while students are told that there
is no such thing as "quality", that a horror comic has as much
artistic status as a poem by Keats and that "the phrase 'George Elliot'
signifies nothing more than the insertion of certain specific ideological
determinations".
Yet, as Gladstone once put it, "the resources of
civilisation are not exhausted". We had to wait a long time for the fall
of Marxism and the Soviet Empire of Evil, but it came in the end. Cultural
dictatorships can be destroyed too. There are in fact signs in the world of
art that paintings created from nature by skills rediscovered from the past
are once more winning favour. This new renaissance can be rapidly accelerated
if young people defy the diktats of their corrupt elders and begin to open
their eyes and look for themselves. Let them expose the fraudulence and cry
with a loud voice that the artistic emperors have no clothes.
Heir to Velasquez? Francis Bacon painted screaming
prelates but could never portray real ones
THE OUTCAST WHO MASTERED MISERY
AND
THE PAIN THAT COLOURED HIS WORK
PAUL RICHARD | THE
WASHINGTON POST | MAY
3, 1992
In the flesh, Francis Bacon suggested -
as his paintings do - unexpected luxury pulled from piercing pain. It's been
nearly 17 years since I saw him last, in 1975. That Anglo-Irish master - who
died at 82 on Tuesday of a heart attack in Spain - was seated in an overpriced
mid-town New York restaurant. In between his smiles his face would sag in
grief. He had a wad of $100 bills wedged into his pocket. His jacket was
black leather, his sweater a black turtleneck. He kept speaking of his
miseries, and pouring the champagne.
He said, "Life is wholly
futile." His closest friends were dead, he said. "Wholly
futile," he repeated - and then he made a sudden movement with his arm.
It was a gesture of odd beauty, as casually graceful as that of a Beau
Brummell tying a foulard. The waiter bowed, attentive. "Another dozen
oysters, please," Francis Bacon said.
That same disturbing shift, from
despondency and suffering to voluptuary elegance, is apparent in his art. His
superbly painted pictures - with their gibberings and howlings, their sucking
sounds of human flesh torn from living bone - clamp your heart with dread.
Yet even as they do so, the beauty of the paint - that sumptuousness of
surface, that perfectly controlled swooping of the brush - somehow sings in
exaltation.
The man could gild the ghastly. The
highest of the high and the lowest of the low are blended in his art. His
pictures have the glow, the grand expensive aura of European masterworks, yet
they stink of stale cigarettes, of windowless hotel rooms, of paid-for sex on
unmade beds. The tensions that divide them - between towering ambition and
sordidness of subject, between faith in art's transcendence and unnameable
despair, between imagined flesh and real paint - could tear your soul in two.
He thought himself - and was - one of
England's greatest painters. He set out to paint masterworks. He insisted
they be shown, as one might display relics, behind gleaming panes of glass.
He surrounded them with heavy frames sheathed in burnished gold. Yet he painted
them in squalor. His decaying mews house in South Kensington in London had
its bathtub in the kitchen. He could have lived in splendour, yet his studio
was a filthy place of bare bulbs overhead and refuse underfoot, thick clots
of paint and rags. The paintings he produced there sometimes sold, at
auction, for nearly $7 million. His art was first seen in London just after
World War II. His final retrospective, arranged by James Demetrion, opened in
Washington at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1989. A small
memorial show of four of Bacon's pictures is currently on view there. As he
aged, his art grew grander, but his themes remained the same.
You cannot see his pictures without
thinking of the horrors of Europe at mid-century, not only of the public ones
- corpses piled high, the stink of burned-out buildings - but of private
horrors too. Bacon's popes scream silent screams as if sensing for the first
time the era's desolations. Other men had shown us the underside of Europe -
think of Jean Genet in jail, of Isherwood's Berlin - but Bacon did so without
showing us any touch of sweetness. He preferred to tear off scabs. His
violent scenes of male sex are never warmed by love, his men are almost
animals, his flesh is butchered meat. Yet he paints with such fierce brio
that he conquers our revulsions. He forces us to see.
He became an outcast early. "I
never got on with my mother or my father," he once told author David
Sylvester. "They thought I was just a drifter... . As you know, {my
father} was a trainer of racehorses. And he just fought with people. He
really had no friends at all... . I disliked him, but I was sexually
attracted to him when I was young. When I first sensed it, I hardly knew it
was sexual. It was only later, through the grooms and the people in the
stable I had affairs with, that I realized it was a sexual thing ...
"And then, when I was 16 or 17, I
went to Berlin, and of course I saw the Berlin of 1927 and 1928 where there
was a wide open city, which was, in a way, very, very violent... . And after
Berlin, I went to Paris, and then I lived all those disturbed years between
then and the war, which started in 1939. So I could say, perhaps, I have been
accustomed to always living through forms of violence."
We feel his violence with our bodies.
The people in his pictures, some bleeding in their business suits, some
crouching in their bathrooms, writhe and retch and die. Bacon was above all
else a figurative painter. At a time when other artists gave up the painted
figure for the realms of pure abstraction (Willem de Kooning, with his
"Women," was a notable exception), Bacon kept the body at the
center of his art.
The strength of his adherence marked him
as an Englishman. The British have for centuries given faces to their
thoughts; they've personified ideas. Think of Shakespeare's troubled kings,
of Milton's fallen angels, of Dickens too and Benny Hill. Bacon in his own
way extended that tradition. Figure painting is nearly dead. Portraiture
that's something more than cartooning or photography is largely moribund in
our land, and throughout most of Europe. But in Britain it's alive. The
figure painters there who followed Francis Bacon - Lucian Freud, David
Hockney and Frank Auerbach among them - rank among the strongest, most
convincing of our time.
Bacon's smeared and kneaded figures
don't participate in our world. Locked behind their panes of glass, or
imprisoned in their narrow cells, or silhouetted oddly against blank
enclosing walls of orange or light green, they writhe in isolation. They're
gruesome, magisterial and completely unforgettable. No one else could paint
them. Though he sometimes borrowed images from the paintings of Velazquez,
from photographs and movies, Bacon had no predecessors. And no followers
survive him. The artist has now joined the pantheon of masters, but like the
figures in his pictures, Francis Bacon is still alone.
Why
Bacon was driven to destruction
DALYA ALBERGE |
THE INDEPENDENT | 5 MAY 1992
Francis Bacon twice
destroyed sackfuls of archival material about himself. The disclosure comes
days after the death of the man widely considered the greatest British
artists since Turner.
While the art world
speculates about who might inherit the fortune of the painter whose work sold
for millions, news that even a little archival material is forever lost will
be a blow to art historians.
According to a friend,
Bacon destroyed the material some years ago, after receiving a letter from
what he considered "an officious person" in the Tate Gallery's
archive. The archivist had asked him to send the Tate the source material
relating to his paintings.
Bacon was so disgusted by
the apparently arrogant tone of the "bureaucratic" letter that,
according to the friend, he gathered up the papers - much of it photographic
material from which he liked to work - and destroyed them, perhaps by
burning.
Some two years later, the
same archivist is said to have dispatched another letter, repeating the
request. Bacon found some more suitable material, and, once again, got rid of
the lot. The archivist was never told. As Bacon's friend explains:
"Francis didn't like to be subjected to harassment, and disliked
high-handed people." His actions were not directed against the Tate
Gallery, to which he was well-disposed. Last year he gave it one of his
triptychs and when two other major galleries clamoured to give him an
exhibition, he chose to have it in the Tate.
A Bacon sold for £3.5m in
1989, making him the most expensive British living artist. That his work sold
for such prices has led many to speculate about bacon's wealth. However,
artists do not necessarily get what their works make in the salerooms. Back
in the Fifties, the price for a Bacon was just £300, of which the artists received
£50. It took six years from 1946 to persuade a public collection to accept
one of his works, Study for the Magdalene: it had been a gift, to any
museum that wanted it, from the Contemporary Art Society, the art charity. It
hangs at Batley Art Gallery.
He was generous to friends
and enjoyed encouraging young artists by buying their work.
No one quite knows who
might stand to benefit from the Bacon inheritance, though many have been
giving the impression that they do know.
In the past he had given
generously to cancer research. While many believe that there are no paintings
in the Bacon inheritance, one of his former friends was reported to be
claiming that Bacon's paint-splattered studio door, which the artist used as
a palette for trying out colours, belonged to him.
Face to face with the dogs of war
Richard
Cork suggests that anyone in search of the essential Francis Bacon should
begin at the Tate
RICHARD CORK | LIFE
& TIMES | THE
TIMES | FRIDAY
MAY 8 1992
For
a considered reassessment of the late Francis Bacon's contribution to
20th-century art, we will have to wait for the full retrospective which must
soon be staged. But until the entire range of Bacon's achievement is
disclosed in that memorial show, I recommend a visit to the Tate Gallery in
London. For there, in Room 20, hangs the great triptych which announced the
unnerving arrival of a formidable new voice in post-war painting: Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.
By April 1945, when Bacon displayed this vehement image at a London
gallery, most people in Britain knew that the second world war was nearly
over. The following month, the Nazi surrender was formerly ratified in
Berlin.
This was, of course, a time for national rejoicing, and VE-Day
witnessed scenes of jubilation across the country. A conflict in which more
than 20 million men, women and children had died gave way to a widespread
feeling of optimism about the prospect of peace.
Bacon's lacerating picture could not have stood in more stubborn
contrast to this new mood. He finished painting it in 1944, after working on
all three parts throughout the war, so the trauma of those years scarred
itself deeply on the roughly worked surface of each panel. Bacon later
admitted that he "began" a an artist with his triptych, and it
certainly carries a far more singleminded impact than any of his earlier,
surprisingly hesitant pictures.
All the same, the protest it makes about the human condition first
lodged itself in his mind long before the war began. As an impressionable
adolescent he went to Berlin in the late 1920s, and afterwards recalled how
this "wide open city" appeared to him "very, very
violent". The neurotic instability of the Weimar Republic, defined with
such power by Grosz, Beckmann and Dix, supplied the ideal compost for Hitler
to nurture the poisoned weeds of fascism.
Nazi imagery would later feed his work in many different ways, ranging
from the photographs of Himmler and Goebbels he pinned on his studio wall in
1950, to the swastika he emblazoned on a man's armband in 1965. Before the
war, though, Bacon's youthful attempts at painting were too uncertain to make
his awareness of fascist savagery overt in his early pictures.
The inconclusive trail of his 1930s works, many half-finished and some
subsequently destroyed, indicates that he saw the crucifixion as the most
direct means of conveying the brutality of the society around him. Although
no longer a Christian, he still regarded the dying figure nailed to the cross
in paintings by Cimabue and Grünewald as
the most eloquent available images of human suffering.
The advent of the second world war must have confirmed all his darkest
misgivings about the world he had seen assailed by so many severe spasms
during the 1930s. To find man's bestiality now demonstrated on a global scale
could only make Bacon determined to develop an art expressive of the new
horror.
For the very first time, he based part of a painting on a photograph of
Hitler getting out of his car at a Nuremberg rally. But the Führer
himself was replaced with a loathsome creature, which extends its reptilian
length over the car window in order to dangle, snarling viciously, near the
ground below.
The disgust which inspired the painting is clear enough, but its
reference to the Nazi was apparently too specific. Bacon did not want to make
an attack on fascism alone alone: he was after an image which would convey a
more general sickness. So Figure Getting Out of a Car was painted
over, for Bacon had suddenly hit on how to incorporate its main form in a new
and more complex structure.
The triptych arrangement enabled him to join three repugnant creatures
in one work. At the same time, it isolates each presence within gilt frames
so that none can alleviate the other's torment. The female figure o the left,
saddled with a pair of limp feelers hanging from her shoulder-stumps, cranes
forward.
She
seems to be trying to slide off her perch and discover what is happening in
the central panel, but cannot move. Paralysis also afflicts the monster on
the right, a humpbacked oddity with starved ribs who can only stretch out its
distended neck and utter a helpless roar.
The realistic human ear attached to this screaming head clashes with
the animality of its body. And the same principal of shock through contrast
applies to the patch of grass growing so unexpectedly in the orange ground
which gives the whole triptych such a parched and eye-smarting air.
The impulsive handling of paint and pastel, smeared, scraped, slashed
and dragged over the hardboard rather than applied with conventional
refinement, shows the urgency with which Bacon set down this atheistic vision
of Hell. But discipline counters the rhetoric wherever you look.
Spare black outlines brushed in behind the figures lend order to the
triptych, and direct our attention towards the middle. Here, the focal image
offers no trace of a body on a cross. Instead, a beast as brutish as its
companions bares jagged teeth at us.
The beast could be growling, like an enraged dog warning strangers not
to get too close. Or it might be yelling because its eyes, like poor
Gloucester's in King Lear, have been put out. The ambiguity is left
exposed, for Bacon understands that a cry can signify aggression just as
easily as pain.
In 1945, many of the gallery visitors who encountered Bacon's blinded
monster, whose white cloth is rendered with a few stabbing thrusts of the
brush, were no longer certain about the role of Christianity in the contemporary
world. The waste of war had only confirmed their doubts about religious
faith, and they might well have understood why the crucifixion is missing
from the triptych.
But that would not have stopped them, in the euphoria of the victory
against Hitler, recoiling from the main emotion dramatised by Bacon—a
howl of pain at a universe so meaningless that humanity is reduced to the
level of gruesome accident.
These three figures' agitation is unalleviated by a saviour on a cross
who reassures them with the promise of eternal life. The triptych format,
which ha been the vehicle for so many heartfelt affirmations of Christianity
in western art, is used here with bitter irony to drive home the
impossibility of painting a traditional crucifixion.
Just as Bacon would later take a Velázquez painting of a Pope and
transform it into a screaming grotesque, so he chose here the ultimate symbol
of human salvation in order to expose its desolating absence.
The forcefulness with which these three Greek Furies, as Bacon himself
once called them, hurl their misery and rage at us proves the extent of his
own loss of faith. If he had not felt the absurdity of existence so keenly,
Bacon would never have mustered the energy to invest his trio of outcasts
with such thwarted grandeur.
Despite their determination to survive the suffering, these bruised
victims with their livid flesh may have seemed to excoriating in April 1945.
But their repulsive malformations, were, in fact, a portent of an historic
event which bore out Bacon's trepidation.
On August 6, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It exterminated
about 70,000 civilians. The war came to an end in Japan soon afterwards, and
yet the terrible injuries inflicted by thee explosion linger today.
Some of the victims were disfigured beyond recognition, as dehumanised
in their way as the wretches in Bacon's picture who warn us, with nightmarish
conviction, of what we might become if the armoury devised for our godless
conflicts since 1945 were ever unleashed. The prospect is almost too horrible
to contemplate, but Bacon's fiercely eloquent imagination insists that we
ignore it at our peril.
Tate
Gallery, Millbank, London, SW1. Mon-Sat 10am-5.50am, Sun 2-5.50
Central
panel from Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,
by Francis Bacon, at the Tate Gallery
Francis Bacon (1909–1992)
By
Caroline Blackwood
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS | VOLUME
39, NUMBER 15 | SEPTEMBER
24, 1992
I first became aware of Francis Bacon shortly after World War II. I
was then eighteen, and I was invited to a formal London ball given by Lady
Rothermere, who was later to become Mrs. Ian Fleming. Princess Margaret was
among the guests and could immediately be seen on the parquet floor wearing a
crinoline and being worshiped by her adoring set who were known at the time
as "the Smarties." She was revered and considered glamorous because
she was the one "Royal" who was accessible. Princess Margaret
smoked, and she drank, and she flirted. She went to nightclubs and she loved
show business and popular music.
As a guest Princess Margaret used to send out confusing signals. At
times she seemed to ask to be treated as an ordinary racy young girl. But her
conception of "ordinariness" sometimes made her behave in a manner
that embarrassed rather than reassured those who entertained her. In order to
put them at their ease so that they could forget that they had a royal figure
at their table, she would pick up strings of tomato-pasted spaghetti from her
plate and make loud sucking noises as she ate them with her hands. However,
because she had emerged from the insulated capsule of her regal upbringing
with ideas of "normality" that were askew, Princess Margaret
inspired fear among her contemporaries. She encouraged familiarity and then,
without warning, drew herself up to her full, small height and administered
chilling snubs in which she reminded the socially inept that they had
offended the daughter of the King of England.
Toward the end of the ball given by Lady Rothermere, after much
champagne had been consumed, Princess Margaret seemed to be seized by a heady
desire to show off. She grabbed the microphone from the startled singer of
the band and she instructed them to play songs by Cole Porter. All the guests
who had been waltzing under the vast chandeliers instantly stopped dancing.
They stood like Buckingham Palace sentries called to attention in order to
watch the royal performance.
Princess Margaret knew the Cole Porter lyrics by heart but she sang
all his songs hopelessly off-key. She was given unfair encouragement by the
reaction of her audience. All the ladies heavy-laden with jewelry, all the
gentlemen penguin-like in their white ties and perfect black tails clapped
for her. They shouted and they roared, and they asked for more.
Princess Margaret became a little manic at receiving such approval of
her musical abilities, and she started wriggling around in her crinoline and
tiara as she tried to mimic the sexual movements of the professional
entertainer. Her dress with its petticoats bolstered by the wooden hoops that
ballooned her skirts was unsuitable for the slinky act but all the rapturous
applause seemed to make her forget this. Just when she had embarked on a
rendering of "Let's Do It," a very menacing and unexpected sound
came from the back of the crowded ballroom. It grew louder and louder until
it eclipsed Princess Margaret's singing. It was the sound of jeering and
hissing, of prolonged and thunderous booing.
Princess Margaret faltered in mid-lyric. Mortification turned her face
scarlet and then it went ashen. Because she looked close to tears, her
smallness of stature suddenly made her look rather pitiful. She abandoned the
microphone and a phalanx of flustered ladies-in-waiting rushed her out of the
ballroom. The band stopped playing because they felt it was unseemly to
continue in the face of this unprecedented situation. There was a buzzing of
furious whispers as Lady Rothermere's guests started to take in what they had
witnessed.
"Who did that?" I asked the nearest white-tied and
black-tailed man who happened to be standing next to me. His face was already
red but rage made it look apoplectic. "It was that dreadful man, Francis
Bacon," he said. "He calls himself a painter but he does the most
frightful paintings. I just don't understand how a creature like him was
allowed to get in here. It's really quite disgraceful."
Later when I was married to Lucian Freud and I got to know Francis he
once referred to this incident, which caused a scandal.
"Her singing was really too awful," he said. "Someone
had to stop her. I don't think people should perform if they can't do it
properly."
Francis had an anarchic fearlessness which was unique. I can think of
no one else who would have dared to boo a member of the Royal family in a
private house. Among all the guests assembled in Lady Rothermere's ballroom,
more than a few were secretly suffering from Princess Margaret's singing, but
they suffered in silence, gagged by their snobbery. Francis could not be
gagged. If he found a performance shoddy no conventional trepidation
prevented him from expressing his reactions. Sometimes his opinions could be
biased and perverse and unfair, but he never cared if they created outrage.
He could be fearlessly outspoken and crushing if provoked. I remember
him being pestered in a bar by a very bad and irritating artist who was
trying to make him come to his studio to look at his work. The artist said
that he had the feeling that Francis only refused to come and look at his
paintings because they threatened him. Francis replied that he didn't feel in
the least threatened by the man's paintings.
"I don't want to come to your studio because I've seen your
tie."
This same quality of fearlessness manifested itself in his work. The
critics who found his painting obscene and ugly did not intimidate him. With
big and masterful brush strokes he continued to stamp his canvases with the
bleak but beautiful images that expressed his darkly Irish, pessimistic, and
extremely personal vision.
There was also a fearlessness in his attitude to money, a wildness in
his reckless generosity. When I first got to know him in Soho he was forty
and he had not yet found any gallery prepared to give him a show because his
work was considered too off-putting. Francis was broke at that time but
somehow, mysteriously, he still managed to pay for rounds of drinks and he
kept the champagne flowing. Later when he became world-famous and very rich
there was no basic change in his behaviour. He continued to keep the
champagne flowing, the only difference was that he filled his friends'
glasses with champagne of a very much higher quality.
His generosity like his fearlessness was infectious. Extremely stingy
and mean-fisted people who hated to pay for others would suddenly and
amazingly offer to pay for a round of drinks while they were in his company.
He could always shame the miserly.
In the Fifties, I remember Francis joining Lucian and me for dinner in
his favourite fish restaurant, Wheelers, in Soho. The owner was perceptive
and he allowed him to eat and drink there in return for his paintings, which
were still spurned by the art world. Francis arrived late because he'd just
been to the doctor. He came rolling in with the confident walk of a pirate
making adjustments to the slope of the wind-tilted deck. As usual his round
cheeks made him look cherubic, but his eyes were far more intelligent than
those of the average cherub.
He said that his doctor had just told him that his heart was in
tatters. Not a ventricle was functioning. His doctor had rarely seen such a
hopeless and diseased organ. Francis had been warned that if he had one more
drink or even allowed himself to become excited, his useless heart would fail
and he would die.
Having told us the bad news he waved to the waiter and ordered a
bottle of champagne, and once we had finished it he went to order a
succession of new bottles. He was ebullient throughout the evening but Lucian
and I went home feeling very depressed. He seemed doomed. We were convinced
he was going to die, aged forty. We took the doctor's diagnosis seriously. No
one was ever going to stop him from drinking. No one would ever prevent him
from becoming excited. We even wondered that night if we would ever see him
again. But he lived to be eighty-two. His attitude toward doctors and death
was disdainful. They didn't frighten him. In his way, he jeered at them just
as he jeered at the bad singing of Princess Margaret.
A younger British painter, Michael Wishart, once said to me that he
thought that Francis had two major ambitions. He wanted to be one of the
world's best painters and he wanted to be one of the world's leading
alcoholics. Whereas most people discovered that these two ambitions were
contradictory and self-defeating he felt that Francis had pulled them both
off.
There was an "Irishness" in Bacon's temperament, although he
vehemently denied it, having experienced his childhood in Ireland as
traumatically painful. He found it impossible to return to Ireland although
he loved its countryside. He developed a neurotic attack of asthma on the
plane whenever he tried to get there. He could fly to any country in the
world without physical mishap, but any flight to his homeland always proved
disastrous.
"My father was a horse trainer," I remember him saying to me
with a shudder. "A failed horse trainer," and he stressed the word
"failed" with such disgust and anger that he made his father's
occupation sound utterly repulsive. When he was a little boy his parents had
put him astride a pony and they had forced him to go fox-hunting. He loathed
the brutality of the "Sport of Kings" and developed a violent
allergy to horses. He turned blue once he found himself on the hunting field
and he started to choke with chronic asthma. His parents were very soon made
to realize that he was never going to be the son they had wanted.
"Surely there's nothing worse," Francis once said to me,
"than the dusty saddle lying in the hall."
Coming from Ireland myself, I sometimes tried to make him tell me more
about his unlikely and horsey Irish upbringing. I wanted him to go on, I
longed to hear more about his loathing of the awful dusty saddles that
symbolically litter the Irish hall. But the subject made him freeze. He
became agitated whenever I broached it. He started to tug at the collar of
his shirt as if he were trying to loosen some kind of noose which he found
asphyxiating; for a moment he resembled the agonized figures in his paintings
whose faces turn a truly dangerous shade of indigo purple as they go into the
last stages of strangulation. I always stopped my questioning because it
seemed cruel and tactless to upset him. I was told by a homosexual friend of
Francis's that he'd once admitted that his father, the dreaded and failed
horse trainer, had arranged that his small son spend his childhood being
systematically and viciously horsewhipped by his Irish grooms.
But with all his horror of Ireland he had the intellectual Irishman's
traditional dislike of Catholicism. The Popes that he painted were all screaming
and distorted. Some of them were sitting on the lavatory. Although he
stubbornly denied that he had been influenced by his Irish upbringing, the
desolation of his vision was very similar to that of Beckett.
There was nothing tragic or untimely about his end, although his
gallantry, his fearlessness, and his exuberance made one feel he could last
drinking champagne forever. Fascinated by the inevitability of human physical
decay, Francis, himself, never believed that he would last forever for one
moment.
Art Market: Bacon nude expected to exceed 1m
pounds
DALYA ALBERGE | THE
INDEPENDENT |
FRIDAY, 30 OCTOBER 1992
THE FIRST major painting by Francis Bacon to
come up for auction since the modern master's death in April will be offered
by Sotheby's in December.
The estimate of more than pounds 1m for Study
of a Nude with Figure in a Mirror takes into account both the way that
prices for a major artist's work are affected after his or her death and the
slump in the art market. In 1990 a comparable picture sold for dollars 3.3m
in New York.
The
painting, which depicts a reclining naked woman and one of Bacon's
'spectator' figures, is from a group he painted in the Sixties. It has been
consigned by a private European collector.
CHRONICLE
By NADINE BROZAN | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | DECEMBER
4, 1992
Francis Bacon, the English painter known for his abstract
images of psychological and physical brutality, left an estate with a net worth
of $16.9 million to his companion, JOHN EDWARDS, when he died in April at the
age of 82, the Associated Press reported.
As the terms of the will were announced in London yesterday, a Bacon
painting of a female nude lying on a table was sold to an unidentified buyer
for $1.3 million at Sotheby's.
Obituary:
Erica Brausen
BARRY
JOULE | THE INDEPENDENT | WEDNESDAY 30 DECEMBER 1992
FRANCIS BACON always said that Erica Brausen
had the best eye in the art world. An accolade like that from the master was
unique. One of his own favourite paintings was Painting 1946 ('I don't
like my paintings for very long. I have always liked that one, it goes on
having power'). It was spotted by Brausen on her first visit to the artist's
studio, stacked against the wall in his shabby room in Beaufort Gardens, near
Harrods. She immediately drew out pounds 350 in pounds 5 notes and bought it
(she sold it on to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1948). This was a
small fortune for Bacon, saddled at the time with mounting gambling debts.
The two soon became devoted to each other and he had his first one-man
exhibition at her gallery, the Hanover Gallery, in November 1949. For a long
time Bacon was not to receive that sort of money again, but the dealer-artist
relationship worked well and nourished what many believe to be the greatest
period of his work.
Erica Brausen was born into a conservative
merchant bourgeois family in Dusseldorf in 1908. Distant from her mother, she
always remained at odds with her father, who was master of the local hunt.
After completing her education and with the rise of Hitler she departed
Germany for the Paris of the 1930s. For some time she shared a large house in
Montparnasse and was able to survive on her family's small allowance.
Liberated by the heady Bohemian atmosphere there, she got to know the young
giants of the Parisian art milieu and became a prominent figure at art
exhibitions.
An intellectual friendship with the Catalan
sculptor Joan Miro led her to travel to Majorca, in 1935. There she ran a
popular bar frequented by many writers and artists who enjoyed the good
island life. As Franco's Fascism began its heavy march across Spain, Brausen,
operating under the code name of Beryl, clandestinely helped her many Jewish
and socialist friends escape the naval blockade. Michel Leiris, later
France's great man of letters, credited Brausen with saving him and his wife.
Through her contacts with the US Navy, who often docked on the island,
Brausen convinced a submarine captain of the importance of getting the
Leirises off the island. They were secreted on board and safely delivered to
Marseilles. Brausen herself slipped away on a fishing boat and with
difficulty made her way to England. She arrived penniless as war broke out.
In London she rejoined some of her old
friends from the Continent and set about organising small exhibitions in
artists' studios, but, as an exiled German, she found it difficult to earn a
living by working legally. Fortunately, a sympathetic homosexual artist
friend married her, to give her status. They remained lifelong friends. Her
first real work in England was to start in the mid-Forties at the Redfern
Gallery, in the West End of London.
In 1946
Brausen met the flamboyant millionaire American banker Arthur Jefferies at a
party and they immediately took to each other. Jefferies agreed to bankroll
her in her own gallery. A lease was secured to 32a St George Street, just off
Hanover Square, in London, and the Hanover Gallery was born. Brausen set
about turning a drab space into a great showroom for art exhibitions. Bacon
remembered it as 'an excellent exhibition space with large rooms of good
proportions and proper day lighting for the pictures'.
It is
almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Hanover Gallery in the
international art world at that time. From early in 1947, when it first
opened, until it finally closed on 1 April 1973, it became - driven by
Brausen's vision - the most diverse and interesting art gallery in Europe.
The Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti had formed a friendship with Brausen
years before in Paris, and Giacometti and Bacon were often to be seen
together in the Hanover, arguing about art or sex.
Brausen suffered a great loss when in 1958
Bacon left the Hanover to join the Marlborough Gallery, with whom he remained
until his death. He later said that he had been sad to leave Brausen, but
that he was desperately short of cash and needed £5,000 to pay off his debts.
The Hanover's new backer was none too happy about advancing a large sum of
money to this rather queer, raffish, gambler artist and refused to do so.
Bacon said that he had no choice but to enter into a contract with the
Marlborough. Brausen, in France at the time, returned to London devastated.
To lose her first artistic 'find' and now greatest star, of whom she was
extremely fond, was a catastrophe. Remorse turned to anger and there were
mutterings about suing the departed artist. But, as Bacon pointed out, as he
had never had a contract with the Hanover, he could not be sued. That was the
end of their artistic relationship. They never made it up, although Bacon
kept a lifelong interest in her work and many projects. (When, several years
ago, he was told that she was ill and needed medical attention, he
immediately sent her pounds 100,000.)
Brausen had a close working relationship with
many of the titans of 20th-century art, among them Matisse, Miro, Henry Moore
and William Scott. (The Hanover held annual sculpture exhibitions and Moore
allowed Brausen to buy his work directly from him; she in turn afforded him
the rare opportunity of arranging his own exhibitions in her gallery.) She
often saw, and exhibited the works of, the Surrealists Marcel Duchamp, Max
Ernst, Man Ray and Rene Magritte. Her own collection in her elegant London
maisonette included works of these artists beautifully displayed. She
acquired a striking collection of furniture by Alberto Giacometti's brother
Diego, to offset her works by Alberto. Rodins sat easily beside a fabulous
collection of early Egyptian sculpture.
Two important people close to Brausen helped
to make the Hanover Gallery the success it was and to ensure its place on the
international art scene. Jean-Yves Mock, now 65, is the curator of
retrospective exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He joined the
Hanover as an assistant in 1956 and remained there until it closed. He proved
a brilliant administrator and worked energetically beside Brausen.
Another enormous influence and great love of
Brausen's was the exotic mixed-blood Javanese Dutch beauty Catherina 'Toto'
Koopman. In the Twenties and Thirties Toto Koopman reigned as one of Europe's
most beautiful women, a model and sometimes an actress. She was caught spying
for the Allies in Italy in December 1941, and survived nearly four years at
the Nazi concentration camp of Ravensbruck, recuperating in Switzerland in
the summer of 1945. The same year, in Florence, she met Brausen. Koopman
moved to London and two women lived together until her death in August 1991.
Koopman vividly recalled the unnerving but
dramatic experience of sitting at the front desk of the Hanover during a
Francis Bacon exhibition, with six of his huge, nightmarish screaming Popes
lined up on the gallery wall directly behind her. She never forgot the
agonised look on startled visitors' faces.
In 1958, the two women began to create an
outstanding residence on the dream-like island of Panarea, north of Sicily -
Le Case dei Sette Mulini, six white houses exquisitely interwoven with
stunning terraces and descending gardens to the sea.
After the Hanover closed its doors in 1973,
Brausen continued to deal in art either from home or from the Zurich-based
gallery which she had started in 1961, and shared with Gimpel fils. Although
a shy and retiring person by nature, she would extract 'top dollar' from even
the sharpest New York dealer after one of her pieces.
The complex and intriguing quadrangular
relationship between a gallery, dealer, artist and public is a difficult one
to explore. On very few occasions do all the ingredients come together
successfully to push the boundaries of what we know and expect in that medium
to something new and exciting. During the 25-year life of the Hanover Gallery
this happened. Erica Brausen's ceaseless exploration opened new vistas in the
appreciation of contemporary art.
Erica Brausen, art dealer, born Dusseldorf
Germany 31 January 1908, died London 16 December 1992.
MADRID
FRANCIS BACON
GALERIE MARLBOROUGH
JUAN VICENTE ALIAGA | REVIEWS | ART FORUM |
VOLUME 31 | NUMBER 6 | FEBRUARY 1993
Francis Bacon's painting
has been characterized as accentuating a latent state of things, as writing
(in many works we see a character seated on a stool), as frozen action,
petrified in those images of water jets or in the use of small red, black, or
white arrows. Despite this dynamism and impulsive vitality, the configuration
of closed spaces, prevails in Bacon's works. Precisely on this stage of inner
doors, ordered like an oppressive huis clos, Bacon establishes a web
of sensitive relations that visually mark the limits of pictorial space. It
is a question of a net formed with permanent indicators: the electric cable
of a light bulb; straight or curved lines that make a box; arrows; circles
that surround the isolated figures; paintings within the paintings; paper
left on the ground.
This exhibition was drawn
from the paintings of the last decade. Nine of them displayed a certain calm,
a serene quiet. We were not standing before a series of images surprising in
their novelty (something that did not seem to worry him), rather, in these
last works, Bacon offers quietude and contemplation.
It would be easy and
simplistic to read these works as an omen of death. There are no echoes of
decadence nor forced signs of decrepitude that allude to his end. Bacon does
not permit a teleological reading, rather, his works are filled with
historicity. He was no stranger to the chaos of World War II, for example,
nor to personal pain due to the death of his friend George Dyer, as
exemplified in his series of triptychs, Triptych. August., 1972, Triptych.
May-June., 1973, Triptych. March., 1974. The horror, the abjection that
oozed from the crucifixes has been transformed in his last paintings into
quiet solitude. The masculine bodies entwined in a carnal embrace have given
way to the solitary figure leaning over the washbasin, standing firm on the
smooth ground, neutral, bald-headed, his convex back deformed, his testicles
contracted in a fold.
Bacon's concept of space
has not been modified: the same sparse, even walls of horizontals and
verticals and a similar chromatic treatment characterize these late works.
The confined space in which his figures move or their apparent immobility are
no more asphyxiating than in previous periods. Even in works like Study
for Self-Portrait, 1981, a mocking smile begins to be seen on the face
split in two.
Conscious of the
deterioration that time and experience leave on bodies, Bacon does not hide
the wear and tear left by the years--above all the marks on the face, the
wrinkles, the thinning hair--in his self-portraits. Folding back into
himself, his gaze explores the pulse of life, the internal fissure. He is not
interested in the immediate contour that envelops his figures; the gaze is
not fixed on the objects. The simple, spare atmosphere of the rooms indicates
this, contradicting the golden, lustrous frames in a ridiculous even absurd
manner. In a statement to Richard Cork, Bacon declared: "I used
to think of making dozens of things that I have never made. Our energy
fluctuates and there is never enough time. Since time passes so quickly, one
can never speak in definitive terms, one can never plan the future. It simply
happens ... suddenly. Everything else seems superfluous."
Unimpeachable sauces
The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon
- Daniel Farson: Century, £17.99
LYNN
BARBER | BOOK REVIEW | THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY | 18
April 1993
DANIEL FARSON met Francis Bacon in 1951 when he, Farson,
was a young and pretty photographer and Bacon was just beginning to be known.
Farson was, he admits, 'a celebrity snob' and a very willing recipient of
Bacon's unquenchable generosity. Thereafter they whiled away many happy hours
in Soho, and it is this slice of Bacon that Farson so brilliantly captures -
the champagne lunches at Wheeler's (Bacon always paid), the drunken
afternoons at Muriel's, the rent-boy pick-ups, the squabbles in the French
pub, the outrageous scenes at parties, the drinking rituals and Bacon's
quaint Edwardian benediction: 'Real pain for your sham friends, champagne for
your real friends]'
Although their friendship deteriorated in later years -
Bacon may have feared, with some justice, that Farson was exploiting him -
they remained in touch and Farson writes movingly and gratefully of Bacon's
many kindnesses, not least the ready cheques that helped him through lean
times. In fact, he says, the greatest mistake he ever made was paying one of
these cheques back and confiding to Bacon's lover, John Edwards, that he had
done it from the advance on this book: Bacon didn't like to be paid back
anyway, and he dreaded biographies - once or twice, in his cups, he gave
Farson permission, but always withdrew it later.
Still, I think he has been well served by this book. It
will certainly be the first of many biographies, and perhaps the slightest,
but it preserves precisely the aspects of Bacon that will be hardest for
scholarly researchers to capture. And although Farson rightly concentrates on
what he knew at first hand - Bacon's Soho social life - he casts some
interesting sidelights on the work, especially the revelation that in the
late 1930s, when Bacon always claimed to be doing nothing, he was actually
turning out dozens of drawings a day and painting, according to a lodger who
shared his house, leafy Post- Impressionist landscapes - extraordinary if
true. Farson knew many of Bacon's models - Muriel Belcher, of course, George
Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne and John Edwards (who became his heir) - and
describes them in memorable vignettes. He traces the rise and fall of his
relationships with fellow artists Graham Sutherland and Lucian Freud, and his
lasting admiration for Giacometti.
Farson is good on Bacon's sex life, too. Knowing many of
Bacon's boyfriends, he recognised his taste in pick-ups - 'masculine in
suits' - and understood the intrinsic dilemma of being a masochist shopping
for sadists. He says, interestingly, that paying for sex was Bacon's way of
alleviating his guilt about being homosexual. He records Bacon's reply when
asked what he would like to have been if not an artist - 'a mother]' - and
makes a conscientious stab at trying to illuminate his childhood: the
loveless parents, the choleric and drunken father, the doting nanny, the
asthma attacks, the sense of gloom and violence that pervaded their various
Irish homes. Bacon told Farson that he had enjoyed frequent orgies with his
father's grooms; he told another friend that his father encouraged the grooms
to horsewhip him.
How
reliable any of this might be remains to be seen, and there is obviously an
awful lot of work for a serious biographer to do. Yet perhaps no one can
convey better than Farson the fun of Bacon's company and the louche
adventures of the Soho underworld. There are some truly joyous yarns in this
book - Bacon appearing in full maquillage at Farson's village pub in Devon, a
drunken visit to Barbara Hutton's house in Tangier, Princess Margaret
insisting on singing at a party and Bacon booing, Bacon clearing a restaurant
by saying loudly that he wanted to be fucked by Colonel Gaddafi - and
wonderful quotes like Bacon's response when being sent endless deliveries of
flowers for his eightieth birthday: 'I'm not the sort of person who has
vases.' All in all, a book that is a joy in itself and a goldmine for
biographers to come.
Soho was
full of drinkers and artists, but there was only one Francis Bacon
Here, four days
before the first anniversary of his death, his old friend Daniel Farson
recalls him
DANIEL FARSON | THE INDEPENDENT | SATURDAY, 24 APRIL
1993
HIS
VIEW of life could hardly be harsher. He did not believe in God, in morality,
in love or in worldly success - only in 'the sensation of the moment'.
Francis Bacon, above all, conveyed 20th-century man in his various states of
loneliness.
To
understand the man it is necessary to accept that he was contradictory. He
was a loner, though he relished company. His work is seen as pessimistic, yet
he had an innate optimism which helped him to survive. He was the best
company, the funniest and most humorous. He could be kind and generous, as I
knew from experience, yet capable of sudden anger, even petulance. He
betrayed many of his close friends, especially if they were rival artists,
and some did not forgive him. He was totally amoral.
He
was born in 1909 in Dublin, of English parents, and was brought up in considerable
luxury and style. His father had been a major in the British Army who moved
to Ireland. Later he moved to train horses in Co Kildare, to a comfortable
house with outbuildings and stables, ideal for a child who was fond of horses
and hunting. Francis liked neither and he detested the countryside for the
rest of his life.
The
only attempt his parents made to give him a formal education was to send him
to Dean Close School in Cheltenham but he stayed there for just a few months.
Partly because of his asthma, his education amounted to little more than
private tutorials with the parish priest. 'I had no upbringing at all,' he
once said. 'I used simply to work on my father's farm.' His closest companion
was his nanny.
How
Irish was he? Lord Gowrie, the former arts minister, understood his
background - they shared the same roots. Gowrie told me that Francis was not
an 'Irish painter', although he was in many respects Irish and his memories
of Ireland had a traumatic effect upon him. Bacon himself said in an
interview: 'I grew up at a time when the Sinn Fein was going around. All the
houses in our neighbourhood were being attacked. I'll always remember my
father saying: 'If they come tonight, say nothing.' ' He has said: 'I was
made aware of danger at a very young age.'
Lady
Caroline Blackwood, who was married to Lucian Freud and is a member of the
Guinness family, was very conscious of his horror for Ireland: 'He had the
intellectual Irishman's traditional dislike of Catholicism. The popes that he
painted were all screaming and distorted. Some of them were sitting on the
lavatory. Although he stubbornly denied that he had been influenced by his
Irish upbringing, the desolation of his vision was very similar to that of
Beckett.'
Homosexuality
was his nature and he had the strength not to wish it otherwise. When he was
18, his father made a final attempt to 'make a man' of his son by placing him
in the custody of a friend of his: a tough, no-nonsense-seeming horse
trainer, but he turned out not to be what he seemed. He was a man with a
taste for decadence. 'We settled in Berlin for a time,' said Francis, 'it
must have been 1926 and by way of education I found myself in the atmosphere
of the Blue Angel.'
They
stayed at the Adlon Hotel, where Francis enjoyed the luxury of breakfast in
their double bed, served by an unperturbed German waiter.
When
he returned to London in the late Twenties, after a brief sojourn in Paris,
he embarked on furniture design, but in 1933 he abandoned that to concentrate
on painting. His picture Crucifixion was that year included
in Art Now by Herbert Read. This was a sensational start,
considering he was untrained and no more than 23 or 24.
Francis
had a deplorable war. When he received his call-up papers, he hired an
alsatian dog from Harrods and slept beside it in order to aggravate his
asthma. When he reported for his medical the next morning, he was granted an
immediate exemption and the unfortunate animal was returned to Harrods - or
so one hopes.
Instead
of fighting, he stalked the 'sexual gymnasium of the city', as he described
the streets of London. No one gave a damn as to who did what to whom, and the
darkness of the blackout provided convenient cover as you went in search of
trade. Asked later if he liked rough trade, Francis said: 'Yes, and married
men, too.'
The
writer and painter Michael Wishart gave this account of seeing him make up
one evening in those years: 'He applied the basic foundation with lightning
dexterity borne of long practice. He was more careful, even sparing, with the
rouge. For his hair he had a selection of Kiwi boot polishes in various
browns. He blended them on the back of his hand, selecting a tone appropriate
for the particular evening, and brushed them into his abundant hair with a
shoe brush. He polished his teeth with Vim.'
Throughout
the war, when he refused to exhibit - although it is doubtful if many
opportunities arose - he survived by gambling.
The
Colony Room was a smallish room with a faded air at the top of some shabby
stairs in Dean Street in Soho, central London. It was a place where you could
drink in the afternoons after the pubs had closed. Owned by a remarkable
woman called Muriel Belcher, it was also known as Muriel's. Bacon came to
love her and the place and was a habitue for more or less the last 40 years
of his life. 'It is a place,' he told me, 'where you can lose your
inhibitions. It's different from anywhere else.' Actually, he had no
inhibitions to lose.
Though
she enjoyed her members' success, Muriel had not the slightest interest in
art. This was all to the good. Generally the last thing artists wish to talk
about is art, and at Muriel's they gossiped about the things that really
mattered - sex, drink, scandal and daydreams. Though Francis was unknown to
the public 40 years ago, he was revered by his contemporaries, especially the
small group that met at the Colony Room and became known as the 'School of
London' or, better still, 'Muriel's Boys'. They included Lucian Freud,
Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and Tim Behrens.
At
Muriel's, as at Wheeler's, his favourite restaurant, Francis always signed
the bill. He would wave his bottle of champagne, slopping it into the glasses
of those around him, spilling much of it on the floor, with the Edwardian
toast: 'Real pain for your sham friends, champagne from your real friends', a
habit he had acquired from his father.
But
Francis was never wholly relaxed, even at Muriel's. It was a long time before
I realised that, when he wandered off to the lavatory with his glass in his
hand as if he could not bear to part with it, he threw the contents away; he
drank less while filling the glasses of those around him.
He
could be very nasty. An artist - I think he came from Trinidad - came into
the Colony one afternoon to present the club with his latest painting, which
was still wet. This generous gesture was accepted politely until Francis made
his entrance. He shook his bottle of champagne, aiming it at the picture, whose
colours dissolved into an even more frightful mess than it was in the first
place.
But
he could also be very gracious. One afternoon an art student navely showed
him a leaflet he had produced. Francis asked if he could buy a copy, adding
that he would be grateful if the young man would sign it for him. Francis
made his day, as he had destroyed the Trinidadian's.
FRANCIS'S
discipline was extraordinary. In the early Fifties he worked from 6am with
fierce concentration. He told me that drink and the after-effects forced him
to concentrate on his painting and at times it gave him 'a sort of freedom'.
It was hard to imagine him asleep, indeed he could not have slept much. I
have seen him on mornings when he was grey and nearly sightless from fatigue
after drinking and gambling through the night, but a few hours later he would
reappear totally refreshed.
His
output was consistent. The years 1951 to 1962, when he was raging around
Soho, were also the period of his artistic ascendancy. If we compare
his Three Studies for the Base of a Crucifixion, the painting
with which he burst on to the scene in 1945, with the masterpieces of his
Soho period (that is to say the popes, the remarkable painting Man
with Dog, his series on Van Gogh, the astonishing Two Figures,
also called 'The Wrestlers' and 'The Buggers', Miss Muriel Belcher,
the Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours, and the
blood-spattered Three Studies for a Crucifixion of 1962,
completed while he was drunk), they confirm his formidable development in a
comparatively short time.
In
1974 he met John Edwards and formed a friendship that would go on for the
rest of his life and be a happy contrast to an emotional life which had been
often turbulent and punctuated with untimely deaths. They met through John's
elder brother David, the licensee of The Swan in Stratford East, who was a
frequent visitor to the Colony and good friends with Muriel. 'My brother used
to say Francis Bacon would be coming to The Swan with Muriel. She would tell
us to get champagne every week - and Francis Bacon would never turn up. We
were always stuck with the champagne because in those days people did not
drink champagne in the East End.'
One
day John was taken to the Colony and when he was introduced to Bacon he said:
'Why don't you turn up when you are supposed to for all this fucking
champagne?'
Francis
was amused and invited him to Wheeler's. From that day they were friends. Ian
Board ran the Colony with Muriel and eventually took it over. He remembers:
'John was hypnotised. Francis told him: 'You don't want an old boiler like
me', but Francis was a great seducer and, to him, John appeared to be a tough
East Ender.'
'To
my amazement,' says John, 'when I walked into his studio about two months
later, there was a picture he had painted of me. I never sat for him. He was
marvellous company, good fun and a great drinking companion. I saw him every
day.'
For
an East End boy who could neither read nor write, it was an extraordinary
transition. Yet he had such self-assurance that Francis didn't have to
explain him to anyone. David Edwards says Francis liked John because he told
him exactly what he thought. Most people just bowed down to Francis; John
stood up to him.
Ian
Board remembers asking Francis: 'Are you in love with him?'
'Oh
no, dear, fond of him.'
'Then
it became 'very fond of him'. Actually, he was riddled with love.'
It
had nothing to do with sex. John told me that they shared a bed once after
Francis passed out from drink and that was as far as it had gone. What was
important was that John was lively, young and streetwise, and of a happy
disposition, a welcome change for Francis.
By
the time he reached 80, Bacon had been one of the world's most famous artists
for two decades, but he had time for some of the people who had need of him.
When Sonia Orwell (George's widow) was dying of cancer, he went to the
trouble of renting an attractive room for her in a hotel near the hospital,
and every evening when she returned from treatment she found champagne and
flowers waiting for her. He was also scrupulous in remembering people who
might have been forgotten, such as his childhood nurse. 'He remained
strangely loyal,' says Ian Board, 'it was one of his surprising
characteristics. I'd meet him and it was either 'I've just been to see the
old girl', or 'I'm just going to visit her'.'
His
stamina and powers of recovery were remarkable. Illness and accidents were
ignored. He was so pissed one afternoon that, going upstairs to the Colony,
he slipped and one of the metal strips hit the right side of his eye and put
it half out. He just pushed it back in again. After an exhausting day's
filming for The South Bank Show, Francis got Melvyn Bragg drunk in Mario's
restaurant. And, when they continued filming in the Colony next morning,
Michael Wojas, the barman, says he can't forget the look on Bragg's face when
he saw Francis already sparkling at 11am, having been there for an hour
already. Bragg sent out for black coffee; Francis continued on champagne.
'Francis
saw him coming,' says Ian Board.
'Did
he get Bragg drunk deliberately?' I asked.
'Oh
yes. He made a particular point of topping up the drink.'
'To
get the edge?' said Michael.
'To
show what idiots they are,' said Ian, with a snort.
With
a final flourish and sleight of hand, Francis Bacon died on the morning of 28
April 1992 in Madrid. He was 82. This was what he had hoped for: no fuss, no
discovery of his body in an empty room a day or two later, not even a
funeral. It was not so much a death as a disappearance.
In his way he was triumphant to the end. He treated death just as he had
treated life. His whole estate went to John Edwards: pounds 11,370,244.
His
friends were shocked by the news of his death, though at the age of 82 death
was hardly a cause for surprise. In Soho there was almost revelry. Members
climbed the dingy stairs to the Colony Room. 'It's been electrifying,' Ian
Board told me. 'The worms crawled out of their holes - I thought many of them
were dead - but the extraordinary thing is that the younger generation came
in full fucking bloom.'
My
own sense of loss overwhelmed me for a few days but one letter I received
gave me particular pleasure, for it came from David Sylvester, Britain's most
distinguished art critic and one of Bacon's closest friends: 'Since he died,
I've not thought about him as a painter. I've only thought about the
qualities that have long made me feel he was probably the greatest man I've
ever known, and certainly the grandest. His honesty with himself and about
himself; his constant sense of the tragic and the comic; his appetite for
pleasure; his fastidiousness; his generosity, not only with money - that was
easy - but with his time; above all, I think, his courage. He had faults
which could be maddening, such as being waspish and bigoted and fairly
disloyal, as well as indiscreet. But he was also kind and forgiving and
unspoilt by success and never rude unintentionally.'
The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson is published by Century at £17.99.
Francis Bacon and Daniel Farson in 1987 © Terence Pepper
Gossip of a gay
genius
The Gilded Gutter
Life of Francis Bacon by Daniel Farson
John Russell
Taylor on an intimate life of the late Francis Bacon
JOHN
RUSSELL TAYLOR | THE SUNDAY TIMES | MAY 1993
Bacon: full of nerve and completely without
nerves
There are books, and there are
documents. What the world will eventually need on Francis Bacon is a book -
measured, considered, carefully researched, neither spiteful nor grovelling.
But not, perhaps, quite yet.
Meanwhile, a document will do
very nicely. And Daniel Farson's is nothing if not a document. Thrown
together from what looks like a very quick rummage through the press
cuttings, and constantly maddening in its inconsistencies of date and
spelling, its tendency to repeat things almost word-for-word a few pages on,
it yet has the inestimable advantage of being written by a real intimate who
has flung down his recollections in a white heat, if not of inspiration, then
at least of eagerness to get there first.
For this immediacy it can be
forgiven a lot - especially if one can regard it as a personal memoir which
others later, at a more critical distance, will quarry. Too much discretion,
too many second thoughts, can be a dangerous thing. And in any case, Farson
seems to be remarkably without malice towards almost anybody, so that his
tales of Bacon and his associates have the tone of good-natured gossip in a
bar over a few drinks. Very much the circumstances in which Bacon himself was
seen at best conversational advantage, indeed, through his nearest and
dearest could hardly claim that his alcohol-fueled talk was always good
natured.
Bacon, though oddly unwilling to discuss
Ireland in any shape or form, seems to have been at times quite expansive
about his Irish experiences, notably his relations with his father. According
to his accounts, his father would seem to have been a sadist who thought that
the best way to make a man of his cissified 'artistic' son was to let the
stable staff thrash him within an inch of his life and (with some tacit
consent, presumably) exact whatever sexual favours they wanted from him.
At least this makes a convenient
explanation of the link between sex and violence in his life. Not that
diagnoses of this kind mean very much. Bacon was, as Farson points out,
"the embodiment of all that was advantageous in being homosexual",
full of nerve and completely without nerves. When Lord Rothermere proved in
1990 to have forgotten who Bacon was (as well he might, after a
traumatic earlier gathering under his aegis in which Bacon was the only one present
to dare boo Princess Margaret's off-key rendition of "Let's Do
It"), he asked the artist hopefully: "And what do you do?"
Bacon blandly answered: "I'm an old poof." He had by that time
turned down all possible honours up to an OM.
Naturally, everyone wants to
read this tittle-tattle, while deploring the fact that anyone thinks it worth
publishing. But in Bacon's case, it is, because the homosexuality, the
bravado, the drink and the discipline are all central to the art of someone
who was widely considered the greatest living painter after the death of
Picasso.
The book also contains other,
rather more alarming revelations. For instance, the tragedy hitherto
tactfully glossed over, of Graham Sutherland's early married life, at just
the time he was closest and most helpful to Bacon, was the birth of a child
so agonisingly malformed that when it inevitably died the Sutherlands were
forbidden by doctors from having another child, for fear that their clashing
genes would assert themselves again the same way.
Bacon was intensely sympathetic.
But we are told that the child was "so deformed that there was little
more than a stump and a heart, no arms or legs". Sounds curiously
familiar in the imagery of Bacon's mature work? If there is any truth in the
story, it was hardly kind of bacon to revert, even unconsciously, to
something so painful in the history of a close friend. But then, maybe he
thought art was more important. Maybe, in this case, it was.
The matter of life and death: Francis Bacon was one of the
greatest post-war artists, and also one of the loneliest.
TIM HILTON | ART | CULTURE | THE INDEPENDENT | SUNDAY 20 JUNE 1993
NOBODY IN the world makes better
exhibitions than David Sylvester and many artists have been lucky to receive
his interest. Last year he gave us the memorable Magritte exhibition at the
Hayward Gallery. This summer he has chosen a Francis Bacon exhibition and
devised its setting in the Correr Museum in Venice. Ii is a triumph. Whatever
one's reservations about Bacon as an artist - and I have many - the show
looks magisterial. The painter has never been better displayed.
It is not a conventional
retrospective of the sort that leads from one period to the next and includes
studies and comparative material. Bacon himself would have vetoed such an
approach and Sylvester's feelings are akin to those of his deceased friend.
In the Correr we find confrontation, not introduction. This is not an easy
show. Its attitude is that you take Bacon as a whole or not at all; that you
do not explain him in terms of a developing, maturing and declining life but
that you match up to his most commanding icons, whenever they were made;
further, that you recognise that those images are so personal to Bacon that
there is no reason why they should be granted to anyone else's eyesight; and
finally that any of his paintings, or for that matter any human life, might
at any time be destroyed, just because the world destroys more than it
creates.
This I believe to be the
general theme of Bacon's painting, so often slashed and burnt by the artist
for reasons that we do not comprehend and which may not have been aesthetic.
His surviving art doesn't work when it fails to be frightening or loses a
sense of fragile life. It has a fleshy nihilism. And just as Bacon luxuriates
in the horrors of the body, he always denies that his paintings can be
explained by the life of the mind. So I think that he was also an
intellectual nihilist (as unrestrainable gamblers often are), a man who felt
that it was futile to consider life through the light of reason. Sylvester is
sensitive to this anti-humanism and has thought about Bacon's aversion to
explanatory retrospectives. The Correr show could be read as a reproof to the
half-dozen or so people who currently hope to write Bacon's biography. Its
message is that no biography of the artist can explain the nature of his art.
In the exhibition's first
gallery are three sets of paintings in triptychs. They are Study for
Self-Portrait (1985-6), the Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988) and the
Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981). So we have a
crucifixion, for this was the subject of the 1944 painting, a classical or
mythological subject, and a rumination by the artist about his own identity -
all in threes, therefore making nine separate canvases.
In all, Sylvester gives us
eight triptych works, overwhelmingly the larger part of the exhibition. This
is a clue to his interpretation of Bacon's view of the world. In the first
place, of course, triptychs are associated with the Crucifixion, Christ
flanked by grieving saints, and convey the general aura of Christianity.
Then, especially in northern European modern art, triptychs suggest
metaphysics and a search for meaning. They also suggest the passage of time,
journeys that proceed towards an emotional resolution.
But Bacon's triptychs are not like this. Obviously they are non-Christian or
hostile to the Christian, so they have the flavour that comes with
desecration. Equally obviously they allow Bacon, never confident with more
than one figure in a painting, to compose with some of the grandeur to which
he aspired. It's more important that Bacon denies the possibility of
narrative suggested by the three-painting format. You feel that he relished
extreme situations but hated change. Here is the reason for his inveterate,
perhaps compulsive recourse to photography. Snapshots were not to help him
fix an image or elaborate a composition. He liked them because they froze
time.
Hence
the weird stories, told by more than one sitter, of Bacon painting from life
but actually looking at a photograph rather than his model. Bacon was never a
direct portraitist, even when he was his own subject. Characteristically,
figures seem to be posed some 10 or 12 feet from his easel. This suited the
most natural size for his paintings, 198 x 147cm, a format found in all the
later works in this exhibition. Smaller paintings of people's features (for
which Bacon also used standard-sized canvases, either 61 x 51cm or 35 x 30cm)
get close up but are among his least convincing works. Bacon liked something
between his brush and the person he was looking at: space, a photograph or
that transparent but impermeable screen suggested by the cage-like structures
that enclose his subjects.
Bacon's
unexplained demand that his pictures should always be glazed, described by
Sylvester in these pages last week, was the external side of this desire for
an interior screen. For an expressionist so drawn to violence Bacon had a
fastidious nature. In the Correr we find a smoother artist than we had
expected. There is even some suavity in his surfaces, no doubt emphasised by
the glass and his gold frames. One moment, as in the Oresteia picture, you
find twisted spurts of dark red pigment - as though the artist had spat out
his own giblets. Yet within the same picture are areas of South Kensington
smoothness.
Bacon reached a high
sophistication in the mid-Seventies, maintained at least until 1988, the date
of the last paintings in the exhibition. He had a balance between the
sickening implications of his pictures and a virtuoso command of his manners.
I recognise the qualities of the later paintings but prefer earlier canvases
that were not academicised by their role in a tripartite schema.
Bacon's
painting took its risks before the 1960s, and perhaps before 1958, when he
joined the Marlborough Gallery and began to paint more often than not on
those 198 x 147 canvases. He became safe in the routines of his
grandiloquence. Just one gallery in Sylvester's show wobbles, and this is
simply because of the size of its pictures - death-mask portraits of William
Blake, a triptych of some bourgeois in a business suit and a picture of
Bacon's friend Michel Leiris. These are 61 x 51 or 35 x 30. As pictures they
are not much good. Why? Because the real instinct of Bacon's vision was to
keep people at a distance.
Or so it
seems when looking at the later pictures, or such celebrated views of
homosexual life as the Two Figures in the Grass of 1954. In paintings like
this, however, Bacon's touch has a closeness that is disturbing. It is a sort
of creeping and scratching application, dry, chalky and scrawled. He began to
paint in this way after the Second World War, the period both of matter
painting and Existentialist statements. He was more of a contemporary artist
at that time. The Figure in a Landscape of 1945, the 1946 picture of a man
with his head apparently blown off, the Fragment of a Crucifixion of 1950 and
other paintings all compare favourably with European art of the time. He was,
for instance, an artist of greater power than many of the contributors to
Paris Post War, the Tate's survey of French Existentialism, while sharing a
number of their concerns.
Bacon was, in fact, the
most European of British artists in the post-war years. But as his life went
on, he became detached from the other painters of his generation. You cannot,
for instance, imagine him contributing to group shows. For many reasons his
paintings would have been too awkward to hang beside canvases by other
people. In the Correr there is a strong impression of a totally lonely
eminence, as though comparisons with the general progress of art were beside
the point. This is why the exhibition is so individual and powerful; but also
why one thinks that the rest of us need not bear Bacon in mind as we get on
with our own lives.
THIS
YEAR'S Venice Biennale has nothing to match the Bacon exhibition but offers,
as usual, much of interest. Ninety-eight years now since it was founded, and
still the Biennale is the largest regular gathering of the world's new art.
The exhibition, or series of exhibitions, lasts longer than people sometimes
think. This year it closes on 10 October, so the attendance - in this capital
of cultural tourism - must be enormous. Though its opening is always chaotic
and the publicity overdone, the Biennale is genuinely important. Behind the
hype we see many indications of the way the world looks at its creative life.
This year the theme
is of internationalism and the crumbling of old empires. Different countries
have always had their own pavilions; but now there is a tendency to swap artists,
to take in refugees or displaced persons and to ignore traditional frontiers.
Competing national self-images are a thing of the past. This ought to be for
the good, one feels, but the international mood is accompanied by something
else - a political and cultural despair that the Biennale has never
previously exhibited.
Bacon’s
works on despair fetch six figures
DALYA ALBERGE | ART MARKET CORRESPONDENT | THE INDEPENDENT | FRIDAY 25 JUNE 1993
IN THE 1940s it took six years to persuade a British
museum to accept a painting by Francis Bacon as a gift; in the 1950s
collectors were prepared to pay about £300 for one. Yesterday, a year after
the death of arguably Britain's greatest 20th-century artist at the age of
82, three paintings achieved six-figure sums in sales at both Christie's and
Sotheby's.
Bacon's record is £3.53m,
but that was set in 1989. That such high prices can be fetched today in
recessionary times said more about Bacon's standing in art history than the
art market. He remains one of the few British painters with an international
following among collectors. Each of the works sold yesterday reflects the
artist's obsession with the human cry, the despair, the pain and the
bleakness of human existence
One of Sotheby's two
examples, Study for a Portrait, dating from the early 1950s, sold for
£562,500 (against an estimated £300,000 to £400,000) to a European private
collector. In the same sale, the 1965 portrait of Lucian Freud, a fellow
modern master, made pounds 221,500 (estimate, £250,000 to £300,000)
Christie's sold
Bacon's 1962 painting, Figure Turning, a powerful image of a man in twisted,
contorted position against a bleak, black background, for £529,500, just over
its low estimate
In 1991, Bacon told
the Independent that among the younger generation, 'there is no real talent
around at the moment'. He did, however, mention Miguel Barcelo as an artist
to watch. Moules et Gants Rouges by this Spanish artist, born in 1957, was sold
at Christie's for £36,700.
Although one leading
dealer dismissed both sales as 'the weakest contemporary auctions I've seen
for some time', buyers at Sotheby's clearly thought otherwise: only 28 out of
117 works failed to sell, achieving the highest total for a London
contemporary art sale since June 1991. Christie's fared less well this time,
with half the items remaining unsold.
From icon to Bacon
Holy Russian and unholy British art: Andrew Graham-Dixon compares an
anonymous painter from Pskov with Francis Bacon
By ANDREW GRAHAM-DIXON | THE INDEPENDENT | 26 OCTOBER, 1993
A
thousand years ago, Prince Vladimir of Kiev decided to put a stop to pagan
practices in the newly founded state of Rus. He sent his ambassadors to many
lands (so the story goes) to choose an appropriately potent religion for the
nation that would become Russia, and they eventually wrote back to him from
the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. ''We knew not whether we were in heaven
or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we
are at a loss to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men .
. . we cannot forget such beauty.'' The persuasive capacities of art should
not be underestimated. Vladimir, weighing up his options, adopted the
Orthodox religion of the Byzantine empire rather than Western Catholicism.
''The Art of Holy
Russia'', at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is dedicated to Russian art's
attempts, over a span of several centuries, to re-create the beauty that
haunted Prince Vladimir's ambassadors. But Russian devotional art is liable
to seem forbiddingly alien to modern eyes. To look at an icon such as the St
Demetrios of Thessalonike, painted by an anonymous artist for the Church of
St Barbara in Pskov in the early 15th century, is to see a painting that
allows virtually no room for the forms of response that the average modern
viewer, of averagely weak religious convictions, tends to bring to religious
art of the past. There is no anecdotal light relief, no hint of narrative,
none of those sudden shafts of reality - a dog drinking from a stream, say,
or a bright landscape background — that may be admired in the devotional art of the
Catholic middle ages and after. The only hint of reality here is the reality
of a human face, although it is a face evidently transfigured by artistic
convention and by an ideal of holiness.
What you see is, simply, a
saint with his attributes (cross, sword and shield) staring out at you with
impassive solemnity from a gold ground. History, it is true, can furnish a
sense of the world which produced such an image —
can explain (in this instance) that the
much venerated Byzantine saint Demetrios, an early Christian martyr renowned
for his defence of the city of Thessalonike against the Roman armies of
Diocletian and Maximian, may have been a natural choice of patron saint for
the people of Pskov who were themselves constantly under threat from Livonian
mercenaries and from the marauding armies of Poland and Lithuania. But the
icon itself is mute about the real, historical world, because that world is
so remote from its concerns.
The icon cannot be
made to fit the evolutionary rhetoric in which so many modern Western
accounts of the history of art have been couched. This rhetoric tends to see
aesthetic convention as something to be deviated from, something to be
escaped in the name of progress. The painter of icons might be said to aspire
to absolute conventionality. Yet this ambition for conformity is nevertheless
charged with tremendous spiritual intensity. When the anonymous painter from
Pskov painted his St Demetrios according to type, when he painted him at once
like a real man and yet also profoundly unlike a real man, he reaffirmed a
very particular conception of holiness that lies at the heart of Byzantine
theology.
The holiness of which
the icon speaks is a holiness of the real transfigured, a holiness whose
ultimate type is the Incarnation of Christ. The conventions of icon painting
might be described as the inevitable visual cor-relatives of the Byzantine
religious obsession with that single great mystery, of how the divine and the
mundane once briefly coexisted. Icons are painted equivalents of that
collision between the material and the im-material world, an intersection
between the visible and the invisible, symbolised by the Incarnation.
Byzantine holiness is emphatically paradoxical, rooted in a sense of being of
this world while not being of it. This starts to explain the tension between
near-realism and total abstraction in all icon painting, the icon painter's
practice of combining an art that quite frequently approaches portraiture
with an art that tends to pure abstraction. This is an art that lives in the
collision between two very specific conventions - and an art, therefore,
which cannot afford to change too much, since to do so would be to traduce
the theology that lies behind it. Repetitiveness can be a form of necessity.
The late Francis
Bacon might not appear to have very much in common with an anonymous 15th-
century painter of devotional art from Pskov but his ''Small Portrait
Studies'' at the Marlborough Gallery share a lot of the characteristics of
holy Russian icons. Bacon's pictures live in the tension between portraiture
and abstraction, between a sense of human reality and its distortion by the
pressures of a convention. They are fantastically repetitive. And their
repetitiveness has an air of inevitability about it as well as an aura of
high seriousness that makes them seem charged with a form of spiritual intent.
David
Sylvester recently described Bacon's desire to be cremated without ceremony
and ''without the imposition of invocations, however half-hearted, of the
Deity''. Bacon painted people, perhaps, to make them look as unblessed and as
unholy as he felt himself to be - or it might be more accurate to say that he
painted people whose predicament it is to live in a world where holiness
itself has been terminally discredited, where it is not possible to be
touched by sacredness.
If the
icon-painter's conventional treatment of the human face makes the saint seem
like a being suspended between this world and the next, real yet also holy,
Bacon's self-created figurative conventions tend in the opposite direction.
Rendering people as restive blurs of swiped paint, he makes of them an odd
blend of the human and the animal. Bacon's portraits, like icons, use the
transfiguring capacities of painting to talk about the capacity to be
transfigured that is inherent within all people - but the difference is that,
whereas the icon speaks of an upward transfiguration, an ascent to holiness,
Bacon's paintings see only the possibility of people becoming still less than
they are. For the abstract gold ground of the icon, symbol of holiness, Bacon
substitutes lurid grounds of dark red, green, pink or yellow: his people
exist not in a sacred void but simply in a void.
But these
paintings are less despairing than they are often made out to be. At their
best (up until the late 1960s), Bacon's small portraits have a kind of
savage, joyous vigour and carnality which communicates not existential gloom
but a weird form of celebration — something like
the manic exuberance of someone who knows he does not have long to live but
has decided (what the hell) to enjoy being alive while he can. These pictures
find a kind of spiritual strength in the denial of spirituality.
Bacon
nude expected to exceed 1m pounds
DALYA ALBERGE | ART
MARKET | THE INDEPENDENT | FRIDAY 30 OCTOBER 1992
THE FIRST major painting by
Francis Bacon to come up for auction since the modern master's death in April
will be offered by Sotheby's in December
The estimate of more than
pounds 1m for Study of a Nude with Figure in a Mirror takes into account both
the way that prices for a major artist's work are affected after his or her
death and the slump in the art market. In 1990 a comparable picture sold for
dollars 3.3m in New York.
The painting, which depicts
a reclining naked woman and one of Bacon's 'spectator' figures, is from a
group he painted in the Sixties. It has been consigned by a private European
collector.
Bacon
fortune is left to companion
TIKELSEY
& DAVID LISTER |
NEWS
|
THE
INDEPENDENT | FRIDAY 4 DECEMBER 1992
THE ARTIST Francis Bacon has
left more than pounds 10m to his companion John Edwards in his will, which
was published yesterday.
Mr Edwards, 43, was the
artist's companion for the last 15 years of his life.
The publication of the will coincided with the sale of Bacon's
painting, Study of A Nude with Figure in a Mirror, at Sotheby's in London but
it failed to reach its reserve price. The painting of a naked, reclining
woman was expected to fetch more than pounds 1m but was bought for pounds
735,000, after the official sale had closed, by an anonymous foreign buyer.
The artist, who died last
April, left his entire estate to John Edwards, whom he first met shortly
after the death of a lover. The estate was valued at pounds 11,370,244 gross,
pounds 10,923,900 net.
Despite his ability to command millions of pounds for individual paintings,
Bacon was never touched by his wealth. His lifestyle was simple and
unpretentious. Naked light bulbs dangled from the ceilings of his home in
south London and he often told friends that he would be happy to return to
the meagre income he enjoyed while working, in his youth, as a cook and
servant. He turned down the offer of a knighthood.
Mr Edwards, one of six
children, was the son of an East End publican and, until he met Bacon, worked
in his father's pubs. Although Bacon was never reticent about his own
homosexuality, the relationship that developed between the two men was
platonic.
Francis saw him as an
adopted son,' one close friend said yesterday. 'He took him under his wing.
He saw this rough diamond and always made him shave, dress properly; made a
man out of him.'
Mr Edwards became his
favourite model and appears in some of Bacon's most famous paintings. The
artist bought him a house in Suffolk and a flat in London. 'He needed
something in his life to cherish.
Apart from each other, the
two shared little in common and Mr Edwards never had more than a passing
interest in art. 'He couldn't have told a Constable if it hit him in the
face,' one acquaintance said.
But their friendship became
one of the best-known, if most unlikely, in the art world. The two had
originally met in Bacon's favourite watering hole, the Colony Club in Soho.
Mr Edwards has two brothers
who are wealthy in their own right as antiques dealers, and art dealers, as
well as artists, are confident that some of the Bacon inheritance will be
used to the benefit of British art.
Wills
JEREMY LEWISON | NEWS
|
PEOPLE
|
THE
INDEPENDENT | SATURDAY 5 DECEMBER 1992
Mr Francis Bacon, of London SW7, the artist,
left estate valued at pounds 10,923,900 net.
ALL
THE PULSATIONS OF A PERSON
Francis
Bacon’s small portraits are
on show in London.
The
exhibition forms a gallery of his lovers and friends, notably Lucian Freud.
David Sylvester, another subject, looks at the paintings and the web of
relationships behind them
DAVID
SYLVESTER | ARTS | THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY | 24
OCTOBER 1993
AN EXHIBITION of heads by Francis
Bacon inevitably presents a portrait gallery of his friends, since the heads
in his paintings are almost always heads of people he knew. He refused all
but three of the many commissions he was offered to do a portrait of someone
unknown to him (one exception was a triptych of heads of Mick Jagger). He
chose to paint people whose features, attitudes, movements, expressions were
familiar.
He did portraits of painter
friends, such as Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud. and of writer friends, such
as Michel Leiris and Jacques Dupin. He did portraits of women who were
intimate friends, such as Isabel Rawsthorne and Muriel Belcher, owner of the
Colony Room, his favourite drinking room. He did portraits of his lovers,
such as Peter Lacy, who was to die in 1962 on the eve of his first major
retrospective in London, and George Dyer, who was to die in 1972 on the eve
of his first retrospective in Paris and who inspired posthumous images which
are probably the most moving things Bacon painted. He did portraits of John
Edwards, the young East Ender who in later years plated the ole in his life
of a surrogate son and was named his sole heir.
There is no kind of portrait more
interesting than portraits of artists by artists, above all when they're
reciprocal. Bacon painted dozens of heads and full-lengths of Lucian Freud,
which are the clearest possible demonstration of what he meant when he said
that in painting a portrait he wanted to "give over all the pulsations
of a person". Freud for his part painted a head of Bacon in the early
1950s which remains the definitive image of his pear-shaped face despite all
the brilliant photographs that were taken of it. He painted no others,
although he, like Bacon, tends to paint interesting subjects again and again.
The reason was merely practical.
Freud makes great demands on his subjects by getting them to sit for him hour
after hour, week after week, for each portrait. Bacon only rarely worked from
a sitter, preferring to work from memory and photographs; the subject could
get on with his life.
The highly rewarding exchange of
portraits between the two of them can be seen as symbolic of what was surely
the most intellectually rewarding friendship Francis ever had. His
relationship with Michel Leiris was not so much a friendship
–
with the usual brutal skirmishes
of friendship –
as a deeply affectionate mutual
admiration. Moreover, he could never have had with Michel, whatever his
esteem for him as a writer, the same free intellectual interchange as he
could have with Lucian, for there was a certain ambivalence in Francis's
relationships with most French intellectuals. On the other hand, he had a gut
feeling that Paris was the cultural capital of the word, so it was always the
place where he most liked exhibiting his work. On the other hand, he was
affronted by the intellectual rigidity of the French. For example, as a
Conservative politically, he despised the automatic leftism of the French
intellectuals of his generation of whom Leiris was typical.
There
was a different kind of ambivalence in his relationship with Lucian. In the
early 1950s, at a time when they were almost inseparable, he would often say
to me: "I'm not really fond of Lucian, you know, the way I am
of Rodrigo [Moynihan] and Bobby [Buhler]. It's just hat he rings me up all
the time. (But any ringing up had to be done by Lucian, as he made a
point of not being on the telephone). At the same time, Francis always said
that Lucian was the most entertaining and stimulating person he knew. And
whatever his ambivalence, h made no pretence that he very much minded the gap
in his life when in later years Lucian stopped ringing up.
In those early days Lucian clearly
had a crush on Francis, as I did. (We both copied his uniform of a plain,
dark grey, worsted double-breasted Savile Row suit, plain shirt, plain dark
tie, brown suede shoes.) The crush was more interesting in Lucian's case,
because he was normally so much in control of every situation. When he was
with Francis he gave the impression that he was twirling around him in his
anxiety to please. Again, he was normally the most discrete of men but he
couldn't resist confiding in Francis, which meant, as Francis was the most
indiscrete of men, that Lucian no longer had any secrets. But, if his
adoration was admirably intemperate, it was also characteristically
intelligent. We had both met Francis at about the same time and used to talk
about him to each other like a pair of groupies. One day, when I had been
going on about what an unexpectedly moral person Francis was, Lucian
amended my gushings by saying that what Francis was really like was
Nietzsche's Ubermensch. He said it with embarrassment
because it was such an extravagant thing to say, but he was, I think,
absolutely right.
TALKING about Lucian's painting,
Francis was usually pretty bitchy: I suppose some of this got reported back
to Lucian, because people behave like that. But then, of course, Francis was
hyper-critical about about everyone's painting. Including his own. And
including that of his heroes, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Picasso, for he always
reserved his enthusiasm for a small proportion of their works.
Not only with art but with
inanimate things generally, Francis was difficult to please. He was much more
lenient about human beings. He was capable of the most devastating, because
the most accurate and penetrating, analyses of the characters of his friends;
he has no illusions about them. But he forgave them. On the other had, he
could be suddenly intolerant.
Francis had read and enormously
admired a book by an eminent academic. He was aware that I knew him, and said
that he would be very grateful if I could arrange a lunch for the three of
us. This was easily done, and we sat down together at Wilton's in an
atmosphere of the greatest cordiality. When Francis asked his guest of honour
what he would like to drink and was told he didn't drink, Francis, for all
his social skills, could not disguise his disappointment and the occasion
never quote took off.
But his exigency was more
generally applied to objects. He was very fastidious about his clothes; if an
expensive raincoat he had bought rustled in a way he disliked, it had to go.
He was very exacting about food – it had to be perfect in itself
and plainly cooked, not tarted up – and very decided in his
tastes. Anyone who believed Fortnum's was as good a grocer as Harrods was
beyond the pale. In restaurants he did not contain his irritation if the
poached turbot was served with a drop of water on the plate or if a waiter
put gravy on the grouse before he could be stopped. He always had me order
the wine and, so that it wouldn't cost him hundreds, I tended to order a
second-growth claret of a good year rather than a first-growth of that year.
This invariably led to him insisting the next bottle should be a
first-growth. But I'm told that behind my back
he poke of my expensive tastes, which had to be satisfied.
Certainly, his dandyism stopped
him from treating great wines with due respect. He didn't like to have them
decanted, so they could breathe: that would have been officious. He preferred
to leave them casually in the bottle, which sometimes meant that the lees got
into his glass. He would drink them with relish. I once made up am epitaph
for him: "He loved the lees of great wines." I think this is an
improvement on his own remarks about living a life of gilded squalor or a
gilded gutter life. He had too much style to put it the right way round.
Upstarts have gilded lives; his life was tarnished gold.
He was difficult about art, then,
but not at al offhand, once he thought an artist had something of his own.
And, whatever his reservations about Lucian's work, he took it very
seriously. Thus he deplored the fact that Lucian had not had a major
retrospective when much lesser contemporaries had. Knowing that I served on
various committees, he frequently said I should try and put that right. I did
try, and after a surprisingly uphill fight, got a retrospective on to the
programme of the Hayward Gallery in 1974. The exhibition was a great success
and Lucian later became the only artist to have a second retrospective at the
Hayward.
Francis cared very much about his
friends, and was deeply generous by instinct. Not only with money but with
his time. If a friend was ill, he was not content to pay their bills:
he would visit them regularly. His old nanny lived with him until she died.
For many years after he would visit a friend of hers every Saturday bearing
gifts. He didn't like his sister Winifred at all –
unlike his sister Ianthe – but when she was permanently
hospitalised he visited her twice a week.
He firmly chose to be the one who
gave. And he was doing so long before was richer than the people with whom he
spent his time. He didn't like to be given things; he felt uncomfortable
about having to be grateful. Quite late in his life he went to dinner one
night at the White Tower with two acquaintances thinking that he was the
host. They ate and drank well and then somebody else picked up the tab,
Francis immediately took them off to Annabel's where he ordered quantities of
caviar and champagne that nobody wanted.
No doubt he insisted on paying
because that way he felt freer. But if he wanted to be the one in the chair
it was not simply out of a need to be dominant. He believed that he had to
buy his way through life. Although he was expert in using his charm to
manipulate, he didn't realise how much he was treasured by the people he
knew, how much they loved having him around, just as he failed to realise how
tremendously his work was admired by fellow-artists, including artists whose
own work was utterly different from his own.
HE ALSO underestimated the
admiration of the tastemakers. When he heard that Alan Bowness had been
appointed director of the Tate, he told me: "Well, U can't expect
anything of him. He only likes Ben Nicholson."
The first thing Bowness did on taking over was to find which of Francis's
available big triptychs was the one that he liked best and to buy it for a
huge sum (though a fraction of its present value). And Bowness was to
describe him in print as "surely the greatest living painter.
But Francis always imagined that
he was going to be frustrated or let down. He could be quite confused if
people were utterly nice to him, asking for nothing in return. He expected
people to behave badly and was rather relieved when it happened.
On the spur of the moment, though,
he could revolt against being put upon. In his relationship with John Edwards
he was truly parental, rather than maternal, worried about his welfare, very
protective of him and of his family as well as materially prodigal. Like parent
he not merely accepted but enjoyed the fact that there was much more give
than take in his role. And John is the sort of person who commands
helpfulness, being handsome, laid-back, never seeking to impress, never
trying to call attention to himself, never apologising for himself, always
relaxing, lapping up kindnesses.
But he overstepped the mark one
day when four or five of us turned up at Holy Trinity, Brompton, to be with
Francis at the funeral of his cousin and friend, Miss Diana Watson. As we
stood in the churchyard afterwards Francis passionately reiterated his wish,
well known to us all, to be incinerated without any ceremony and if possible
with no one there. He had often expressed quite serious anxieties that no
crematorium would dispose of his corpse without the imposition of
invocations, however half-hearted, of the Deity. One day I had therefore
telephoned the West London Crematorium to find out whether it was possible to
be cremated there without any ceremony whatever, had been assured that it
was, and had passed the good news straight on to Francis. He went on not
quite believing it, and in the churchyard I reminded him of what I'd been
told. That satisfied him for the moment.
"But you wouldn't mind our
having a party for you, would you Francis?" said John.
"No, I wouldn't mind that at
all."
"Maybe you'd better leave
some money for it, Francis," said John.
"Well, I'd have thought you'd
had quite enough of that already."
A good deal in Francis's handling
of money suggests that his generosity was also a way of keeping people at a
distance. And a disinclination for sustained intimacy could have played a
part in his method of painting portraits. Posing for an artist – quite apart from any question of
a sexual relationship – is one of the best of ways for
two people to get to know each other. Not wanting any of that may have been a
part of Francis's resolute practice of not working from a sitter but from
photographs of the sitter. In doing so he was also, since he always painted
people he knew, working from memory of what they looked like when moving
about and not just from theses fixed images.
In an interview in 1966 he
explained that he found it inhibiting to have the subject sitting there in
front of him. "They in inhibit me because, if like them, I don't want to
practice before them injury in private by which I think I can record the fact
of them more clearly."
Published reminiscences of Francis tend to give the
impression that his life was extremely gregarious. In fact he needed
solitude, to dream up images, look out of the window, read, walk in the
streets, take the Underground, think, do nothing. And he preferred to be
alone when painting. He was telling the truth when he said he liked to paint
in private; I don't how serious he was being when he talked about doing
injuries to the model.
What he could have said seriously was that he found it much
easier to paint pictures from photographs – or from
paintings by other people, such as Velasquez or Van Gogh, or from his own
previous paintings – than
from life, that for him it was a great advantage to be working from images on
the flat rather than from real figures in space. Throughout his career he
used photographs from books and periodicals – some of
them famous photographs, such as Muybridge's studies of human and animal
locomotion, some of them found casually, such as pictures in the papers of
politicians or prize-fights or an illustrated book of David Gower in action,
In using photographs, of course, he was continuing a tradition that included
Degas and Sickert and Bonnard and Vuillard.
In the early 1950s, however, he decided to try to work from
a model. Lucian and I were among his sitters. When Lucian arrived at the
studio to pose to Francis's first portrait of him, he found that the picture
had already been nearly painted from a photograph of Franz Kafka. When I was
sitting for him in 1953, part of the time he as looking at me, part of the
time at a photograph of a rhino in long grass: he said that he found this
photograph suggested ways of rendering certain textures in paint. It has been
supposed by one or two writers that the model was idiotically sitting there
wasting his time while the artist was depicting the head of a rhino. In fact,
he was producing a head of the model, one which is fairly recognisable.
However, the following day, working without a model, he
dressed up the likeness as one of his Popes after Velasquez. During the next
two weeks he painted seven further Popes. Some of their faces resemble that
of the Velasquez Pope; none of them resembled mine. The picture I had sat
for, and which triggered off a series, was thus a compound of several
elements – a
sitter, a wild-life photograph, an Old Master painting, plus a colour,
violet, for the Pope's robes which is quite different from their colour in
the Old Master painting. This is how a painter like Bacon works, not by
reason but by instinct. And in life as well as art Francis put his faith in
instinct: the word had an almost magical force for him.
In the course of doing those portraits from life of Lucian
and myself, and also many of many of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, Francis
realised that he might as well work from images and stop confusing himself
with live models. At all events, from the mid-1950s on he did all his
portraits from photographs which he commissioned for he purpose. In one way
and another he was haunted by photography. He often said that his triptychs
of heads were inspired by police mugshots.
Those triptychs began quite spontaneously. In the summer of
1953 he had dome a very remarkable small painting of a head resting on a
pillow, a head in which the form was so broken up by the marks of the brush
as to create a poignant image of disintegration. After several unsuccessful
attempts to sell it had been made on his behalf, it went back to the studio,
and he did two further paintings of heads to go with it, putting them
together as a triptych. The initial work was on the right, at the end of the
sequence; the head on the left was Peter Lacy; the head in the middle of a man
orating was based on a photograph of a politician lately published in Time.
The middleman who had tried in vain to sell the initial
canvas to various Bond Street Galleries for the sum of £60 or even £50 did
find a buyer for the triptych. The middleman was I. I had started
occasionally selling pictures for Francis the year before. It grew naturally
out of the fact that we were meeting almost everyday – in his
current borrowed studio; at the senior common room at the Royal College of
Art; in Soho, at Wheelers, the Colony Room and the Gargoyle. We also went
greyhound racing together at Stamford Bridge or Wembley. Though we both
backed horses and often discussed and duplicated our bets, he never came with
me to the races.
The sales I made of his work were made behind the back of
his dealer, Erica Brausen of the Hanover Gallery. It was immoral of me to be
part of the conspiracy because I owed a lot to Erica, firstly because she had
wisely ordered me in 1942 to give up trying to be painter, secondly because
she had lately been giving me encouragement and patronage as a writer by
commissioning catalogue prefaces for exhibitions. Of course, there was less
to be earned from these than by trading on Francis's behalf. He paid me a
very generous commission: 20 per cent of the selling price, the price to a
dealer being £150 for a large painting, £60 for a small one – the
dealers would sell them for double that or rather less. It's possible that
the financial incentive meant less to me than endearing myself to Francis.
He really had no alternative to cheating. Erica would give
him advances against paintings to be delivered but, thanks to the stinginess
and obtuseness of her backers, the advances were too small. Francis was
always in need of funds and it was an irresistible temptation to sell
unofficially for ready cash rather than deliver something already paid for. I
went on acting as his agent in these arrangements until 1955, by which time
the trade price for a big picture was £200.
ONE MORNING in 1953 three large paintings for sale arrived
at my flat in Chelsea from Henley, where Francis was working: a man in a city
suit; two figures embracing in a window; two figures on a bed having sex. The
first was an averagely good example; the second was pleasant and the subject
made a change, but it wasn't a strong painting; the third was a masterpiece,
and one with a subject matter that was new, amazing, inevitable and, for
many, objectionable.
It was clearly one of the finest things Francis had done
and without exception his finest tribute to the Italian Renaissance, with a
largeness and a sensuousness that recall Titian. At the same time it also
recalled the faces of Peter Lacy and Francis Bacon. The composition was based
faithfully upon a photograph by Muybridge of wrestlers. This was a perfect
instance of something Francis said in an interview years later – that memories of Muybridge and Michelangelo
and of bodies he had known became inextricably intermingled in his paintings.
In 1953 it was not going to be an easy picture to sell; it
certainly couldn't be exhibited. Three or four months later Francis was to
paint an almost equally beautiful picture of figures having sex in long
grass, less brazen in its treatment of the subject. It was delivered to Erica
Brausen and nearly 40 years later Francis was still giving a fierce
impersonation, with an exaggeratedly foreign accent, of her saying: "Vy
do you have to paint these feelthy pictures that I can't sell?" She did
sell it, and it was shown at the ICA in 1955, but Francis left the subject
alone for 10 years, when the climate had changed, thanks partly to the Lady Chatterley case. In the meantime, when the
picture which had arrived that morning was finally shown, nearly 10
years later, it was at the Tate, which lent it respectability. The Tate was
circumspect to enough to exhibit the Muybridge photograph of the wrestlers
nearby. Actually, it looked much more pornographic than the painting.
I got on the telephone and made an appointment with Pat
Philips of the Leicester Galleries to come at 11 and another with Freddie
Mayor to come in the afternoon. Pat bought the suited man without hesitation
for the asking price of £150 in cash, but showed no commercial interest in
the others. I sat wondering whether Freddie would be more daring. I hardly
knew him but greatly like and admired him. His father had been a good painter
and since the early 1930s he had been England's most distinguished dealer in
difficult modern art; indeed in 1933 he had exhibited Francis. He was also a
great gent and totally unpompous, given to abandoning his gallery to go
racing in the afternoon.
He responded positively to the two paintings. "But
it'll be very difficult to sell that one. I certainly shan't be able to show
it in the gallery."
"I'm sure you won't, but there must be certain
collectors for whom that will make it all the more enticing."
"I don't think I could get the normal price."
"Are you sure that if you can sell at all it won't be
for well above the normal price?"
"Well, you're asking £3oo for the two. I'll give you
200 –
140 for the figures in the window and 60 for the other." I was shaken,
morally. I said I'd accepts 250 (150 for the figures on the bed and 100 for
the other). Freddie stuck at 200.
We walked slowly down the long corridor to the front door.
"Freddie, I'll tell you what. I'll accept your offer on condition that
Francis has the right if he can raise the money within seven days to buy the
£60 picture back for £100."
That evening I handed Francis an envelope containing £350
less my £70 commission. He thus received £48 for a painting which would now
fetch more millions than any other single canvas he ever painted. I felt
ashamed, and determined that Freddie should not keep the picture at such a
price. If it couldn't be sold for a proper price it had to stay in the
family. There was no chance that Francis could find the money: he needed all
he had to buy champagne and oysters for his friends. And I wouldn't be able
to buy the picture myself: the £70 was needed for arrears in rent, and in any
case I had already bought one marvellous large painting. I therefore told
Lucian that if he could raise £100 in cash within a week he would become the
owner of a superlative Bacon. Meanwhile the paintings went off in a van.
After five days Lucian telephoned to say he had the money (it was
provided, she later told me, by Caroline Blackwood, his future wife). I rang
Freddie and said that Francis had managed to raise the money and would like
the picture back; he wanted to give it to Lucian Freud. Freddie said that
this was very sad for him because he had a client for the picture. I said I
was terribly sorry and I was, but I had no qualms: he hadn't been wanting to
keep the picture and he had almost doubled his money in a week.
Lucian proved to be a devoted owner. Though he was to sell
other Bacons he had bought or been given, he resisted every temptation to
sell this one, whatever the pressure of his spectacular gambling debts. He
did pawn it several times but always managed to redeem it. Francis was
extremely disappointed that he refused to lend it to the 1985 retrospective
at the Tate and, as a curator of the 1993 memorial exhibition in Venice, I
was extremely disappointed that he refused to lend it there. As to my own
Bacon, in 1955 I sold it to a friend for £350 to get ammunition to go racing
with.
Francis
Bacon 1909-1993 Small Portrait Studies, Marlborough Gallery, 6 Albemarle St,
W1 (071-629 5161), to 3 Dec.
Quotations extracted from 'Interviews with Francis Bacon'
by David Sylvester (Thames & Hudson). The author is currently working on
a critical study of Bacon.
Review: Francis
Bacon. Venice
JEREMY LEWISON | THE BURLINGTON
MAGAZINE | VOLUME 135, NUMBER 1088 | NOVEMBER, 1993
Francis Bacon's death in 1992 has
provoked a number of publications and exhibitions of varying merit. The most
impressive was David Sylvester's exhibition at the Musco Correr in Venice
(closed 10th October), mounted as part of this year's Biennale. It was small
but choice, and Sylvester, with his characteristically spare hanging – one work per wall – amply demonstrated that Bacon is
an artist of classical roots, his triptychs the equal of any renaissance
altar-piece in terms of their poise and equilibrium, their remoteness and
elevation, their scale and their finish and not least there thematic grandeur.
The
exhibition opened back to front with three triptychs of the late years vying
for attention with a black and white marble floor, an ornately carved frieze
and a cluster of chandeliers. If there was a weak point in the exhibition it
was this opening sequence. The richness of Bacon's paintings and frames
appeared excessive in this opulent but colourless setting, and problems of
reflection in the glass, evident throughout the show, here proved
insurmountable. These late triptychs are eloquent statements of Bacon's
continuing energy in later life, but they appear rather rhetorical alongside
the triptychs of the early 70s. The primal energy and rawness of the earlier
works has been replaced by a certain ironic distance, a cleanliness and a
clinicalness which diffuse their impact. They are grandes machines.
From this hall, with its embarrassing
richesse, the visitor mounted to the upper floor where the rest of the
exhibition was housed. Resisting the temptation to include more than one
papal scream, Sylvester hung the first room with works of a domestic scale,
mostly in black or grisaille and depicting heads or fragments of them, which
showed clear debts to Picasso, particularly to the screaming and weeping
figures of the Guernica period. (Bacon's debt to Picasso was tellingly
communicated by Herbert Read as early as 1933 in Art Now when he
reproduced Bacon's Crucifixion of 1933, alongside Picasso's Bathers of 1929).
A number of these paintings also showed an affinity with artists such as Jean
Fautrier, as David Mellor points out in his excellent essay in the
confusingly designed catalogue, and even to Jean Dubuffet. Fautrier's
Large tragic head, its features obliterated to express pain and despair, and
Dubuffet's strident portraits of friends and women of the late 40s and early
50s convey alternative expressions of anguish and horror, while in America
Willem de Kooning's series of women evoke a similar sense of violence and
violation. Such community of themes in the post-war period merits further
investigation for, as Mellor points out, Bacon's reputation as a unique
artist of singular vision, without influences or peers, can no longer be maintained.
Far from his reputation suffering at the hands of historians such as Mellor,
who have begun to look into the influences on Bacon's work, it will be
enhanced by our understanding of how he was able to appropriate, assimilate
and transform the images of other twentieth-century artists to achieve his
own powerful ends.
Among
the artists whom Mellor discusses as having had a bearing on Bacon's work are
Hogarth, G.F. Watts, W.R. Sickert, James Pryde, Roy de Maistre, Graham
Sutherland and Naum Gabo. Velázquez is, of course, another, but one artist
appears to be especially pertinent to an understanding of Bacon and that is
Ingres. This is particularly evident in Bacon's use of compressed and
confined spaces - one thinks for example of the 1863 portrait of Mme
Moitessier with its fattening mirror; his taste for luxuriant colour -
paralleled in, for example, Odalisque and slave or even the earlier portrait
of Mme Moitesserie with its rich, red background; his love of contoured
postures and distorted anatomies - of which Ingres's Turkish bath is a
paradigm; his evident enjoyment in painting flesh; his emphasis on simple,
unitary compositions - here one might recall the three paintings of the
Riviere family and compare them with, say, Triptych August 1972; and finally,
but not least important, his desire to paint subjects relating to the
Classics. Ingres's Oedipus and the Sphinx, to which Bacon paid homage in his
own painting of 1983 (not in the exhibition), must surely have made an
impact on Bacon at an earlier period, not only for its conjunction of a nude
with a being half-human half-beast, but for the seemingly distanced and
dispassionate atmosphere evoked by the painting. What comes across clearly in
this exhibition is that however 'hot' the subject of a painting by Bacon, and
however expressive the paint surface, his pared down environments and his
insistence on hiding the canvas behind a sheet of glass reduces the
temperature, smoothes out the impasto and distances the viewer from an active
participation in the events before him. Thus the death of George Dyer is
perceived as no more horrific than a portrait, and although a sense of grief
is evoked it is without sentiment. Through the simplicity of his
compositions, the concentration of forms, the sometimes restricted range of
tones and the physical barrier of the glass, Bacon prohibits the viewer from
entering the drama and renders the action remote and enobled. Horror and
violence are are aggrandised and exalted to an heroic level, beyond the
worldly, in the manner of a history painting, and although Bacon's violence
has been much commented on, it is, however, mitigated by the sensuousness of
the paint handling, the contrast between between thick impasto, suggesting
viscera, and smooth sweeping brushstrokes of thinned paint, representing a
fleshy perfection. The poses of some of Bacon's protagonists - for example
the reclining nude in the centre panel of Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962)
recall Ingres's odalisques while others others suggest variations on academic
nudes, although rudely exposed, can be as seductive as many a
nineteenth-century painting. Bacon is a painter of the grand manner.
Throughout the exhibition, less obvious
affinities with a number of twentieth-century artists came to mind. The solitary
nature of many of Bacon's figures recalls the isolation of Edward Hopper's
characters; the background of the left and right panels of Triptych 1974
called to mind the Ocean Park paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, while the
right panel of Three studies of a crucifixion (1962) suggested a
possible link to Marcel Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase and
related paintings. The curious combination of David Hockney, Paul Nash and
Giorgio de Chirico was summoned up by Sand dune (1981) and Jet of
water (1988; Fig.56) in the last room, while Mark Rothko was
invoked not only by the nineteenth-century sense of elevated heroism
found in many of Bacon's works but also by the use of sombre colours of
extraordinary depth in paintings such as Triptych May June 1973 and
even Second version of Triptych 1944 (1988). It is no coincidence that
both Bacon and Rothko painted 'mythological' images during the Second World
War. While Bacon continued to develop a figurative idiom, Rothko pursued
'tragic and timeless' subject matter in an abstract manner. Essentially,
however, they were both painters of the human condition.
In general the exhibition was hung
chronologically, the occasional painting surfacing out of order
sometimes to telling effect, as with the Portrait of Michel Leiris
(1976; Fig.57) juxtaposed with two two versions of Study for
portrait (1955) and Three studies of the human head (1953), where
the portrait of Leiris acts as a marker for Bacon's later development and
refinement and, rather extraordinary, evokes the special contortions and
volumes of some of the sculptures of Naum Gabo. Indeed the excavation of the
body and and the sculptural rendering of its interior in, for example,
the middle panel of the Triptych inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus
(1981), suggests that Gabo may have been more than passing interest.
Considering Bacon's interest in modernist design in the 30s this may not be
altogether surprising. While Picasso is often cited as the origin of
Bacon's contorted faces, Gabo's interest in space needs to be taken into
account. There is a great deal of work to be done on the overlap between the
figurative work of Bacon and contemporary abstract painting and sculpture.
A less successful chronological
interruption was the inclusion of Figure in a landscape (1945) among
paintings from the fifties. Although its surface texture has some
similarities to works of this decade its subject is more diffuse and its tone
considerably brighter. Sylvester indicates in the catalogue that the source
for this picture was a snapshot of Bacon's lover, Eric Hall, dozing on a
chair in Hyde Park, but the conjunction of an arm with what appears to be a
chair back or railing, the dark area immediately beside the figure - not to
mention the machine gun (for which, possibly substitute umbrella) - suggests
Manet's Balcony as a further source.
The hanging of this exhibition allowed
for concentration on individual works and close comparisons between no more
than three works at a time. In his division of the long gallery into chapels,
Sylvester recreated the sense of containment found within Bacon's painting,
allowing for an intensification of experience. The concision of the show
unequivocally demonstrated Bacon's status as one of the great British artists
of this century, an artist capable of working grand themes on a grand scale.
A larger show might have dissipated this impression for it cannot be
denied that Bacon's work is uneven in quality. A glance at the catalogue for
the exhibition held earlier this year at Lugano proves the point. Bacon found
a successful formula but he was at his greatest when he rose above the
formulaic.
Bacon's first major exposure outside
Britain was at the 1954 Venice Biennale when he shared the British Pavilion
with Ben Nicholson and Lucian Freud. Nicholson was granted senior status and
given the greatest number of rooms, but Bacon was allocated the large first
room, much to Nicholson's annoyance, because the British Council felt that
Bacon's work, seen first, would make a greater impact. Although neither Bacon
nor Freud had the success of Nicholson that year, in 1993 Bacon has stolen
the show.
JEREMY LEWISON
Tate Gallery
DEEP
INTO THAT DARKNESS PEERING
PETER PARKER | WASHINGTON
POST | DECEMBER 26, 1993
At the time of his death in April 1992,
Francis Bacon was widely considered the greatest British painter of the
century. He was a grand master in the style of Rembrandt and Velazquez, with
a style and subject matter entirely his own. He declared that he painted for
himself and that it was the act of painting, not what happened to the
canvases thereafter, that drove him on. What happened to many canvases was
that they were sold for large amounts of money, but Bacon (who had known real
poverty in his time) remained uncorrupted by wealth, for he was one of the
last Bohemians.
A familiar figure in the pubs, drinking
clubs and restaurants of London's Soho and Fitzrovia, he was an importunate
host who almost always insisted upon paying for everyone, peeling off
banknotes from the fat rolls of them he customarily carried in his pockets.
He drank vast amounts of champagne and was a profligate gambler. Flamboyantly
homosexual, with a taste for rough trade, he would tell people that his lover
and model George Dyer had entered his life through a bedroom window, intent
upon burglary.
In spite of the appalling images he
produced in his paintings - figures, often mutilated, eviscerated or
deformed, portrayed in bleak, mute isolation, or raging against the world and
what it had done to them - Bacon proclaimed that he was an
"optimist." At one moment he would say that he was painting
"the history of Europe in my lifetime," at another furiously deny
that his work was in any way illustrational. Any biography of Bacon needs to
explore these contradictions and the apparent gulf between the man who was
such amusing company and the artist who produced the bleakest and most
disturbing paintings of our age.
Novelist
and social historian Andrew Sinclair, as he freely admits, is no art critic;
neither, unfortunately, is he much of a biographer. He defines his job as
"to explain the interaction between an individual and his times,"
but all too often he is so busy colouring in the background that Bacon simply
disappears from view. Much of the social history he provides is irrelevant
and seems little more than padding: the overall impression left by this book
is of someone diligently leafing through files of newspaper clippings and the
indexes of biographies of the period in search of Bacon, Francis. In spite of such
endeavours, Sinclair's actual quarry seems to elude him, except in the
briefEndpiece, which provides a summary more succinct and valuable than
anything that has gone before.
Bacon had said that he did not want a
biography written about him while he was still alive. Consequently, as soon
as he died, the race was on, with several writers, who had been circling
impatiently at the starting line, galloping off into the distance. In
England, Sinclair passed the finishing post almost neck and neck with Daniel
Farson, whose The Gilded Gutter
Life of Francis Bacon, an unashamedly personal memoir, provides an altogether
livelier and more evocative account of its subject.
Sinclair's biography shows every sign of
haste, both in the writing and editing, with the frequent repetition of
information and numerous inelegancies of style. For example, of Bacon's
famous Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, first exhibited in April 1945, Sinclair
writes: "It seemed to howl against the massacre of the twenty million
dead and more in the conflict, just as the nation was about to celebrate a
victory that seemed to be justice." Strenuous attempts at fine writing
frequently go awry, as in the nonsensical assertion that: "There was
more wit on one hair of Bacon's paintbrush than in all the saliva on {Brian}
Howard's loose tongue." Occasionally one realizes that Sinclair cannot
really mean what he has written. "So radical, disruptive, seminal and
real were Bacon's paintings," he states at one point, "that he
would achieve what the Auden Communist group of the 'thirties dreamed of: an
exhibition of pictures in Moscow, seen there as revolutionary protests
against religious authority and the destruction of humankind." Just what
sort of pictures Auden and his friends dreamed of exhibiting in Moscow is not
explained: their own?
Many chapters bear portentous or simply meaningless
titles. Chapter 8, The Blood of an Englishman, is prefaced by a quote
from King Lear and opens: "Like the wise Edgar pretending to
play the Fool - Fie, Foh, and Fum - Bacon was to smell the blood of two of
his beloved British men within ten years of their deaths." Is Sinclair
suggesting that Edgar prophecies the deaths of his father and Lear - the
words he uses, after all, are those of a ravening, cannibalistic giant - and,
if so, how does this relate to Bacon? If Sinclair means that Bacon in some
way predicted the deaths of Dyer and his predecessor Peter Lacy, he does not
say so. If he does not mean this, then what is the burden of this sentence?
As with rather too much of his overwritten book, the answer would appear to
be: sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Portrait
of a Portraitist
Of
a Century's Horrors
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | TUESDAY, DECEMBER 14, 1993
The images created by Francis Bacon are
shocking ones, visceral, contorted, often horrific: Human beings
metamorphosing into demonic birds and dogs, their bodies twisted unmercifully
into grimaces of pain. Shrieking popes imprisoned in golden cages, unleashing
primal screams upon a world incapable of hearing. Copulating men writhing on
a bed, their fat, pink limbs melting together in a desperate, meaty embrace.
Ragged, butchered carcasses dangling from a ceiling, leaking blood onto a
ghoulish man in a suit.
In such images can be read the horrors of our
century: the devastation of two world wars, the crimes of Hitler and Stalin,
the terrors of the atom bomb, the dislocations of a world shorn of its
illusions. As Bacon once observed, his ambition was to paint "the
History of Europe in my lifetime." "I think of myself," he
said, "as a kind of pulverizing machine into which everything I look at
and feel is fed."
In Francis
Bacon: His Life and Violent Times, the writer and social historian Andrew
Sinclair attempts both to chronicle the painter's life and to situate his
work within a historical context. Though the volume relies heavily at times
on earlier books (including David Sylvester's fascinating Interviews With Francis Bacon and John Russell's Francis Bacon), it
also draws upon the author's own talks with the painter, and it succeeds in
giving the reader a vivid sense of both Bacon's maturation as a painter and
the ways in which his work was shaped by his times.
Although Bacon was born to a wealthy Irish
family - he was a collateral descendant of his namesake, the famous
Elizabethan philosopher - his childhood was rootless and fearful, indelibly
shaped by the Zeppelin bombings of London in World War I and the countryside
atrocities of the Irish civil war. Mr. Sinclair argues that the blackouts,
which shrouded daily life in ominous, murky shadows, informed Bacon's
portraits in which "distorted figures would emerge from a fearful night,
as sudden and grotesque as the strangers glimpsed in the dim streets" of
wartime London. Similar parallels can be drawn between the lynched bodies the
young Bacon saw during the Irish rebellion and his later preoccupation with
the idea of crucifixion, and the image of butchered meat.
Bacon's willful flouting of authority -
mirrored in his fierce deconstructionist portraits of popes, dictators and
businessmen - also had roots in his childhood. According to Mr. Sinclair, it
was a reaction to the religious authorities, both Protestant and Catholic,
who seemed to have condemned Ireland to bloodshed, and to Bacon's censorious
father, who regarded him as a weak, asthmatic sissy and who banished him from
the house at the age of 16.
With an allowance of £3 a week, the young
Bacon began a peripatetic life in London, moving from one rented room to
another, until a distant relative took him on a trip to Berlin.
There, in the waning days of the Weimar
Republic, Bacon was introduced to a sexually licentious life style, and to
the work of artists who would indelibly shape his own vision. From Edvard
Munch and the German Expressionists, Mr. Sinclair notes, Bacon would learn
about the iconography of emotional violence; from Otto Dix, Christian Schad
and other practitioners of New Objectivity, he would learn the value of
precision and detachment.
Paris, the next stop on Bacon's youthful
odyssey, provided another set of influences: Picasso and his Cubist
reassemblings of the human body, and the Surrealists, with their emphasis on
instinct and the unconscious. It was also in Paris that Bacon came to
appreciate the cinematic genius of Eisenstein and Bunuel, and to value the
art of photography (he would base many of his later paintings on Eadweard
Muybridge's action shots of animals and people in motion).
Although Bacon began painting in London in
the early 1930's under the mentorship of Roy de Maistre, who was also his
lover, he did not come into his own until the death of his father in 1940.
Liberated from the inhibiting memory of his harsh, judgmental progenitor and
galvanized by the bloody events of World War II, Bacon embarked on the
ferocious paintings - including Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Painting 1946 and a series of frightening Heads - that would begin to earn him a
reputation as one of Britain's foremost painters.
Throughout this book, Mr. Sinclair doggedly
traces the autobiographical impulse in Bacon's work. He does a nimble job of
explicating the many influences on his work, from Goya and Velazquez to
Aeschylus and T. S. Eliot, and he also provides an ample supply of colourful
anecdotes illustrating the painter's raucous, bohemian life. We are told
about Bacon's taste for raffish, lower-class lovers, his penchant for gambling
and his almost complete disregard for money.
Along the way, a lot of adjectives are
offered up to describe Bacon: generous, chameleon-like, waspish, passionate
and reckless. We're also told that he was a dandy, an existentialist and a
nihilist. None of these words, however, really conjures up a full picture of
the man; as far as this volume is concerned, Bacon, who died in 1992 at the
age of 82, remains a slippery, mercurial figure, eluding capture in the
biographer's cage. It is in evoking Bacon's tumultuous times and tracing the
conjunctions between the painter's work and world that Mr. Sinclair is most
convincing. Indeed, he makes a powerful case in these pages for regarding
Bacon as a representative artist of the violent and disordered modern age.
Francis
Bacon His Life and Violent Times By
Andrew Sinclair Illustrated. 354 pages. Crown Publishers.
Raw
slice of artist Bacon’s
life
GERARD O'REGAN | IRISH
INDEPENDENT WEEKENDER | SATURDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 1994
FRANCIS
Bacon, the Dublin-born artist of genius, died in Madrid in April, 1992, and
almost exactly a year later came a biography which aroused much controversy,
mainly because it was written by one of his close friends.
Not that friendship, as
such, ever rated very high on Bacon's list of priorities. "I've always
thought of friendship as where two people tear each other apart - that way
you learn something from each other," he once wrote.
The book, The Gilded
Gutter Life of Francis Bacon,
by Daniel Farson, is now out in paperback (Vintage £6.99). While not
pretending to be the definitive "life", it nevertheless makes for
compulsive reading.
It was back in 1951 when a 23-year-old Farson first met
Bacon in Soho. The artist was by then in his late 40s - but it was the
beginning of a long-running friendship.
Bacon's early life in Co Kildare, where his father owned a
stud farm, is sketched in detail. After London he drifted to Berlin,
indulging in a sexual freedom which fortified his instinct to flout
convention of practically any hue.
Farson's incidental and anecdotal style makes the book more
of a personal memoir than an autobiography in the strict sense of the term.
But it is also an approach which makes for high readability.
The author suggests that Bacon's unabashed homosexuality
was a crucible in his artistic make-up. "If he's been straight, he would
not have been so daring," commented one of his friends.
Yet Bacon's savage sense of nihilism was at times almost
frightening "I have never had any love in the whole of my life, and
what's more I don't want any. Al I do is cast my rod in the sewers of despair
and see what I come up with," he once wrote.
Tragedy and a sense of indulgent despair haunted much of
Bacon's life, as well as his work, and to the end he indulged what might be
termed "low life" to a near manic degree.
Former British Arts Minister David Mellor provided one of
the best reviews of a book which describes the life and turbulent times of a
man widely regarded as one of the century's greatest artists.
He wrote: "This book will shock some people a lot and
almost everybody a bit. It deals, I suspect, with people and events far
removed from the common experience of most of those who will read it" -
a fact that few, as they will stagger through all the drink, all the gay sex,
and some of the bloody and violent deaths, will regret.
Francis
Bacon — never
thought highly of friendship
Unleashing a 'Human Cry'
FRANCIS BACON: His Life and
Violent Times,
By Andrew Sinclair (Crown
$30; 354 pp)
THE GILDED GUTTER LIFE OF
FRANCIS BACON,
By Daniel Farson (Pantheon $25; 293 pp)
JEFFREY HOGREFE | LOS ANGELES TIMES | APRIL 10, 1994
After dinner in private houses,
Princess Margaret likes to sing Cole Porter. As sister of the most powerful
monarch in the world, she can generally hold guests captive to her lack of
ability. One night, though, at a fancy ball given by Ann, Lady Rothermere
(later Mrs. Ian Fleming), the princess began the familiar lyrics of
"Let's Do It," when the cheering of Queen Elizabeth's subjects was
drowned out by the sound of booing rumbling like thunder from the back of the
ballroom. Unaccustomed to criticism, the princess abandoned the microphone,
the band stopped playing, and Lady Rothermere's guests asked what happened.
"It
was that dreadful Francis Bacon," a man said to Lady Caroline Lowell.
"He calls himself a painter but he does the most frightful paintings. I
just don't understand how a creature like him was allowed to get in
here."
Inarguably the most original
20th-Century British artist, a creature like Francis Bacon gave a new twist
to horror. His work has been equated with the pain and suffering of the 20th
Century. These are paintings of writhing, corpulent wrestlers, blood-soaked
Crucifixions and caged, screaming popes: "slimy, slithering, pure blind
images," in the words of novelist and art historian Anita Brookner. As
recently as 1989, one of the artist's paintings brought a bid of $6.2 million
dollars at Sotheby's in New York, and they are found in great collections
worldwide.
But
Bacon's real fascination judging from two books that have appeared since he
died at the age of 82 in 1992, is in the accumulation of Jacobean antics that
colored the artist's life. Bacon was openly gay--part gnome, part
mischief-maker--"taking no part in society's rituals, observing none of
the canons or taboos," according to Andrew Sinclair, a British novelist
and social historian, in "Francis Bacon His Life and Violent
Times," the first complete biography. This has been augmented by
"The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon," a thoroughly
entertaining memoir by Daniel Farson, a British art critic and friend of the
subject.
He was born in 1909 in Dublin to Edward
Bacon, a major in the British army who was a collateral relation of the
Elizabeth philosopher, his namesake, and Christine Winifred Firth, whose
family owned one of the largest Georgian houses in the center of the Irish
capital. Shunted between relatives during outbreaks of the Irish Civil War,
an asthmatic who turned purple the first time he rode with the hunt, his
disruptive upbringing consisted of private tutorials with a priest and a
truncated year of boarding school. A gambler and alcoholic who unsuccessfully
operated a racing stable outside of Dublin, Edward Bacon was, "a
complete bastard," according to his famous son, a sissy who was
encouraged by his mother to dress up in her clothes. Francis was introduced
to sex by stable grooms who worked for his father. In turn, as punishment he
was routinely horsewhipped by the same stable grooms in front of his father.
At 16, he was finally expelled from this twisted setting when caught dressed
only in his mother's underwear, but he never forgot the pain of his
childhood. "Surely there's nothing worse," he said, according to
Sinclair, "than a dusty saddle appearing in the hall."
When Bacon arrived in London in 1925, as
Sullivan observed, his "violent upbringing curiously prepared him for
life in the jungles of large cities." Relying on published material and
one interview with the subject, Sullivan's many observations attempt to
integrate the "homosexual milieu" with the subject. Slightly more
than 25 years after Oscar Wilde was convicted on charges of gross indecency,
homosexuality was still a punishable criminal act in Great Britain, and open
gays, by virtue of their lawlessness, often lived alongside criminals.
Entering this Faustian world, the young artist supplemented an allowance of 3
pounds per week from his mother with proceeds from theft, gambling and
prostitution. "One is always helped when one is young," he said
airily, according to Sinclair, "I was what you call pretty. I had no
trouble getting around and getting money."
In 1933, Bacon exhibited a startling painting
of a bloody Crucifixion at a gallery in London. It was an immediate success,
illustrated in Art Now, an influential journal. With no formal training, his
art was nurtured in the great museums and galleries of Berlin and Paris on a
junket to Europe with a "sporting uncle." Like many artists at this
time, his first influence was Pablo Picasso, but a viewing of Nicolas
Poussin's "The Massacre of Innocence," led the artist to realize he
too could capture "the human cry" in paint. Although his avowed
influences were also Francisco Goya and Diego de Velazquez, it was the
Expressionism of Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh that gave his early work
its raw power.
Bacon's patrons were inducted into a
mysterious world of decadence. Farson knew this world as a firsthand
participant, and he brings refreshing immediacy to the subject. The artist
lived with his elderly nanny, an eccentric Victorian who slept on the kitchen
table during the day. She startled visitors by calling out for capital punishment
for the Duchess of Windsor. For the crime of stealing the King of England she
wanted to see her drawn and quartered in a public gibbet in Marble Arch. At
night, "Nan" doubled as a hat check girl in an illegal gambling den
in the artist's paint-spattered studio under a pair of enormous crystal
chandeliers. Dressed in black leather jacket and boots, the artist appeared
to his gaming guests with liquid make-up caked to his beard and Kiwi boot
black in his hair, sometimes only in a set of elaborate garters supporting
black fishnet stockings. "I am looking for a cruel father," he
admitted matter-of-factly, according to Sinclair.
Both authors make the connection between the
release of new power in his art and the death of his father in 1940. This was
first seen in a 1945 exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, of "Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion." With the horrors of
Nagasaki and Dachau resting uneasily on people's minds, according to art
critic John Russell, people looking at the painting were "brought up
short by images so unrelievably awful that the mind shut with a snap at the
sight of them."
The Expressionism of his youth was eventually
supplanted by a more sophisticated neo-mannerism during the 1950s. Using
Velazquez's portraits of Pope Innocent X as a springboard, Bacon turned out
exquisitely styled paintings of purple screaming popes trapped in golden
cages. Though he had been taught by Catholic priests, the artist refused to
have his work linked to anti-religious sentiment, and resisted other obvious
interpretations. They were personal, he said, as were his images of twisted
wrestlers, which it was interesting to learn came directly from a
19th-Century photograph by Eadweard Muybridge he discovered in the Victoria
& Albert Museum. Of the wrestlers, Sinclair presents a flimsy argument
that Bacon, "saw images of aggressive homosexuality and used them to
produced paintings that mocked the moral code and subverted the criminal law
of the time."
Bacon saw himself as a
grand artiste, a divinely inspired purist with links to the Renaissance,
reacting to forces beyond the petty concerns of day-to-day living. Trying to
force him into a mold as a moral guardian for a gay movement, as Sinclair
does, is irritating and wrong-headed. Far better it would seem to merely take
Farson's unjudgmental position, and join in the celebration of the
high-spirited mischief-maker always thumbing his nose at convention, whose
searing honesty and standards of perfection were sometimes painful for the
recipient to bear.
"Someone had to stop her," the
artist explained candidly to Lady Lowell after he took the unheard of step of
booing a member of the royal family in a private home and stopped Princess
Margaret cold. "Her singing was really too awful. If you are going to do
something, you shouldn't do it as badly as that."
Bacon's
screaming pope for sale
DALYA ALBERGE | ART
MARKET CORRESPONDENT | THE
INDEPENDENT | THURSDAY APRIL 21,
1994
ONE OF the most famous works by Francis
Bacon, widely considered the greatest British master since Turner, is to be
sold by Christie's this summer for an estimated pounds 2m. It is one of the
few important Bacons likely to appear at auction.
Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by
Velazquez, his violent image of a screaming pope, was painted in 1959. It was
the culmination of a series of reinterpretations of Velazquez's original,
which Bacon described as 'one of the greatest paintings in the world'; it was
an image that 'haunted and obsessed (him) . . . by its perfection'.
His sources also included a contemporary
photograph of Pope Pius XII, a blurred photograph of a baboon, and the
wounded face of the nurse from the 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. Bacon's
distorted imagery in the Popes series reflects his obsession with the pain
and bleakness of existence.
Bacon, who died in 1992, was not a prolific
artist, and only a handful of works come on to the market each year. He is
one of the few British painters bought by international collectors. In the
Fifties, his works could be acquired for just pounds 300. In 1990, a Bacon
sold for pounds 3.75m in New York. He was unsentimental about his paintings
and cared little about the millions they made. In 1991, Bacon told the Independent that if he could have his way,
his figurative work would not have any titles. He said: 'I don't think it's a
way into a painting.' By prefixing a description with the words 'study for',
he intended to imply that the composition was not a final statement.
Christie's auction takes place on 30 June.
Obituary: Ian Board
CHRISTOPHER HOWSE | INDEPENDENT |
MONDAY 27 JUNE 1994
IAN
BOARD, the successor to Muriel Belcher as the proprietor of the Colony Room
Club, in Soho, was distinguished as much by the peculiarities of his
appearance as by the pungency of his speech.
Muriel
Belcher, who founded the Colony Room, in Dean Street, in 1948, was famous for
the foul- mouthed greeting she gave to visitors to her afternoon drinking
club. Board's line in talk was no less obscene, but tended towards a
sustained stream of enraged invective, usually directed towards a stranger or
someone who exhibited signs of weakness, such as drunkenness. 'Look at you,
you great lump,' he would shout at some unsuspecting woman. 'Just take a look
at yourself. You're a sad and pathetic sight. For fuck's sake pull yourself
together . . .' - and so on, in great sweeping periods of abuse.
By his
mid-fifties Board's nose had swollen under the influence of brandy to a great
red pitted ball, like a giant strawberry. He would dress in a bright green
floppy cap and green tracksuit, and outside would often carry a stick, since
he had hurt a leg and his back in falls.
The club
is housed in a small, dark upstairs room, painted racing green, and heavily
hung with pictures, photographs and mirrors, a survival from the Fifties.
Until the change in the licensing laws in 1988, 'Muriel's' was particularly
popular between 3pm and 5.30pm, with Thursday afternoon the busiest time
before the grander members left for the country the succeeding day. Board
would perch on the high stool at one corner of the bar, on the customers'
side, where Muriel had always sat. Her capacious handbag hung from the
ceiling near one window, and on her birthday he would buy drinks in her
memory.
Ian David
Archibald Board, whom only his closest associates dared call by his nickname
'Ida', came from a poor family in Exeter. His mother died before he was five.
He cared neither for his father nor for his stepmother. Escaping to London as
a teenager, he went straight to Speakers' Corner and picked up a man, with
whom he lived for some weeks. After a time he became a commis waiter at a
restaurant in Greek Street, Soho. He retained something of his Devon accent,
and in the style of his region put the letter 'l' at the end of words ending
in a vowel: tomorrowl, dildol.
For all
his crude talk, Board could sometimes display, and certainly appreciated,
verbal wit. Woe betide anyone who tried to tell a formal joke. 'I can't stand
jokes]' he would yell. 'Shut your cakehole, you boring dreary fart.'
Board's
continued survival under the assaults of drink was a source of wonder. He
would go without food for days, then eat a cold tin of ravioli in the small
hours of the morning. In his 60th year he gave up drinking brandy for
breakfast. He drank vodka in the morning at home and from noon to 11pm more
vodka and brandy at the club.
Board
treasured the patronage of famous artists - Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud,
Michael Andrews, Barry Flanagan - though in truth their visits became rarer
or stopped. One night he bundled Francis Bacon, then nearly 80, out of the
door, shouting, 'Get out] Call yourself a painter. You can't fucking paint.
Take your boring friends with you and don't bother coming back.' But he did.
Board
was attracted by success. He was delighted to find that the girl who had
taken to drinking in the Colony on her visits to London was the singer Lisa
Stansfield, and went to visit her in her home in Rochdale. The return train
journey was enlivened by a mother with a baby that kept on crying. Board,
infuriated by the noise, and by the strong drink he had taken that morning,
asked the woman why she did not chuck the 'thing' out of the window. A
policeman was on the platform to meet him on his arrival in London.
In 1991
the Colony's existence was threatened by a planning application from its
landlord to turn it into offices. Hundreds of objections were sent to
Westminster Council, largely through the organisational efforts of Michael
Wojas, Board's loyal barman. The planning meeting was swamped by dozens of
Colony Room Club members looking strangely pale in the unaccustomed daylight.
The application was refused.
It is
odd that despite Board's personal unattractiveness the club inspired such
widespread affection. But it was certainly a backwater of a disappearing
Soho, where men and women from all social backgrounds (there were a couple of
dukes and a couple of stagehands who turned up regularly) could talk and
drink and laugh. With the death of Ian Board that world has shrunk a little
more.
Ian
David Archibald Board, club owner: born 16 December 1929; proprietor, Colony
Room Club 1981-94; died London 26 June 1994.
Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self
The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times
Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel
Archimbaud
Bacon Book Reviews by Faye Hirsch
FAYE HIRSCH | ART
IN AMERICA | DECEMBER
1994
"One's basic nature is totally without hope, and yet one's
nervous system is made out of optimistic stuff," Francis Bacon told
David Sylvester in the early '70s.[1] Bacon died of asthma in spring 1992 at
the age of 82, after a life so prodigal that only a high degree of optimism -
and no doubt some sturdy genes - could account for his longevity. The artist
also worked assiduously, starting at six or seven o'clock most mornings, he
asserted, in spite of the hangovers that were the aftermath of his late-night
carousals with the luminaries and drifters of his milieu. "What is
called inspiration," said Bacon, "only comes from regular
work."[2] This combination of profligacy and hard work provides a tough
precedent dent for artists whose nervous systems aren't quite up to snuff.
And it certainly makes one curious about the man. The Sylvester interviews -
surely among the best we have with a 20th-century artist - and Bacon's
several appearances on film have given us a taste of what he was like - his
wit, his cynicism. "When he entered a room," writes Daniel Farson,
"it was an occasion." Bacon refused to sanction a biography during
his lifetime, but since his death two - Farson's The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon and Andrew Sinclair's Francis Bacon: His Life and
Violent Times - have already appeared, and more are promised.[3]
The challenge for any artist's biographer is to formulate some
meaningful nexus between the available data about the artist's life and his
or her work. There is always a temptation to read the contours of a life into
the visual imagery, and with Bacon that temptation is especially strong.
Despite his repeated disavowal of the "illustrational" in his
paintings, he frequently painted his friends and lovers - Isabel Rawsthorne,
Lucian Freud, George Dyer, John Edwards, Sylvester, et al. He also led an
eventful and, at times, violent existence that seems to have its correlative
in his violent iconography. But, no matter how allusive the imagery seems,
one must be wary of drawing too literal a connection. The Farson and Sinclair
biographies of Bacon and Ernst van Alphen's Francis Bacon and the
Loss of Self, a study of Bacon's paintings, raise the question of whether
there is some middle ground between an approach that sees the artist's work
as an illustration of his life and times, and one that entirely eliminates
biographical material from consideration of the work. Genet wrote of
Rembrandt, "a hopeless complicity linked his eye to the world."[4]
But deducing the nature of that complicity can be a tricky matter.
Sinclair's biography is written with the apparent conviction that the
subject, his times, and his work are discernibly linked. The author says he
had only sporadic direct conversations with Bacon, one in depth in 1988; a
fresh tone, then, is not the chief virtue of this biography. Still, though he
may not have had an ongoing relationship with Bacon - as opposed to Farson,
whose work is engaging precisely because of his 40-year friendship with the
artist - Sinclair consulted numerous friends and relations and did thorough
research, fleshing out his account with the type of second-hand material that
is missing from Farson's account. The same basics are presented by both
biographers: Bacon's childhood among the lower aristocracy in Ireland, where
he was the son of a Protestant military officer in service to England, and
later a horse trainer; his youthful adventures in Weimar Germany; his
bohemian escapades in London's Soho and in Tangier.
Bacon's education was sporadic, his antipathy to academies unwavering.
He returned to Ireland only rarely after leaving home as a teenager, when he
was banished by his father for dressing up in women's clothing. He remembered
being horse whipped by his father's grooms at his father's behest; some
connect this experience, justifiably or not, to his later sadomasochist bent
(Bacon himself confessed that there was a sexual dimension to his paternal
attachment).(5) After drifting about in London, he was sent to Berlin under
the "protection" of one of his father's friends, a "sporting
uncle," as Bacon called him, with whom he plunged into the seediest
aspects of Weimar nightlife. When he returned to England, by way of Paris,
where he was awed by the work of Picasso, Bacon came under the protection of
the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. By the late '20s he was designing furniture,
but he had also begun to paint, and a reproduction of an early crucifixion by
him was included in Herbert Read's Art Now of 1993. Success
was not to come steadily until after April 1945, when his Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion appeared in a
group show at Lefevre Gallery in London along with works by other British
artists, including Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland (the latter was one of
the many friends with whom he would subsequently fall out).
Bacon did, of course, live through dramatic times, and Sinclair often
crams any gaps in biographical information with verbose descriptions of
events of the period and the artist's surroundings. His long excursuses
provide backdrops, but little recommends these descriptions over any other
of, say, London during the Blitz or Ireland during the Sinn Fein rebellion.
Often such events are used to explain, none too subtly, Bacon's artistic
sensibility or to prefigure the appearance of specific details in his
paintings. About a 1950 sea voyage the artist made to visit his sister in
South Africa, Sinclair writes: "On his voyage, the white iron railings
of the old liners with their polished wooden tops would have given, with
their oblong definitions, a restraint and a cage to the violence of the
living sea and the chaotic wake" - laboured way to describe a simple
ship railing, but this railing was contemplated by Bacon, who tended to
include railings as frames within his paintings. All of Bacon's world, as
seen through Sinclair's eyes, is made of such details, as if the paintings
are somehow a distillation of that world. And working in reverse as well,
Sinclair discerns in Bacon's paintings innumerable metaphors for contemporary
existence: "The umbrella represented the dark halo of the modem age, the
poison cloud of the nuclear threat from the air, its ribs spread like the
black lines of sound in Munch's The Cry." Sinclair, a
self-proclaimed "social historian," thus transforms art into a
mirror of history.
Farson, by contrast, neither fantasizes about Bacon's subjective
experiences, nor attempts to write art history. His is an anecdotal,
sometimes self-promoting but always appealing account of the man. Farson
knows first-hand the underworld Bacon frequented, and was eyewitness to
numerous astonishing encounters. He skillfully recalls dialogue and minute
gestures: Bacon tugging on his collar as he delivers a stinging bon mot, the
unique impression Bacon made on others:
It was nearly one o'clock when [John] Deakin gave a stage whisper:
"I think, kiddo, this is going to be one of the good days. Look who's
just come in." Opening his mouth in that grimace of a well-meant smile,
he nodded to a man on the far side of the bar who now came over to join us.
He walked with the cautious tread of a first-class passenger venturing out on
deck in a high sea, or that of a man who suspects there might be a small
earthquake at any moment. This was my first sight of Francis Bacon; he was
laughing already.
Farson does not disguise his adulation of the man ("I doubt if he
was the greatest man I have known, but he was the most extraordinary").
Although objectivity may not be Farson's strong point, he does vividly
recount instances of the cruelty of Bacon, who could be ruthless to friends,
artists and critics, not to mention anyone with unattractive pretenses.
(Farson describes Bacon's rude jeering at Princess Margaret when she gave an
extemporaneous recital of Cole Porter songs at a party they were both
attending. "Someone had to stop her," Bacon said afterwards.)
Farson's picture is not always pretty - one dark chapter begins with
vignettes of alcohol-sodden deaths (Bacon's was a quintessentially pickled
circle and another, about Bacon's relationship with the pianist Peter Lacy,
includes accounts of Lacy's having slashed Bacon's canvases and inflicted
weals on the artist's back. Although Farson might to some degree be accused
of sensationalism, Bacon did lead a sensational life. ("Seduire c'est
tout," said Bacon to Farson.)
Admittedly, Farson's enterprise is less
ambitious than Sinclair's, and his genre as much memoir as biography. The
memoir, unlike biography, can risk seeming tainted by vanity, since the
memorialist claims a privileged relationship with the deceased. And, indeed,
Parson does not entirely avoid this pitfall. He includes, for instance, an
abridged transcript of a television interview he did in 1958 with Bacon for a
program called The
Art Game. Since the film of this interview was subsequently
lost, one wonders if Farson's intention here is not primarily to claim
precedence over Sylvester's (and others') later interviews. Drawing on the
film's "continuity sheets" for dialogue, he shows himself eliciting
remarks on several of Bacon's most famous themes some years before Sylvester
did, For example, in 1962, Bacon told Sylvester that his painting was
"an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system
more violently and more poignantly." But four years earlier, according
to Farson, Bacon had rhetorically asked, "How can I . . . present what
is called the living sensation more nearly on the nervous system and more
violently?" And although, in 1966, Bacon said to Sylvester, "I did
hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry," eight years before
he had already told Farson that "one of the things I wanted to do was to
record the human cry, and that in itself is something sensational."
There are similar expressions, as well, of Bacon's views of happiness and
love, of optimism as the reverse side of "the shadow" - that is,
mortality, and of his opinion of abstract art, particularly action painting,
as mere "decoration."
Thus,
Farson's belated transcription of his interview is nearly superfluous.
Furthermore, much of the incidental dialogue elsewhere in Farson's book is so
wonderfully recalled that many parts of it feel like very richly embellished
interviews, in which characters and props have been added for emphasis. Even
Farson's digressions into his own life or those of others in the Soho circles
- photographer John Deakin's, for instance - nicely work to make the milieu
come to life. This vitality is precisely what Sinclair's text lacks; in spite
of his book's title, Bacon's fife and times in Sinclair's version seem too
remote, too abstract to be of compelling interest.
By the time Michel Archimbaud interviewed Bacon in French in 1991-92,
there were few new revelations. Francis Bacon: In Conversation with
Michel Archimbaud, recently published in translation by Phaidon in an
attractive paperback, is little more than an addendum to the incomparable
Sylvester interviews, which are still in print. But Archimbaud's are the
final formal interviews, with some insights to offer. The artist repeats his
views on Eisenstein's Potemkin, on Velazquez, and on the subject
of chance; but he also makes quite specific remarks about a wide range of
artists from Degas and van Gogh to Warhol and Klee. And, because of
Archimbaud's interest in music, Bacon reveals as well his tastes in a field
he has spoken little of before. Had Archimbaud been able to carry his
interviews through as planned, who knows what other tidbits he might have
recorded? But the artist died before the last of the scheduled interviews
could be conducted.
As an alternative to biographies and memoirs, a major new study by
Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, scrupulously
avoids the life in pursuit of a theoretical analysis of the work. "The
first time I saw a painting by Bacon, I was literally left speechless,"
writes the author in his introduction. "I was perplexed about the level
on which these paintings touched me: I could not even formulate what the
paintings were about, still less what aspect of them hurt me so deeply."
In thinking over his "incapacitation," van Alphen, a professor of
comparative literature at the University of Leiden, turned to other works of
art and literature that had a similar effect on him, in order to try to get
at the expressive mechanisms that provoke a "momentary loss of
self." His study of Bacon is a close analysis that draws on a wide range
of literature and criticism to demonstrate "how Bacon's works hit the
nervous system, not only of the viewer, but also of Western culture and its
artistic traditions."
Van Alphen begins by examining the ways that Bacon's paintings
"stimulate" but then cancel out, narrative readings. Through formal
discontinuities that undermine temporal and spatial coherence, Bacon creates,
particularly in the triptychs, "another kind of narrative: narrative
that is contiguous with the reader [sic], that touches the reader by its
focus on the performative 'affect' of narrative." Van Alphen
characterizes Bacon's "narrativity" as one in which the modernist
gaze is destabilized even as it is seduced by an apparent readability.
Bacon's subject matter is frequently concerned with perception and its tools
- cameras, mirrors, lights - and the figure of the voyeur makes repeated
appearances. Van Alphen sees Bacon as eroding the distance between the
viewing subject and the painted object; Bacon's "procreative
narrative," he says, "does not allow for a safe distance between
viewer and a unified image, but . . . implicates the viewer, in almost a
bodily way, in the act of production." What the viewer sees, according
to van Alphen, is a shattered image with no potential for a heroic
reconstruction of self. Such devices as the multiplication of interior frames
or a displacement of corporeal forms onto landscape serve only to confuse
inside and outside, subjectivity and the world. Finally, van Alphen claims
that Bacon's representation of masculinity in bodies which "show no
signs of stability, control, action, or production"
"re-subjectifies" the body, establishing a new self through
resistance to received notions of identity.
This is a sketchy summary of a dense argument that ranges through the
hot spots of contemporary theory - narrative, perception, mortality, the
body, gender. Van Alphen draws upon a battery of literary critics and
philosophers ranging from William James to Roland Barthes to Leo Bersani. His
own observations on Bacon can be quite insightful, but the constant sampling
of secondary sources is sometimes wearying.[6] There are inspired analogies -
van Alphen characterizes Bacon's portraits as "mystery portraits,"
comparing them to Willem Brakman's De Vadermoorders (The
Fatherkillers), a crime novel in which the murderer is never unveiled.
According to van Alphen, "Bacon ... shows that representation, seen as
an act of detection, does not unmask the figure; it forms, or better, it
deforms, decomposes, and kills the figure."
More
surprising is van Alphen's choice of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood to shed
fight on the splitting and replicating figures in Bacon's paintings. Clearly,
homosexuality has something to do with it; van Alphen sees Barnes's book as
apposite because in it lesbian love is presented as "the ideal
representation of loss of self." But why choose Nightwood's lesbianism
rather than, say, the male homosexuality of Genet's Querelle, where
"twinning" and split subjectivity are also of great importance and,
I might argue, in which the subcultures portrayed are closer to those that
Bacon frequented? The answer, I believe, lies in van Alphen's desire to
eliminate the person of the artist from his consideration of the paintings.
But Bacon was, after all, a gay man, although he assiduously denied the
importance of that fact for the interpretation of his paintings. No doubt van
Alphen knows Bacon's position. Perhaps he has inadvertently succumbed to the
artist's desire to control the critical interpretation of his work; or
perhaps he is simply pursuing his own critical project, which seems to take
the idea of "death of the author" to literal extremes. Van Alphen's
last chapter, on masculinity, perhaps the best in his book, never once mentions
homosexuality in a 26 page discussion of Bacon's deconstruction of masculine
identity.
Van Alphen's fragmentary use of passages from criticism and philosophy
sometimes results in distortions of the argument of his source. For example,
in support of his assertion that there is a masochistic subtext to Bacon's
depiction of "loss of self" van Alphen cites Leo Bersani's
article, Is the Rectum a Grave? which appeared in an issue of
October devoted to AIDS.[7] There Bersani argues that before gay men can
truly see the mechanism of their own oppression, they must acknowledge their
masochistic fascination with the phallocentric order. "The logic of
homosexual desire includes the potential for a loving identification with the
gay man's enemies," writes Bersani, but gay male sexuality frightens
those in power, who transfer their terror, more or less unconsciously, into a
hysterical reaction to the public health crisis of AIDS. Neglecting the
important political implications of this article and Bersani's predominant
emphasis on gay male sexuality, van Alphen focuses exclusively on the
Freudian argumentation of the piece and stresses its universal aspects.
Wouldn't it perhaps have been more relevant to use Bersani's argument to
support a reading of Bacon's attack on pictorial conventions - that is, to
see his radical perversions of the representational order as a species of
specifically gay male homoeroticism? Instead, van Alphen moves on to discuss
Bacon's work in the context of Nightwood, with its references to a specifically
lesbian "gay body."
Van Alphen demonstrates only a minimal
interest in the enormous Bacon bibliography, and his comparative visual
material is relatively scant (in contrast to his many literary allusions).
Clearly, he is no art historian - though that should not, of course, preclude
his making a study of 20th-century art. Nevertheless, some of his statements
- e.g., "The conventions of chiaroscuro culminated in the work of
Rembrandt, whose paintings are commonly seen as the major achievement of
visual art" - seem rather naive. Likewise, his comparison of Bacon's use
of the triptych format with the traditional, use of it appear uninformed. He
generalizes that the triptych "traditionally displays temporal continuity
spatially. . . . This type of triptych is a plain representation of a
story." In fact, a more knowing eye trained on the vast history of
devotional triptychs would surely reveal narrative discontinuities just as
disorienting, although obviously for different purposes, as anything found in
Bacon. Temporal sequence is often beside the point in devotional triptychs,
and the narratives of these works are so familiar (as van Alphen himself
acknowledges) that to read them as "plain stories" win get the viewer
nowhere.[8] Is there really a closer narrative connection, as van Alphen
seems to believe, between the central crucifixion and the saints in the wings
of Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece than there is between the two lateral
images of Lucian Freud and the central image of the same artist in
Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969)?
The facts of Bacon's life are so seductive
that they often encourage reckless interpretations of the paintings. On the
other hand, some discussions of Bacon's works have intentionally concealed
relevant biographical information - which is what van Alphen accuses Hugh
Davies of doing in his 1975 commentary on Triptych May-June 1973.[9]
Davies describes the three panels as depicting "a naked man vomiting
into the bathroom sink, then crossing the room, then dying on the
toilet." It is generally agreed that this painting depicts the death of
Bacon's lover, George Dyer, from an overdose of drugs and alcohol on the
night of the opening of Bacon's 1971-72 retrospective at the Grand Palais.
But Davies omits some of this information and, according to van Alphen,
thereby "turns the story into a burlesque tragedy." For van Alphen,
however, Davies's real mistake is even to attempt to see the work as a
sequence of narrative events. "How relevant," he asks, "is
Bacon's biography to the reading of his paintings? . . . Davies's reading -
and any narrative reading of this kind - rests on the assumption that the
painting illustrates. . . . But the work does nothing to encourage this
assumption."
Bacon himself might have disagreed. Talking
about the painting to Melvyn Bragg, he described it as "the nearest I've
ever done to a story." He also said: "That is how he was
found."[10] But Bacon referred to this triptych as the exception rather
than the rule; he was - rightfully, as Sinclair proves - leery of
biographical interpretations of his work. And perhaps he would have respected
the intentions of van Alphen's book, which offers valuable new readings of
the work independent of distracting biographical detail.
Yet for this reader, van Alphen's tendency to
step too warily around the details of Bacon's life is a weakness of his
study. Rather than limiting the possibilities for a sound theoretical
analysis of the artist's work, a judicious use of the biographical facts
might well have helped van Alphen expand his interpretation in a manner fully
complementary to his own admirable purposes.
[1.]
David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, Thames
& Hudson, 1975 & 1980; reprinted 1985, p. 80.
[2.] In Melvyn Bragg's program on the artist
for The South Bank Show, June 9, 1985.
[3.] David Plante, in his own excellent
memoir of Bacon, Bacon's Instinct, in the New Yorker (Nov. 1,
1993, pp. 98-99) mentions two additional biographies in the works (by Michael
Peppiatt and Henrietta Moraes) as well as a number of memoirs.
[4.] Jean Genet, Rembrandt's
Secret What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and
Flushed Down the Toilet, trans. Randolph Hough, Madras A New York,
Hanuman Books,1988, p. 77.
[5.] Sylvester, pp. 71-72.
[6.] And his own observations are never so
alluringly radical as, say, those of Gilles Deleuze, who described Bacon's
"marks or features of animality" as "spirits that haunt the
wiped-off parts, deforming, individualizing and describing the head without a
face. Deleuze, Logique de la Sensation, Paris, Editions de la
Difference, 1981, chapter IV (Le corps, la viande et l'esprit, le
devenir-animal), partly translated as A New Power of Laughter for the
Living, in Art International (Autumn, 1989), p. 34.
[7.] Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a
Grave? October 43 (Winter, 1987), pp. 197-222.
[8.] On the sacred in Bacon, see Michel
Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full Face and In Profile, trans. John
Weightman, New York, Rizzoli, 1983, pp. 40-41. It should be mentioned that
John Russell has added a chapter to his 1971 study of Bacon in a 1993 edition
from Thames & Hudson.
[9.] Hugh M. Davies, Bacon's Black Triptychs, Art in
America, Mar.-Apr., 1975, pp. 62-68. [10.] Bragg, op. cit.
Francis Bacon, The
Art Game,
London
27th August 1958
The School of London,
Mordantly Messy as Ever
ALAN RIDING | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | SEPTEMBER
25, 1995
When the American artist R. B. Kitaj coined the phrase
"School of London" in 1976, he conceded that such a school existed
largely in his head. There were "10 or more" world-class painters
working in London, he said, but they would need a lot more attention and
encouragement if they were to constitute a movement.
Strangely, though, his phrase stuck: the
notion of a School of London was born, and its core members were gradually
identified as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach,
Michael Andrews and Mr. Kitaj himself. And, while it was none too clear how
much they had in common, they at least flew the flag of figurative painting
when it was distinctly unfashionable.
Now, with artists again showing interest in
the human body, two exhibitions - "From London," at the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, and Bacon-Freud: Expressions, at
the Fondation Maeght in St.-Paul-de-Vence, near Nice - have looked afresh at
the links and differences between the London-based artists. If the existence
of a School of London is still debated, the timing of the shows could not be
better.
As recently as the late 1980's, skeptics
asserted that promotion of a School of London was merely a way of associating
the names of lesser-known artists with that of Mr. Bacon, who was already
enshrined as one of the great painters of the postwar era. But with Mr.
Bacon's death in 1992, the others have emerged from under his shadow and are
flourishing more than ever.
Mr. Freud's 1993 retrospective at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was widely acclaimed. Mr. Kossoff
represented Britain at this year's Venice Biennale. Mr. Auerbach just had a
show at the National Gallery in London. Mr. Kitaj, whose big 1994 show in
London later traveled to New York and Los Angeles, was awarded the top
painting prize in Venice this summer. And, before his death in July, some
critics felt that Mr. Andrews was doing the most daring work of his career.
Their success as individuals, then, has
served to renew interest in them as a group. Their work was first displayed
together in A School of
London: Six Figurative Painters, an exhibition sponsored by the British
Council that traveled in Europe in 1987 and 1988. And now, with the Edinburgh
show, which closed on Sept. 5 and will soon go to Luxembourg, Lausanne and
Barcelona, they have been seen for the first time as a group in Britain.
In St.-Paul-de-Vence, Jean-Louis Prat, the
Fondation Maeght's longtime director, chose to focus his exhibition, which
runs through Oct. 15, on Mr. Bacon and Mr. Freud only. Nonetheless, he
identified them as "the prominent actors in an English school and in the
School of London, which, albeit little known and invariably badly exhibited,
is held together by tenacious individualism."
His emphasis on their individuality was not
accidental. In the 1960's, the six artists frequently wined and dined
together in Soho (although Mr. Bacon fell out with the others well before his
death). They also sat for each other, with Mr. Bacon's portrait of Mr. Freud
and Mr. Freud's painting of Mr. Auerbach now considered significant works.
Today the surviving four are all in their 60's and 70's.
But their backgrounds were very different.
Mr. Kossoff, the only one of the six to be born in London, is of Russian
Jewish extraction. Three others are also Jewish: Mr. Kitaj, who was born in
Cleveland, as well as Mr. Freud (a grandson of Sigmund Freud) and Mr.
Auerbach, both of whom were born in Berlin and brought to London as children.
Mr. Bacon was Irish, and Mr. Andrews was born in the English provinces.
Still more important, their styles of
painting are different, ranging from the contorted eruptions of flesh
presented by Mr. Bacon to Mr. Andrews's often ethereal landscapes, and from
the thick brushstrokes of Mr. Freud's many nude portraits to the mystical
multicolored figures favored by Mr. Kitaj. In the strictest sense, probably
only Mr. Auerbach and Mr. Kossoff, with their use of deep layers of paint,
could be described as belonging to the same school.
Yet the Fondation Maeght's show reveals more.
"I wanted to do Bacon and Freud together because I felt their language
was both close and distant," Mr. Prat explained. "Once you see
Freud, you can better understand Bacon. Once you see Bacon, you accept Freud
more easily. They're tied together like mountain-climbers. You can see
Freud's importance thanks to Bacon."
With 30 paintings by Mr. Bacon and 40 by Mr.
Freud to work with, Mr. Prat decided to display the artists separately,
bringing them together only in a final exhibition room. "A chronological
approach would have worked to Freud's disadvantage," he said,
"because his early works were small, while Bacon was already painting
large oils." By viewing them separately, it is also easier to see how
Mr. Bacon's peculiar vision of the fragility of human identity developed -
but did not fundamentally change - between the 1950's and late 1980's, while
Mr. Freud has continually revised his style and, in Mr. Prat's view, is only
now "reaching his summit."
In the final room, Mr. Prat felt free to set
up a confrontation of late works by the two artists. Suddenly the logic of
the exhibition becomes apparent in the dialogue between painfully isolated
figures in Mr. Bacon's Study
From the Human Body (1987) and Study for Self Portrait triptych (1985-1986) and in Mr.
Freud's three giant portraits of a monstrously fat woman in repose, painted
in the 1990's.
In contrast, Richard Calvocoressi, who
organized the Edinburgh show, decided to test the idea of a School of London
more directly by having some exhibition rooms dedicated to just one artist
and other rooms displaying the works of several artists. He avoided the
temptation of uniting Mr. Kossoff and Mr. Auerbach, as if he were eager to
show their differences. But monumental figure paintings by Mr. Bacon, Mr.
Freud and Mr. Kitaj were hung together.
With 100 paintings on display, the range of
styles was enormous, from the screaming face of Head VI, painted by Mr. Bacon in 1949, to a
dreamy landscape of the Thames estuary completed by Mr. Andrews weeks before
his death. So, while "From London" reinforces the notion of a
School of London, it also questions it.
During a heated debate about the exhibition
during this summer's Edinburgh Festival, the British art critic David
Sylvester went further, challenging the quality of recent work by Mr. Freud,
Mr. Kitaj and Mr. Auerbach and arguing that Mr. Bacon was too different from
the other five for the concept of a School of London to work. "For one
thing, he, unlike the others did not paint or draw from nature," Mr.
Sylvester explained.
But in Mr. Calvocoressi's view, what holds
the London group together is less its form of expression than its roots in
the great tradition of figurative painting. "If there is a single source
of inspiration common to all six artists," he wrote in the catalogue,
"it is that treatment of the great universal themes of human existence
to be found in the paintings of the Old Masters."
Bacon, Freud
and Human Bodies
MICHAEL GIBSON | INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE | AUGUST 12, 1995
The exhibition devoted to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud at
the Maeght Foundation is a fascinating confrontation of two artists so close
and so contrasted, curiously heightening what is best in each.
The disquieting treatment to which both of them subject the
human face and body also raises troubling questions — emotionally and
intellectually — just as their decision to continue painting the body, in the
postwar years and an age that frowned on such things, brings back the
belabored question of "the subject of painting."
Bacon's paroxystic and baroque depictions of
the human figure, his silent screaming cardinals and his more recent
boneless, grimly distorted anatomies give pause. They are mythic and tragic.
These terrible events often unfold in a world
of pastel decorator tones, incongruously reminiscent of the better hotel
rooms, while the pigment representing the bodies themselves is applied in
masterful brush strokes often reminiscent of great artists of the past. But
why this terror?
Freud, on the other hand, after a period not
all that foreign to the Neue Sachlichkeit of the '20s, opted for a curiously
perverse form of naturalism that often stresses the least Grecian traits of the anatomies he
paints: implausibly lumpy noses, sagging muscles, superabundant fat, sickly
skin and unhealthy green or ocher complexions.
In contrast to the clean environment in which
Bacon's victims sit or crouch, Freud's people live in a world of extinguished
hues and more often than not recline in a state of utter passivity.
This preference for the supine position and a
striking absence of muscular tone in face and body is just as disquieting, in
its own way, as Bacon's explicit violence.
Critics have sometimes been tempted to ask
the artists about what such things may mean. More often than not, they brush
the question aside, as Bacon does in a television interview — and rightly so,
since this is not his business. His paintings, however, stand on their own,
both as painted objects, and as a highly sensitive response to this artist's
peculiar experience of being in the world, nailed to a time and place.
ANTHROPOLOGISTS have discovered the wide
variety of representations of man in diverse cultures. In our own societies,
these mythic images have suffered in the past hundred years or so, and the
distress expressed by both Bacon and Freud might have traits of the anatomies he
paints: implausibly lumpy noses, sagging muscles, superabundant fat, sickly
skin and unhealthy green or ocher complexions.
In contrast to the clean environment in which
Bacon's victims sit or crouch, Freud's people live in a world of extinguished
hues and more often than not recline in a state of utter passivity.
This preference for the supine position and a
striking absence of muscular tone in face and body is just as disquieting, in
its own way, as Bacon's explicit violence.
Critics have sometimes been tempted to ask
the artists about what such things may mean. More often than not, they brush
the question aside, as Bacon does in a television interview — and rightly so,
since this is not his business. His paintings, however, stand on their own,
both as painted objects, and as a highly sensitive response to this artist's
peculiar experience of being in the world, nailed to a time and place.
ANTHROPOLOGISTS have discovered the wide
variety of representations of man in diverse cultures. In our own societies,
these mythic images have suffered in the past hundred years or so, and the
distress expressed by both Bacon and Freud might have some bearing on this.
They would both be entitled to say this is
nonsense — and they would be right, since this is no direct concern of
theirs. It is however the concern of the public, which discovers in the
pictures a magical mirror of its present condition.
As for "the subject of painting" —
every artist needs a strategy to approach his own creative depths. The
artist, more often than not, declares that the subject does not matter. Yet
we have seen so many of them over the past half-century forsaking the human
face and body to pursue some underlying pattern of reality.
The dominant idea behind this pursuit, is
that the ultimate reality is not man, but the sustaining patterns that
surround him.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault
shocked even some of the stauncher defenders of such ideas when he declared
that "man (as a notion) is in the process of disappearing." He
certainly did seem to be doing so in the mirror of art. But now, with the
extraordinary paintings of Bacon and Freud, we turn as though to a different
mirror, and there, rather to our surprise, man still stands (or lies) — in a
terrible metaphysical condition to be sure — still demanding to be
recognized.
That, I suspect, along with the splendid
craft and art of both these formidable English painters, is what makes these
terrible paintings so strangely appealing. - Bacon and Freud, Maeght
Foundation, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, to Oct. 15.
A Subdued Start to Spring Auctions
BY CAROL VOGEL | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | MAY
3, 1995
Portrait
of Henrietta Moraes on White Ground (1964)
The usual suspects packed Sotheby's salesroom
last night for the first important art auction of the spring. While the
audience looked the same as it always does, the crowd of dealers and
collectors, art experts and auction-house groupies who came to watch and to
bid on contemporary art didn't act the same. Hadn't they taken their
vitamins? Bidding was cautious, if not anemic. But the auction still managed
to total a respectable $13 million, not far below Sotheby's estimate of $15.7
million to $22 million. Of the 46 works offered for sale, 36 found buyers.
Still, caution seemed contagious last night.
For the most part, works tended to sell for around Sotheby's estimates.
Francis Bacon's Portrait of
Henrietta Moraes on White Ground (1964),
depicting one of the artist's favourite models reclining on a bed, went to an
unidentified American buyer in the front row for nearly $1.4 million, right
in the middle of Sotheby's estimate of $1.2 million to $1.8 million. The
price must have been right. In London last June, Christie's tried to sell a
Bacon with an estimate of $3.1 million, but the painting, Study of a Portrait of
Pope Innocent X by Velazquez (1959),
didn't elicit a bid.
Remaking Bacon
John Russell. Francis
Bacon . London: Thames and
Hudson, 1993. 192 pp.; 37 color ills., 138 b/w. $11.95 paper
Andrew
Sinclair. Francis
Bacon: His Life and Violent Times. New York: Crown, 1993. 368 pp.; 10
colour ills., 52 b/w. $30.00
Ernst van Alphen.
Francis
Bacon and the Loss of Self. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992. 208 pp.; 15 colour ills., 108 b/w. $39.95
F
ANDRES
MARIO ZERVIGON
| BOOK
REVIEWS | ART
JOURNAL | VOLUME
54 NUMBER 2 | SUMMER
1995
A
large literary corpus has arisen around Francis Bacon reflecting in its size the
consistent popularity of the artist as well as the strong impact of his
paintings. Despite its size, the literary corpus on Bacon can be broken down
into two approaches with one mostly focusing on the form Bacon's art takes
(Russell) and the other focusing on the artist's biography (Sinclair). A
third approach that has arisen recently, however, deploys theoretical
concepts new to art history in an effort to understand the art's content and
effect (van Alphen). The three books under review represent these different
approaches, as well as a broader evolutionary process in art history that
greatly expands the limits of what material is admissible and relevant,
especially in terms of sexuality and gender.
The literary corpus on Bacon charts this evolution particularly well.
Perhaps the excess seen in his paintings has discouraged commentators from
breaking with the reigning critical and art historical orthodoxy. Their
writing generally shows a need to establish control in the face of art that
seems out of control. Considering the context of Bacon's initial success,
this restraint is quite predictable. In an era dominated by abstraction and
formalist criticism, Bacon's beaten bodies and blood-filled beds introduced a
content that few people wished to discuss (as seen in Three Studies
for a Crucifixion, fig 1). The result has been writing that analyzes
Bacon in formalist terms and politely omits the erotic and violent elements
that threaten to overwhelm his art. Only in the realm of biography have these
issues arisen, but their connection to his art has been kept carefully vague.
This effort to control Bacon's art, or at least to control its reception,
renders the extreme praise for his paintings strangely baseless, but such a
control conforms to the restrictions imposed by a once stodgy art history.1 As the discipline has broadened, so has the
willingness to discuss the sexuality and violence that in the past appeared
too powerful a topic to broach. Now we can admit that the enthusiasm for this
art may be related to the sexual violence that reviewers resisted discussing
for so long.
In coming to terms with the critical silence that surrounds Bacon's
art, one must confess that his painting is difficult to decipher. Though its
figurative realism promises a legibility denied by abstract painting, its
lack of clear setting or narrative disrupts the familiarity that the figures
might otherwise provide. Furthermore, the violence these figures suffer can
be attributed to no agent, while the sterility they occupy robs them of
context. The vehicles of meaning that produce such clarity in Leon Golub's
Mercenary series, for example, are rarely present in the work of Bacon. With
this in mind, it is interesting to see how reviewers cope with Bacon's work
when its sexual violence is overwhelming and the evidence otherwise assisting
interpretation is limited.
John Russell's book, revised for the third time in 1993, continues to
pursue a largely formalist approach to Bacon's painting, taking as its focus
the artist's handling of paint. The result is a critical assessment of
Bacon's entire oeuvre where works demonstrating less painterly skills are
judged to be works of lesser quality. Russell's formal critique is a
restrictive approach to painting in which the content is responsible for much
of the overall impact, but his attention to quality offers sobriety to the
praise-heavy world of Bacon studies. Perhaps because of this more tempered
treatment, his book has been a standard text on Bacon since its first
publication in 1971.
Russell's study is strongly influenced by David Sylvester's response
to the negative criticism that greeted the first ten years of Bacon's
successful output (1944-54).2 A long time advocate of Bacon,
Sylvester sought to temper the artist's negative reception by shifting
attention away from issues of content and highlighting instead Bacon's
overlooked painterly skills. By mobilizing the existing critical language on
abstraction, he explained that the only significance found in Bacon's art was
its paint, an ambiguous presence that essentially signified nothing.3
Sylvester's critical approach reduced any discussion of content to purely
aesthetic considerations. Accordingly, such motifs as screaming bloody mouths
were seen as harmless studies in pink, white, and red. By contrast, Bacon's
negative press in its obsession with sexual violence spoke more clearly about
the content and effect of his work than the positive reviews of then and now.
Russell, who has been writing on Bacon since the early sixties, adopts
Sylvester's concern for paint but develops a more complicated analysis. In
his hands, the ambiguous paint described by Sylvester becomes a semiabstract
blur that threatens to abdicate its place in representation and assert a
singular presence as pigment. According to Russell, Bacon's skill resides in
his capacity to position this blur on the boundary between representation and
abstraction, allying "the strongest possible dose of verifiable reality
to the strongest possible dose of inspired risk" (p. 107). Here, in this
narrow border region, Bacon distinguishes his art from straightforward
representation; he produces wholly unique and compelling images through a use
of abstracting deformities. Although Russell attributes these deformities to
Bacon's technique of chance, he also acknowledges their origin in the
artist's lively subconscious.
Russell's primary interest, as it turns out, is the photographic
source of Bacon's images. The way in which the artist can scan innumerable
photographs and synthesize their disparate features into one painted image
fascinates Russell. This synthesis, he feels, produces images with a power
quite distinct from their photographic sources, a skill few painters have
mastered. Furthermore, Bacon's technique marries fine art and photography
into a union well adapted to the demands that abstraction makes upon
representation. It demonstrates that modem painting need not distance itself
from representation, and indeed, that a reliance upon photography allows
painting to reflect its epoch. Russell writes that Bacon "aims to set up
one day against this undifferentiated flux of visual garbage [the
overabundance of photographic images] the great single image which will halt
the wandering eye and cause us to say, "This makes sense of life"
(p. 59).
Bacon's painted blur marks his synthesis. The more successful
paintings are those where the blue and the image work in harmony without one
overtaking the other. By Russell's standard, the more shocking and celebrated
paintings from the fifties are not Bacon's best since they rely too much upon
direct quotations (Velazquez's Pope Innocent X, Eisenstein's Potempkin
nurse) and consequently feature images that overwhelm their paint. The two
come together more successfully with the onset of the sixties, when Bacon's
skill at synthesis produces representations defined by, rather than
surpassing the blur of paint; when a certain degree of likeness co-exists
with a certain amount of abstraction. Miss Muriel Belcher (fig. 2)
presents a good example of just such a combination. Through the seventies
Bacon's painting continues to improve as a growing reliance upon personal
experience augments his photographic reservoirs, further stimulating his
ability to synthesize.4 The result, says Russell, is a greater
power and immediacy to Bacon's painting. Assisting his power is the
increasingly convincing space of Bacon's paintings - the rooms and theaters
that contain the blurred figures.
A periodization and a critique of Bacon's work may seem the basic
ingredients of any formalist art historical study, but as far as Bacon is
concerned, Russell's is one of the few. He describes exactly what makes this
art successful and where that success is less realized.5 As for
interpretation, however, he reproduces the standard argument initially set
out by John Rothenstein in 1962. In the catalogue to Bacon's first
retrospective, Rothenstein explained that this painting reflects the violent
century out of which it is born. By making human anguish dramatically
significant to our generation, he added, Bacon's work communicates a message
that goes beyond the specificity of the scenes depicted.6 This
interpretation, also adopted by Russell, dissolves the sexual brutality of
Bacon's images into "universal reflections" of our century's suffering.
Therefore, the shock that viewers feel before one of these paintings
surpasses the base titillation of raw sexuality and arrives at a more
philosophical, and hence acceptable, reflection on history. Russell's
treatment of Bacon's biography generally reinforces this interpretation,
linking the artist's experience of war and other grand episodes of violence
to the motifs in his paintings. We hear little about the more individual and
sexual nature of this violence since portions of Bacon's biography pertinent
to these motifs are quietly left behind.
Only in the last chapter of this book does Russell change course and
focus on the intimate nature of Bacon's iconography. Here he examines how the
artist's relationship with his lover, George Dyer, affected the style and
content of the painter's art. Bacon's physical familiarity with his lover,
for example, is reflected in Three Studies of the Male Back, where
"there was an exuberant power that could only have been born of a sense
of being completely and gloriously at home with one another" (p. 161).
The same familiarity occurs in the paintings following Dyer's suicide, when
Bacon depicts his lover's death and repeatedly recreates their domesticity.
Such obsessive redepiction arises from the loss of a lover rather than the
loss of a friend, as Hugh Davies has maintained.7 Russell only
fails to explain why these many depictions of Dyer feature a figure so
deformed and fragmented. Nonetheless, his last chapter begins to show how
Bacon's sexuality informs the subject and form of his painting. In contrast
to the rest of this book, we see that Bacon's paintings may not be just a
"universal reflection" of history, as Russell describes, but a more
individual manifestation of the painter's sexuality as well.
This final chapter represents the only significant addition Russell
has made to his study since its original publication in 1971. His 1979
edition also contained an additional final chapter, but in this 1993 version
Russell has reworked his earlier addendum into something of an obituary.
While this allows him to digest the final twenty years of Bacon's production
and nod in the increasingly biographical direction of Bacon criticism, its
brevity is disappointing. Russell's interest, however, lies not so much in
covering Bacon's life or proposing a comprehensive interpretation of the
artist's painting. Instead, he intends to create a wide art historical space
where Bacon may reside with other great modern painters. He argues this case
quite convincingly.
While Russell gestures toward the biographical direction of current
Bacon scholarship, Andrew Sinclair pursues its extreme. As his book's title
suggests, Sinclair covers Bacon's life and violent times, using both as a
basis for interpreting the paintings. In doing so Sinclair follows on
Rothenstein's older interpretive approach, which saw Bacon and his work as a
product of their times. But thirty years on, what is deemed acceptable and
relevant in art history has dramatically changed, allowing Sinclair to firmly
link Bacon's painting and historical context through biography. The private
significance of Bacon's iconography now surfaces in greater detail: the
artist's sexual life, his relationship with his parents and friends, and the
vibrant subculture in which he thrived; all of these are reflected in his
painting, according to Sinclair. Indeed, this study relies heavily upon such
personal biographical material because it forms, for Sinclair, the only clear
linkage between painting widely perceived as violent and a century commonly
accepted as brutal.
The use of this linkage has recently become ever more widespread.
Russell, of course, now finds it helpful, as does Daniel Farson in his recent
book The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. Henrietta Moraes's
upcoming autobiography will likely do the same.8 Sinclair,
however, possesses the tools of an accomplished social historian and with
these delivers a specificity of facts that lead to startlingly literal
interpretations of Bacon's art. But this specificity forces various factors
to compete for a position as the influence or meaning of a given motif. The
cages Bacon used so often in his paintings, for example, could be inspired by
his radical sexual practices or by the steel boxes set up to protect London
from German bombing runs during World War I. They could also hearken back to
the transport vehicles in which British troops enclosed themselves during
Ireland's Sinn Fein.9 Although various influences may echo in a
single motif, Sinclair's additive approach to image interpretation lacks an
explanation for how these various factors combine or co-exist in the
paintings. This problem arises, perhaps, because Sinclair's search for
linkage requires each historical episode of the artist's violent context to
have a visible connection to his painting.10
Otherwise, Sinclair adopts Russell's study in order to critically
assess Bacon's painting. But this does not mean that Sinclair's study simply
recycles an existing analysis. Rather, he improves upon it. The artist's
skill with paint, for instance, acquires further significance once Sinclair
has traced its origin to years of dedication and informal apprenticeship.
Similarly, what Russell calls Bacon's game with chance comes to characterize
not only the artist's technique but his whole life style as well, giving us a
sense that the artist's dedication was infused with impulsiveness. This
clarification highlights Bacon's intuitive approach to painting and generally
shows the benefits of a study so heavily focused on the artist's life."
But again, the search for clear links between Bacon's context and art grows
problematic once Sinclair articulates Russell's ideas concerning the role of
photography in Bacon's art. Now a stress on autobiographical sources of
inspiration conflicts with the claim that Bacon's inspiration lay on his
studio floor, in the innumerable photos and medical books collected and used
over the course of a career. In those images Bacon found what he could not
experience directly, such as the influence of Eadweard Muybridge. The nineteenth-century
photographer is clearly part of Two Figures (fig. 3), for
example, even if Bacon's sexual desire exhibits its own powerful presence.
This conflict between claims of inspiration would be calmed if Sinclair
explained how influences may occur in numbers and make their subtle effect as
a network of stimuli. However, his demand for clear links between Bacon's
historical context and artwork strains the contribution of any one influence,
especially in lieu of such an explanation.
But the fact that Sinclair discusses Bacon's sexual desire at all is a
vast improvement over other commentators. His study, despite its literalness,
often benefits from this attention to "impolite" details, allowing
us to see that Bacon's work begins as a personal expression of desire, even
if it is accepted as a general reflection of history. So with Sinclair's
exhaustive research and attention to detail, we see that Bacon's repeated
depiction of love-making men expresses his openly gay identity. As for the
cruel condition in which these men and other figures are seemingly depicted,
Sinclair tells us of Bacon's professed interest in sadomasochism.
If we choose to see other factors as contributing rather then
competing, then Sinclair's study can expose nuances of the cruelty visible in
these paintings. For example, Bacon's many crucifixions may retain a direct
sexual message while also representing the terrible suffering the artist
experienced throughout his life: whipped and sexually abused by his father's
horse grooms, struggling with asthma, kicked out of home at an early age.
Sinclair's search for linkage works well where the details of his study
expose the very personal side of Bacon's work. Indeed, one would expect that
links between an artist's life and his/her art could say more about such
personal messages than they could say about the historical context in which
the art was made. Sinclair spends much of his time in this more personal
realm of Bacon's biography, exactly where other commentators have feared to
tread.
Lastly, Sinclair's friendship with the artist gives him unique insight
into the facts that he so laboriously collects. They reflect well on the
personality they are supposed to define. Furthermore, in Sinclair's hands
these many facts take an anecdotal form, giving his study a readability
uncharacteristic of art biographies.
Ernst van Alphen pursues an altogether different approach to Bacon's
art, devising an interpretation less reliant upon considerations of form alone
or the artist's biography. Instead, he employs relatively new theoretical
conceptions in an effort to understand how these paintings affect their
viewers. He proposes that by understanding this effect on viewers, we can see
how the paintings communicate and ultimately how they can be interpreted. As
evidence of the distinctive type of communication that Bacon's art initiates,
van Alphen points to the silence that echoes throughout the Bacon literature.
This is not just the critical silence of commentators unwilling to discuss
the artist's scandalous private life or violent subject matter. Instead, van
Alphen sees something typical of passersby before a brutal automobile
accident, a silence of viewers left in pain by what they see. He calls this
phenomenon the loss of self.
The primary agents of this loss are supposed to be the figures who
populate Bacon's painting. Their disintegrated and fragmented form shocks us,
imparting a pain that renders us speechless. Our response, however, is not a
straightforward pain of sympathy, but a more complex although no less
unsettling pain of isolation. Van Alphen explains that these figures in all
their mutilation demonstrate a capacity to form their own sense-perceptions
and hence a capacity to form their own self-perception. As we witness their
independence from discursively formed perceptions of the self, we are
momentarily divested of our identity isolated from the mechanisms that
situate us within reality.
Ultimately, the course of this analysis is determined by the French
writers on Bacon, namely Gilles Deleuze and Michel Leiris. Their studies
examine Bacon's iconography through the lens of psychoanalytic theory.12
Van Alphen takes up Deleuze's interest in the role of sensation, but he
shifts the French writer's focus away from overall composition and focuses
instead upon figural form. He then deploys a sophisticated theory of the gaze
and a discursive theory of subjectivity to explain how Bacon's figures
undermine Western conventions of the role of vision in constituting
subjectivity.
Understanding
this experience of loss can become rather difficult, but all the reader must
truly comprehend is van Alphen's primary theoretical point: "While
others see the subject's body as object and as whole, the subject has only inner
experiences or fragmented outer views of her or his body" (p. 114).
Hence, "the subject depends for wholeness on the gaze of the other"
(p. 115). We overcome the fragmented outer views of our body by absorbing the
whole views of ourselves made by others, through representations composed by
subjects who look back at us as objects. Their look back is the gaze of the
Other, central to van Alphen's theorization. Bacon denies the power of the
Other's gaze by displaying figures completely unreliant upon it. They
"are all represented as trapped in an entirely inner sensation of
self." These figures arrive at their self-perception without the power
of the gaze because "only the inner body . . . is given to a human being
himself, " as van Alphen quotes Bahktin (p. 115). This capacity to
independently generate self-perception constitutes a refusal of the wholeness
offered by the Other's gaze. Bacon's figures, "can . . . be read, first
figuratively, as the confinement of the subject within his inner sensations,
and second, more literally, as the demarcation of the subject's position,
always alone on the border of the world" (p. 119). The breakdown of this
self/Other relationship leaves the viewer equally isolated and experiencing a
similar though temporary loss of self. This phenomenon, then, accounts for
the silence we feel before Bacon's paintings. "The viewer's
subjectivity," van Alphen says, "is forced to engage in a
confrontation with figures that block the very possibility of subject
construction. But these works are not committed to this negative view for the
sake of negativity. Their target is a specific element in subject formation
in the Western world. They aim, that is, to respond through their
specifically visual discourse to cultural discourses that are central to our
culture" (p. 163).
Bacon's images present the fragmentation that the viewer as
subject should recognize as the original inner-sense experience. Their
condition is not the result of violence, but conversely, their
independence from the violence normally wrought by visual perception.
Van Alphan assures us that the only place violence arises as an issue is in
the viewer, in whom a temporary loss of self creates pain. Otherwise, Bacon's
images actually uplift the viewer since the artist refuses to allow his
figures to be defined by the Other; they have a self-perceptual independence
whose benefit we share.
Despite the heavy theoretical stress of his study, van Alphen
devotes a large portion of his analysis to a visual interrogation of Bacon's
works. Surprisingly perhaps, he focuses upon Bacon's use of the painted blur
just as Russell does, and for rather similar reasons. That blur, he feels,
articulates the fragmented state of the figures presented, and as such, it
visually traces their various sense perceptions. In Reclining
Woman (fig. 4) for example, the swirling pigment and the figure's
position express the rapture of orgasm. But her cursory representation denies
her discursively preformed attributes of physical beauty.13
Instead, she is pure subject whose sense perception, though fragmentary,
constitutes her form and allows her a pleasure unavailable to the viewer.
Russell aesthetically appreciates the visibility of Bacon's paint, while van
Alphen philosophically lauds it.
While Russell appreciates Bacon's space for its increasingly
convincing quality, however, van Alphen appreciates its ever indeterminate
character We can see this indeterminacy in mirrors that don't reflect but
alter, frames of images that don't contain but release, and shadows that do
not project but redefine. The space in Bacon's work absorbs the figures as
they spill from their corporal confines, a process seen most clearly
in Two Figures in the Grass, where the figures and space merge into one
entity. Van Alphen feels that this lack of figural-spatial boundaries creates
a pool into which visible traces of the figure's sensations can spill and
accumulate, enhancing viewer awareness of the figure's sense perception. The
viewer's enhanced awareness guarantees a loss of self.14
This theoretical articulation, endowing Bacon's work with the
power to deconstruct cultural assumptions of visuality and subjectivity,
offers an enticing alternative to heavily biographic and iconographic
studies. It accounts for the response that these works generate and then
interprets that response as a significant part of the meaning of the image
But there remain a number of shortcomings to this approach. One is that
Bacon's agency as an author remains rather vague through the whole of the
book. Although van Alphen makes a good case arguing that the figures
presented are active and in charge of their own subjectivity, the fact
remains that they are still representations produced by the hand of a single
individual. Of course, a basic postmodern premise is that reality is
articulated by a language beyond our control, a phenomenon that displaces
Bacon's agency as an author. But van Alphen has not theorized the removal of
Bacon from his art. He remains present and, thus, responsible for producing
what appear to be mutilated figures. One may be able to make a case that
these figures are not producing their own stimuli, but rather, they are
suffering pain by someone else's agency.
Another problem is that the features allegedly unique to Bacon's work
that grant it a power to deconstruct might also be found in other art with a
different effect. For example, Picasso's fractured yet sensual bodies,
particularly those of women, have been seen by some critics as misogynist and
lacking in any redeeming value.15
Van Alphen leaves us with a conclusion we may not be ready to accept;
the appeal of Bacon's art arises from a pleasurable and uplifting refusal to
be defined by the Other, a loss of self that resubjectifies the body. While
this phenomenon seems to function in theory, could the average viewer
consciously or subconsciously be aware of it enough to experience its
pleasure? Van Alphen himself offers and then abandons a simpler and more
direct explanation for the pleasure of, and silence around, Bacon's work. He
notes early in his study that "no critic [of Bacon's work] has admitted
that the violence [of this art] itself excercises a particular attraction for
him or her; yet when one asserts the thematic centrality of violence, while
at the same time expressing admiration, such an inference is hard to
avoid" (p. 10). Could it be that Bacon's subject matter is indeed
violent as so many attics have asserted, and could it be that the pleasure of
viewing, his art is nothing more than the pleasure of masochism? This explanation
could account for the strong reaction to and appeal of Bacon's art while also
accounting for the suspicious silence of those who dare not speak the meaning
of this art and its appeal.
These problems are minor considering the overall strength of van Alphen's
study He is the first scholar to produce a Convincing interpretation of
Bacon's work free of the heavily biographic and iconographic concerns that
have burdened other commentators. More importantly, he is the first to
finally address the critical silence that has existed for so long around
Bacon's art. By reading this silence as an important factor in the art's
meaning, he has proposed a wholly new way of understanding what was otherwise
inexplicably impenetrable painting. His book shows the degree to which art
history's new openness can expand the understanding of visual
representations. By utilizing conceptions new to art history and
incorporating the long-ignored viewer into his analysis, van Alphen
demonstrates the new possibilities of our field of study.
Notes
(1.) Discussions on the quality of Bacon's
work tend to lack the restraint characterizing the literature on this artist.
For a discussion on the extreme praise Bacon's painting has received, see
William Feaver, "The Greatest Living Painter?" Artnews 84
(September 1985):123-25. While many writers have praised Bacon's work, they
have found it difficult to explain exactly why it warrants superlatives.
Commentators clearly experience a strong appeal for his painting, yet they
somehow find it difficult to articulate this appeal. Substantiations for such
claims as, "The greatest British painter since Constable," are hard
to find. Russell, at least, strives to demonstrate in clear formal terms why
Bacon's painting is good.
(2.) Anita Brookner was one of the more
thoughtful critics reviewing his work negatively, but Alan Clutton-Brock (The
Listener) and David Corrupt (Evening Standard) typify the less
premeditated reactions against Bacon's art, up to and even through the early
1960s.
(3.) In 1954 Sylvester wrote that Bacon's art
presents paint "that brings flesh into being and at the same time
dissolves it away. Paint that means nothing and something, and the something
is never one thing. Paint whose fluidity conveys the fluidity of all it
conveys." David Sylvester, Francis Bacon, in La Biennale di
Venezia, exh. cat. (Venice: Lombroso Editore, 1954): 317-19; English
translation in Rive Droite, February 12-March 10, 1957.
(4.) Russell fails to explain what comprises
this personal experience, other than to mention that the artist's friends
appear more frequently in his work.
(5.) Many writers seem so impressed by
Bacon's work that they hesitate to criticize it. Their writing attempts to
describe the acceptable contents of his art and/or trace the images that inspired
it They mostly laud his painting skill but fail to explain what comprises
this skill.
(6.) "Bacon's contemporaries belong to
generators that have seen the destruction of cities by bomb, the flight of
whole peoples under the lash of fear, the concentration camps, the death
camps and the rest. His power of making human anguish dramatically
significant to our generation is due in part to the dignity and the sobriety
of his treatment of all his subjects." John Rothenstein, Francis
Bacon, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1962). Other critics who followed
Rothenstein's lead are Sylvester himself, as well as Hugh Davies, Cecil
Beaton, Lawrence Gowing, and Sam Hunter.
(7.) Hugh Davies, Bacon's Black
Tryptichs, Art in America (March/April 1975): 62-68.
(8.) Moraes was a friend and model of the
artist.
(9.) Bacon lived through all these, and
therefore, such sources of inspiration are relevant.
(10.) As a further example, Sinclair writes
about Bacon's childhood experience during London's World War I blackouts: "There
was only a dull gleam on the pavement on starry nights, and the road was no
brighter than a country lane. Bodies of people would loom out of the
obscurity and disappear again Throughout the future portraits by Francis
Bacon, distorted figures would emerge form a fearful night, as sudden and
grotesque as the strangers glimpsed in the dim streets of London in the
black-out" (p. 21)
(11.) Bacon always painted without the use of
drawings or studies.
(12.) Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon,
logique de la sensation (Paris Editions de la difference, 1981);
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: Face et profil (Paris Albin
Michel, 1983).
(13.) van Alphen also points out that this
figure's position facing away from the viewer further undermines her role as
a source of our viewing pleasure.
(14.) In a parallel analysis van Alphen
discusses how Bacon's blurred paint and ambiguous spaces deconstruct
representation's role as a re-presentation Of realty The painted blur, he
says, reaffirms the fact that visual representations nominally hide their
means of articulation and hence, "that the subject is [normally] the
product rather than the producer of representation, and that paint does not
stand in but stands before the figure, not uncovering but hiding it" (p.
13). As for Bacon's indeterminate space, he asserts that its failure to
define the figures it surrounds further undermines the power of
representation. An example of this indeterminacy can be seen in the room
of Painting 1978. Here a figure reaches from what could be
the inside or the outside of a room in an effort to open a door with his foot
Similarly ambiguous is Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne (1967),
where the figure exist; in three places simultaneously.
(15.) For a discussion on this with further
references, see Anna Chave, New Encounters with Les Demoiselles
D'Avignon, Art Bulletin 75 (December 1994): 596-611.
ANDRES MARIO ZERVIGON is a doctoral candidate
in the Fine Arts Department of Harvard University. He is currently
researching a dissertation on Otto Dix and the representation of modern
identity.
COPYRIGHT 1995
College Art Association
Francis
Bacon in 1930: An Early Exhibition Rediscovered
BY
RICHARD SHONE | THE
BURLINGTON MAGAZINE | VOLUME 138 | NUMBER 1117 |
APRIL 1996
ALMOST
nothing is known of Francis Bacon's first exhibition beyond the fact that it
was put on by the artist himself in his studio-flat in South Kensington in
London at sometime in 1929. It appears to have consisted of paintings (all
subsequently destroyed) together with furniture and rugs designed by
the artist. A little more is reported of the second show he organised in his
flat, an exhibition shared with his friend the Australian artist Roy de
Maistre (or Roi de Mestre as he was then known). The date of this show varies
in the literature but most commentators follow the chronology established by
Ronal Alley in the 1964 catalogue
raissone
of Bacon's work and place it in the winter of 1929-30 when the artist was
twenty years old. It is assumed that the exhibition, attracting attention to
Bacon as an interior designer rather than as a painter, prompted The
Studio
to publish a brief, illustrated notice of his modernist rugs and furniture in
its August 1930 issue.
Much of the above can be modified or discounted in the
light of a shift of papers left behind by actress Jean Shepeard (1904-1989),
who, it transpires, shared the same exhibition wit Bacon and De Maistre and
in fact contributed well over half the listed items in the show. Born to
immigrant Rumanian parents in Manchester, Shepeard first studies at the Slade
School of Fine Art before moving on to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in
1925. From then onwards her career was divided between art and the stage. As
a recent exhibition demonstrated, she had a fluent gift as a portraitist in
pastel, pencil and ink, her synoptic and dramatic style being praised by,
among others, a former editor of this Magazine. At the same time she became
an up-and-coming actress, appearing alongside John Gielgud in Margaret
Kennedy's The Constant Nymph in London and on tour (1927), and in a
succession of popular if now forgotten plays on the West End stage. How she
came into contact with the young Francis Bacon is unknown. Her own circle
revolved around the painter R.O. Dunlop (whose lover she became), well known
from the 1920s onwards for his thickly painted landscapes and interiors,
often in sombre colours put on with a palette knife in emulation of Segonzac
and Vlaminck. In 1923 he had founded an obscure society of artists, musicians
and writers in Chelsea known as the Emotionist Group, which published its own
illustrated magazine (two issues are known to have been produced) from its
meeting pace, the Hurricane Lamp gallery in Cheyne Walk. One of the later
members of this group was Peggy Ashcroft, who wrote poetry before the stage
claimed her completely. She and Jean Shepeard, who became Emotionists at
about the same time (c. 1928), shared a flat in Golders Green and appeared
together on stage, first in May 1927 at the Hampstead Everyman Theatre. Ashcroft
was the subject of several of Shepeard's drawings.
The founding of the Emotionists is recounted in Dunlop's
aptly named memoirs Struggling with Paint. His only mention of Jean Shepeard
[sic] is as a member of this group; none of the other members' names can be
associated with Francis Bacon's known friends or colleagues at that time but
it is possible that the sociable and ambitious De Maistre (1894-1968) may
have provided the contact. Dunlop and Shepeard showed in group exhibitions
for three or four years beginning with the Summer Salon at the Redfern
Gallery, London, in August 1929 (where Hooper Rowe, another Emotionist
member, also exhibited. She shared a show with Dunlop and two other artists
at the Ward Gallery, 3 Baker Street, in 1931, held a one-woman show of
drawings at Reid & Lefevre in early 1933, which attracted considerable
notice, and had works at the Wertheim Gallery and the Picture Lending
Society, Bloomsbury, in the same period. She seems to have given up
exhibiting in c. 1933-34 when her stage appearances became numerous, but
continued to draw and paint until her death in Highbury, London, in 1989.
Two facts are immediately established from the papers Jean
Shepeard left behind relating to this shared exhibition. The first is that
Bacon lived at 17 Queensberry Mews West, South Kensington, and not at number
7 as has been given in all previous literature. And the second is that the
show was held from 4th to 22nd November in late 1930, not in the winter of
1929-30, and thus three months after the Studio puff had been published.
Perhaps that article was a contributing factor to Bacon's increased
professionalism for he printed not only an invitation card (Fig. 41),
presumably designed by him, in fashionable eau-de-nil and black, but also a
brief catalogue (see the Appendix below), both hitherto unrecorded.
Queensbury Place Mews runs between Queensbury Place and
Queen's Gate, S.W.7, (and very close to Reece Mews where Bacon lived and
worked in the last three decade s of his life). It was well known for its
motor garages and motor accessories showrooms and it is known that Bacon's
ground-floor studio was a converted garage; living quarters occupied the
storey above, reached by an outside staircase from the News; number 17 (which
exists seemingly unchanged externally and is now part of a health and fitness
club; Fig 43) was at the end of the cul-de-sac running west of the Mews
itself, half-way down, and abutting the ecclesiastical Place Gate Hall. The
exhibition must have taken place in the white-walled, converted garage where
the photographs for Studio had been taken. There are at least two paintings
by Roy de Maistre of the room. In the first, an internal staircase at one
corner leads to the flat above. The second, known as Interior (Fig. 42) and
almost without doubt shown in the 1930 exhibition (no.7), depicts the front
of the studio with recognisable furniture and a rug by Bacon, as well as the
barred windows still in situ. The painting, in De Maitre's coolly objective
style (which alternated with a more modernist manner inspired by the
modernism of Herbin and Metzinger), has been in the Manchester City Art
Gallery's collection since 1934. These records of Bacon's pristine working
space at that time form a remarkable contrast to the celebrated photographs
of his later studios.
Further confirmation of Bacon's tenancy is found in the
London Post Office Directory. For 1931 'Bacon Fras' is listed under 17
Queensbury Mews West, indicating he was resident in 1930 when the Directory
was compiled. In 1932 a Mrs Favell has taken up residency and we lose sight
of Bacon until 1934 when he appears as 'Bacon Fras. artist' above Mrs Alex
Scott's oriental art business at 71 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, where there
was a rear studio whose previous tenant had been Anna de Wolkoff. In 1932-33
it seems Bacon was peripatetic, living in or near Fulham Road and in Glebe
Place, Chelsea. It seems likely that Bacon's return from Berlin and Paris
must have been towards the very end of 1929, when he lighted on the Mews
garage, his tenancy just too late for inclusion in the Directory for 1930.
Notes
on Francis Bacon
DAVID SYLVESTER | THE
INDEPENDENT | JULY
14, 1996
Five
thousand people a day are going to see the new Bacon retrospective in Paris,
the city which the artist always thought of as his mecca. Here, the show's
curator reflects on the contradictions and the mystery in the work
Francis Bacon was
an old-fashioned militant atheist who always seemed to be looking for
pretexts to issue a reminder that God was dead and to bang a few nails into
his coffin. Nevertheless, Bacon's paintings - especially the big triptychs -
tend to have a structure and an atmosphere which make them look as if they
belonged in churches. Within the tradition of European religious painting God
appears, of course, in numerous guises - as creator, as vengeful judge, as
merciful father, as the son sacrificed and reborn, as king of the universe,
and here as dead and gone. So Bacon's art has a momentous quality that has
won him a widely perceived role as something like a successor to Picasso;
it's not his formal qualities that have given him this exalted place but his
creation of images that are seen as apocalyptic.
He himself said:
"Really, I think of myself as a maker of images. The image matters more
than the beauty of the paint . . . I suppose I'm lucky in that images just
drop in as if they were handed down to me . . . I always think of myself not
so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance . . . I think
perhaps I am unique in that way, and perhaps it's a vanity to say such a
thing, but I don't think I'm gifted; I just think I'm receptive . . ."
This extremely sophisticated, intellectually acute man, with a deep realism
about life, saw himself as a prophet.
While allowing
that "the image matters more than the beauty of the paint", Bacon
felt that painting tended to be pointless if the paint itself were not
eloquent. He aimed at the "complete interlocking of image and
paint" so that "every movement of the brush on the canvas alters
the shape and implications of the image". All sorts of ways of putting
paint on and taking it off were used to bring into being something
unforeseen; it was a question of "taking advantage of what happens when
you splash the bits down". Painting became a gamble in which every gain
made had to be risked in the search for further gain. Winning, as always, was
largely a question of knowing when to stop. For many years Bacon hardly ever
stopped in time.
We walk into a bar
or a party and suddenly people are there occupying spaces we might have moved
into. They surge up in our field of vision and every movement they make seems
to set off vibrations that impinge on us. They are expansive, anarchic
presences, and we cannot avoid paying attention to them.
A similar raw
immediacy emanates from the figures in Bacon's paintings. And with it a smell
of mortality. But also an easy grandeur which suggests that they are demigods
or kings.
These epic figures
are mostly depictions of individuals in Bacon's life - his erotic life or his
drinking life. Bacon had something of Picasso's genius for transforming his
autobiography into images with a mythic allure and weight.
Was Bacon an
expressionist? He didn't think of himself as one: "I'm just trying to
make images as accurately off my nervous system as I can. I don't even know
what half of them mean. I'm not saying anything. Whether one's saying
anything for other people, I don't know. But I'm not really saying anything,
because I'm probably much more concerned with the aesthetic qualities of a
work than, perhaps, Munch was. But I've no idea what any artist is trying to
say, except the most banal artists."
At the same time,
he was convinced that "the greatest art always returns you to the
vulnerability of the human situation".
FB: I was thinking
about your bedroom - that just to have Holland blinds would be better
aesthetically but that curtains make sex more comforting.
DS: Well, I'm sure
curtains go very well with sex because they're there so often in pictures of
sexual scenes. You yourself used to have curtains in your earliest pictures
of having sex but now the backgrounds are starker and the sex seems just as
good.
FB: Yes, but in
the more recent pictures it's pure sex. You know, I don't really like the
billing and cooing of sex; I just like the sex itself. Do you think that's a
homosexual thing?
DS: No. I think it
can go right across the board.
His choice of art:
Egyptian sculpture. Masaccio. Michelangelo - the drawings above all, perhaps.
Raphael. Velsquez. Rembrandt, mainly the portraits. Goya, but not the black
paintings. Turner and Constable. Manet. Degas. Van Gogh. Seurat. Picasso,
especially where he is closest to Surrealism. Duchamp, especially the Large
Glass. Some Matisse, especially the Bathers by a River, but not
wholeheartedly: "he doesn't have Picasso's brutality of fact." And
Giacometti's drawings, but not the sculpture.
His choice of
literature: Aeschylus. Shakespeare. Racine. Aubrey's Brief Lives. Boswell's
Johnson. Saint-Simon. Balzac. Nietzsche. Van Gogh's letters. Freud. Proust.
Yeats. Joyce. Pound. Eliot. Heart of Darkness. Leiris. Artaud. He liked some
of Cocteau but generally had a positive dislike for homosexual writing, such
as Auden and Genet.
Bacon was almost
the only important artist of his generation anywhere who behaved as if Paris
were still the centre of the art world.
Even today Bacon
is widely thought of as an artistic leper. People like to say complacently
that they are afraid to go near the work. They decline to cope with its
"violence". Well, of course, Bacon's work is violent, in the sense
that a Matisse or a Newman is violent in the force and incisiveness of its
impact: it is aesthetically violent. ("I think that great art is deeply
ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and
accidental things, nevertheless I think that they come out of a desire for
ordering and for returning fact on to the nervous system in a more violent
way.") But the main objection that seems to emerge from the muddy
controversy about Bacon's violence is that it is something more specialised -
that it's a "morbid" taste for real violence.
There is certainly
a very convulsive quality in many of Bacon's figures, and convulsion is a
sign of violence. But not necessarily of a horrific violence. Convulsions of
sexual pleasure are something most of us undergo as often as we can.
In the monumental
spaces of the retrospective at the Centre Pompidou the balance of power in
Bacon's work between convulsion and order seems remarkably different from
what it has previously seemed (and will no doubt seem again in other
installations). Here the dominant attributes are grandeur and calm.
Some peculiarities
of Bacon's paintings:
(1) They are
intended to be seen through glass - always, not just when they are partly in
pastel.
(2) All the extant
canvases are upright in format, with two exceptions; all others with a
landscape format are triptychs.
(3) There is
normally a single mass on a canvas unless it depicts a couple coupling and
coalescing into a single mass.
(4) Human beings
are always shown on roughly the same scale: the small canvases depict heads and
these are about the same size as the heads on the figures which the big
canvases depict - about three-quarters life- size.
(5) Even when the
space is a perspectival stage in the Renaissance tradition, there are often
elements such as arrows or dotted lines which are clearly not meant to be
read as parts of what is depicted but as diagrammatic signs superimposed upon
the image. Another indicator of the work's artificiality is a dichotomy
between the handling of figures and that of settings: the figures are
realised with highly visible brushmarks, the settings with a flat layer of
thin paint.
(6) The paintings
have titles like Study from the Human Body, Study for
Portrait, Study for Crouching Nude, Study of a Figure
in a Landscape, Study after Velsquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent
X. So there are studies from, studies for, studies of, studies after, as
if to say that at least some of the works were preliminary sketches for more
definitive statements. What is in fact being said is that the artist wishes
all his works to be regarded as provisional.
According to a
curator's wall text at the Tate, "Bacon's view of existence strips life
of purpose and meaning". So much for wall texts. Bacon's view of
existence was that life was not empty merely because it was bereft of an
afterlife and a deity. "We are born and we die, but in between we give
this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives." The paintings are a
huge affirmation that human vulnerability is countered by human vitality.
They are a shout of defiance in the face of death.
"And what
about the great silent figures of Aeschylus?" he suddenly said one day,
apropos of nothing.
The Aeschylean
menace and foreboding, the feeling - despite the humanism - of the immanence
of higher and decisive powers, are there all of the time.
Francis Bacon, organised with the collaboration of the British Council,
continues at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (00 33 1 44 78 12 33), to 14 Oct (not
Tues). On 28 Oct, the exhibition will open at the Haus der Kunst, Munich (00
49 89 21 12 70), to 31 Jan 1997.
Bacon's
cardinal steps into the light
By
MARIANNE MACDONALD | ARTS
CORRESPONDENT | THE
INDEPENDENT | OCTOBER
12, 1996
The usual suspects packed Sotheby's salesroom
last night for the first important art auction of the spring. While the
audience looked the same as it always does, the crowd of dealers and
collectors, art experts and auction-house groupies who came to watch and to
bid on contemporary art didn't act the same. Hadn't they taken their vitamins?
Bidding was cautious, if not anemic. But the auction still managed to total a
respectable $13 million, not far below Sotheby's estimate of $15.7 million to
$22 million. Of the 46 works offered for sale, 36 found buyers.
Still, caution seemed contagious last night.
For the most part, works tended to sell for around Sotheby's estimates.
Francis Bacon's Portrait of
Henrietta Moraes on White Ground (1964),
depicting one of the artist's favourite models reclining on a bed, went to an
unidentified American buyer in the front row for nearly $1.4 million, right
in the middle of Sotheby's estimate of $1.2 million to $1.8 million. The
price must have been right. In London last June, Christie's tried to sell a
Bacon with an estimate of $3.1 million, but the painting, Study of a Portrait of
Pope Innocent X by Velazquez (1959),
didn't elicit a bid.
Bacon:
Terrifying and Seductive
MICHAEL GIBSON | INTERNATIONAL
HERALD TRIBUNE | SATURDAY,
JUNE 29, 1996
Twenty years ago, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) made the cover
of Newsweek under the caption Art
as Agony. In 1989 it was The
New York Times Magazine's turn
to celebrate his work under the title Unnerving
Art. Both phrases testify eloquently to the troubled emotions Bacon's
paintings can arouse.
As demonstrated by the stunning exhibition of close to a
hundred works (including numerous triptychs), which opened this week at the
Pompidou Center, his terrifying visions still seduce and disturb as can no
other work of contemporary art. Walking through the halls in which these
paintings hang assembled, one is first struck by the extraordinary continuity
they form, as though one thread ran through them all, stringing them together
into a single coherent narrative.
The work of other artists (Cézanne, Picasso)
can be broken down into such watertight categories as landscapes, nudes or
portraits.
These same categories also exist in Bacon's
work, but the startling unity and coherence of the experience his paintings
provide as soon as they are set side by side suggests that the artist
addressed something that lies beyond such categories, binding them all
together as surely as still life, landscape, portrait and narrative stand
intimately fused in a Renaissance fresco.
There is nonetheless a strong contrast
between the setting depicted in most of his paintings, in which color is
diluted and applied evenly across the surface in pleasant, decorative tones,
and the figures themselves, which stand out in drips and smears and
occasionally crusty impasto.
The neutrality of the setting, which
resembles nothing so much as a bare and freshly painted hotel room, stresses
the indifference that surrounds the abominable suffering of the figure
bleeding and leaking various offensive fluids at the center of the picture.
At Beaubourg we find ourselves confronted
from beginning to end with a single continuous Via Dolorosa, a gruesome
Passion narrative.
This effect is heightened by the fact, that
Bacon's paintings, as his friend David Sylvester, co-curator of the
exhibition, so rightly observes, "tend to have a structure and an
atmosphere which makes them look as if they belonged in churches."
Crucifixions are allusively treated in
several major triptychs; countless other works are devoted to the agony of vivisected
bodies which may or may not be human. Horror even emerges in such mundane
ventures as portraits in which the sitter's features are smeared, distorted
or — in Bacon's own words — subjected to "injury."
Considering the great unity of the work in both
form and subject matter, one is oddly faced with the idea that the exhibition
as a whole addresses the viewer in terms that are precisely those of
religious art. Nor is this incompatible with the fact that Bacon was
(Sylvester, once more) "an old-fashioned militant atheist."
These works may be said to address the human
condition, but without attempting to deliver any message. "I work for
myself," Bacon declared, "for how can one work for a public?"
- THIS is indeed a crucial point, for viewers often seem to have a sixth
sense that immediately detects whether an artist is using the seductive power
of his work as a lever to make some moral point. There is none of this in
Bacon's work. He paints from the vantage point of his own special solitude
without trying to convince anyone of anything. ''That's why I'm always
surprised when anyone else likes my work,'' Bacon concluded. But why all this
pain? An answer to such a question is to be sought in such older works as
Grünewald's Issenheim altarpiece with its blood-flecked
and gangrenous Christ on the cross, or in Titian's Flaying of Marsyas in which a little dog is shown
lapping up the blood that flows from the skinless body: Pain, moral and
physical, is an existential issue that art has consistently touched upon
throughout the centuries. The issue of pain is also at the core of the
question of meaning: When pain reaches such paroxysmal intensity, can any
life still have meaning? Bacon did not believe in any divinely ordained
meaning, but he clearly did believe that his own kind of pain found meaning
and, indeed, a defiant form of redemption in the triumph of his art.
This exhibition, so appropriately assembled
as the century hastens to its close, suggests that Bacon is not alone in
finding redemption, or at least catharsis, in these works. So do, perhaps,
the occupants of this inhuman age, brought face to face not so much with
bloody deeds as with the horrifying, degrading conception of man that alone
made such deeds possible.
Francis Bacon, Centre
Pompidou, to Oct. 14. Then to Munich, Haus der Kunst, Nov. 4 to Jan. 31.
A Mystery Livens London Art
Auctions
By CAROL VOGEL | THE NEW YORK TIMES | JULY 1st, 1996
A mysterious
German-speaking collector went on a wild shopping spree at Sotheby's last
week, buying approximately $22 million worth of paintings by Chagall, Renoir,
Klee, Miro, Dubuffet, Freud and Bacon, among others. She bid by telephone to
Agnes Husslein, Sotheby's Vienna representative, who was here for the
Impressionist, modern and contemporary art auctions. Since the buyer asked
that the auction house not reveal her identity, Sotheby's would say only that
she was a woman who lived in Europe.
While there has been frenzied speculation
among experts as to who she is, the name that has surfaced most is that of
Heidi Charmat, the widow of Helmut Horten, a Viennese owner of a
department-store chain, who died in 1987, leaving her a reported $3 billion.
One of the sale's
highlights was Francis Bacon's Head
of Woman, a 1960 portrait of Muriel Belcher, the proprietor of the Colony
Room, a famous Soho drinking club, which sold to an unidentified telephone
bidder for $832,370, just above its low $800,000 estimate.
A British
Outsider Embraced With a French Blockbuster
By ALAN RIDING | ARTS | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | JULY 10, 1996
PARIS July 9 - Like many other cities, Paris now routinely uses blockbuster
shows to revive interest in artists ranging from Poussin to Cezanne. But what
distinguishes the major retrospective of Francis Bacon that just opened at
the Georges Pompidou Center is that the British artist died only four years
ago. Already, it seems, his work is considered ripe to be rediscovered.
Not that Bacon lacked for attention in his
lifetime. In fact, one of the most important exhibitions of his works was
held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. France nonetheless always viewed
him as something of an outsider, a figurative painter when abstract and then
Conceptual Art were all the rage, a man whose distinct visual language seemed
to owe nothing to French artistic tradition.
For a new generation, then, the show at the
Pompidou Center, the largest Bacon exhibition in a decade, is indeed a
discovery. And it has been received here as such, with extensive coverage in
newspapers and magazines and the publication of a comprehensive 336-page
catalogue. The exhibition, which closes on Oct. 14, has 79 paintings,
including 16 of Bacon's 30 triptychs, and 7 works on paper.
"Bacon at last!" Jean-Marie Tasset
wrote in Le Figaro.
"If he had not been a millionaire, he would no doubt have been our
martyr of contemporary art. For so long he was scorned as reactionary and
conventional by the official thinkers of the day. Long excluded, he is now
recognized by all. Through his life and work, Bacon showed that individual
courage is the best way of fighting prejudice."
Bacon made no effort to reach out to most of
his contemporaries. For many years he was a close friend of the painter Lucian
Freud, although he disliked being grouped with Mr. Freud, Leon Kossoff, Frank
Auerbach, R. B. Kitaj and Michael Andrews in a so-called School of London. He
also dismissed Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and made no secret of
his deep distaste for the whole range of nonfigurative postwar art movements.
What becomes apparent in this exhibition is
that from the moment he created his Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in 1944, Bacon found his own
tormented vision of art. And until his death in 1992 at the age of 83, he
continued to explore the disturbingly deformed images of the human face and
body that distinguish his work from anything before or since. His favorite
subject in his later years was John Edwards, the friend to whom he left $16.9
million. Bacon liked to consider the 1944 triptych, with its monstrous
semi-human figures set against an acid orange background, as marking the
start of his career as an artist. In truth, he began drawing and painting
more than 15 years earlier, but he destroyed almost everything he did. Of 10
surviving pre-1944 paintings, three are in the show here, including his
ghostly Crucifixion of 1933, which was well received at
the time.
Bacon was born in Dublin of English parents
in 1909 and moved with his family to London in 1914. In 1925, at 16, he left
home after a fight with his father and began what became an infamously
bohemian life. He began work as a decorator and furniture designer and often
went to Europe. In 1928, he visited a Picasso exhibition in Paris that
inspired him to start drawing.
By the mid-1930's, he had given up decorating
for painting but had had little success. He showed his work in some
collective exhibitions and did odd jobs to make ends meet. The two other
early works on display here point the way to his lifelong use of rich, almost
garish colours, although their styles are derivative, Interior of a Room (1935) of post-Cubism and Figures in a Garden (1936) of Surrealism. Two of the
works on paper, one an hommage to Picasso, also date to this period.
In 1944, recognition of Bacon as an original
began to grow. His personal life was tumultuous: he was an inveterate
gambler, he always drank heavily and he flaunted his homosexuality. But his
provocative way of life seemed to inspire him to create. He was an avowed
atheist, yet he returned frequently to the theme of crucifixion, always
calling his works "studies," as if one day he planned to paint a
complete crucifixion. The howling mouths or silent screams that characterized
much of his work through the 1950's soon appeared, with a series of isolated
heads giving way to his many studies inspired by Velazquez's majestic
portrait of Pope Innocent X. In this series and in his studies for a portrait
of van Gogh, his tributes to the artists were direct. Elsewhere, he quoted
more subtly from Monet, Michelangelo, Turner and Degas.
In the 1960's, Bacon began to use friends, among them Mr. Freud, as
models, although working from photographs because he liked to work alone in
his studio. And even here, the photos were merely to remind him of certain
features. What counted was the image they projected to him, and it was this
he would paint, often mangling faces or twisting bodies to catch their
"appearance."
"The image is a kind of tightrope walk between what is called
figurative painting and abstraction," he once told David Sylvester, an
old friend and distinguished British art critic who organized the Pompidou
exhibition. "It will go right out from abstraction but will really have
nothing to do with it. It's an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto
the nervous system more violently and more poignantly."
With these portraits, Bacon also began to reduce competing images in
his canvases to a minimum, apparently eager to focus all attention on the
pain or sex or violence or solitude he was trying to convey. Obsessed with
geometric forms, he introduced lines as "glass cages" to create
frames within frames. In Triptych
Inspired by T. S. Eliot's Poem 'Sweeney Agonistes' (1960), the flanking panels show
two nude women and two nude men on beds inside "glass cages," while
the central panel shows a bloody corpse in a train compartment.
In many of his works of this period, he used his lover, George Dyer,
as his model, as in Three
Studies of the Male Back. And after Dyer committed suicide in 1971 (just
before Bacon's Paris exhibition that year), Bacon continued to paint him, as
if anxious to purge himself of responsibility for his friend's death. Triptych: In Memory of George
Dyer is particularly
touching, with the central panel showing Dyer holding the key to the door of
an apartment.
Bacon's sense of the continuity of his work was underlined in 1988
when he repainted his 1944 triptych, now somewhat more stylized and with a
dark red background replacing the original acid orange. And until the end of
his life he continued to probe himself in studies for self-portraits. But he
always insisted that his purpose was not to shock or disturb.
"My figures are not twisted or tortured by torture," he said
in a 1971 interview with a French magazine. "I do not deform bodies for
the pleasure of it, rather in order to transmit the reality of the image in
its most poignant phase. Perhaps it is not the best way, but it is the only
way I know of to get to something that is as close as possible to life."
The
artist formerly known as British
ANDREW GRAHAM-DIXON | THE
INDEPENDENT | JULY
16, 1996
The Francis Bacon retrospective, which opened
a fortnight ago at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, has been attracting
approximately 5,000 visitors each day. That is a remarkable figure. Picasso
and Matisse apart, it is hard to think of another 20th-century artist capable
of drawing such crowds. It is impossible to think of another British
20th-century artist capable of doing so.
As far as the French are concerned, we are to
understand that Bacon is not British at all, but European. According to
Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the president of the Pompidou Centre, he is one of the
quintessentially European artists of modern times. Indeed, Aillagon adds, the
exhibition may be counted upon to reveal the "profonde Europeanite"
- the profound Europeanness - of his painting. It is very unusual for the French
to consider a British artist as one of them, as part of the mainstream, in
quite this way.
The desire to recruit Bacon as a
"European" is not entirely perverse because, at the level of its
technique, Bacon's art does speak long and lovingly about the art of the
Italian, Spanish and Dutch masters he admired (above all Titian, Velázquez
and Rembrandt). Yet the Pompidou exhibition and its popularity surely says as
much about the the times in which we live as it does about Bacon's art.
The readiness or the desire to see this
difficult, refractory boundlessly vital individual as an emblematic
trans-national European figure may be symptomatic of something else; part of
a broader quest for some binding sense of European identify, perhaps. But
there is a paradox here, because Bacon's grand subject is the troubled and
fugitive nature of identity itself. Bacon's art teaches us to admit that we
do not know quite who we are, nor quite what is going on, nor why. Could it
be that modern Europe is prepared to embrace him because it sees in his work
a reflection of its own uncertainties and fragmentation?
The images confronting those 5,000 daily
visitors to the Pompidou Centre are neither pleasant nor comforting. In
Bacon's art the Pope screams, the newsreader, in his glass box, laughs the
laugh of a maniac; while the politician grins, melts and collapses into an
incoherent puddle of matter. The dissolved, blurred and otherwise deformed
people we see in Bacon's paintings have lost their coherence and have
metamorphosed into projectiles of flesh and energy, going God knows where.
They embrace each other. They eat each other. Often, we see them in the
process of turning into animals.
Bacon's is an art of breakdown, meltdown and
entropy - a fact he makes plain by taking the classic forms of Western
European religious art (the triptych, the icon) and twisting them to his own
ends. One of the first pictures to be seen in the exhibition is that with
which the artist made his London exhibiting debut, in 1944: Three Studies for Figures at the
Base of a Crucifixion. The writer John Russell, who went to see the
painting in an exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery just a month before the end
of the Second World War, has left a fine description of the appalling impact
it made on the fragile optimism of its first audience.
"Immediately to the right of the door
were images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut snap at the sight of
them. Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal and they were confined in a
low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite,
probe and suck, and they had very long, eel-like necks ... Common to all
three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a
ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. They caused a total consternation.
We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them."
Yet the mood at the Pompidou Centre is one of
reverence. The paintings are hung within spaces and arranged in
configurations that suggest the sacredness of the chapel. There is even,
perhaps, a sense in which Bacon has now come to seem all too easily
accessible an artist. These days Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion does not seem to prompt shock but
(and this may itself be shocking in another way) an almost straightforward
sense of recognition. On the day when I visited the exhibition, I saw a young
couple approach Bacon's howling, sneering, squatting maenads, consider them
for a moment or two in silence, nod sadly and move on. Yes, the choreography
of their bodies seemed to say, yes, this is what the world is like. Ghouls
like these ones lurk everywhere - in corners of the mind best left unvisited,
in the shadow lands of society, in war zones.
Bacon originally seemed a disturbing artist
because he insisted on emphasising those aspects of humanity - transgressive,
violent, bestial - that most of his audience had spent their lives attempting
to suppress or ignore. Once, his work scandalised those who saw it. Now, many
seem to find in it cause for consent, even consensus. One generation' s
revelation has become another generation's given.
Perhaps it is in this sense, then, that Bacon
has become a "European" artist. In his visions of the ego
perpetually succumbing to the id, of the humane succumbing to the bestial, of
the coherent being swallowed up by the incoherent, we now simply see a
convincing account of the way things are - especially in central and Eastern
Europe. Yet, while the troubled modern European sensibility finds it tempting
to see itself and its own predicaments so uncannily reflected in the
deformations, apparent violence and the heightened sense of mortality
expressed by Bacon's work, this does not necessarily make it any easier for
us to see his strengths and weaknesses as an artist. Bacon himself, it ought
to be remembered, passionately disliked overt symbolic interpretation of his
work. Indeed, few things horrified him more than the notion that his pictures
might be taken for allegories of the political, moral or other ills of the
20th century.
The danger is that our own historical
circumstances, and our own sense of history, may persuade us to see Bacon's
work as merely a form of higher illustration; a series of cartoon diagrams
depicting such abstractions as the Human Condition or Late Twentieth Century
Anxiety. Yet at his very best, and particularly in his earlier work, which
looks more impressive with each passing year, Bacon gave expression to his
undoubted morbidity and pessimism with a pictorial inventiveness - an
originality in the actual handling of paint itself - unmatched in the art of
any of his contemporaries.
His paint had a visceral quality, and a
perverse beauty, that sets itself against the apparent horror of his imagery.
He once said, a propos of the screaming face that so fascinated him as a
motif that he wanted to paint the glitter and the life of the human mouth as
if he were Monet painting a sunset.
To see Francis Bacon as a great describer of
what it means, now, to be a European, may be in one sense to pay him his due.
But it is also to risk ironing out the unevenness in his work, and seeing
almost everything he touched as a masterpiece - which is almost the same as
forgetting what made him great, when he was great, in the first place. The moment
when we begin to find Significance in an artist's work may, also, be the
moment when we begin to lose sight of the work itself.
Cooked
up emotions
Edward Lucie-Smith
e EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH | ARTS
| EXHIBITIONS | THE
SPECTATOR | 27 JULY 1996
The Bacon retrospective at the
Centre Pompidou in Paris is about the best representation of the artist which
can be imagined — intelligently selected and flawlessly hung: no surprise,
this, when the curator of the show is David Sylvester, a close friend of the
artist, the major expert on Bacon's work, and a man who has turned the making
of exhibitions into an art form in its own right. The question the event
raises, and in even more acute form since the exhibition itself is so well
done, is whether Bacon is all he is cracked up to be.
Few
contemporary artists have attracted the support of intellectuals to the same
extent. From the great anthropologist Michel Leiris in Paris to Marta Traba,
founder of the Museo de Arte Moderns in Bogota, they have all sung Bacon's
praises. Traba's book Los
cuatro monstruos cardinales,
published in Mexico City in 1965 (the other 'monsters' were Dubuffet, De
Kooning and Jose Luis Cuevas), was enormously influential in spreading
Bacon's reputation throughout Latin America. It is a major omission from the
Centre Pompidou's otherwise very thorough bibliography. The attitude of these
intellectuals towards Bacon's work is summed up in the titles of two essays
by the veteran French poet and critic Alain Bosquet. One, published in Le
Quotidien de Paris
in 1987, was called 'Francis Bacon ou le terreur de soi'. The other,
published in Le
Figaro
four years ago, was called 'Francis Bacon, le terreur d'être'. That is, the
artist is seen as some- one who teaches us about that favourite 20th-century
concept, existential fear of the void. A militant atheist all his life, Bacon
emerges from the writings of his admirers as a quasi-religious figure. Can
one accept this? Equally, can one accept the view that Bacon is a technical
wizard, one of the few artists of his generation who actually understood what
paint could be made to do on canvas?
At
this point, I think it must be said that I already have a fairly prominent
place amongst the sceptics. I reviewed Bacon's first retrospective at the
Tate for the Listener in 1962, and I reviewed his work
again for the Evening Standard in 1978. On both occasions, if I
remember correctly, I compared him to Johann Heinrich Fuseli, painter of that
wonderfully hysterical, but also rather comic, near-masterpiece The
Nightmare', and central figure in the late 18th-century Sturm and Drang. Bacon, I thought, was
technically hit-or-miss, just as Fuseli was. I also felt that, like Fuseli,
he dealt in cooked up emotions — rushing around saying boo to any goose he
could find.
Has
the current exhibition caused me to change my mind? The answer must be 'a
little bit, but not as much as I hoped'. This is the first would-be
comprehensive survey of Bacon's work mounted since his death in 1992.
Sylvester has not had to consult the artist, and it shows in the choices he
has made. There are 88 single paintings and triptychs in the catalogue.
Sixty-two of these date from before the year 1972. Thirty-five date from
before 1960. Clearly the curator thinks that the early years produced Bacon's
most significant work. Going round the show, it is hard to disagree with this
verdict. 'Figure in a Landscape' of 1945, and the two 'Figure Studies' of
1946 — apparitions conjured up from an old tweed overcoat and a few other
props — are disturbing, masterly paintings which evoke a state halfway
between sleeping and waking, when familiar objects seem sinister and
alienated. Some of the paintings dating from the early 1950s based on images
made by the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge are scarcely less good.
These were also the years
when Bacon courageously faced the subject of his own homosexuality, in images
whose meaning could scarcely be misconstrued. 'Two Figures in the Grass', of
1954, is present in the Pompidou exhibition. The even more forthright 'Two
Figures on a Bed', of the 'Study of a Figure in a Landscape' by Francis
Bacon, Phillips Collection, Washington previous year, is absent, but
reproduced full-page in the catalogue. Post-Wolfenden, post-Hockney, post-Gay
Lib, these paintings have lost a great deal of their original impact. In the
repressed climate of the 1950s, they had the force of an explosion. People
talked about them, though they were little seen. When the Institute of Con-
temporary Arts gave Bacon a retrospective in 1955, featuring only 13
pictures, 'Two Figures in the Grass' was included, but prudently not
reproduced in the catalogue.
Perhaps because the imagery
carried such a serious freight of meaning, this was also the epoch when
Bacon's actual technique was at its most secure. As everyone knows, he was
not a trained artist, and the three paintings done in the 1930s which are
included here (Bacon destroyed a number of others) are not models of
technical refinement. Indeed, it wouldn't be going too far to call them
slightly ham-fisted. His best technical achievements came when he learned to
use the 'wrong, unprepared, side of the canvas. This led to the vaporous,
dream-like look typical of the series of Popes (paraphrases of Velazquez's
'Portrait of Pope Innocent X'), the paintings which, more than any others,
supplied the bedrock of Bacon's early reputation. In the 1960s, there is a
change, and not for the better. Now only the figures are freely brushed,
against linoleum-like grounds of flat, unarticulated colour. As if to
compensate for deadness of a large part of the picture-surface, Bacon also
elaborated the whole decorative apparatus which already played a role in his
works — platforms, transparent boxes, screens, bath- room fittings, distorted
items of modernist furniture. Even where the paintings commemorate real,
tragic events, like the suicide of the artist's lover George Dyer on the eve
of the triumphant opening of Bacon's first Paris retrospective in 1971, there
is something cooked up about them — a shrill, forced, sensationalist element
which would only strengthen as the years went on. Even the most personal
works became scenes from a melodrama.
If one considers Bacon's career as a whole, one is struck
by certain things. He relied on a very small store of key images, most of
them borrowed — from the Velazquez just mentioned (a painting he never dared
to see in the original), from Muybridge, from medical textbooks, from
Eisenstein's Battleship
Potemkin. Equally, he mythicised a small group of friends and
lovers, whose likenesses appear again and again — Dyer, Isabel, Rawsthome,
Lucian Freud, Muriel Belcher (proprietress of the Colony Room in Soho),
Henrietta Moraes. With the exception of Freud, few of these were
personalities of general interest, though as anyone who encountered some of
them in the flesh can say, they did have a certain arrogant confidence in
their own bohemianism, just like Bacon himself. Whether you can actually
found a universal myth about the splendours and horrors of contemporary life on such
specialised and scanty materials must, I think, remain in question.
It
remains to say something, briefly, about the other 'British' show in Paris, A
Century of British Sculpture at the Jeu de Paume. Alluding to the exhibition
in these pages (6 July), Leslie Geddes-Brown seemed to think it was rather a
good thing. Alas, this is not the case. Epstein, Moore, Hepworth, Ben
Nicholson, Caro, Paolozzi are crammed into small spaces downstairs. Upstairs,
in the larger galleries, is a parade of currently fashionable names —
Flanagan, Long, Cragg, Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst. It is British
sculpture seen through the eyes of leading international art magazines: a
hierarchy of what is 'important' which has everything to do with current hype
and almost nothing to do with a sense of history or with individual judgment.
Better not to publicise national achievement at all than to publicise it in
these terms.
Francis
Bacon (Pompidou Centre, 14 October)
‘Study
of a Figure in a Landscape’ by Francis Bacon, Phillips Collection, Washington
He
hung himself on a hook
By
MARTIN GAYFORD |
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH |
SATURDAY, 24 AUGUST, 1996
FRANCIS
BACON fills the main exhibition rooms at the Pompidou Centre this summer
(until October 14). How many other British artists would be accorded similar
prominence in Paris? Turner, and Constable, no doubt, and Henry Moore, and
that's about it. To most art lovers in continental Europe the above is an
exhaustive list of significant art from this island, and Bacon is a key
element of it: the 20th-century English painter. But, back in his own
country, Bacon is not necessarily awarded so much honour.
Several critics
have come out over the last couple of months with admissions that, frankly, they
can't see what all the fuss is about. To many people, not necessarily
philistines either, Bacon what he was to Mrs Thatcher: the man
who painted those horrible pictures. This impeccably hung and selected
exhibition offers an opportunity for an interim assessment of Bacon's
reputation. How good was he really?
The case against
him comes in two parts, one moral and one aesthetic. Let's take the first
first. According to this his view of the world was too warped for his
paintings to count as major art. Bacon, this line goes, was a Johnny One-note
of art, offering a repetitive Hobbesian diet of visual nastiness and
brutishness. Bacon's vision of human existence therefore requires, in the
words of the late Peter Fuller, "a moral refusal". In other words,
life simply isn't like that.
To this Bacon had
an answer. In the course of his interviews with David Sylvester he described
his aims as an artist thus: "I've always tried to put things over as
directly and rawly as I possibly can, and perhaps, if a thing comes across
directly, people find that it is horrific. Because people tend to be offended
by facts, or what used to be called the truth."
This exhibition
substantiates Bacon's opinion of his own work.
Thus Bacon, in his
own mind, was by no means a master of modernist Grand Guignol; on the
contrary, he was a sort of realist. His work was an attempt to make images
which would have the most intense possible effect on his nervous system,
images which would affect the viewer "more violently and poignantly".
True or false?
It seems to me
that this exhibition substantiates Bacon's opinion of his own work. Bacon was
not an expressionist, but a painter who was out to capture how real people
looked and, included in the way they looked, inevitably, the feelings that they
gave him. He did this, however, in a highly idiosyncratic way. Many great
figurative artists of the last century - from Cézanne to Kossoff, Auerbach
and Freud - have slogged their way through a fresh vision by working directly
from nature. Others have used drawings, or photographs.
Bacon worked from
his memories. He used photographs, true, but the resulting image did not look
photographic. Bacon looked at photographs, as he explained, to jog his memory
- as one would look up a word in a dictionary. It was the memories he was
after.
That explains a
great deal about his paintings - their slightly dream-like quality, the
impression they sometimes give of being not quite there, and at the same time
tremendously vivid. There is an ectoplasmic feel, for example, about the Three Studies of the Human Head from 1953, one of his best
paintings of the period, which is easily comprehensible as a memory, a
powerful, probably drunken memory, rather than as an image of a sitter in
front of the artist.
Essentially, he
was trying to find an equivalent in paint to his own emotional reactions to
people - and he clearly had an overpowering sense of the animal nature of
man. Most of us scarcely think of ourselves as made up of muscle, which is
meat. Bacon clearly never lost that awareness.
His distortions
are no more radical than those employed by many 20th-century artists.
He was always
surprised, he said, when he went into a butcher's shop, not to find himself
hanging up on a hook. This visceral sense of the beast in man evidently
struck Bacon as both alarming and touching - "violent and poignant"
- because it is linked so clearly with mortality.
Thus there is a
feral blur - as if of something caught in the act of pouncing - not just
about his paintings of animals, for example the Dog of 1952, but also about his
pictures of people, such as the Study for Nude from the previous year. Some
of his pictures of people have an air of sardonic menace - Study for a Portrait 1953 is an example - which one
associates with gangland villains in films. Could Bacon sometimes be
humorous? It's a strange thought.
On the other hand,
some of his people - the reclining man on the right section of the triptych Three Figures in a Room 1964 - have an air of nobility. But
to see that you have to get over the shock value of his idiom. In fact, his
distortions are no more radical than those employed by many 20th-century
artists.
Thus Turning Figure from 1962 has a good deal in
common with the running figure, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, by the
Futurist, Umberto Boccioni. His heads are often dissected into curving planes
in a way that brings Picasso to mind, or the Russian sculptor Antoine
Pevsner.
The difference is
that with Bacon there is a far greater sense that his figures are actually
made out of living flesh. Indeed, one or two give the impression that the
sitter has been rearranged along modernist lines with a chain saw. But that
shock - not so much the shock of the new as the shock of the real - was
exactly what Bacon was after. To the extent that he produced it, he
succeeded.
The other charge
against him is that the paintings do not work as art. In the later work there
is certainly sometimes a jarring dislocation between the figures executed in
meaty swirls of oil paint and the crisply clean, brightly-coloured settings
which are close to geometric abstract painting. But that, arguably, is part
of Bacon's expressive purpose. It dramatises the contrast between messy,
organic, mortal man and his clean, dead, manufactured environment.
A few years after
his death, the best of Bacon's painting looks sure to last.
It is less easy to
acquit Bacon of the charge of repetitiousness. After the early surreal period
of Three Studies for Figures
at the Base of a Crucifixion, and the succeeding period of Screaming
Popes, the classic Bacon man - and sometimes woman - evolved. The format to
an extent became standardised. There was a saminess about his work which
perhaps resulted from its lack of direct contact with reality.
Towards the end (he
died in 1992) there was a clear falling off. Few paintings from the last
decade of his life work, with the exception of the moving Study for
Self-Portrait: Triptych from 1985-86. Some - especially those that examine
the sexual potential of the cricket-pad - are not so much raw and shocking as
preposterous.
But repetitiousness is a common fate of late 20th- century
artists of all varieties - figurative, abstract, conceptual. Now, a few years
after his death, the best of Bacon's painting looks sure to last. But, as he
said himself, it takes 75 to 100 years for a reputation to settle down.
"Time is the only great critic."
The Body as Flesh: Theological and Medical
Discourses
Professor Bryan Turner
Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Deakin
University. He has published widely on social theory and made fundamental
contributions to the sociological study of citizenship, religion and the
body.
Art, Medicine & Body Conference, Perth,
August 1996
I will move forward into some twentieth century images of
the human body. Francis Bacon's work, I think, is interesting for today's
paper on the whole idea of fleshliness. A lot of people have commented on
Francis Bacon's own name as an interesting statement about the human body.
You probably know that many of Francis Bacon's works were influenced by his
fascination, as a younger man, with medical pictures of pathology of the
mouth. As we will see in some of the later slides I will show, [there is] an
emphasis on the mouth in many of Bacon's works. He is, as you probably know,
also very much influenced by the whole problem of war, violence, and terror
in contemporary society. This relates more to what I want to say in the
second paper, but the body raises acute issues of what the self is, and I
think in Bacon's portraits, what we are getting is a reflection on how the
face relates to the notion of self in human society.
These are probably quite well known slides of Bacon that
you will be familiar with. I want to get to the one called Painting 1946, which is
the thing that I am going to concentrate on. It has got all the
characteristic signs, so to speak, of a Bacon painting. There is the cage, or
the frame that the body is located in; there are bits of butchered meat in
various parts of the painting; we have got at the back a side of beef, yet
again, which to me sends out signals about Rembrandt and Soutine and Goya and
the whole western history of the body as flesh, the body as meat. Again, it
raises important questions about relationships with nature and society, but
also important questions about animal flesh and human beings, and the fact
that human beings, in so far as they are carnivorous, share a community, a
company, with animals through the consumption of meat. In the background,
there is either a side of beef, or a crucifixion scene.
Then there is a characteristic umbrella-or at least I read
it as an umbrella-over the head, and in some of the interpretations of this
painting that I have read, this head is partly based upon images of
Mussolini. Here again, I think the mouth [is] the orifice which is connected
to the beating and the destruction, with the consumption of meat, but also
that organ which is characteristically human, namely the organ of speech and
communication, an organ closely associated with sexuality and love, kissing
and touching of lips, but also biting and violence. The fascination with the
mouth and the fragmentation of the body into different parts-again, following
both earlier talks-I think is quite interesting.
The human mouth, again, is totally ambiguous, apart from
the hand, probably one of the most expressive parts of the body. We shake
hands, we spit on our hands, we clasp hands-another way of bonding, of
course, is kissing and communicating through the mouth. So, [like] a lot of
writing about deconstructionist methodologies-in one of the earlier papers,
Alan was talking about the idea of language and body going together-I would
say speech and communication and embodiment [are] very fundamental to much of
what Francis Bacon is trying to say here.
Francis Bacon
Centre Georges Pompidou
LINDA NOCHLIN | ARTFORUM | REVIEW | VOL. 35, NO. 2 | OCTOBER 1996
On
entering this major Francis Bacon retrospective, curated by David Sylvester,
one was immediately confronted by the memorably horrific Three Studies
for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. These weird sisters, phallic
in inspiration, ambiguously maleficent in pose and identity, seem to have
been inspired by the vengeful Eumenides who, in Aeschylus' drama, pursued
Orestes after Athens lost the Peloponnesian war. Writhing before a stark
orange background, mouths either hardly visible or wide open in a vagina
dentata-esque howl, these creatures are nevertheless oddly domesticated, more
demons of the middle-class parlour than mourners at a crucifixion. With its
obvious references to World War II, this triptych initiates the thematic and
formal intensities that were to mark Bacon's career as a whole; it was the
work he invariably chose to inaugurate all his retrospectives after 1962.
It is hard to recapture the existentialist
aura that surrounded Bacon's imagery in postwar Europe: the comparisons with
Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the references to the Blitz and the
horrors of Auschwitz; the grandiose overreadings and philosophical
generalizations that his work almost inevitably attracted in the '50s and
early '60s. Yet, another reading of these early paintings is also possible.
The first work of Bacon's that I really got to know well was one in the
series of variations on Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1650,
which was best represented in the Pompidou show by Study for Portrait, VII,
1953. Now generally condemned as "too obvious" or "too
illustrative," it seemed at the time that, far from being an image of
generalized postwar angst, the papal portrait constituted an exemplum
virtutis of sardonic concreteness. Despite the usual reading of the pope's
open mouth as a sign of existential nausea - universal scream on the order of
Edvard Munch's famous image - I always read it, in the Vassar version with
which I was familiar at any rate, Study for Portrait, IV, 1953, as
a sneeze, which reduced the papal being, or rather, Velazquez's famous image
of Innocent X, to a modern photo-op, the pope's partially covered mouth agape
in a vigorous and nonexistential kerchoo. In Bacon's portrait, temporal
immediacy and mere physical reflex wittily undermine the pictorial effects of
hierarchy and permanence. And this not merely in the captured gesture, but in
the very transparency of the physical substance of the image itself, its
reality as a chance instant enhanced by the neat lines of gold that encase
the quivering papal form.
Almost from the beginning, Bacon's work has
been engaged with temporality, making, at the very least, a flirtation with
narration almost unavoidable. Or one might say, more accurately, that Bacon's
imagery, his considerable formal gifts and his technical bravura have been
harnessed to change - sexual struggle, the metamorphosis of man into meat, or
vice versa; the disruption or coagulation of the structure of face and body,
the blatant reduction of the dignity of human form to a trickle or a puddle
of paint; and, at the end, time's grimmest depredation, the horror,
bestiality, and meaninglessness of death. His whole oeuvre, with rare
exceptions, can be seen as a gigantic figure of meiosis, a rhetorical
belittlement of the human condition, except that, as Lawrence Alloway pointed
out many years ago, it so often makes reference and aspires to the Grand
Manner of traditional High Art: Velazquez, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Degas.
Yet such references are always ironized, pulled to earth by the intervention
of more "factual" imagery - photography, most explicitly Eadweard
Muybridge's series of the human figure in motion, medical illustrations,
movie stills, snapshots - and also by the artist's furious yet controlled
will to debasement, his stated wish to create painting which, in its very
materiality, its lack of idealism or transcendence might touch the nervous
system directly.
As early as 1953, Bacon turned to one of his
most obsessively reiterated subjects: men engaged in sex. Although the
famous Two Figures of that date, "one of the most provocative
homosexual images of our epoch," according to Daniel Farson is not
included in the Pompidou show, the equally innovative Two Figures in the
Grass, 1954, is. Here, Muybridge's photograph of two wrestlers serves as the
basis of a hallucinatory image of intercourse. The men seem to be going at it
in a kind of grass-covered boxing ring (another reference to wrestling,
perhaps?), and the fragile and activated substance of the nude figures seems
almost to merge with the windblown grass carpet on which they lie. These
spasms of passion are bordered by a stark black band at the bottom of the
canvas and something that looks like pleated curtains above.
Although Bacon certainly was drawn more
frequently to the male nude than to the female variety, he nevertheless
created several important paintings of nude women, most notably the 1970
triptych Studies of the Human Body, which featured three sculptural and
voluptuously mutilated figures posed on a kind of ramp-armature against a
flat, continuous, mauvish pink background, the central, frontal figure
incongruously haloed by a large bottle-green umbrella. No less
striking, Lying Figure, 1969, was based on a series of photographs
depicting Henrietta Moraes naked on a bed. In the painting, the model is
presented head down, legs up, her head and face aggressively eradicated by
bold swishes of paint, her arm nailed to the bed by an extremely businesslike
syringe, whose presence Bacon explains as a kind of formal and iconographic necessity:
"I included the syringe not because she was injecting herself with
drugs, but because it is less stupid than putting a nail through her arm,
which would have been even more melodramatic." The uptilted figure,
offered to the spectator as though on a tray, is surrounded on the one hand
by a series of sordid, realistic details - an ashtray, cigarette butts, a
light switch, a bare lightbulb - and then, as though to deny the reality of
the setting, by almost abstract circular forms like that of the striped
mattress, the blue appendages of the bed, the yellow oblique oval of the
"light" in the background.
It was in the late '60s and the '70s that
Bacon created his great triptychs, not all of them successful but many of
them powerful and disturbingly original. According to Gilles Deleuze,
in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Francis Bacon: the logic
of sensation, 1981), the triptych form enabled the artist to engage with the
human figure without being drawn into the conventional storytelling mode.
"It's not only that the painting is an isolated reality, and not only
that the triptych consists of three isolated panels and the fundamental rule
that they never be united into a single frame: it's rather that the Figure
itself is isolated in the painting. . . . And Bacon has often told us why: in
order to avoid the figurative, illustrative, and narrative character that the
Figure would necessarily assume if it weren't in isolation." In one of
the most memorable of the great triptychs of the '70s, Triptych, May-June
1973, Bacon is, however, less set than usual on staving off demon narrative.
Here, contrary to Deleuze's assertion that the triptych form serves an
isolating function, it seems to me that the images beg to be read as a story,
from left to right. And the story, at once personal and melodramatic, is
riveting: the suicide (right before the opening of a major retrospective of
Bacon's work in 1971-72 at the Grand Palais in Paris) of the artist's lover,
George Dyer, at the Hotel des Saint-Peres. Here, the ignoble furniture of
daily recuperation - the toilet, the sink - become the instruments of Dyer's
Passion. To the left, he shits; to the right, he vomits; to the center, he
hovers against the black background which is transmuted into a giant shadow,
his shadow. In the opaque darkness, death itself assumes the form, however
inchoate, of a giant bat, a demon, a revenging angel. Sex, death, and the
throes of creation are at one here, as Jean-Claude Lebensztejn points out in
his brilliant catalogue essay, an extensive analysis of the recurrent squirt
of white paint streaking across the surface of many of Bacon's most intense
canvases of the period. Figured as a kind of materialized sexual spasm, a jet
of sperm, the white spurts up in the final, right-hand images of the
triptych, in which Dyer, who has overdosed, spews his soul into the hotel
washbasin.
One may ask: Why this persistent "fear
of narrative," permeating not only Bacon's own statements about his
work, but most of the critical analyses of his work both pro and con? Almost
everyone who has discussed Bacon - most prominently Deleuze - hastens to
defend the artist from charges of illustrativeness, jumping in with an
account of his antinarrative strategies, strategies in which the format of
the triptych, the isolation of the human figure, and the patent flatness of
the pictorial sitting play an important role. This defensiveness is
understandable enough in the heady days of Abstract Expressionism (which
Bacon ostensibly hated but which obviously exerted a certain seductive power
on his formal language), an era when "illustration" and
"decoration" figured as the two sides of artistic failure.
Nevertheless, nobody really explains just why illustration and narration are
such terrible sins, temptations to be avoided at all costs. After all,
British art, from Hogarth to the pre-Raphaelites and later, has had a
considerably positive engagement with narration - and with narration in the
service of morality at that. Perhaps that is why Bacon and his supporters have
been particularly avid to separate the artist from this tradition, to make
sure that he is seen and judged as a player in the game of International
Modernism, as a painter whose formal inventiveness and up-to-date anguish
sever his work completely from all connection with the fuddy-duddy past of
pre-Roger Fry and pre-Clive Bell British achievement.
Finally, it would be interesting to compare
some of Bacon's late, kinky, often campy male nudes, such as Study of
the Human Body, 1982 - a rear view torso, isolated against a reddish-orange
background, adorned with cricket pads, no less - with Warhol's extensive
repertory of the same subject created at almost the same time. The
Bacon-Warhol comparison is never attempted, but should be taken seriously.
Bacon's male nudes, though less deadpan, share with Warhol's an equivocal
delight in the body, a fascination with the seductiveness of technical
finesse, and with the scars of an incorrigible materialism.
COPYRIGHT 1996 Artforum International Magazine,
Inc.
Francis Bacon
High anxiety maybe - not
high art
Pompidou Centre, Paris, 27 June - 14 October
1996
A Francis Bacon show in
Paris is drawing crowds, but Richard Dorment is repelled by the artist's
work
RICHARD DORMENT | THE DAILY
TELEGRAPH | 18 JULY 1996
IN
Study of the Human Body of 1982 Francis Bacon presents us with an image of a
mutant creature composed of a man's genitals and buttocks, standing on two
bare legs covered from feet to knees in cricket pads. To be frank, the
picture strikes me as too silly for words. But the reason it is high camp and
not high art has less to do with its subject than its composition. Bacon is
giving visual form to a sexual fantasy, depicting another person not in terms
of his humanity but as fragments of his body.
Since those cricket pads reek of fetishism, the painting may interest
students of abnormal psychology. But artistically it is a failure. Instead of
limiting the amount of space around the central motif (as Magritte or Courbet
instinctively did in their tightly cropped close-ups of women's sexual
organs), Bacon places the body parts on a pedestal in the middle of the
canvas and surrounds them with space, asking us to regard them as objects of
aesthetic contemplation, not of fetishistic fascination.
The result invites ridicule. It may be unfair to judge Bacon by a painting
done 11 years before his death in 1992. For most people it is the work of the
first half of his career that places him among the most important British
artists of this century. But is this division between the early and later
work really so acute? The occasion of the British Council's retrospective of
his work at the Pompidou Centre in Paris (until October 14) gives us a chance
to revise the received view by taking a long, hard look at the career as a
whole.
The show has been selected and installed by Bacon's formidable advocate, the
critic David Sylvester. My enormous admiration for Sylvester means that this
exhibition represents the best and probably the last opportunity I will have
to come to terms with an artist who has always left me cold. Before seeing
it, I had always thought that Bacon's paintings perfectly captured the angst
of the post-war period, but that his work did not transcend his own time in
the way that, say, Pollock's has, and Jasper Johns's surely will. Having now
seen the show, I wish I could say it changed my mind. But, though Bacon at
his best ranks as the most gifted painter of the School of London, seen from
an international perspective he is the most overrated artist since
Bouguereau.
Where to begin? Technically, Bacon is such a limited painter. He found it
nearly impossible to sustain the visual interest in a picture over the entire
surface of a canvas, from the central motif to the edges. A face or figure
may contain ravishingly painted passages, but it will typically be surrounded
by vast areas of dead, flat pigment.
It isn't that Bacon didn't try, in works like the Study for a Portrait of
1953, to create space and atmosphere with modulations of light and dark, but
that, having tried, he soon lost interest, and eventually gave up. In the
later works he simply used a can of spray paint. As early as the Self-Portrait of 1956 it feels to me as though he
was working on too large a scale - too large, that is, for a neo-Romantic
artist who was no draughtsman and had no technical training. As the paintings
get bigger, they flare into life only in isolated passages, usually where
impastoed paint is used to evoke gobs of viscera, spattered brains and
smeared bloodstains.
Another problem is Bacon himself, as we know him through his pictures. When Three Studies for Figures at the
Base of a Crucifixion was first
seen by the British public in 1944, the three armless and legless torsos
howling with rage or pain were seen as symbols of spiritual despair or of
suffering humanity. But Bacon was not happy with that interpretation. When he
returned to the subject on a much larger scale in 1988, he made changes which
conveyed a much nastier message: that these were not timeless archetypes, but
sado-masochistic fantasies, creatures who, in order to feel anything at all,
offer their bodies to be violated and mutilated. You have to conclude that
Bacon finds pain erotic. Because his paintings are so often filled with
lovely colours, Bacon aestheticises physical and emotional suffering.
There are two outstanding paintings in this exhibition. The pit bull terrier
in Man with Dog of 1953 is set against a nocturne of silvery blacks and blues
beautifully painted with a dragged brush. Against an uptilted plane, the
animal becomes as mysterious and threatening as a Cerberus guarding the
entrance to the underworld, here suggested by a sewer. And the Study for Portrait of Van Gogh III of 1957 is wonderfully voluptuous,
colour-saturated painting, demonstrating that Bacon might have been a de
Kooning, if not a Van Gogh, if only he had not been so desperate to enter the
pantheon of great artists by taking on ever more portentous subjects.
But what are we to make of the succession of enormous triptychs in which men
in their underpants defecate or vomit or look as though they've just been
beaten to a pulp? The answer is: quite a lot if you are a psychoanalyst
treating them purely as material for interpretation. I have no objection to
this approach if, as with some contemporary conceptual artists, this is how
the viewer is invited to respond to the work. But to do that, you first have
to set aesthetics aside. Bacon wanted his work to be judged as painting, he
was asking us to see beauty in pain and death. This to me is repellent.
But what I dislike most about Francis Bacon's art is that in both earlier and
later paintings he manipulates his viewers. I hate being told what to feel in
front of a picture. It is like the difference between Grand Guignol and
Chekhov. The first is crass and crude and admits of only one possible
response: revulsion.
Real art is more complex. It allows us to bring our own thoughts and feelings
to it. I just don't understand an artist who pitches the level of anxiety in
all his pictures so high that it crowds out anything remotely resembling a
real thought or feeling. You can do one of two things in front of an image of
unadulterated horror: either you go along with it and scream, or you say
"this has nothing to do with my experience". Since 4,000 people a
day are pouring into the Paris show, and Bacon is one of the most revered of
all British artists, I realise that his work says something to them that I
just can't hear.
The Francis Bacon retrospective, organised in collaboration with the British
Council, is at the Pompidou Centre in Paris until October 14. Information: 00
33 1 44 78 12 33.
A
Life with thugs
DAVID
SYLVESTER | THE
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY | SUNDAY,
3 NOVEMBER, 1996
Francis Bacon
used to say that what he wanted to capture in a portrait was all the
pulsations of a person. This portrait of him is a speaking likeness. It is
especially telling on the subject of his most unattractive fault, his
controllingness.
It is also
very telling about the agonising long love affair in which he was for once
controlled by the other person - the ex-fighter pilot Peter Lacy. Lacy died a
year before Peppiatt met Bacon with a view to getting him to talk to about
himself and writing down what was said for later use. The enterprise worked,
for his account of the affair with Lacy is based purely on what he was told.
When it came
to Bacon's other highly destructive long relationship, the one with George
Dyer - a petty crook with a drink problem - Peppiatt was often a witness at
close quarters, and here his report is still more moving. It brings back what
a profoundly nice and utterly hopeless creature Dyer was and the depth of
Bacon's despair in trying to cope with him when he was alive and that of his
remorse after his suicide. When Bacon first took up with Dyer after Lacy's
death he told me: "I don't care whether they're upper-class thugs or
working-class thugs so long as they're thugs." Dyer may have been a thug
in the bedroom - or may not - but as a member of the criminal class he was a
Ferdinand the Bull.
The
publication of Peppiatt's account of the Bacon-Dyer affair is extremely
timely inasmuch as the BFI and the BBC and David Puttnam have been showing
some determination to bring into being a feature film about that affair to be
called Love is the Devil.
If they will only read this book and get a scent of how Bacon and Dyer
actually behaved and talked, they may realise before it's too late that
they've been backing a squalid travesty.
In other
respects the book is not timely. It shows several signs of having been rushed
into print, presumably in order to cash in on a currently hot subject. For
one thing, it could have done with more rigorous editing. It is shamelessly
repetitive, and while that may help over serialisation, it's a bit of an
insult to buyers of a book. Then there's the problem of the quality of the
writing. It can be effective (even if ungrammatical) when Peppiatt concentrates:
"Yet
there can be little doubt that Bacon's interest in the open mouth was due in
large part to its sexual suggestiveness; and that the cry itself is an
example of pure ambiguity, betokening rage, pain, fear or the pleasure of release
without the slightest degree of differentiation. It is this enigmatic
combination which fascinated the sado-masochistic artist. It was the one
moment at which human nature could be perceived wholly naked, undisguised by
civilised restraint; the spasm that made man indistinguishable from beast.
For Bacon, whose genius dictated the shortest way to the heart of existence,
the cry was the one indisputable moment of truth."
But on the
whole the writing has to get by through the strength of the author's
obsession with the subject. Still, it would have been worthwhile to take
another look at the passages which are too embarrassingly pedestrian, like:
"Outside
the studio, Bacon dressed immaculately. Even when he wore a sweater with
jeans and a leather jacket, the clothes were of the best quality; and his
suits impressed many of his contemporaries by their expert tailoring".
Or too vulgar,
like:
"It was
at Ann Fleming's that Bacon got to know a whole segment of London society
including such ubiquitous personalities as the poet Stephen Spender and the
legal wizard Lord Goodman, who later defended the artist against charges of
drug possession. These frequentations, with or without a Teddy boy in tow,
certainly did no harm to Bacon's career".
Further work
might also have corrected some of 20-odd factual errors.
For instance,
there is a failure to pick up on Bacon's own error in believing that he first
saw Eisenstein's Strike,
which so much impressed him, before the War, rather than in the 1950s. Other
examples are that Louise Leiris wasn't exactly Kahnweiler's daughter and that
Isabel Rawsthorne, though at first a professional model, didn't give all
those sittings to Giacometti because she needed money: she was married then
to a highly-paid foreign correspondent.
Such mistakes
tend to arise because Peppiatt's knowledge of the art world is sketchy. For
example, six million dollars is a high but not an "astronomical"
auction price for an outstanding painting about two metres by five by a
leading international artist. Mention of "a Mr and Mrs Bomford" as
the surprising owners in the 1950s of 19 Bacons signifies unawareness of
their fascinating existence as eccentric collectors who also owned a private
racing stable with a string of National Hunt horses whose star was the great
Colonel Bagwash. There is no mention whatever of Blaise Gauthier, the
inspired prime mover of the Grand Palais retrospective in 1971 of which
Peppiatt makes so much, nor of Lilian Somerville who, as art commissar of the
British Council, not only gave Bacon a show at the Venice Biennale in 1954
but had the cheek to give him the best room in the pavilion and, under
protest, Ben Nicholson a back room. And he writes about Bacon's complicated
dealings with Erica Brausen of the Hanover Gallery in ignorance of published
details as to how he double-crossed her. In short, Peppiatt needed time for
more thorough research.
Some of the
gaps in the book are strange. Dennis Wirth-Miller, who for the last 40 years
of Bacon's life was his closest friend, and Nadine Haim, probably his closest
friend in Paris, get three passing mentions between them. It seems arbitrary
whether people who mattered to Bacon are there or not. Among those missing
are Peter Watson, Joan Leigh-Fermor, Janetta Parlade and Gilbert de Botton
and several artists he was friendly with, such as John Piper, Richard
Hamilton, Mark Boyle, Clive Barker and Karel Appel.
As to artist
friends who are present, Peppiatt could have been much more precise on Bacon's
complicated and volatile views about the work of Freud and Auberbach and
Michael Andrews. Nor is there enough about his views on dead artists. Nothing
is said about the admiration he constantly expressed in the 1950s for Bonnard
and the Soutine of the Ceret period, admiration that related to the
development of his own painterliness.
I called the book a "portrait" earlier because it is only a draft
for a biography, not a "definitive Life" the publisher claims it to
be. I do hope that Peppiatt will find the time and energy and funding to
produce a fuller version of this essential book.
Hiding from the glare
of morality
FRANCIS BACON by Michael
Peppiatt - Weidenfeld, pp. 366
By RICHARD SHONE | THE
SPECTATOR | NOVEMBER 9, 1996
Francis Bacon was one of
the most arresting personalities in post-war Britain. Few others can hold a
candle to his striking affirmation of individuality. He conferred on British
art its sharpest international edge, raising its profile beyond the earthy sobriety
of Moore and the genteel anxieties of Sutherland. His direct influence as a
painter was always dangerous but his example as liberator and free spirit was
cherished by a wide range of artists
Although the vision Bacon
bequeathed is somewhat narrow and the tally of his innovations restricted, he
created an instantly recognisable Bacon-scape that has captured successive
generations. That particular perfume of catastrophe founded on a repertory of
salient images, mostly hit upon in his early years, stood him remarkably well
over nearly half a century. Such images were continually transformed by the
circumstances of what he called his 'extraordinary life'. He was an
unmitigatedly autobiographical painter who cannibalised events, friends,
lovers and places almost before they were dry on the page of his life. Inevitably his personal history
will go on being scrutinised for any key that might unlock the potent imagery
of his work.
From
several, mostly recent publications, we already know a good deal about Bacon.
Michael Peppiatt's biography has two advantages - he knew his subject for
over 25 years and he knows something about art. Of these new books, his is
the most reliable. He may not have that affinity with the gilded gutter that
was Daniel Farson's trump card or the contextual sweep that upholstered
Andrew Sinclair's 1993 biography, but he has laborious merits of his own.
Future books on Bacon will owe him a solid debt.
As
he grew older and more celebrated, Bacon tailored his life story with all the
economy of the sharp Italian suits he liked to wear; much of the established
local colour - the gambling and drinking and fetishistic sexuality - comes
from other people's reminiscences. Not unreasonably, Bacon felt that giving
away too much ,source material' would bring down a screen between his work
and its public (he once burnt two sacks of documentation which the Tate
Gallery was after). Peppiatt unravels layers of meaning in the paintings in a
consistently illuminating way. Whether or not his interpretations are correct
is another matter: his tidying mind tends to underestimate those elements of
chance and accident which weave themselves into an artist's work. Bacon
himself was self-protectively disingenuous about the origins of his imagery:
not many painters would account for a swastika armband on a figure by saying
that a red accent was needed at that particular point on the canvas. As for
his biography, although Bacon was often frank about what he did vouchsafe, he
had a reticence about revealing personal detail, especially when one
remembers how much of his life was lived beyond the pale of the law and
outside conventional morality.
From
the start, Peppiatt established Bacon's extreme individuality and personal
magnetism. He sifts facts from legend in the early years to achieve the most
convincing portrait yet published of this dissolute, amoral, asthmatic,
immensely intelligent sprig of a well-to-do, unattractive English family
living in Ireland. To escape his punitive and anti-social father whose only
advice to his son was 'If anyone talks to you, run and get the police', the
teenage Bacon began several years of self-education in London, Berlin and
Paris. A weekly allowance from his mother was supplemented by short-lived
domestic jobs, thieving and the generosity of older men. In 1929 we find him
established in a mews in South Kensington as a swish interior decorator
specialising in modernist steel and glass furniture. He began to paint and
draw, diffidently exhibiting in the 1930s and 40s works in which sensationalism
and high camp contributed to his blazing images. He was nourished by selected
Old Masters, by Van Gogh and Picasso, by wide reading (Peppiatt is good on
the influence of Eliot, for example), by the cinema and news photographs, by
his masochistic sexual preferences, and above all by his being constantly on
the look-out for 'the dog beneath the skin'.
From
the early 1950s which saw the screaming Popes, grimacing heads and men in
claustrophobic rooms where curtains are closed and blinds down against the
prying glare of orthodox morality, Bacon's professional career went from
strength to strength. More feted in Europe than in the United States, he
became one of the few post-war painters who inched forward the European
figurative tradition in an era of triumphant abstraction. In Britain he was
viewed as an isolated and subversive artist: his lines of compatibility
snaking out to Giacometti and Fautrier, Picasso and de Kooning, were
frequently underestimated. The ambitiousness of the true dandy and the longing
for aesthetic certainties of a man obsessed by transience and nihilism came
together to produce some of the unforgettable images of post-war art.
Peppiatt is good on Bacon's ill-starred lovers and their effect on his life
and work. Less happy are his portraits of Bacon's circle, those friends and
models who were essential to his existence and to several of whom Bacon was
lavishly generous. Peppiatt's long residence in Paris gives conviction to his
picture of Bacon in the capital he loved, but his evocations of Soho are
lacklustre, partly because his style is serviceable rather than vivid. For
pertinent illustrations, much needed in a book that examines a mass of the
artist's work, we must look elsewhere: they are in black and white, one is
upside down and several are printed in reverse or with a triptych's panels in
the wrong order. But a bonus is the painter's reported conversations with his
tenacious Boswell. They are authentically Baconian in their 'exhilarated
despair'.
Bacon dripping with confidence
ART | TIMES
HIGHER EDUCATION | 27
DECEMEBER 1996
Francis Bacon appreciated what was expected of a great artist by his
public and gave it to them with great style. In this book the publisher sets
out to do something along the same lines. Like one of Bacon's paintings, it
is constructed with confidence, full of quotes from its guests, and dripping
with references to chance and gambling. Like one of Bacon's paintings, it
forces us to ponder things we should disapprove of, carefully picking its way
with a smooth magic towards a well-framed and sumptuous object: 220 colour
illustrations of portrait heads cut at the neckline and three big photographs
of the artist's studio framed by two essays.
The introduction "The painter's brutal gesture" by the Czech
novelist Milan Kundera builds up on one side of the colour plates an
equivalent in words to one of Bacon's canvases. In doing this, Kundera
manages to juxtapose Jesus, Shakespeare, Picasso and Beckett. At the other
end of the book an essay by the Belgian art historian France Borel
entitled Francis Bacon: the flayed face takes us elegantly
from the Colony Room via the artist's palette to the Apocalypse. Both essays
share Bacon's relish for chaffing raw meat and rough trade into an elegant
and apparently aristocratic dish.
Bacon's portraits are small by modern standards, allowing the
photographer to go in close and focus on the tooth of the canvas. The result
is that we can see quite clearly how the picture is made. This is what makes
the book. To get some idea of the quality of the plates, compare the 1976
portrait of Michael Leiris with the same image in the 1985 Tate Gallery
catalogue (also by Thames and Hudson). The comparison shows the benefits of
new advances in photomechanical reproduction.
Bacon's paintings are usually trapped under plate glass which brings
with it reflections and enhancements. Unglazed they are dry and rough like
pastel drawing by Degas or paintings by Kitaj. Details become blurred; a half-tone
is built into the brush stroke with dry paint dusting the surface of the
canvas. The camera has caught this and allows us to see Bacon as a rebel
taxidermist, a mature surgeon stitching away at his operations, a carnal
consultant who blends in my mind with Henry Tonks, who trained as a surgeon
then turned to art but kept a foot in both camps by practising plastic
surgery during the first world war. Kundera expresses surprise at Bacon's
ability to achieve a likeness through his distortions. If he had seen Tonks's
images of disfigured soldiers he would see that likenesses survive the most
extreme upheavals. The only one of Bacon's subjects I know well enough to
comment on is Richard Chopping. I look at the small black and white
illustration of him and compare it to Bacon's portraits. The real thing wins
out. The photograph is more as I remember him. The painting makes him look
too handsome, too nice. No psychological surgery seems to have taken place,
just magenta cross-hatchings which on this occasion go across the sitter's
lips like a barrier. More fetish than likeness. This book does not enquire
into meanings or begin to question why Bacon's work is so highly valued. It
celebrates, through the craft of making a book, the work of an important
20th-century artist and through new technology makes it more visible.
Stephen Farthing is an artist, painter and Ruskin master of drawing at
University of Oxford.
Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits
Editor - Milan Kundera With essay by France Borel
ISBN - 0 500 092664
Publisher - Thames and Hudson
Price - £39.95
Pages - 216
|
Influence and Inspiration: Francis Bacon's Use of
Photography
APERTURE | ARTICLE | FALL 1996
|
Muriel Belcher 1958 John Deakin
They were a particularly ambivalent yet strangely fitting pair of
friends. Francis Bacon was one of the pre-eminent post-modernist painters of
our times, while John Deakin, despite a prolific career as a photographer
for British Vogue, remains a relative unknown. Now, a series of
exhibitions in London and a new book are providing an opportunity to reassess
Deakin's work, in the process shedding significant light on the influence and
inspiration photography had on Bacon's painting. "John Deakin -
Photographs," at National Portrait Gallery, and curator Robin Muir's
accompanying catalogue (Schirmer/Mosel), represent the most significant
contribution towards this reappraisal, but another Deakin show at the Zelda
Cheatle Gallery fleshes out the picture of his career, while "Velazquez
and Bacon: Paintings of Popes," at the National Gallery also contains
important clues to understanding the substantial role photography in general,
and Deakin's photographs in particular, played in Bacon's work.
A self-taught painter, with no real formal art education, Bacon made
conflicting claims about his use of photographs. In a conversation with
Michel Archimbaud which took place in 1991, he said that "Photographs
are only of interest to me as records. I know people think I've often used it
[photography], but that isn't true. But when I say that to me photographs are
merely records, I mean that I don't use them at all as a model. A photograph,
basically, is a means of illustrating something and illustration doesn't
interest me." However, in the same discussion, Bacon explained that
"Since the invention of photography, painting really has changed
completely. We no longer have the same reasons for painting as before. The
problem is that each generation has to find its own way of working. You see
here in my studio, there are these photographs scattered about the floor, all
damaged. I've used them to paint portraits of friends, and then kept them.
It's easier for me to work from these records than from the people themselves,
that way I can work alone and feel much freer. When I work, I don't want to
see anyone, not even models. These photographs were my aide-memoire, they
helped me to convey certain features, certain details."
Bacon's disengenuity at this stage in his life (he died a year later,
in 1992), seems designed to contradict earlier statements made in a
noteworthy series of interviews with his friend, the art historian David
Sylvester. In those discussions, which began in 1962 and continued through
1974, Bacon spoke much more specifically about his use of photography.
"The thing of doing series may possibly have come from looking at those
books of Muybridge with the stages of movement shown in separate photographs.
I've also always had a book of photographs that's influenced me very much
called Positioning in Radiography, with a lot of photographs showing the
positioning of the body for the X-ray photographs to be taken, and also of
the X-rays themselves." Later, referring to photographs by Marius Maxwell
which he admired in the 1924 publication, Stalking Big Game with a
Camera in Equatorial Africa, Bacon acknowledges that "one image can be
deeply suggestive in relation to another. I had the idea that ...textures
should be very much thicker, and therefore the texture of, for instance, a
rhinoceros skin would help me to think about the texture of human skin."
In addition, Bacon was well aware of Documents, one of the great
European magazines of the late 1920's and early '30's; one issue in
particular featured photographs of slaughterhouses, which became a recurring
motif in several of his paintings.
He also alludes to different, more oblique role photography had on his
approach to looking at things. "Photographs are not only points of
reference; they're often triggers of ideas...I think one's sense of
appearance is assaulted all the time by photography. So that, when one looks
at something, one's not only looking at it directly, but also looking at it
through the assault that has already been made on one by photography. I've
always been haunted by them [photographs]; I think it's the slight remove
from fact, which returns me onto the fact more violently." From these
comments, it becomes clear that Bacon was discussing not just with the
influence specific images had on his work, but also the inspiration he
derived from the particular regard of photography.
Even when creating works that referred to other paintings, Bacon preferred to
work from photographs. The Velazquez and Bacon exhibition at the National
Gallery imparts a sense of reunion that is misleading. Bacon's four studies
from Velazquez' portrait of Pope Innocent X all derive from photographs and
reproductions of the earlier masterpiece rather than any first- hand
experience with the actual painting. Despite traveling to Rome, Bacon never
saw the "Innocent X" in the Doria-Pamphilj Collection. He spoke,
instead, of "a fear of seeing the reality of the Velazquez after my
tampering with it." Andrew Sinclair suggests that Bacon's use of
photography in this regard derives from a Surrealist approach to
picture-making, in which the artist finds inspiration in the objet-trouve,
the random thing or postcard or photograph.
Interestingly, Bacon rarely
refers specifically to his use of Deakin's portraits. Deakin started photographing
in 1939 and continued to work intently if intermittently through the
mid-1960's. His heyday occurred during the '50's when he was under contract
to Vogue (where he had the dubious distinction of being the
only staff photographer ever fired twice by the same administration).
Although his tenure there was short-lived, in a period of approximately 4
years he produced more work than his contemporaries at Vogue,
including Norman Parkinson, Clifford Coffin and Cecil Beaton. Deakin
photographed everything for Vogue,
including fashion and beauty, but his forte was portraiture. The poet and
novelist, Elizabeth Smart, remarked that Deakin had "tyrannical
eyes," and the art critic, John Russell, wrote that Deakin "rivaled
Bacon in his ability to make a likeness in which truth came unwrapped and
unpackaged. His portraits, like Bacon's, had a dead-centered, unrhetorical
quality. A complete human being was set before us, without additives."
Deakin's portraits were characterised by a monochromatic austerity and raw
clarity that wasn't in keeping with the buoyancy of the work done by
Parkinson or Beaton; indeed, it precedes the nearest thing to it - the
photographs of David Bailey and Richard Avedon - by a decade. "Whoever
the sitter, Hollywood actor, celebrated writer or valued friend," writes
Robin Muir in his catalogue essay, "Deakin made no concessions to
vanity, his portraits are never idealised or evasive, and typically contain
no pretense to flattery. There is no soft focus, no blurring or retouching.
At their most extreme these images are cruel depictions. And even now, over
forty years later, his prints are still defiantly modern."
Despite creating a memorable body of work, Deakin remains largely forgotten.
His prints were outsized and consequently not easily archived. Deakin himself
distrusted their worth. "He really was a member of photography's
unhappiest minority whose members, while doubting its status as art,
sometimes prove better than anyone else that there is no doubt about
it," recalls his friend, Bruce Bernard. His greatest undoing, though, is
evident in his portraits. Many of his subjects were his friends and drinking
companions from the pubs and clubs of Soho; Bacon and Deakin, along with
Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, and Lucien Freud comprised a group
(virtually a subset of R.B. Kitaj's "School of London"), that would
frequently gather for drinks at Muriel Belcher's club, the Colony Room, a
setting described as "a place you could take your grandmother, and
possibly your father, but not your mother." But while Bacon would
regularly return to his studio from a late night out and religiously put in
several hours painting, drinking affected Deakin's work and led to his
dismissal from Conde Nast. His career as an independent photographer was not
a success and his life devolved into a series of trips abroad.
Deakin's portraits did have a life, albeit largely unacknowledged, in Bacon's
paintings. Bacon commissioned many of Deakin's portraits as reference points
for his own work. "Even in the case of friends who will come and
pose," Bacon said, "I've had photographs taken for portraits
because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from them. I
think that, if I have the presence of the image there, I am not able to drift
so freely as I am able to through the photographic image. This may just be my
own neurotic sense but I find it less inhibiting to work from them through
memory and the photographs than actually having them seated there before me.
I don't want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my
work."
Bacon's studio was
notoriously chaotic and cluttered. "My photographs are very damaged by
people walking over them and crumpling them and everything else, and this
does add other implications to an image," he stated. To see the
exhibition of Deakin prints from Bacon's estate consequently becomes an
experience in watching the figure deconstruct according to the state of
destruction in which the print has settled, much as the figures in Bacon's
painting appear tortured, convoluted and deconstructed. While Bacon spoke
about the ways in which he used photography, he rarely specifically cited
Deakin's photography by name. Nor did he comment on the inspiration he drew
from these torn and crumpled prints. However, in the same manner in which
photographs of Velazquez' portrait of Innocent X had an object quality and
presence for Bacon above and beyond that of the work itself, it is not
inconceivable that Deakin's photographs, transformed by the damage sustained
while in his studio, came to represent much more than simple aide-memoire for
him.
In a different context, Bacon once commented that "his [Deakin's] work
is so little known when one thinks of all the well-known and famous names in
photography - his portraits to me are the best since Nadar and Julia Margaret
Cameron." Deakin's photographic output essentially ended in 1961, yet he
and Bacon retained some semblance of a friendship. It was Bacon who was
listed as Deakin's next of kin during his last hospital stay and it was Bacon
who paid for his convalescence in Brighton where Deakin died of heart failure
in 1972. But the kinship seems strongest in the work. The prints of Deakin's
photographs which Bacon held in his studio, set alongside Bacon's painted
portraits, are evidence of the influence and inspiration photography provided
for Bacon. Deakin could have been speaking for Bacon as well when he said
"Being fatally drawn to the human race, what I want to do when I
photograph it is to make a revelation about it. So my sitters turn into my
victims."
THE DUALIST: FRANCIS
BACON
The late Francis Bacon, the subject of a retrospective now on view in
Germany, was vehement in his disdain for abstraction and illustration.
And yet, the author suggests, these techniques were
integral to his presentation of violent imagery
Francis
Bacon, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany
DAVID COHEN | ART IN AMERICA | 1st
JANUARY 1997 Feb 1
998
Francis Bacon offers a strange feast for the eye. Abundant painterly
pleasures were to be had at the sumptuous retrospective at the Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris (the show which comes four years after the artist's death, is
now at its second venue, the Haus der Kunst, Munich), but such pleasures are
necessarily tinged with a frisson of guilt. To marvel at Bacon's
manipulations of material and form, anatomy and perspective, innovation and
convention is to delight, at the same time, in the representation of extraordinary
states of mutilation and pain. To enjoy - as one is enticed to enjoy - such
adventures in representation, one must divorce the form of content. And yet
one cannot: to separate them would be like pulling apart Siamese tins,
leaving limbs and torsos bloodied as any in the paintings of Francis
Bacon. To enjoy Bacon is, inevitably, at some imaginative level, to
participate is injury.
Just as there is an esthetic compulsion to look more and more closely at
Bacon's paintings - especially when they are gathered "in the
flesh" at a major exhibition of this kind - so there is a moral
exhibition of this kind - so there is a moral imperative to come to terms
with Bacon's violence. In a way, though, these two levels of attention are
mutually exclusive. The work's painterliness enjoins us to aestheticize any
extremities of depiction, such as the way faces are mashed by unexpected
twists of the brush, just at the very moment when we might be groping for
psychological or political excuses for such distortions. Pondering Goya's
etchings, Disasters of War, Jean Genet describes a similar quandary:
"We are so absorbed by the lightness and vitality of Goya's line that
the beauty of the spectacle makes us forget to condemn the war it represents."
There is a standard interpretation of Bacon as an artist who reflects the
violence of his century, but this has come to seem inadequate precisely
because it fails to confront the ambiguity of the violence in his work, as
well as the fact that the word "violence" operates on different
levels in the artist's own statements. Andrew Sinclair exclaims in his recent
biography, Francis Bacon: His life and Violent Times (1995), that
the artist "read the entrails of his half-century, pulverized them and
vomited his three Eumenides in paint" [seeA.i.A., Dec. ‘94]. This is a reference to Three Studies for Figures and
Violent Times (1944),
which Bacon identified as a depiction of the furies in the Orestia of
Aeschylus. Sinclair is able to
draw upon plenty of reserves of violence in Bacon's life, from his childhood
in Ireland during the Troubles and in London during the zeppelin raids of
World War I (He was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents), through an
adolescence all the more turbulent because of his homosexuality and his
ambiguous relationship to his tyrannical, racehorse-trainer father. He
follows Bacon's more to the seedy Berlin of the Weimar Republic and Paris of
the 1920s, where the artist came of age and defined his outlook (it was
after seeing a Picasso exhibition in Paris that he resolved to become a
painter). During the 1930s Bacon was predominantly a designer of innovative
modern furniture; he never darkened the door of an art school, but
experimented during these years with current French artistic avant-garde as
his models. Sinclair also draws liberally upon the historical calamities that
marked the years of Bacon's public emergence. The artist was excused from the
military service on account of his asthma, but World War II nonetheless had a
galvanizing effect on him. As he launched his painting career in earnest
towards the close of 1944, Auschwitz and Hiroshima were godparents of his
painted furies. But Sinclair's biographically and historically casual view
can be countered with Mark Roskill's contention - ever fresh from his 1963
essay Francis Bacon as a Mannerist - that "if both Rosso
Fiorentino's art and Bacon's look ‘sick' to us, this is because they play
upon our sensations in parallel ways, not because their periods gave them
relevant imagery and mood."
Bacon's use of the word "violent" in his interviews with David
Sylvester (who, along with
Fabrice Hergott, curated the current retrospective) was not always literal,
despite enough blood-and-guts in his images to warrant such use. The
"violence" of images - apart from specific scenes of mutilation or
torture - can as often mean, to Bacon, the abruptness or keenness with which
such images present themselves. He can thus speak of making things "more
clearly, more exactly, more violently." Violence is as much what happens to images as within them. Bacon's people don't always
suffer from their mutilations; many are quite able to go about their usual
business. It is in this sense that he is a mannerist: violent distortion is
just his way of doing figures, of painting faces. His stylistic distortions
of body or visage - the mangled, lacerated features, the radical contortions
or mutilation of limbs - as often accentuate aliveness as portend death.
But Bacon has it both ways with violence: he elevated and sanitizes injury to
the level of style, but he also trades on the emotionally charged resonance
of injury, exploiting the repulsion and fascination that such wounds - were
they real - would elicit. Bacon exhibits an ambivalence toward violence not
only in his finished paintings but also in the procedures underlying them.
For instance, he said that he preferred to develop his portraits from
photographs rather than have a person actually sit for him. The living
presence of his sitters would inhibit him, he told Sylvester, "because,
if I like them, I don't want to practise before them the injury that I do to
them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I can
record the fact of them more clearly."
Bacon was famously and consistently disdainful of abstraction. He told
Sylvester that "it can convey very watered-down lyrical feelings,
because I think any shapes I can. But I don't think it can really convey
feeling in the grand sense." Elsewhere he insisted that "the image
matters more than the beauty of the paint." Invariably, however, viewers
must adopt a point of view diametrically opposed to the painter's if they are
to survive the assault of his art. At some conscious or unconscious level,
every admirer of Bacon has to say to himself or herself: the paint matters
more than the ugliness of the image.
An anti-epicurean stance comes through in Bacon's avowed preference for
Picasso over Matisse. Matisse was "to lyrical and decorative....he doesn't
have Picasso's brutality of fact." And yet Matisse springs to mind on
seeing the first painting of the Paris exhibition, Interior of a Room (ca. 1935). When Bacon fully
embarked on his painting career in 1944-45 (with the Three Studies) he destroyed his previous
output. Those few early pieces which were already in other hands, and thus
survived, would be omitted from exhibitions during his lifetime. The
exception to this rule was the ghostly Picassoid Crucifixion (1933),
which had been reproduced by Herbert Read in his landmark 1934 book, Art Now, marking Bacon's first official
recognition as an artist. (Read had wanted to include Bacon in the 1936
International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries, but
bizarrely his co-selectors deemed him "not surrealist enough.")
An accurate reckoning of his pre-1944 output within the context of his entire
career is now possible, and is one of the things that makes the Paris/Munich
show so significant - and the most comprehensive Bacon retrospective to date,
even though there were more pictures in the 1985 Tate survey, and at the
Grand Palais, Paris, in 1971. Another of the artist's own myths exploded by
this exhibition is that of his not having made drawings. The curators have
gathered several revealing works on paper - in gouache, pen and crayon - as
well as his paintings over photographs in books.
The 1935 Interior of a Room is richly prophetic on a number of
counts. It already announces Bacon's love for spatial ambiguity and somewhat
nauseating colour. Structurally, the composition is probably too ambitious
for its own good, but it is telling that t here is (loosely speaking) a
tripartite division, anticipating his adoption of the triptych format. And
there is evidence of another consistent trait, the desire to do subversive
things with paint, smudging and smearing it to gain disconcerting effects.
But with all the cubistic complications of space and the intrusions of both
oddly biomorphic elements ad irregular rods, there is an unfamiliar
decorative intensity in the lozenge shapes we can read as wallpaper in the
center of the image, and in the luscious red and purple stripes to the right.
The way the lozenges - yellow and green on green- are "written" in
a pinched, abbreviated, uneven handwriting seems pure Matisse. What would
happen in subsequent work is that a dualism of living matter and inanimate
surroundings would sharpen: the dog at the bottom right is the only living
thing depicted, but it is passive and inert; there is more life in the
ambiguous forms in the opposite corner. The vitality invested in these
lozenges will be reinvested in organic forms (the dog will spring into
action, so to speak). Backgrounds will become exactly that - background,
consigned to a secondary role - and they will be forced to take on an
intentionally deadpan quality, creating all t he more heightened contrast
with the main event, the concentrated, centered living form. Sometimes the
background will be painted in "dead" acrylic, the figures in
"fleshy" oil, to intensify the dichotomy.
The decorative
element, so joyously bodied forth in the painting of the young interior
designer, would be subordinated, once he relaunched his career, but not
expunged. The stripes of the top right corner ofInterior reassert themselves in Painting (1950).
Here they look more Bonnard than Matisse, perhaps because the nude - of
uncertain gender - is standing in a bathtub. The stripes are the second
subject, but only just. Although they and the blue and red rectangles topping
and tailing the composition can be read as depicting the wall and the side of
the bath, there is an unnerving consonance between this figure painting and
then-contemporary American abstraction.
Various considerations conspire to block appreciation of the decorative
aspects of Bacon's work: his disdain for abstraction; his status as (apart
from Giacometti, whom he much admired) quite probably the greatest reinventor
of figuration after Picasso; the sheer brutality of his subject matter. And
yet, the abstract qualities are an indispensable component of the paintings.
However compelling the central figure in Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne
Standing in a Street in Soho (1967), however intriguing the ambiguous
animal-cum-automobile form behind her, the first and last memory of the work
is of the rich blue flapping shapes at the top of the composition and the
swerving spiral that arcs below. Of course, these can be "read" -
as awnings and road respectively - but this does not distract from their
autonomy as abstract shapes, their right to be regarded as flat shapes on the
canvas. Likewise, the brushwork m the decorate flooring/plush carpet of the
1973 triptych Three Portraits: Posthumous Portrait of George
Dyer, Self Portrait, Portrait of Lucian Freud (1973), with its
gay abandon, is too involved in its own lyricism to be explained away in
descriptive terms. Often in Bacon one senses an abstract painting bursting to
escape from the figurative space it is enlisted to describe.
But this is to discuss abstraction as if it is a quantifiable state apart
from figuration. Bacon's argument with abstraction is not that he despises
the abstract, but that he takes it to be inextricably linked to other facets
of painting. "I think painting is a duality," he explained,
"and that abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always
remains on one level. It is only really interested in the beauty of its
patterns or its shapes." The patterns and shapes in the two paintings
just mentioned, admired for their abstract, "esthetic" qualities,
can also be absorbed within denser, more multifaceted readings of the images
they serve. The billowing awnings in the Isabel Rawsthorne painting rhyme
with the swelling of Rawsthorne's skirt, the voluptuous tightness of her
clothing. The very involvedness of the ground in the triptych intensifies the
isolation of three figures depicted within the same space. That the pattern
arises from undisciplined doodles, with colors that are loosely flesh tones,
lends to it a sexual suggestiveness.
Bacon's suspicion of the "entirely aesthetic thing" and his plea
for another level of meaning recall Ruskin's famous distinction between
"aesthesis" and "theoria," between "mere animal consciousness of the
pleasantness" and "exulting, reverent and grateful
perception." Of course, Ruskin's moral universe is turned upside down by
the time this dualism reaches Bacon: his outlook is so imbued by a Nietzschean
sense of vitalism that "mere animal
consciousness" is actually the "exulted" condition he seeks.
Ruskin's projected state beyond the esthetic, with its overtones of moral
rectitude, would have smacked to Bacon of "illustration," to which
he was just as hostile as he was toward "decoration" and
"abstraction."
Illustration, according to Bacon, transports imagery along a cumbersome route
through language, association, meaning. His ideal was to bypass such
laborious stages of cognition in a brutal assault directly upon the core of
our physical being: "Some paint," he said, "comes across
directly into the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a
long diatribe through the brain." He is ever the inverted Cartesian,
rooting for the body in its dualistic struggle with the mind. ("I
masturbate, therefore I am," as Donald Kuspit once put it apropos of
Bacon's men.) To Bacon, the physical being is more real, more truethan any more or social being. A line from
Andre Gide's The Immoralist making similar Nietzschean plea for
the authentic in raw physicality suggests itself as almost prophetic of
Bacon's art: "The layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the
mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the
authentic being there."
Bacon the
dualist is as prone to play form against meaning as meaning against form. He
is even capable, at times, of talking like a true formalist, as when he came
to justify his use of a swastika armband in the right-hand panel of Crucifixion (1965). This motif, appearing in a work,
moreover, belonging to the Staatsgalerie in Munich, naturally gave rise to
fanciful historical and political interpretations of precisely the kind Bacon
preferred to avoid for his work. Pressed on the matter of the armband in his
second interview with David Sylvester, Bacon disconcertingly replied that he
wanted to "break the continuity of the arm and to add the colour ....
You may say it was a stupid thing to do, but it was done entirely as part of
trying to make the figure" work - not work on the level of
interpretation of its being a Nazi, but on the level of its working
formally." The swastika happened to present itself to him, he claims
because he had just been studying photos of Hitler and his entourage.
When Bacon made his distinction between illustrational and nonillustrational
form, his preference was obviously for the latter, for the form which works
upon the nervous system, bypassing memory and expectation. And yet he is a
realist in the sense that he paints immediately recognizable objects and
forms from the observed world in a pictorial language that is predominantly
accessible, and when ambiguous, deliberately and contrastively so. The
dichotomy of real versus illustrational has one status in his statements,
another in his work, for it is in fact the distorted, ambiguous forms -
usually the figures - which are the more vital and urgent forms, the more
"real." As with the way Bacon paints background very differently from
foreground, so in this respect his work presents a duality of different kinds
or degrees of realism. There are the moments of radical distortion and
painterly spasm, but these are offset by surrounding passages of blandness,
in which the mode of depiction is as deadpan as the paint-handling. Everyday
objects - furniture, baseboards, mirrors, roller blinds, fight bulbs, door
knobs, etc. - are often achieved with the studied simplicity of a commercial
artist, of a cartoonist or (dare one say it) an illustrator. This makes all
the more forceful the explosions of flesh, the deformative smudges, or the
onanistic ejaculations of paint which are allowed to intrude upon and
puncture this otherwise innocuous surface. Opposite in execution as in
appearance, these heightened moments stand apart from the calculated banality
of what surrounds them - the real as in the actual substance of paint is
pitted against "realism" as in pictorial representation.
"I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by
chance," Bacon once said. Chance, with its risk of spoiling everything,
is a sort of violence committed against Bacon's own meticulousness, a rude
interruption of the smooth, measured surface. His infatuation with chance has
none of the idealism of Surrealist or Abstract-Expressionist notions of
automatism, which link spontaneity to freedom or truth. Instead, his chance
is imbued with a nihilistic, existentialist sense of the arbitrary. Flung and
frenzied marks declaim the violence of their moment of becoming.
It would be a mistake, though, to think of the miraculous splurges as the
authentic Bacon, and the rest as the painter marking time. This is not just
because the distinction between the two modes is frequently blurred. It also
has to be stressed that the background Bacon is often Bacon at his most
lyrical; that his design is capable of compelling compactness (as with the
blue a= in the Rawsthorne portrait); that even the shorthand details and
illustrational passages can have the sort of mesmerizing hold of such masters
of the deadpan as Hopper and Magritte. But there is another reason not to
overrate the chance effects, namely that they are not as "chancy"
as they might appear. Bacon was in actual fact a compulsive gambler, losing
large sums at the roulette wheel, but in the act of painting, the wheel can
be said to have been weighted. Through his studio risk taking, he could
simulate the thrill of the wheel knowing that each "gamble" would
eventually pay off: time and an unlimited supply of paint and canvas were on
his side. He could keep working until he won.
In a painting done toward the end of his career, Jet of Water (1988), life is seen to imitate art:
a burst of water from a faucet in an anonymous street provided Bacon with a
perfect subject to pursue his connection of the fluid, the violent and the
effects of chance. In general, Bacon's work of the last 20 years had neither
the disturbing power of the paintings of the 1940s and 1950s nor the compelling
design quality of the 1960s canvases. Relative to his earlier work, a
diffuseness bordering on sterility began to set in; the sharpness of contrast
between figure and ground was a casualty, even as the dead-centered figure
became almost ubiquitous, making the contrast especially needed. But, with a
burst of the old energy, Jet of Water -
and several other quietly sumptuous works from the last years gathered in the
Paris/Munich exhibition - defied the impression of talent going to seed. This
image redramatizes the dichotomy between an almost fey and punctilious
background - actually very reminiscent of Pittura Metafisica, with its pale
blue sky, delicately drawn architectural elements, characteristic dry-brush
fines and edges - and a vigorous foreground, here very literary a ‘splash' of
paint.
Bacon, who rightly insisted that he was not an expressionist, is arguably at
his most canny when the materials seem most freely handled and invested with
personal feeling and surprised response. It is telling that these qualities
should emerge so forcefully in one of the numerous works done in homage to
Velazquez, that master of control: Study for Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1965), with the brushiness of the
flame- and limb-like folds of the backcloth, the diaphanous whiteness of the
pontiff s frock, the unfinish of his oddly misshaped throne, the bravura
economy of his cape. An almost love-hate ambivalence towards the very stuff
of paint comes through in Study for Portrait of Van Gogh (1957) with its voluptuous yet
disdainfully fluid dollops of red and white, and blue and black, mixed as
much on the brush as on the sickly yellow ground.
There is actually a sort of violence in the way Bacon cannibalizes historic
sources; his attitude toward the old masters mixed awe and contempt. As with
his depictions of contemporaries, he was more comfortable working from
photographs of past art than from the originals. (Numerous creased,
paint-splattered art reproductions and photographic portraits recovered from
the floor of Bacon's studio are included in the Pompidou catalogue.) Just as
the 16th-century Mannerists subverted the classical perfection of Raphael so
Bacon repeatedly took up artists of calm and measure in seeming contrast to
his own sensibility - the unaffected naturalist Velazquez, the restrained
classicists Poussin and Ingres, the rationalist pioneer photographer Eadweard
Muybridge - twisting their images around for his own expressive purpose. (The
contrast in sensibility was admittedly less when he borrowed from van Gogh.)
Idealism and positivism are turned on their head when a pair of Muybridge's
male wrestlers, for instance, naked for the purpose of documenting movement,
metamorphose into male lovers. "Bacon's compulsive emotion would break
Poussin's precious, porcelain mouth to pieces" says Donald Kuspit,
referring to Bacon's appropriation in countless images of the aghast mother's
expression from Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents.
Bacon's willful misreading of the old masters can border on the
deconstructive as he homes in upon unconscious lesions and incongruities
which make the images so alive for him. Citing Degas's After the Bath in London's National Gallery, he
delight in the way "the top of the spine almost comes out of the skin
... this gives it such a grip and a twist that you're more conscious of the
vulnerability of the rest of the body than if he had drawn the spine
naturally." But there is no arrogance in his exploitation of the
masters. On the contrary, talking with David Sylvester he wonders, looking at
a favourite Rembrandt, why any modern should bother competing with such an
image. Logically speaking, his actual connection with the old masters is
tenuous: he never trained academically, after all, never drew in life-class
or copied in museums. And yet his relationship with them is more profound
than the staginess of his appropriations would at first allow, and more
meaningful than that of most self-conscious traditionalists: experience of
Bacon's work puts one in mind of great paintings of the past. I have often
detected in my own response to Bacon a marked discrepancy between attitudes
in the presence of actual works and memories of them. In memory, as indeed in
photographic reproduction, the image out-balances its conveyance, and one
thinks of the paintings in iconographic or narrative terms. Seeing an
immaculately hung and judiciously selected retrospective such as the
Paris/Munich show restores the extraordinary sense of design and scale, the
sheer painterliness, of Francis Bacon. But still, the images come across even
more strongly. His aestheticized violence, like that of Titan's Flaying of Marsyas or Rape of Lucretia, of Goya, Delacroix, of Manet's Execution of Maximillian,
genuinely invokes what Bacon called "feeling in the grand sense."
(1.) A fragile
work belonging to the Tate Gallery which is rarely allowed to travel, it is
included in the Paris/Munich show.
(2.) The
Listener, London, July 25, 1963, quoted from Art International,
September 1963, p. 44.
(3.) Conducted
between 1962 and 1986 and collected in a third edition as The Brutality
of Fact (1987). Reviewing an earlier edition, the novelist Graham Greene
reckoned that these dialogues "rank with the journals of Delacroix
and the letters of Gauguin." All the quotes from Francis Bacon in
this article come from the Sylvester interviews.
(4.) Donald
Kuspit, Francis Bacon: The Authority of Flesh, Artforum, Summer
1975, p. 50.
(5.) From the
translation by Richard Howard, New York, Knopf, 1970.
(6.) This triptych
was only exhibited in Munich; the Guggenheim's Three Studies for a
Crucifixion (1962) was its substitute in Paris.
(7.) The
painting is at Chantilly and was actually seen by Bacon (unlike the Velazquez
portrait of Pope Innocent, in Rome, which he only knew from reproduction)
when he was living in Chantilly as a language student in 1928. Another
acknowledged source for the gaping mouth form which so fascinated him was a
still from the scene of massacre on the steps from Eisenstein's
movie Battleship Potemkin (1925).
The Francis
Bacon retrospective appeared at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris [June
27-Oct. 14, 1996], and is currently on view at the Haus der Kunst, Munich
[Nov. 4, 1996-Jan. 31, 1997]. It is accompanied by a 335-page catalogue with
contributions by the exhibition's curators, David Sylvester and Fabrice
Hergott, as well as Jean Louis Schefer, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Herve Vanel
and Yves Kobry.
COPYRIGHT 1997
Brant Publications, Inc.
Dark Vision
FRANCIS BACON
Anatomy of an Enigma
By Michael Peppiatt
NICHOLAS FOX WEBER | BOOK
REVIEW | LOS
ANGELES TIMES | SUNDAY,
JULY 27, 1997
"The
more indiscreet you are, the better the book will be," Francis Bacon
counseled Michael Peppiatt about this biography. The English painter believed
in laying things bare. The bold brushwork of his canvases presented screaming
popes, anguished figures crouched on toilets, nude male wrestlers in a frenzy
of violent sex. Discretion, clearly, was not the better part of valor for the
octogenarian who, after more than the usual accord that most artists enjoy in
their lifetimes—blockbuster exhibitions at the
Grand Palais in Paris, the Tate in London, the Metropolitan and the Museum of
Modern Art in New York; the sale of one of his paintings at Sotheby's for
more than $6 million dollars—told Peppiatt,
"My life hasn't changed much, you know. I still masturbate."
Yet
for all of Bacon's license with him, and licentiousness in life, Peppiatt has
been remarkably restrained in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. Five
years after the painter's death, and some 20 years since that initial
discussion in which Bacon advised indiscretion, the editor of Art
International and writer on modern European art has produced a balanced,
intelligent book that illuminates Bacon's paintings with an objectivity and
perceptiveness for which the work cries out.
Bacon's
art will never seem the same to us if, instead of thinking of its violence as
gratuitous or imposed--as the twisted bodies and howling mouths sometimes
seem — we consider the human suffering a result of
"the tension that plagued Ireland throughout his childhood."
Peppiatt supports the point well. Bacon was Anglo-Irish. His family and his
beloved nurse were Protestant, while "their domestic staff and seven of
their nine grooms were Irish and Catholic." Bacon's maternal
grandfather, a police officer, was a likely target for IRA violence at the
time of the Civil War. One evening when Bacon was about 10 years old, the two
were driving home when their car got stuck in a bog that conveniently trapped
such vehicles for local rebels. Bacon and his grandfather scrambled to a
large house whose owners cross-examined them with guns before taking them in.
"An awareness of life as a perpetual hunt—the
stalker and his prey, the aggressor and his victim--was to be fundamental to
Bacon," Peppiatt tells us. That sort of insight helps clarify the art.
The
theme of aggressor and victim was crucial to Bacon's sexuality as well.
Nearing the age of 50 and living in Morocco, he would periodically be found
"beaten up on some street in Tangier in the early hours of the
morning." And it wasn't only toward Bacon's person that Peter Lacy,
Bacon's lover of the mid-'50s, was brutal. Lacy slashed most of the artist's
work of the previous six months with a knife. The assaults prompted the
British consul-general in Tangier to ask the police chief to increase the
patrol of the city's dark alleys. But after a few weeks, and several more
beatings, the police chief- came back to the consul-general with the
explanation that there was nothing he could do; Bacon liked this state of
affairs. That self destructiveness clearly showed up in his work.
Bacon
cherished artifice as well as outrageousness. These tastes permeated his statements,
both verbal and artistic; his personal appearance as well as the look of his
art. There were no boundaries. "All life is really ridiculous—ridiculous and futile," the artist declared. So he
willingly invented, or reinvented himself, just as he developed a hitherto
unknown world in his work.
To
demonstrate Bacon's "uninhibited love of Original effects,"
Peppiatt provides a description from one of the artist's close friends, the
painter and writer Michael Wishart;
"I
enjoyed watching Francis make up his face. He applied the basic foundation
with lightning dexterity born of long practice. He was more careful, even
sparing, with the rouge. For his hair he had a selection of Kiwi boot
polishes in various browns. He blended these on the back of his hand,
selecting a tone appropriate for the particular evening, and he brushed them
through his abundant hair with a shoe brush. He polished his teeth with Vim.
He looked remarkably young, even before this alchemy."
As
for lipstick, we hear of another observer "wondering whether she should
tell him he must have sucked his paintbrush and got red paint all over his
mouth." Peppiatt's skill is that he does not just provide such vivid
descriptions but connects them accurately to Bacon's art, "The array of
idiosyncratic cosmetics he used to change his appearance was not unlike the
variety of personally adapted techniques he came to employ in his
paintings."
Sometimes,
however, Peppiatt's detached approach and his scholarly art-historical tone
are inappropriately clinical for Bacon's deliberate lack of restraint. Time
and again "Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma" meanders from
accounts of the artist's preferred perversions to tales of his lavish
lifestyle, as he hosted dinners with vintage wines at Lucas-Carton in Paris
and the Ritz and the Connaught in London, to descriptions of his
paintings-all without either, the slightest change of pace or any sense of
Peppiatt's own reactions. Peppiatt's account too often sounds like a lab
report. "Women's underwear and, notably, fishnet stockings were an
essential part of the artist's wardrobe for most of his life. He also 'became
well-versed in the literature' of sadomasochism, but theory was the least
part of his interest, and at one point he owned a collection of 12 rhino
whips." One longs for a bit more style, some Wildean irony, instead of
the implicit throat-clearing of words like "notably." And how does
Peppiatt get from that description, so lurid in content if dry in tone, to
the observation that "Bacon's own preferences ... can be sensed with
such immediacy in his own paintings"? I do not consider myself naive for
having known Bacon's paintings for many years without ever before having
deduced that he liked to wear fishnet stockings and collect whips.
Given
the boldness and directness of his subject, Peppiatt is sometimes far too
obtuse. He proffers too many statements of the sort that weigh down art
history journals, "Slowly, an effective barrier of non-elucidation grew
up around the oeuvre." If you take the time to translate and dissect the
claim, it means something, but Peppiatt had already far more effectively made
the simple point that Bacon refused to explain his work.
Bacon
has been the subject of many books and articles, as well as of some excellent
interviews, and this book contributes significantly to the literature. While
covering some of the same ground as Daniel Farson's The Gilded Gutter, Life
of Francis Bacon, which appeared in 1994, it is more thorough and
informative. But there is still something missing in Peppiatt's effort. It
provides ample knowledge of Bacon's life and artistic . growth, his tastes
and distastes, but nowhere do we adequately feel passion-either the writer's
or his subject's. Just as Bacon preferred, strangely, to see Velazquez's work
in reproduction rather than in actuality, this book keeps its material one
step removed and emotion too distant.
The
lacuna is not a flaw one can readily pinpoint; it is not as if Peppiatt has
made errors or hazarded risks for which we might call him to task. In fact,
unlike Bacon, he has taken few chances; nor has he adequately uncovered the
layers. (Why did the artist never want to look at his favorite Velazquez,
even When, in 1954, he was minutes away from it in Rome?) This is an
interesting, well-ordered biography, but it's too stolid; the writing is too
leaden, especially given the vigor of the subject. "Anatomy of an
Enigma"? Perhaps, but where is the celebration or dismay, the courage to
evaluate, the engagement and imagination essential to a great biography?
Nor
have we yet had ample consideration of what Bacon's work unleashed in modern
English art. Bacon, Peppiatt conscientiously informs us, was fascinate with
"photographs of all kinds of disasters, from a car accident with bodies
lying in pools of blood to a huge crowd fanning out m terrified flight as
soldiers fire into it." He also loved gazing at meat on display in
Harrods' Food Hall. Since then, Damien Hirst has exhibited dissected cows and
sharks in formaldehyde; Marc Quinn has incorporated his own frozen blood into
his sculpture; and Mona Hatoun has videoed the inside of her body. Most
recently, the British sculptor Anthony-Noel Kelly has been using dead body
parts, from corpses allegedly acquired from the Royal College of Surgeons, to
make plaster casts.
The
explanation for the development of this morbidity in the art of our times may
lay in an morbidity in the art of our times may lay in an understanding of
both the shortcomings and the power of Francis Bacon's work—and a real
probing of the mind behind it. Such a penetrating analysis has yet to be
written.
Nicholas Fox Weber,
executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, is currently
writing a book about the painter Balthus.
Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma
BY
GLEN HELFAND | THE
ADVOCATE | JULY
8, 1997
Francis Bacon is
an artist whom viewers have strong feelings about: His work is love-it-or-hate-it
kind of stuff. His powerful signature compositions of gnarled, tortured flesh
against backgrounds painted in lush, queasy tones aren't exactly pretty. It's
difficult, however, to deny this British artist's skill.
Despite the often
controversial nature of his work, Bacon's startling paintings have earned him
a place as one of the great artists of this century. He was also openly gay.
Still, Bacon, who died in 1992, was never the type to flaunt his inner
feelings. Particularly not in his art. "Bacon insisted that his painting
be viewed in a kind of biographical vacuum," writes Michael Peppiatt
in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, his engaging and often
dishy new biography.
Bacon's veiled
strategy of distancing his personal life from his art is not surprising given
that he was part of a generation of gay men who faced legal persecution for
their sexuality, But though his public persona may have been shrouded in
secrecy, that doesn't mean he wasn't enjoying himself in private, The book
presents him as a generous, erratic, and appealing character with
contradictory tastes. Bacon led what he called a "gilded gutter
life" - one that included swank gambling sprees in Monte Carlo, lavish
art openings, and quick sexual encounters with street studs
As a longtime
friend of the artist, Peppiatt had access to intimate personal details
regarding Bacon's life, and he balances them with art historical readings of
Bacon's work. The artist's early years are particularly fascinating because
his development as a painter was tied to his budding sexuality. At 16 he was
expelled from home after his tyrannical military father caught him in his
mother's panties. After drifting through London's homosexual underworld, he
was sent with an uncle to late-'20s Berlin, where the young artist found an
even more vibrant gay scene. As Bacon ended up with various sex partners -
including his uncle - he also witnessed the kind of economic inequity and
social injustice that may have sparked some of his raging images.
Although Bacon
encountered tragedies and low points throughout his life, here his history
seems richly layered with experiences of joy and artistic triumph, In his
preface Peppiatt quotes Bacon saying, "It would take a Proust to tell
the story of my life." It's a daunting message to any biographer, but
Peppiatt approaches his subject confidently. If not exactly Proustian, the
book is an intimate portrait of the artist as a brilliant and complex gay
man.
In
praise of Bacon
Ross
Bleckner pays tribute to the artist
ROSS
BLECKNER |
THE ADVOCATE |
8 JULY, 1997
Francis Bacon is
undoubtedly one of the most important painters to emerge from post-World War
II Europe. As a young artist I didn't like his work as much as I do now. I
didn't get it. I thought it was too expressive, too theatrical, too
narrative, too illustrative, too Catholic, too European. Not to mention too
figurative. My particular historical affinity was toward artists who were
more transcendental, more American. Artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett
Newman - artists who were trying to break their way out of the fragmentation
and claustrophobia of (European) easel painting to make their way toward a
new (American) abstraction with all the freedom and expansiveness that it
implies.
What I don't get
now is why I was so doctrinaire about it. I mean, what was it that I really
didn't like? Why should abstraction serve as another mental hegemony for
somebody whose work is barely even formed? The point is to be open, to be
messy, to make the game a little more complicated. That's what Bacon did.
That's also what made his work a little scary to me. I couldn't separate the
mental picture of him that was in my head - drunk and bloated and ugly-from
the pictures of his paintings that were in my head--explicit,
sadomasochistic, bloody, scatological - from the paintings themselves - raw
and powerful. Bacon's work is intensely human in a way that makes us confront
and deal with things and feelings that are often repressed--especially for
me, when I first encountered his images in the early 1970s.
In Edmund White's
lecture at the AIDS and Literature Conference in Key West, Fla., last
January, he made the point, which I agree with, that one doesn't have to
choose between the idea of art being a "promise of happiness" or an
"idea of pure 'disinterested contemplation.' " In other words,
Bacon's "messiness" collapses the dichotomy between the
transcendental and the real. It seems more appropriate to think of art as a
wayward mirror: convoluted, multiple, inverted, simultaneous, continuous,
distorted, like life.
The immediacy and
beauty of so many impulses and images recorded together and operating
simultaneously as if a mind were opening outward is what makes Bacon such an
important artist, That opening outward is what I understand today to be the
truest accomplishment possible as an artist.
COPYRIGHT 1997
Liberation Publications, Inc.
A Magnificent
Mischief-Maker
To be in Francis Bacon's company was to be dazzled and
confused, seduced and stunned
By JOHN RUSSELL |
THE NEW YORK TIMES |
JULY 27, 1997
Anatomy of an Enigma.
By Michael Peppiatt.
Illustrated. 366 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
That there was a book to be written about the
life of Francis Bacon (1909-92) was never in doubt. No one who had seen Bacon
in the street, let alone in a crowded room, could forget his spring-heeled
tread, his pink, pulpy and most often convivial features, and his cannonading
diction. Quite apart from the paintings that made his name, and eventually
his very large fortune, he was one of the great English originals of this
century. As such, he was talked about, argued about and speculated about.
The problematic element was that ever since
he had been banished from his father's house at the age of 16 - reportedly
for trying on his mother's underclothes - Bacon lived a layered life.
Secrecy, make-believe and a flamboyant mischief were fundamental to it. From
adolescence he referred to himself as ''completely homosexual,'' and at 17 he
learned his way around two great cities - first Berlin and then Paris - in
which appetites of every kind could be satisfied. ''To find yourself,'' he
said to his biographer, Michael Peppiatt, ''you need the greatest possible
freedom to drift.'' Bacon enjoyed that freedom. But how, where, when and with
whom?
The answers to these questions were as if
written in the sand dune of which Bacon was to paint an amazing picture late
in his life. But almost all of them could have been washed away by the
equally amazing jet of wild water he painted in 1979.
Among those who knew Francis Bacon most
vividly - some for half an hour, others for half a lifetime - many were never
known by name to anyone but him. Almost all those who were known have lately
died off, one after another. Others, still living, have refused to speak
about him and are not going to change their minds now. Than that there is no
greater compliment.
So there is a huge disparity between the
recorded and the unrecorded. Bacon handled these matters to perfection. In
what passes for formal society, he had beautiful manners (inherited from way
back) and appeared to give his whole self to any company he was in. But there
almost always came a moment at which other people elsewhere had priority, and
he was suddenly gone. Few men have been at home in so many worlds, or so
adroit in adjusting from one to another.
When talking about himself, he could dazzle
and confuse, seduce and stun. But when he was bored or provoked, he could
carry on like an intelligent windup toy whose every word torched the air. His
friendship, once given, was so irresistible, inventive and generous in spirit
that when he withdrew it, as he sometimes did, the loss was very hard to bear.
These were private matters, but they make life difficult for a biographer.
All this notwithstanding, Michael
Peppiatt's Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma is
pleasurable reading on the whole. It has a good, steady beginning, in which
the reader learns that one of Bacon's maternal great-great-grandfathers
founded a small steelworks in Sheffield that grew into ''one of the world's
biggest suppliers of castings for guns.'' (It was, in Bacon's view, the
prospect of a residuary fortune from Sheffield steel that persuaded his
father to propose to his mother.)
His great-aunt Eliza married the heir to a
shipbuilding fortune, and Bacon as a boy spent summer holidays in her mammoth
neo-Gothic mansion near Newcastle. From his mother's mother he inherited a
sense of fete and a gift for cosmopolitan and open-handed hospitality.
Peppiatt also reminds us, though Bacon himself never did, that Byron
dedicated ''Childe Harold'' to one of Bacon's paternal great-grandmothers.
He gives a good account of Bacon's early
career in London as a designer of furniture, rugs and other domestic
incidentals, some of which had a second life in his paintings. Much of the
story told here about his life after that is already familiar - and not all
the gossip reported is substantiated. But the story is skillfully sewn
together and rebuttoned (or, in some cases, unbuttoned), even if a little too
much comes inevitably from memoirs that are malicious or self-serving.
Peppiatt first met Bacon in 1963, when he was
editing a student magazine called Cambridge Opinion, and they got
on well. In 1966, Peppiatt went to live in Paris, where he eventually became
editor and publisher of Art International. In the 1970's, when Bacon decided
to live in Paris and see how he liked it, Peppiatt was always at hand. He
therefore had a 30-year acquaintance with his subject and made good use of
it. (Bacon's late-night soliloquies in Paris ring particularly true.) His
book is also enriched by echoes, all of them duly credited, of the many
tributes to Bacon that were printed after his death. (In many of these, one
can sense a feeling of relief that Bacon would never read them.)
Peppiatt has also been able to draw on what
will from now on be an indispensable biographical source. It is unique in its
kind, consisting of the sumptuous mulch of photographs, newspaper cuttings
and leavings of every kind that Bacon had trodden into the floor of his
studio. It has since been taken apart, piece by piece.
Among the treasures on the floor was a long
series of beat-up photographs by Bacon's friend John Deakin. When rescued not
long ago, these were shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In
those battered images, Bacon himself lives again, as do his favourite
subjects - Isabel Rawsthorne, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Lucian Freud,
Peter Lacy, George Dyer and others from intellectual, social and artistic
circles in London.
Without Deakin's photographs, Bacon's
portraits of those same people could seem weird, perverse, even hostile. But
as he said himself: ''I terribly don't want to make freaks, though everyone
seems to think that that's how the pictures turn out. If I make people look
unattractive, it's not because I want to. I'd like them to look as attractive
as they really are.''
Also - and unlike most of Bacon's boon
companions - Peppiatt has done some original work. He tracked down, for
example, the daughter of a French woman of the world, a pianist and
connoisseur of the arts called Yvonne Bocquentin, who had taken the 17-year-old
Bacon in hand in 1927 - a daughter with an excellent memory. Not only did
Mme. Bocquentin invite Bacon to lodge in her house in Chantilly; she made
sure he made the most of all that Paris had to offer in the way of high
culture.
When it comes to the art, neither Bacon nor
Peppiatt is well served by the boilerplate jacket copy of this book, in which
we read of Bacon's ''canvases of screaming popes,'' which are said to be
''defining images of 20th-century anguish.'' ''Get real!'' is the only answer
to this phrase, which is the equivalent in marketing to friendly fire in
warfare. These ancient fallacies do no honour to the publisher.
Where are these ''screaming popes''? Anyone
who looks with a fresh eye at the Head VI of 1949 or the
Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X of 1953
- classic pieces, both - may conclude that the Pope figure is not screaming
at all. He may be singing along, in full-throated Italian style. He may be
yawning after a long day at the office. He may also be roaring with laughter.
Bacon left his options open, no matter how often others preferred to ignore
them.
After all, what did he actually say? ''I am
not a preacher,'' he said. ''I have nothing to say about 'the human
situation.' '' What he wanted, among other things, was to reinvent the
language of portraiture in ways that summoned the rest of us to reinvent the
language of criticism.
Peppiatt does not quite do that, but he has
one or two enviable inspirations. One of them is to quote at the end of his
book a passage from Marcel Proust that might have been written with Bacon in
mind. ''People do not die immediately for us,'' Proust said, ''but remain
bathed in a sort of aura of life. . . . It is as though they were traveling
abroad.''
John Russell writes frequently about art and
culture for The New York Times.
Francis Bacon's Sizzling Life
DAVID D'ARCY | NEWSDAY | AUGUST
24, 1997
Francis Bacon professed never to read the reviews of his work.
"If I did," he said, "I'd
probably never paint again."
Bacon may have
sought attention with a passion (he talked about himself and his work as much
as any artist has), but if he ever cared about what people thought of him, he
rarely showed it. Seen in this detailed biography by his friend and longtime
admirer, the critic Michael Peppiatt, Bacon was a thoroughgoing contrarian.
Born in Ireland to an English family, he was an avowed homosexual who
rejected bourgeois propriety for a life anchored in London's pubs. Peppiatt's
tour of Bacon's travels through those haunts is vivid. Too vivid, perhaps.
After providing Peppiatt with most of the material in the book in the 1970s,
Bacon forbade the author to publish. Now, five years after the painter' s
death in 1992, the truth has come out.
Toward the end of
his life, Bacon, not one to minimize his own importance, declared that only
Proust could do justice to his colourful biography. With a touch more
modesty, Peppiatt calls himself the Boswell to Bacon's Samuel Johnson, the
amanuensis who tags along just about everywhere and records his mentor's
every word. Overblown as it might sound, this is just what Peppiatt has
achieved. The result is not a critical biography, but a closely observed
account of what Bacon thought of himself. Readers eager to learn about
Bacon's art or about the evolution of the London art scene of this century
will not be disappointed.
Largely
self-taught, Bacon rejected modern art's glacial drift toward abstraction by
painting the human figure, which he in turn disfigured with a vengeance. He
would have been delighted to witness the art world's current vogue for
grotesque figurative painting and no doubt would have claimed paternity.
The author calls
Bacon an enigma. Paradox is a better word. An esthete and fastidious dresser,
he would nonetheless roam the public lavatories for rough trade. He fell into
art largely by accident. A magnanimous host and drinking companion who
visited sick friends and paid their hospital bills, he spoke derisively of
most of the artists who got his career going. The man later acclaimed as the
world's greatest living painter placed ads in the 1920s seeking work as a
"gentleman's companion" on the front page of The Times. At the
same time, the elderly nanny who had raised him was living with Bacon and a
male companion in London, in bohemian quarters so cramped that she slept on
the kitchen table. She would live with him until she died. Artists with
glaring contradictions are nothing new, yet even by the standards of artists'
lives, Bacon's life was an odd one. It's no surprise that a movie is being
made of it. If that movie, now in production, includes even half the detail
presented in this biography, it could be a nonstop orgy.
Born in Dublin in 1909, Bacon spent
most of his unhappy childhood in sprawling Irish country houses. His mother's
family made a fortune from a colliery in northern England. His father,
retired from the British cavalry, was a failed horse trainer, loathed by
Francis. The father banned alcohol from the house (Bacon grew to be a
prodigious drinker), threw angry fits over trivial details and sought to
toughen up his frail eldest son by having Irish grooms horsewhip the boy.
Bacon got his revenge by inaugurating his legendary sex life at an early age
with the same grooms.
As Bacon would
often recall, he saw himself from an early age as "completely
homosexual." In fact, his adult life began when his father, upon
discovering this truth about his son, expelled Francis from the family home.
Sex, as much as anything, came to rule Bacon's life as a young man. Convinced
by his father that he was ugly, Bacon learned that in a city such as London,
all sorts of men found him attractive. Prostitution supplemented his low
wages from odd jobs. In pre-Nazi Berlin, where he visited an uncle, that
uncle became one of many sexual encounters. In Paris, Bacon found his element
among the artists and hangers-on in Montparnasse's demi-monde.
Bacon began his
art career as an interior decorator, an activity for which he displayed an
innate flair despite a complete lack of training - the same as it would be
with painting. His room designs, published in 1930, pointed to the vision
that would turn up in his paintings: cagelike spaces, sparse furnishings,
severe curtains. It was as if he were already defining the background against
which he would paint, Peppiatt argues, "the interior in which he would
later set his drama of mid-century man caught in an animal awareness of his
futility and despair."
Later
in life, Bacon spoke only reluctantly about his decorating, because he
thought that the experience would detract from his respectability as a
painter. That design work did put him in a milieu with painters such as Ben
Nicholson and Roy de Maistre, who helped nurture his drawing skills.
Eventually, he would surpass all of them.
After he became a celebrity, Bacon was mysterious about the
influences on his work. One transfixing visual experience was his first sight
of Poussin's 17th-Century Massacre of the Innocents at the Chateau
of Chantilly outside Paris in 1927, where the 17-year-old Bacon had been
taken in by an older, worldlier woman. What struck Bacon in the image of a
frenzied mother fighting to keep a soldier from killing her child was her
mouth in a scream, "probably the best human cry ever painted." Bacon
would spend his life trying to better it.
Yet Peppiatt makes it clear that Picasso was the prime
mover behind Bacon's style, "Bacon's first and most important father
figure." It was Picasso's bone-like grotesque exploration of the human
figure in the late 1920s, including his Crucifixion of 1930, that
inspired Bacon' s notorious 1933 Crucifixion, the first of many
crucifixions that he would paint, which Peppiatt calls "an image strung
like a bat on a primitive cross." That kind of figure, and other morbid
fixtures of Spanish painting, would haunt Bacon, a steadfast atheist, until
his death on a trip to Spain.
The prospect of death also haunted him. As a weak,
asthmatic child, the only one of his parents' four sons to survive past the
age of 30, Bacon was made to watch an uncle torture and kill animals. Also,
during his childhood in rural Ireland at a time of violent anti-British
upheaval, his family lived in fear of attacks from the Irish nationalists who
regularly burned estates owned by the English. And for the rest of his life
Bacon remembered hearing the cries of Irish prisoners as they were whipped by
British police. Yet death retained a special allure for him. Slaughterhouses
were among his favourite places to visit.
In literature, as well as painting, Bacon was an
accomplished autodidact. He knew Shakespeare well and loved
the Oresteia so much he could quote it from memory, but much more
elementary drives ruled his life. The word "anatomy" in the book's
subtitle is crucial. "Total abandonment to instinct, above all sexual
instinct, was an idea which Bacon maintained with astonishing vigour to the
end of his days," Peppiatt writes. "If he had a sustaining belief,
it was in the supremacy of instinct as the only guiding principle in life. And
when he said he 'painted to excite himself,' he surely meant: to recreate
certain extreme sexual sensations."
This biography has already been attacked for failing to
make connections between Bacon's jam-packed personal life and his chilling
art. The critics are not entirely wrong. Not all of those connections have
been made. Yet Bacon's art has been published and scrutinized over decades,
while the events of his life have never been presented so extensively or
systematically. If Peppiatt has not gone far enough in drawing life and work
together, readers now have Peppiatt to thank for the raw materials to do so.
Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma
LISA LIEBMANN | BOOK
REVIEWS
| ART
FORUM | SUMMER,
1997
This biography has a lot going for it: an urbane,
insightful author and a famously flamboyant, risque subject who
simultaneously is and isn't one of the signal forces in twentieth-century
art. Michael Peppiatt, to his credit, does not fully conceal a certain
ambivalence about the masochistic and controlling Francis Bacon, who lost two
lovers to suicide - each just before the opening of a major exhibition - and
kept house with his old nanny until he was forty-two, nor about the sometimes
contrived-seeming terribilita of the Baconian oeuvre. The leitmotiv of Dorian
Gray, invoked either to emphasize the artist's remarkably enduring if rather
pickled boyishness or to conjure up the splenetic wonders of the portraits,
serves Peppiatt well on both scores.
Even
Bacon's detractors might agree that the artist at his best succeeded
brilliantly in realizing his goal of getting pictures "to look as if a
human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the
human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its
slime." There has been much less consensus, however, about the passing
importance of that accomplishment, never mind its profound resonance.
Peppiatt does not exactly bring the gavel down on this issue. Instead, he
plea-bargains, in a sense, emphasizing the single-mindedness of an artist who
so powerfully declared his loyalty to the human figure during the postwar
decades - a period Peppiatt himself seems to identify almost exclusively with
abstraction. (The cameo appearences in this book of the painter Lucian Freud,
one of Bacon's frequent sitters, do little to cloud his view.)
Certainly,
Bacon was a bit of a one-note trombonist. The mood of existential futility
and ferocity so thoroughly associated with his work was pretty well in place
from the very start, around 1930, which is when the artist, barely in his
early twenties, gave up a promising first career as a self-styled interior
decorator and furniture designer. (He largely stopped painting for nearly a
decade soon after he began, however, and for the most part acknowledged only
work dating from this second beginning, right before World War II.) Bacon seems,
in general, to have been one of those people who were hatched fully formed.
At fifteen or so, he was already well into women's underwear, a lifelong
preference that in the short run proved to be a fast one-way ticket out of
the house of his sclerotically hotheaded father. Once he returned to London
from more than a year's sojourn abroad - on the loose in Weimar Berlin and
prewar Paris, between the ages of seventeen and nineteen - he remained as out
as out can be. There is indeed a hint of irony lurking about the notion that
a man who spent hardly any time at all finding himself could be responsible -
along with, say, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus - for some of the most widely
recognizable symbols of postwar angst and doubt.
At
times, Bacon's trademark flick-of-the-wrist-and-blur-of-the-brush facial
distortions seem merely to be tricks, effective formal gimmicks, with a dash
of Surrealist horror a la early Bunuel, derived from Picasso's Marie-Therese
portraits, de Kooning's liberated licks of paint, and from the artist's
longstanding skill at applying makeup to his own face. Many of his
figure-ground relationships, in turn, seem to have evolved out of the
combined principles of Muybridge's photographic studies of wrestlers and of
AbEx gravitas as delivered by painters such as Motherwell, Newman, and
Rothko. Yet we learn that the erstwhile decorator dismissed abstraction as
"decorative" pattern-making and was witheringly snooty about its
practitioners, referring to Pollock as "that old lacemaker" and
comparing de Kooning's "Woman" paintings to "playing
cards." According to Peppiatt, however, Bacon "also understood that
taking a figurative image to the verge - but just short - of abstraction gave
it a mysterious and compelling tension."
Something
about the central emotion conveyed - the career-long fixation on themes of
nihilism, carnal decay, and the primal sexual combat of males - screams
adolescence. So did the artist's cloaked and cultivated aura - he played down
his more or less upper-class background and was attracted to working-class
men - and his society-flouting, sex-rebel stance. It appears that I am not
alone in having first discovered and embraced this artist while still in my
teens. By the '70s, Bacon had become a cult hero second only to Warhol among
alienated youth all over Europe and the United States, but nowhere more than
in Paris, where, as Peppiatt informs us, "These groupie-like
followers had been building up . . . ever since Bacon's retrospective at the
Grand Palais," in 1971. (Bernardo Bertolucci - that connoisseur of
raffish chic - also saw the exhibition, just before he started shooting Last
Tango in Paris, and "was so impressed by the paintings that he went back
to the Grand Palais to look at them with his leading man, Marlon
Brando." Thus, the film not only features Bacon images in its opening
credits, but has a main character directly inspired by the classic Baconian
physiognomy - "faces," as the director put it, "eaten up
by something that comes from within.")
For a
show at Galerie Maeght Lelong more than a decade later, in 1984, the groupies
"turned out again in almost unmanageable force, with a strong punk
addition that made them look more threatening. . . . His status was neatly
confirmed when the words 'ONLY FRANCIS BACON IS MORE WONDERFUL THAN YOU'
appeared on the graffiti-covered house where Serge Gainsbourg, the anarchist
poet-cum-singer, lived."
Peppiatt
met Bacon in Paris in 1963, while on assignment for a Cambridge University
student magazine, and remained a friend until the artist's death in 1992. He
is a remarkably unobtrusive observer. Although writing intimately and
knowledgeably about an artist whose importance and popularity are
inextricable from the '70s zeitgeist of sexual, especially homosexual, liberation
- Bacon, in this respect, plays Lucifer to Hockney's happy angel - Peppiatt
reveals nothing, even through his dedications, about himself. What he does
offer are wonderful, pithy descriptions of louche as well as luxurious living
in Berlin and Paris during the late '20s, the time of Bacon's defining
wanderjahren; of Bacon's bizarre London menage, which for many years
consisted of the artist, his older lover, and the memorable Nanny Lightfood,
who did a bit of shoplifting for the household and had a vociferously
expressed penchant for capital punishment (she wanted to see the duchess of
Windsor hanged); and best of all, of that indiscriminate deployer of the
pronoun "she," the artist. Bacon can be heard loud and clear in
this keenly pitched book. No mean feat for a dead queen.
Lisa
Liebmann writes frequently for Artforum.
F R A N C I S B
A C O N:
anatomy
of an enigma
BY
CHARLES TAYLOR | SALON | SEPTEMBER 16, 1997
In a 1985 interview with Melvyn Bragg for
British television's South Bank Show, the painter Francis Bacon said,
"We are born, and we die, and that's it." There's less torment in
those words, though, than there is acceptance that life can be a pretty bleak
proposition. If you don't see much point in worrying about what awaits you in
the next world, or if you don't even believe there's a next world, chances
are you'll be able to get on with things free of the anxiety that hounds so
many. In Michael Peppiatt's new biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an
Enigma, Bacon's acceptance translates into a weird capacity for enjoying
life. Among friends and drinking acquaintances, he was spontaneous, generous,
engaged in a hunt for the next pleasure that nightly took him from fine
restaurants to seedy Soho drinking clubs to rough streets in search of rough
trade. That he could also be cruel and cutting spoke not only of the sudden
mood shifts induced by his large and lifelong capacity for alcohol, but of
his refusal to blunt his opinions, even if it meant hurting or jettisoning
people who had been his friends for years.
Peppiatt met Bacon in the early '60s when he
interviewed him for a student newspaper. He stayed friends with Bacon for the
rest of the artist's life, and his account benefits from clear-eyed fondness.
Given the details Peppiatt makes public here, we can be grateful that he
hasn't written a sensationalistic book, though many of the details are juicy.
In addition to the most complete view to date of the upbringing that Bacon
referred to only obliquely (even to close friends), Peppiatt fills in the
details of the young Bacon's travels through '20s Berlin and '30s Paris. (Bacon
was kicked out of his home at 16, after his father caught him trying on his
mother's underwear.) We find out that the only person from his upbringing
with whom Bacon stayed close was his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. When she
couldn't find work, he took her in, and she lived with him and his various
lovers until her death, in 1951. When money was really tight, Jessie
shoplifted food or scanned the offers Francis received after advertising
himself in the Times as a "gentleman's companion."
Nothing is presented moralistically here.
Peppiatt doesn't gloss over the way Bacon took advantage of some lovers or
the sharp-tongued remarks that left even longtime friends wounded, any more
than he sentimentalizes the generosity that led Bacon to press large sums on
friends who had hit hard times. Best of all, Peppiatt doesn't present Bacon's
fondness for drinking or masochistic sex as sad or self-destructive. (Perhaps
that's because he recognizes Bacon's extraordinary discipline.) And he
doesn't shortchange the grief in Bacon's memorial triptychs to his lover
George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of Bacon's 1971 retrospective
at Paris' Grand Palais (among living artists, an honour that had been
accorded only to Picasso).
Peppiatt's judgment of how the events of
Bacon's life played out in his paintings feels very sound, if at times a bit
too Freudian. The problem he faces is similar to the one Bacon said
figurative painters face in the age of photography. With photography taking
over the function of illustration, it is up to figurative painters to find a
reality beyond literal representation. Peppiatt does an admirable job of
laying out the facts of Bacon's life, and a superb job of painting a portrait
of the man with both affection and perspective. But the facts cannot alone
account for the shock and the mystery of Bacon's work. Peppiatt's real
accomplishment is that he makes you feel Bacon as a living presence. Like any
biography worth its salt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma makes
you grieve for its subject.
Charles
Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.
Striking a violent chord
THE
ECONOMIST | JULY 10 1997
PEOPLE have been moaning for ages about
violence in the movies, and for even longer about violence in art (Hieronymus
Bosch's horrific fantasies preceded Damien Hirst's mutilated cows by more
than four centuries). Violence in classical music has a long history too, but
it has been given vicious new twists by Mark-Anthony Turnage, one of
Britain's most highly-regarded young composers.
Britain's influential Aldeburgh Festival
opened this summer with the première of an opera he had composed. It was
inspired by the killing of an abusive husband: his wife stabbed him, in the
words of the title, “Twice Through the Heart”. Now only 37, Mr Turnage
first came to international attention in 1988, when his opera “Greek”
(Argo CD 440 368-2), was premièred at the Munich Biennale. A
visceral version of the Oedipus story, it is set in London's East End, where
yobs sing football chants, bash each other and are bashed by the police, and
yuppies claw their way to fortune.
Since then, Mr Turnage has concentrated on
orchestral works. As composer-in-association with the City of Birmingham
Symphony Orchestra in 1989-93, he produced “Three Screaming Popes”, which was
inspired by Francis Bacon's angst-ridden painting of the same name, and
“Drowned Out”, which was based on William Golding's novel “Pincher Martin”
and its hero's death by drowning.
Mr Turnage is a great artist, capable of
depth and richness in his compositions. Consider his most recent orchestral
work, “Blood on the Floor”, first performed in London last year and scheduled
to be presented at the Salzburg Festival in August (when it will be released
on Argo CD 455 292-2). Again inspired by a Francis Bacon painting,
its first movement was described by Mr Turnage as “probably the nastiest
thing I've written”. But the nine-movement whole is also full of gentler
sounds, containing such pieces as a moving “Elegy for Andy”, in memory of Mr
Turnage's younger brother, who died of a drug overdose.
Initially trained in the 12-tone system of
classical music, Mr Turnage abandoned its strictures when he discovered such
free-spirited jazz musicians as Miles Davis, a trumpeter, and Gil Evans, a
composer-arranger. Now he freely combines the textures and procedures of jazz
and classical music; and in his pieces the two really do cohere, instead of jostling
unconvincingly as in the work of so many composers. “Blood on the Floor”
featured three jazz musicians and included space for improvisation. Though
“Twice Through the Heart”, left no room for improvisation, its hovering,
bitter-sweet sonorities had a jazz flavour.
Mr Turnage's blending of violence, emotional
depth, and catchy music is no better illustrated than in “The Country of the
Blind”, his companion première opera at the Aldeburgh Festival. Based on a
short story by H.G. Wells, it tells the tale of a mountaineer who discovers a
land inhabited by sightless people, falls in love and is invited to join
them—at the cost of his eyes. Though much of the score is compelling, its
high point is a poignant duet between the hero and the blind woman he loves.
One critic called it “ravishing”; another said, wryly, “while I don't want to
destroy Turnage's reputation, you really do come out humming the tune.
Blood on the Floor, Francis Bacon,
1986
Obituary: Daniel Farson
Television interviewer, writer and photographer who
turned into a monstrous drunk in his beloved Soho
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | 29
NOVEMBER 1997
Francis Bacon with Daniel Farson
Daniel Farson, who has died aged 70, was a talented television journalist,
writer and photographer; he was also a nightmare drunk.
Farson was a
prime specimen of Soho at its height, the Soho of Francis Bacon, Dylan
Thomas, John Minton, John Deakin, Jeffrey Bernard, Muriel Belcher and other
strange characters. To Farson, Soho meant home, and he, convinced he was a
misfit, never felt at home anywhere else.
From middle
age on Farson was a fat man - the solid kind rather than sagging jelly. He
never lost his hair, which was fair; in old age he presumably dyed it. In
London he dressed in a smart suit with sleeves cut long to cover the tattoo
of a fish on the back of one hand that he had had done in the merchant navy.
He was a brave
man even when sober and strong enough to make an antagonist think twice. He
would go off at night to such places as a pub nicknamed The Elephants'
Graveyard. It was some surprise that, with his alarmingly risky sex life, he
had not been murdered.
To meet Farson
at nine in the evening in the Colony Room Club, for example, was to witness a
transformation that any film actor in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde would have
thought strained credibility. Within minutes, fuelled by a rapid series of
large gins scarcely diluted by tonic, his polite talks about his great uncle
Bram Stoker or his interlocutor's latest book would turn into a rant of
increasing volume and decreasing intelligibility: "I loathe you, I can't
stand you," he would roar, gargling in his podgy throat. "You're so
clever, so patronising." Sometimes the late Ian Board, the club's
proprietor, would chase him down the steep, dark stairs, belabouring him
forcefully with an umbrella.
Often, the
morning after, Farson would appear with a cut face, from a fall, a fight with
a rent boy or some forgotten tussle with a policeman. But he would return
immediately to the alcoholic fray and the never-ending job of seeking work
from newspapers or publishers.
Farson could
take good photographs. He caught the changing moment and his pictures were
often of interest for their subjects - a hungover Jeffrey Bernard, head in
hands under the statue of King Charles in Soho Square, or the smoky French
pub, with Gaston Berlemont opening another half bottle of champagne for a
crowd of overcoated and hatted men and women. Others had poignancy, such as
the little boy with a dirty face and a dart in one hand at Barnstaple Fair or
the handsome beggar with two peg-legs in Barcelona.
Farson, in his books,
photographs and conversation, idealised Soho, though he was aware from
experience of its destructive power. In Soho in the Fifties, one of
his better books, he described the round of drinking: from the French pub to
Wheeler's for lunch - with luck in the company of Francis Bacon - then on to
the Colony Room Club during the afternoon (when the pubs were shut from 3pm
to 5.30), back to the Coach and Horses perhaps, and on into the night, at the
Mandrake or some shabby homosexual club. Farson was fortunate enough usually
to have money to pay his way, and was closer to the oysters and champagne
side of things than the cadged halves of bitter familiar to the likes of John
Deakin.
Farson had an annoying way
of claiming intimacy with famous people and writing about them on the
strength of it. It was not that he did not know them, but that he wrote,
often inaccurately, about private conversations from past years. His book about
Bacon was called The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon -
which sounded silly, though it was a quotation from a joking telegram that
Bacon had once sent him. More recently, Farson set great store by his
acquaintance with Gilbert and George.
In later years he lived in moderate
peace in Devon (though he was barred from all but one pub in Appledore),
writing books. Every now and then, on the pretext of an interview, he would
make increasingly suicidal raids on London, getting drunk earlier and earlier
in the day. He would miss his train back to Devon, and perhaps return to the
country two or three days late.
Over and over again Farson's assaults on London meant drinking all day,
picking up a rent boy and very often being robbed by him at his hotel. He was
barred from several hotels for trivial offences such as being found with his
trousers round his ankles in the corridor. One Sunday afternoon in the Coach
and Horses an angry rent boy (aged about 30) came into the pub and tried to
shame Farson into paying him for his afternoon's services. Farson was
shameless: "But you didn't bloody do anything," he shouted back.
"And I bought all the drinks."
The two most admirable
things about Farson were his energy and his determination to start his life
again each time he ran into a cul-de-sac.
Daniel Negley Farson was born on Jan 8 1927. His father
Negley Farson was an American-born journalist who would bring the boy an
elephant's tooth or an embryo alligator from his trips abroad. During one
trip on which little Dan accompanied him, the boy was patted on the head by
Hitler as a "good Aryan boy". Negley resigned suddenly from
the Chicago Daily News in 1935, but then made money from his
autobiographical books, The Way of a Transgressor being the best known.
Of
Negley, Dan was to write: "He was a stronger man than I am, free from
the taint of homosexuality." But he was also an alcoholic. Daniel Farson
described how he set off with his parents in 1935 to drive across Europe: "I
crouched underneath a blanket on the floor at the back, pretending to be
asleep - impossible with the arguments raging in the front, my father
constantly wanting to stop, seizing any excuse for a drink, while my mother
implored him not to. Occasionally he lost his temper, sometimes violently,
followed by angry silence and the utter desolations of my mother's sobs, when
I did not dare to move. Then there were whispers as they remembered I was
there." Dan lived up to his parents' tortured example for the rest of
his life.
In 1940, Dan's prep school, Abinger
Hill, was evacuated to Canada. During the holidays he was sent to stay with
variously unsuitable relations and friends of his father's in the United
States. One day he was collected in a car by Somerset Maugham and his
secretary Gerald Haxton. They took him to visit another homosexual, Tom
Seyster, who, for some reason, was in fact his godfather. Nothing untoward
occurred. The two younger men drank a great deal; Maugham sympathised with
the boy's loneliness and responded later with a kind letter to some poetry he had
shown him.
In 1942
young Daniel sailed back to wartime England, feeling more comfortable amid
its dangers and shortages than in untroubled America. He was sent to
Wellington, a ridiculous misjudgement. After a year he persuaded his parents
to let him leave.
He desultorily set about
learning Russian, but soon landed a job at the Central Press Agency. This
decrepit organisation was staffed by an aged skeleton staff during the war,
but it had the privilege of sending a lobby correspondent to Westminster. The
head of the agency, Guy L'Estrange, had not been to the Commmons since the
end of the 19th Century, and Farson, aged 17, was sent to cover Parliament.
This blond-haired youth was a strange sight in the corridors of Westminster,
down which he was pursued without success by the predatory MP Tom Driberg.
For a while, though, his
career almost progressed backwards. He served in the American army, during
which time he was sent on a journalism course. He went with the army to
Germany, where he discovered the possibilities of photography in the ruins of
Munich. He then went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, aged 21. Though he
took a degree, he thought he had wasted his time academically. He did
learn about the realities
of sexual relations, but never found a satisfactory way of accommodating his
own preferences.
Farson
spent a short time at an advertising agency and then in 1951 joined Picture Post as a staff photographer. At this
time he made such friends as the impossible, drunken, annoying photographer
John Deakin, who had utterly broken with his Liverpudlian background on
coming to London. Deakin, arrested for indecency when a night club was
raided, was asked in court if he had not thought it odd to see men dancing
together. "How could I possibly know how people in London behave?"
he replied; he was acquitted. Farson was sacked from Picture Post at
about the same time Deakin was sacked from Vogue.
In the 1950s, Francis Bacon took to
Farson, despite occasional differences. One night in the Gargoyle club, a
male friend with whom Farson was infatuated butted in on Bacon's
conversation. Farson apologised to Bacon, only to be met by: "It's too
bad that we should be bored to death by your friend and have to pay for his
drinks, but now you have the nerve to come over as well, when you're not
invited." But next day, Bacon bought Farson champagne in the Colony Room
Club: "If you can't be rude to your friends, who can you be rude to?"
Farson's next bright idea
was to join the merchant navy. He joined the crew of 634 on the 30,000 ton
Orcades and sailed 50,000 miles around the world, crossing the equator four
times. He thought for a moment that he had got Soho out of his system.
He next found
work with the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail; he
persuaded Colin Wilson, the author of The
Outsider, to speak unguardedly, and published the damaging interview in Books
and Art. Then he was commissioned to interview Cecil Beaton for This Week
on television, and a new chapter opened.
Farson could have been
made for television of that period. He was quick-thinking, still handsome,
with enough charm to beguile interviewees. He drew out Dylan Thomas's widow
in a live broadcast which had to be faded out when he provoked her to fury.
Farson went from strength
to strength. He caused outrage with a programme, Living for Kicks, about
coffee bar teenagers, dubbed "Sexpresso Kids"' by the Daily
Sketch. He produced a series Farson's Guide to the British. He
was fascinated by misfits. His series Out of Step dealt with oddities from
witchcraft to nudism.
Farson was in
the middle of filming a programme about lonely old people at Christmas when
he was called to the phone and heard that his mother had died after falling
down stairs at the end of a lunch with Lady d'Avigdor Goldsmid. A man in a
pub told him he had just heard the news on television: "Daniel Farson's
mother dies in fall."
In 1962, with money left
him by his parents, Farson bought the tenancy of a pub on the Isle of Dogs,
on the Thames in the East End of London. The pub was given a boost by a
television documentary Farson made called Time Gentlemen Please! The
idea of the Waterman's Arms was to stage old-fashioned music hall, but the
scheme also appealed as a chance to play the host, drink and meet attractive
men. But whatever money the pub made never found its way into Farson's
pockets.
The venture lasted a year.
In all he lost perhaps £30,000 - enough in 1963 to buy a row of houses. His
days in television were numbered too. A documentary he made, Courtship,
proved "dull". Farson thought he had gone stale and threw in the
towel, though many thought he had been sacked for drunkenness or emotional
instability.
He moved to Devon, living
in his parents' house near the sea, and made an income from journalism and
books. He also contrived a television quiz show on art called Gallery. He was
hit badly when his younger friend, Peter Bradshaw, who lived with his
girlfriend in Farson's house, died in 1992.
There was life in Farson
yet. He traced his father's footsteps over the Caucasus and went to Moscow
for a show by Gilbert and George. He went frequently to Turkey, always
getting drunk and picking up men there.
Farson knew he
was dying of cancer when his autobiography Never a Normal Man was
published just after his 70th birthday. It begins: "Two nights ago I
flew into Istanbul to sort out my life. So far I have not done well." In
it he confessed all - or rather confessed to a larger audience than he had
been confessing to for years late at night in Soho.
At the same time he held an exhibition of
photographs in a Mayfair gallery and went on Radio 4's Midweek with
such a hangover that his voice sounded as if it came from inside a wardrobe.
The title of the book, the reader soon discovered, was a remark made about
his father, not him.
On the day of the funeral of Diana,
Princess of Wales, Farson went to the Coach and Horses in Soho, straight from
a trip to Sweden. He stood at the bar, noisily impersonating a friend, Sandy
Fawkes, bursting into tears. Behind him young people told him to shut up
because they were trying to hear the speech of Earl Spencer on the
television. Such had become the bohemia that he was shortly to leave for the
last time.
Obituary: Daniel Farson
Daniel
Negley Farson, photographer, broadcaster and writer: born 8 January 1927;
died 27 November 1997.
PHILIP HOARE | THE
INDEPENDENT |
MONDAY 1 DECEMBER 1997
Mythomaniacal, egotistical, and often unable
to tell the truth or the difference between it and fiction, the character of
Daniel Farson - photographer, writer, and drunk - is redeemed by at least one
grace: that of self-awareness: "One of the more bizarre aspects of my
life is the way it has veered from triumph to disaster without my seeming to
notice the change."
Farson was the son of Negley Farson, a renowned American
foreign correspondent, author of the Thirties bestseller The Way of a
Transgressor and, like his son, an alcoholic. "My father'
Farson's childhood was a peripatetic one: he was evacuated
to Canada during the Second World War, and spent holidays in the United
States. At 17 he became the youngest ever Parliamentary and Lobby
Correspondent for "an ancient press agency where no one else was young
enough to be mobile". He spent his National Service years in the
American Army Air Corps, and at 21 relinquished his dual nationality in favour
of Britain, while taking advantage of the GI Bill of Rights to go up to
Cambridge.
There he started the magazine Panorama with Anthony West.
An article satirising the Picture Post had Farson summoned to that magazine's
offices, only to leave them with the post of staff photographer. He was soon
photographing the likes of Noel Coward, who happily struck all manner of
attitudes for the blond newcomer's lens.
But it was at the age of 23 that Farson was launched
fatefully into the world of Soho Bohemia, a world of dives and drunks whose
tentacles would never let him go. He had been innocent until then, unmoulded:
"Soho cast me. All too quickly, I made up for lost time." It became
his second home, "often my first", and introduced him to Francis
Bacon: "I moved out of my father's shadow and into Bacon's." Farson
admitted his role of hanger-on; and yet, as a photographer and writer of some
talent, his value lies in observations of a world whose habituees were too
busy drinking to document themselves. Conversely, he was unable to write a
book without putting himself in it; an attempt to render himself as part of
the Soho myth. Friends wondered how he remembered in-depth conversations from
the night before. He probably didn't: he was already being barred from the
French House for behaviour he could not recall.
From photo-journalism Farson moved via the Merchant Navy
(crossing the Equator four times) and newspaper journalism (writing for the
Evening Standard and the Daily Mail) to television, joining
Associated-Rediffusion "in the exciting early days of TV when no
boundaries were set and we were able to explore". Such a brief suited
Farson, and explorations included having to cut off a drunken Caitlin Thomas
in full flow, and an equally drunken interview with Bacon for The Art Game,
filmed on 27 August 1958. During the long delays between changing film
magazines, Bacon and Fargon consumed large quantities of oysters and
champagne, and when the three hours of film was edited to 15 minutes,
"the startling effect was an instant transformation, from two sober
Jekylls into two alcoholic Hydes".
Farson went on to appear in a series of shows, from This
Week to Living for Kicks, ending, as his fame declined, with an art game show
called Gallery in which he called upon the talents of old friends such as
Michael Wishart. It was bizarre to see such sacred monsters of Bohemia
dragged out on afternoon television, Wishart answering banal questions in his
catatonic drawl while a studio audience was ordered to applaud.
Television fame made Farson's half-handsome, prefect-fat
face nationally recognisable. It also gave an added frisson to the encounters
with rent boys; like Wilde and Coward, Farson was feasting with the panthers
of the East End.
He discovered the charms of the sailors and barrow boys of
Limehouse - an area which seemed to operate outside the law - and set up home
at 92 Narrow Street, to be joined by Bacon and other figures such as the
writer Andrew Sinclair and, later, the struggling doctor David Owen. Here not
even the Kray Twins (with whom Farson was intimate) descended to
"renting", i.e. homosexual blackmail. Like Wilde, Farson saw his
East End boys as a race apart, describing them in a letter to Stephen Tennant
as having "a real sense of chivalry . . . these young men looked and
behaved like true aristocrats".
In 1962, using money left by his parents, Farson set up a
"singing pub", The Waterman's Arms, on the Isle of Dogs; he was, as
Colin MacInnes recognised, "realising his own dream". His celebrity
summoned an extraordinary mixture of names to this muddy loop in the lower
Thames. Bacon brought William Burroughs to join Jacques Tati, Shirley Bassey,
Clint Eastwood, Judy Garland or Groucho Marx. "Finally, The Waterman's
Arms was killed by its own success," wrote Sinclair, ". . . in a way,
Farson was like [David] Owen, destroying the culture he loved by introducing
into it the glamour and power of other parts of other cities".
By 1964 Farson had made his break with London, decamping to
the Grey House, Braunton, North Devon, also a legacy of his parents'. There
he wrote his books - 27 in total, rather belying his reputation of drunken
ineptitude - on subjects ranging from Jack the Ripper and Bram Stoker (his
great-uncle) to historical fiction and, well, historical fiction, as many
regarded his own memoirs of life in Limehouse and Soho to be.
Perhaps his greatest achievement was his best-selling
The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (1993), originally commissioned
in 1982 but delivered ten years later, after Bacon's death. Farson's subjective
biography is full of Farson, his life blended with that of his subject: the
effect is to render the author as an adjunct to the artist's self, rather
than securing his - Farson's - place in art history. His 1991 book on Gilbert
and George in Moscow had a similar agenda, whilst bringing Farson into the
modern world of Sohoitis. From Devom he made roaring forays into Soho, lost
weekends during which he would succeed in beguiling, and offending, a whole
new generation of Sohoites.
Perhaps most extraordinary is a last, almost libellous
portrait of Farson in Robert Tewdwr Moss's posthumously published travelogue,
Cleopatra's Wedding Present (1997), in which the author encounters the
apoplectically drunken Farson in a Syrian hotel and is accused of all kinds of
calumny - most egregiously, seduction of the local youth, a misdemeanour of
which Farson himself was much more likely to be guilty. Cornering Tewdwr Moss
in a restaurant over a plate of roasted sparrow, a red-faced Farson
splutters, " 'And by Jove, sonny, if I see you again, I shall make it my
job to destroy you and your career.' In between threats he was snatching up
the bodies of the birds and stuffing them into his mouth - naked little
ornithological corpses, sliding down into the maws of hell."
s guilt made me guilty," wrote Farson, as much about
his sexuality as his addiction to drink. He remained in thrall to his
father's fame, even when his own exceeded it: while Francis Bacon taunted his
friend by declaring Negley's books "second-rate", Farson was proud
enough of them to send one as a calling card to the reclusive aesthete
Stephen Tennant.
Somehow
Dan Farson managed to escape the maws of hell by recycling his incontinent
life in his books, making a living out of myth. He kept abreast with a
sometimes cruel cast of solipsists whose only loyalty was to themselves and
their kind; and then not always to be relied upon. What he leaves behind, in
photographs and words - perhaps most notably in his book Soho in the
Fifties (1987) - is a record of that world which, while doubtless wild,
inaccurate and full of his own hyperbole, is probably as close to the truth
as we will ever get. His autobiography, Never A Normal Man, was
published early this year, shortly after his 70th birthday. It was a final,
bloodshot eye-witness report from the edge before he tottered over it.
Francis
Bacon with Daniel Farson at the first Soho Fair
Bringing home the bacon
RICHARD INGLEBY | VISUAL
ARTS | THE INDEPENDENT | SATURDAY 3 JANUARY 1998
From Augustus Egg to
Francis Bacon, from the 17th to the 20th centuries, from painting to
sculpture, London's public galleries are offering arts for all tastes and
interests in 1998.
It had to happen. Sooner or
later someone had to devise an exhibition to include the 19th-century painter
Augustus Egg alongside modern masters Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.
"The Art Treasures of England", as they have called it - I can't
help but think of it as "Freud Egg and Bacon" - gathers some 450
artworks from 100 museums around the country in celebration of the richness
of our regional collections and ought to be the first unmissable show of the
year. It opens at the Royal Academy (0171-300 8000) at the end of this month
and runs through to the middle of April.
Meanwhile,
there's plenty more Bacon at the Hayward Gallery (0171-921
0600) in February and March in the first major showing there of his work for
10 years while at the Tate Gallery (0171-887 8000) from February to May an
exhibition devoted to the altogether gentler pleasures of Pierre Bonnard will
include several amazing pictures of his wife Marthe in the bath.
1998 is the centenary of
Henry Moore's birth, so we can expect a host of anniversary exhibitions
around the country. One of the simpler and more intriguing tributes is at the
National Gallery (0171-747 2885) in April where the sculptures by Moore will
be placed alongside a selection of his favourite works from the National
Collection. Come the summer the Tate swaps the high-coloured brilliance of
Bonnard for that of Patrick Heron. He's 78 this year and as time rolls by he
looks like one of the major British artists of the last 50 years.
On a rather different note,
if, like me, you missed the once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer exhibition a couple of
years ago, there is a small consolation at Dulwich Picture Gallery (0181-693
5254) in August and September in the shape of a Pieter de Hooch exhibition,
apparently the first ever devoted to this subtle second master of the 17th
century.
Francis Bacon: The Human Body
HAYWARD
GALLERY February 5 — April 5
RICHARD
SHONE | ARTFORUM | PREVIEWS | VOL. 36, NO. 5 | JANUARY 1998
The
comprehensive 1996 Francis Bacon retrospective organized by the Pompidou
didn’t make it to the painter’s homeland of Britain, but this concise
anthology of his works devoted to the figure and the human head at least
represents partial compensation. In works ranging from 1945 to the mid-’80s
and from single canvas paintings to triptychs, most of the players in Bacon’s
human circus are present—his lover George Dyer, Lucian Freud, Isabel
Rawsthorne, and, from his earlier years, the Popes. David Sylvester has
selected the paintings and distilled his long-ruminated thoughts on the
artist’s work in the catalogue essay. For those who harbor skepticism over
the upcoming biopic on Bacon, here’s the real thing.
A slice of lean
Bacon
RICHARD INGLEBY | VISUAL
ARTS | THE INDEPENDENT | SATURDAY 31 JANUARY 1998
The
Human Body, Hayward Gallery, SE1 (0171-928 3144) 5 February-5 April
Despite huge exhibitions in Germany and France, the work of
Francis Bacon has not received a proper airing in Britain for over 10 years.
Yet in just 23 paintings, the new show at the Hayward Gallery has managed the
impressive job of summarising Bacon's complex career.
It is some time since we in this country have had a chance
to see a major exhibition of work by Francis Bacon, the man most often billed
as the century's greatest British painter. Recent years have seen several
large-scale shows further afield, including enormous exhibitions in Paris and
Munich, but there has been nothing of consequence here for at least 10 years.
Whichever way one looks at his work, Bacon could not be called
an intimate artist - yet, somehow, a veil of intimacy has snuck into the
Hayward Gallery's current show. It's partly the scale of the thing (just 23
paintings made over 40 years) and partly the selection, which concentrates on
self-portraits and pictures of his friends and familiars such as Lucian
Freud, Henrietta Moraes and the tragic George Dyer.
This exhibition, which is titled The Human Body (as if
Bacon ever painted anything else) succeeds, surprisingly, in capturing the
essence of a complex career in a couple of dozen pictures. It's a good deal
less extravagant than the recent shows in France and Germany, and all the
better for it. The credit for this success belongs to David Sylvester, whose
excellent selection is accompanied by a pithy catalogue composed of pointed
observations about the man and his work. It's a format which allows Sylvester
to touch on all the main themes: on Bacon's curious androgyny; on the balance
between grandeur and grotesqueness in his images; and on the various references
which appear and reappear, from Velasquez and Degas to Eisenstein and
Muybridge.
It's one of the best bits of writing about Bacon to appear
for many years, but the over-riding sense that emerges from the catalogue,
and to a lesser extent from the choice of paintings, is of Sylvester himself
growing old with Bacon's work. It is not an inappropriate tone, as, over the
years, Sylvester has done as much as anyone to cement Bacon's reputation, and
it's his involvement here which defines the unexpected intimacy of the
occasion. Don't miss it.
Sweeney among the screaming popes
As a new Francis Bacon exhibition opens in
London, David Sylvester talks about the painter's love of poetry
DAVID
SYLVESTER | CULTURE | THE
INDEPENDENT | SUNDAY
1 FEBRUARY 1998
WHEN
I asked Bacon whether he felt he might have worked in a medium other than
painting, he said he might make a film of all the images that had crowded
into his brain and not been used. But he wondered whether he would be able to
find the images if he were not working in paint; he doubted whether in
another medium "things would come to me as easily as they are thrown
down to me in my painting". "That does seem to mean that painting
is your medium." "I certainly couldn't have been a poet."
"What makes you think that?" "Well, because, much as I love
poetry, much as it has influenced me, I don't feel, myself, that that is the
way my imagination works."
His very
interviews, however, show how well his imagination did work verbally. In
their description of his aims and methods they are not especially accurate -
often because he didn't want them to be - but they evoke the creative process
marvellously through telling cadences and a vivid, unexpected use of words.
"You see, all art has now become completely a game by which man
distracts himself; and you may say it has always been like that, but now it's
entirely a game." Or: "To me the mystery of painting today is how
can appearance be made. I know it can be illustrated, I know it can be
photographed. But how can this thing be made so that you catch the mystery of
appearance within the mystery of the making?"
Such
turns of phrase didn't always come on the spur of the moment. Right up to the
end of his life there was sometimes a telephone call at eight in the morning
trying out some formulation of a thought. He had obviously been working on it
and wanted to get the wording just right. That is not the behaviour of a man
who is not something of a poet. It is true that being "something of a
poet" does not involve the energy or care that it takes to be a poet,
but the phrase does at least put Bacon firmly in the ranks of those brought
up in Ireland for whom the use of language is equivalent to driving a racing
car rather than taking a bus to get from one place to another.
As to his love of
the poetry of others, I suspect that it resembled his love of other people's
painting. He had a short attention span, was quick to take what he needed
from something that touched him. He never looked at a painting in a gallery
for more than a few minutes, though he was possibly more patient with
reproductions. He famously never bothered during a long stay in Rome to visit
the Palazzo Doria to see the Velasquez Innocent X that he loved.
Reproductions had given him what he needed: not the physical presence but the
idea. And he was used to loving artists for a small proportion of their work:
most of Picasso bored him; so did most of Rembrandt
So I think he was
always probably more moved by a great line than a great canto, and, when
reading plays, more by a great speech than a great scene. I suspect that in
his passion for Aeschylus in translation he did not read the whole plays or
even substantial parts of them so much as re-read or recall the quotations so
wonderfully translated in Stanford's Aeschylus in his Style, such as
"Dust is mud's thirsty sister" and "The reek of human blood
smiles out at me". And I suspect that again with Racine (which he read
in French) and even with Shakespeare, he read fragments.
It may have
contributed to his preference for Eliot among modern poets that Eliot is such
a master of compression and fragmentation. On the face of it, we might
suppose that Bacon's love for Yeats would have surpassed his love for Eliot,
that no quality in Eliot would have moved him as much as the majestic
colloquialism of Yeats's language or his constant realisation of Bacon's own
avowed ambition "to make the animal thing come through the human".
But he had an addiction to Eliot that overcame the defects and the qualities
that he must have found really hard to take, largely because of his militant
anti-Christianity. It could not have been easy for Bacon to achieve enough
suspension of disbelief to be able to say: "I often read the Four
Quartets, and I think perhaps they're even greater poetry than The Waste
Land, though they don't move me in the same way.
Eliot, of course,
was as remote from him temperamentally as he was ideologically. But there was
an obsession they shared: the Oresteia. Eliot's obsession was manifest in
"Sweeney among the Nightingales", in one of the epigraphs to
Sweeney Agonistes and above all in The Family Reunion, where the hero is
tormented by the Furies called up by his guilt over his belief that he has
murdered his wife. In the Bacon triptych of 1973 showing three moments in the
death of George Dyer (above), the foreground of the central panel is filled
by the silhouette or shadow of a phantasm which is surely (in Bacon's
iconography) a Fury and can be interpreted as confronting the beholder of the
scenes, the first of whom was the person who brought them into being. Bacon
confessed that this and other triptychs arising from Dyer's death were a
conscious attempt to exorcise his guilt over the part he felt he had played
in bringing it about. And it does seem more than likely that writing The
Family Reunion served a similar purpose: pace Ackroyd's objections to the
banality of the equation, the guilt of the play's hero must surely be a
reflection of the author's personal feelings over the part he had played in
destroying his wife Vivien's life.
The exhibition
'Francis Bacon: The Human Body', curated by David Sylvester, opens at the
Hayward Gallery, SE1, on 5 Feb (to be reviewed next week).
Slaughterhouse Earth
The crucifixion of Francis Bacon
I would like my pictures to look as if a
human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the
human presence.
Francis Bacon, 1955
By JOHN W. WHITEHEAD | GADFLY | MARCH 1998
"We are potential
carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that
I wasn't there instead of the animal," Francis Bacon confided in a
remarkable set of interviews with David Sylvester. To Bacon, planet earth
seemed a slaughterhouse on the verge of annihilation at any moment.
Bacon was an enigma to many. He was fiercely
atheistic, believing life was futile and meaningless. But he said, "You
can be optimistic and totally without hope." Bacon was acerbic and
difficult but kind and generous to friends and relatives. Gay with a
sado-masochistic bent, he was predominantly right-wing in his thinking
(although too individualistic to classify politically or otherwise).
Bacon, who died in 1992, had a despairing and
often sarcastic sense of humour, along with a total disdain for convention.
Indeed, he once booed a member of the British royal family who had decided to
sing before a crowd at a ball. Publicly hissing at Princess Margaret may have
been cruel and shocking, but it also demonstrated his honesty and sense of
criticism. She was, in fact, singing off-key. Bacon had a way with words as
well. When a member of the royal family asked him what he did for a living,
"I'm an old queen," he replied.
Bacon's honesty and enigmatic personality
translated to the canvas. Where at times Picasso was clearly playing an art
game, Bacon's work always spoke of a different message. Bacon might very well
be the greatest post-World War II painter. He inspired awe with his paintings
of twisted body parts and distorted animalistic human faces which seemed
intensely concerned with the torn and alienated human condition.
Bacon's paintings portray an intense
loneliness, despair and inner turmoil. He saw violence, hatred and human
degradation as essential elements in the parade of life.
Bacon expected his paintings to assault the
viewer's nervous system. He strove to "unlock the valves of feeling and
therefore return the onlooker to life more violently." Toward the end of
his life, he was delighted to hear that a woman viewing one of his paintings
in Paris had closed her eyes and crossed herself.
The great painter became who he was through
many influences and experiences. A primary influence was his childhood.
"I think artists stay much closer to
their childhood than other people," Bacon once remarked to a friend.
"They remain far more constant to those early sensations."
The aspects of Bacon's childhood that most
strongly affected his art were his aberrational family relationships, his
war-time childhood, his life-long struggle with asthma and his introduction
to homosexuality.
BACON: My relationship with my father and
mother was never good. We never got on. They were horrified at the thought
that I might want to be an artist.
The enfant terrible was born in Dublin in
October 1909 to English parents who were continually moving between Ireland
and England or from mansion to mansion in Ireland. Francis would later say,
"My father and mother were never satisfied with where they were."
This rootlessness would set the course for much of his adult life.
Bacon was a frail, sensitive child, often
life-threateningly ill with attacks of asthma. His upbringing in Ireland
would prove to be so traumatic that in later years an attempt to return to
Ireland would bring on such a severe case of asthma that he came near to
choking to death.
Although luxurious, his home life and
childhood were characterized by dysfunctional relationships, and Bacon later
spoke of his family with bitterness.
His father, Anthony Bacon, a veteran of the
Boer War, was at least fourteen years older than Francis' mother, Winifred
Firth, an heiress to a steel business and coal mine, who brought to the
marriage a comfortable dowry.
Anthony was a soldier and horse trainer, and
he raised his sons as if they were army horses, becoming violently outraged
if anything went wrong. He gambled frequently, sometimes sending Francis to
the post office to place a bet by telegram before the "off."
Anthony regularly estranged his friends by his quarrelsomeness and was no
better at getting along with his children. Francis later described him as
"an intelligent man who never developed his intellect at all."
Domineering and prone to fits of rage, Anthony had Francis viciously
horsewhipped by their Irish stable boys on at least one occasion. He also
forced the boy, who was sensitive to pain and terribly allergic to horses and
dogs, to go fox hunting—-a
traumatic experience that brought on Francis' asthma. The father was also
antagonistic toward Francis' homosexual leanings and banished him from the
house at the age of 16 after discovering the boy dressed in his wife's
underwear.
BACON: I disliked him, but I was sexually
attracted to him when I was young. When I first sensed it, I hardly knew it
was sexual. It was only later, through the grooms and the people in the
stables I had affairs with, that I realized that it was a sexual thing
towards my father.
Francis' mother was more gregarious by
nature. She kept the house immaculate and was more easy-going than Anthony.
However, in later years Francis would speak of her with resentment, claiming
she seemed more concerned over her own pleasures than his needs as a child.
Francis had two brothers, the younger of whom
died of tuberculosis as a child, prompting the only tears Francis ever saw
his father weep. He also had two much younger sisters, born shortly before he
left home.
In the face of his father's outright
rejection and his mother's more subtle rejection, one person Francis truly
loved was his lively, strong-willed maternal grandmother. She was a
flamboyant and forceful woman who loved people and gave grand parties.
"My grandmother and I used to tell each other everything," Bacon
recalled. "I was a kind of confidant for her, I suppose, and I used to
take her to the hunt balls and other things that went on when I was an
adolescent."
Francis was terrified of his grandmother's
second husband, Walter Loraine Bell, however. Cruel and sadistic, Bell was
known as "Cat" Bell for his habit of hanging cats while he was
drunk and of throwing live ones, trapped in bags, to his hounds. Among other
cruelties, Bell put Francis' mother, uncle and grandmother on unbroken
horses, forcing them to ride in terror for their lives. Francis' grandmother
eventually divorced Bell for cruelty, but he made a lasting impression on
Francis.
When his grandmother married a third time, Francis continued to spend
much time with her at Farmleigh, her new home in Ireland. Bacon's new
step-grandfather, Kerry Supple, was the Kildare District Inspector of the
Royal Irish constabulary. As such, Supple drew the wrath of the new Sinn
Fein, the Irish army rebelling against the English. In later years, Francis
would recall the frightening days at Farmleigh when the windows were
sandbagged against invaders, and snipers waited at the edges of the fields.
But the rooms that overlooked the garden were beautiful—semicircular with bay windows—a theme later reflected in the curved
backgrounds of some of his triptychs.
The violence prevalent in Bacon's work also
had some of its roots in World War I and the Civil War in Ireland, both of
which occurred during his childhood. As a youngster in Ireland, Bacon lived
near a British cavalry regiment that trained close to his home. Sometimes the
soldiers galloped up the driveway of the Bacon mansion, carrying out
manourvres. And, in the dead of night, the family could sometimes hear bugles
in the forests as the troops practiced.
Bacon would later remark, "Just the fact
of being born is a ferocious event.... I was made aware of what is called the
possibility of danger at a very young age." And Bacon carried a sense of
annihilation with him the rest of his life which, according to biographer
Michael Peppiatt, sharpened "his appetite not only for pleasure but for
every aspect, however banal, of what he called 'conscious existence.'"
BACON: I remember that when there was a
blackout they used to spray the Park with something phosphorescent out of
watering cans, thinking that the Zeppelins would suppose it was the lights of
London and drop bombs on the Park; it didn't work at all.
When the war began, Anthony Bacon was
appointed to the War Office in London and the whole family moved there,
introducing the 5-year-old Francis to black-outs, charred remnants of homes,
the whine of bombs and the stealthy approach of the Zeppelins. By day,
Francis collected shell fragments and shrapnel in a nearby park. At night,
searchlights raked across the dark sky looking for an airborne enemy,
impressing upon the child the idea that death might drop at any instant. The
distorted human figures that loom from the frightening night in Bacon's
paintings may have their ancestors in the Londoners who would suddenly appear
from the dark and disappear again, continuing on their way through the
shadowy streets.
The most long-lasting influence of that stay
in London was the impression of the newsreels and photographs of actual
trench warfare, a far cry from the exhibition trenches dug in Kensington
Gardens. "From that awareness," wrote biographer Andrew Sinclair,
"he would often choose the monochrome and the snapshot as an insight
into reality rather than the many-coloured surface of what he could see,
which might be only propaganda." Later in life, Bacon painted mainly
from photographs and newspaper clippings rather than from real life.
After the Armistice, Anthony Bacon returned
to Ireland with his family, at the onset of the Irish Civil War. In 1919, the
Irish Republican Army formed, and armed bands of guerrillas began to roam the
Irish countryside during Francis' formative years. "I suppose all that
leaves some impression," Bacon said later. "You can't separate life
from suffering and despair."
As English gentry in an Irish land, the
Bacons were, in many respects, the enemy. Anthony Bacon frequently cautioned
his children about what they should do if the IRA attacked their home during
the night. Francis would visit his grandmother in fear, their car dodging
snipers on the corners of her fields. Police barracks were torched, bodies
hacked to pieces with axes, men hunted with bloodhounds and women shot for
consorting with the British.
One night, a military guard dispatched to
guard the home of Bacon's grandmother was ambushed. The men were shot as they
tried to climb over the locked iron gates and left to hang there. The image
would probably later influence Bacon's paintings of dead meat in butcher
shops such as Painting (1946) which shows a split carcass suspended
like a human body crucified.
The military transports soon were caged with
wire netting in an effort to protect the soldiers from grenades, just as
similar steel netting had been erected in London during the war to protect
buildings and monuments. The cage theme later appeared in many of Bacon's
works, for example around the figure of a screaming pope.
The theme of stalkers and their victims also found its way into
Bacon's work. Some were more obvious, such as figures which appear to be in
mortal combat. Other paintings seem to contain figures, writes Michael
Peppiatt, who simply watch, either for "sexual excitement or—like the hidden snipers—the desire to destroy."
There was a genuine trauma in living through
two wars, but many children suffered the same wartime experiences. Peppiatt
has noted that the dramatic effect upon Bacon may have been due to his desire
to seek out the strong sensations of fear and dwell upon them. Bacon, perhaps
fueled by a need for high drama, was fond of describing his childhood in
desolate and harsh terms, and it tainted everything within his reach.
Another element of Bacon's character which
profoundly impacted his art was his homosexuality. The point when his
leanings toward homosexuality began is difficult to determine, but at one
fancy-dress party, Francis arrived as a flapper with an Eton crop, dressed in
a backless gown and sporting long earrings, much to the amusement of the
ladies and the disgust of his father.
At some point in his adolescence or earlier,
Francis had sexual encounters with the Irish grooms at his home, possibly the
same grooms who carried out the horse-whippings ordered by his father. The
pain and humiliation of the horse-whippings, combined with the sexual
attraction for the grooms and his father, no doubt gave rise to some of the
violent sexual imagery in his artwork, as in Two Figures in the
Grass (1954). Bacon felt that the subject of human coupling was
limitless: "You need never have any other subject, really," he
remarked. "It's a very haunting subject."
At age 16, Francis was banished from the
family home and left to support himself, with a weekly allowance from his
mother. Having concluded that instinct and chance were the driving forces of
life, he set out to see where life would take him. He went at first to London
where he took on a series of odd jobs to supplement his income and, according
to Peppiatt, entered the gay underworld and frequently earned extra money by
being picked up by wealthier gay men.
It was while in London that Bacon read some
of Nietzsche's work, lost the last vestiges of any religious belief and came
to the conclusion that life was futile unless he could somehow do something
"extraordinary" with it.
After some time, Anthony Bacon again made an
attempt to "straighten out" Francis, this time by entrusting him to
the care of a distant family relative travelling to Berlin. However, things
did not go the way his father planned, as it was only a short while before
Francis and the "uncle" were in bed together.
In Berlin, Francis found himself in a luxurious and violent world of
gay cabarets, transvestite clubs and nude dancing—an environment that offered any sexual
experience he could desire. As a "pretty" young man, he had no
trouble getting picked up and getting money.
In Berlin, Bacon also discovered the
functional art of the Bauhaus movement which influenced the design of the
furniture he began to build a few years later.
Eventually, Bacon's uncle moved on, and at
17, Francis set off for Paris. In Chantilly, a French woman and her family
took him in, and he learned French and saw the sights. Eventually, he moved
out on his own and entered the gay circles in Paris.
BACON: I went to Paris then for a short time.
While there I saw at Rosenberg's an exhibition of Picasso, and at that moment
I thought, well I will try and paint, too.
In Paris, he saw a work that deeply stirred
his imagination, Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents (1630-31),
which showed a mother trying to defend her child from a soldier's sword. The
scream of the victim so affected him that he later referred to it as
"probably the best human cry ever painted," and the human scream
became one of his most painted subjects. Perhaps, as Peppiatt suggests, this
is because it "corresponded to the release of a tension so deep within
him."
In either Berlin or Paris, Bacon viewed
Eisenstein's classic film The Battleship Potemkin (1925). He was
especially stirred by the image of a nurse shot on the Odessa steps. Her face
is bloodied, her glasses shattered and her mouth open in a terrified scream.
He later credited the film as an important catalyst to his work, and he used
the idea in Study for the Nurse (1957).
The impact of Massacre of the
Innocents and Potemkin led him to purchase a medical book on
diseases of the mouth. It contained hand-painted illustrations, and Bacon
used it constantly when he painted. He once commented, "I've always been
very moved by the movements of the mouth and the shape of the teeth. People
say these have all sorts of sexual implications, and I was always very
obsessed by the actual appearance of the mouth and teeth... I like, you may
say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth."
In 1927, Bacon attended a Paris exhibition of
Picasso's work, something he often mentioned later. Picasso's attempts to
allow the subconscious to flow into the conscious and his use of chance to
produce uncalculated results particularly impressed Bacon. The exhibit
inspired him to begin drawing and making watercolours on his own. Six years
later, his first recognizably Baconian image, Crucifixion (1933),
reflected Picasso's influence. However, where Picasso's
1930 Crucifixion was made of bones, Bacon reduced his to an X-ray
of a wraith-like figure.
Bacon repeated on various occasions that he saw the Crucifixion in
terms of a "self-portrait," but, as Peppiatt notes, he did not
elaborate on "the astonishing implications" of this concept—-a concept he projected in many of his other
paintings. "For over half of his career," writes Peppiatt,
"Bacon's work revolved around two of the most potent images of the
Christian faith, the body on the cross and the Pope on his throne."
Other influences at this time included
artists Soutine, de Chirico, Arp, Picabia and Dali, the art
magazine Cahiers d'Art, and Luis Buñuel's film Un Chien Andalou.
Bacon was also influenced by the review Documents which contained
photographs of a screaming mouth and pictures of bloodied animal carcasses
and Positioning in Radiography, a reference book which had photographs
showing the position of the body for X-rays to be taken and the X-rays
themselves.
Around age 20, unable to make a living in Paris, Bacon returned to
London, carrying with him images of violence and anger—carcasses and screams that would impact the
rest of his life. In London, he took up residence with Roy de Maistre, a man
he saw as both father-figure and lover. De Maistre had money, which enabled
Bacon to spend time designing and manufacturing furniture. De Maistre was
also a painter, and the two held a joint art exhibit in their garage. It was
during this time that Francis painted several crucifixions which would later
lead to his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of
a Crucifixion (1944), perhaps inspired by de Maistre's convictions
as a convert to Roman Catholicism.
Bacon himself was antagonistic toward
religion, perhaps partly as a reaction to his dictatorial father whom he
found both terrifying and attractive. As a boy Francis claimed to fear the
Bible, the law and his father's verdict. Although his entire family had
attended a Protestant church, Bacon saw this as primarily a public protest
against Catholicism in the Irish country where civil war brewed. In addition,
the Catholic Church condemned sodomy and homosexuality. Bacon, however, would
later deny that religion played any role in his Crucifixion paintings and
claim that he simply found the elevated human figure intriguing.
After a failed art show a few years later,
Bacon was so discouraged by the lack of response to his work that he
destroyed most of the works he had displayed and painted very little for the
next ten years. He parted ways with de Maistre and took up a wandering
lifestyle again, making a living through petty theft, running a roulette
wheel, doing odd jobs and occasionally receiving requests to design
furniture. "I think I'm one of those people who have a gift for always
getting by somehow," Francis would later muse. "Even if it's a case
of stealing or something like that, I don't feel any moral thing against
it."
During this time gap, World War II broke out,
and Bacon again found himself in a torn and violent landscape. Yet the bodies
and bombed-out buildings intrigued him. His father died, and the relief Bacon
felt after that "release," in addition to the exhilaration of the
war, sent him back to his brushes. He began to paint again, and by 1945 his
first famous work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, was on display.
BACON: I've always been very moved by
pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to
the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There've been extraordinary photographs
which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were
slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course, but it appears
by these photographs that they're so aware of what is going to happen to
them, they do everything to attempt to escape. I think these pictures were
very much based on that kind of thing, which to me is very, very near this
whole thing of the Crucifixion. I know for religious people, for Christians,
the Crucifixion has a totally different significance. But as a nonbeliever,
it was just an act of man's behaviour, a way of behaviour to another.
Bacon, an atheist, believed life was futile,
a "mere spasm of consciousness between two voids." However, in a
perverse way, he was one of the most deeply religious painters of the
century.
As Peppiatt puts it, "A fetish force
appear[ed] to draw him back repeatedly to religious themes all through the
earlier part of his artistic development, as if he had to make a belief out
of his nonbelief, using structures of established religion to proclaim his
distance from them." And use them he did. Bacon, notes Peppiatt,
pillaged "the central truths of both the Greek and the Christian faith:
only there, he was convinced, could he find the structure to convey the
extent and the implications of his own drama."
Bacon had reached a position not only of unbelief but also of despair
for anything beyond what one can actually see or experience: "Man now
realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that
he has to play out the game without purpose, other than of his own
choosing." On another occasion he remarked: "We are born and we die
and there's nothing else. We're just part of animal life." His paintings
express modern man's condition—a dehumanized humanity dispossessed of any
durable paradise, supernatural or otherwise. This outlook, along with Bacon's
homosexuality, would greatly affect his canvases.
The importance of Bacon's homosexuality to
his life and vision, as Peppiatt recognizes, cannot be overstated: "One
might reasonably say that, along with his dedicated ambition as an artist,
his sexuality was the most important element in his life." Bacon said he
painted to excite himself. And, despite his atheism, he seemed to identify
his own suffering from his homosexuality with the anguish of the Crucifixion.
"Homosexuality is more tragic and more banal," Bacon said,
"than what is called normal love." Indeed, he had always been
plagued by an acute sense of guilt "caused," as Peppiatt records,
"in part by his homosexuality and the way it had made him an outcast
from his own family." Moreover, Bacon "openly regretted it on
occasion. 'Being a homosexual is a defect,' was the way he put it in certain
moods. 'It's like having a limp.'"
As Andrew Sinclair, another Bacon biographer, notes, "He feared
exposure and expulsion and even imprisonment. Especially sensitive and
observant, he particularly felt as an adolescent the four crosses of the
homosexual at that time—isolation
and illegality, insecurity and guilt."
In a hypocritical world that condemned his acts, Bacon
could see little hope. Perhaps in this vein, the flesh often crucified in
Bacon's paintings may be the great painter's own. Peppiatt muses, it is
possible "that Bacon identified with Christ on the Cross." Indeed,
Bacon referred to the whole theme of the Crucifixion "as a kind of
self-portrait conveying deeply personal truths."
Daniel Farson in
his book on Bacon notes of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion (1944): "The forcefulness with which these three Greek
Furies... hurl their misery and rage at us proves the extent of his own
loss of faith."
Clearly,
with Three Studies Bacon's work began to epitomize the nihilistic
spirit of twentieth century thinking. He once said: "Nietzsche forecast
our future for us—he was the Cassandra of the nineteenth
century—he told us it's all so meaningless we might as well be
extraordinary."
Several other
important subthemes underlie Three Studies. One is sexual, and relates
to Bacon's interest in the open mouth. The pleading figure in the middle
panel reflects the concept of "penis dentatus." This may be a
variation on the Surrealists' concept of "vagina dentata" or the
combination of sex and mouth.
In addition,
artistic influences may have led to the gloomily phallic Three Studies.
Bacon had a good knowledge of art history, and it is logical that Grünewald's
crucifixion paintings would have influenced him. There is little doubt that
the idea for the cloth bandage above the snarling mouth in the central figure
of the triptych was inspired by Grünewald's Mocking of
Christ (1503). Grünewald had also influenced Picasso's earlier Guernica (1937).
In a hypocritical world that condemned his acts, Bacon
could see little hope. Perhaps in this vein, the flesh often crucified in
Bacon's paintings may be the great painter's own. Peppiatt muses, it is
possible "that Bacon identified with Christ on the Cross." Indeed,
Bacon referred to the whole theme of the Crucifixion "as a kind of
self-portrait conveying deeply personal truths."
Daniel Farson in
his book on Bacon notes of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion (1944): "The forcefulness with which these three Greek
Furies... hurl their misery and rage at us proves the extent of his own
loss of faith."
Clearly,
with Three Studies Bacon's work began to epitomize the nihilistic
spirit of twentieth century thinking. He once said: "Nietzsche forecast
our future for us—he was the Cassandra of the nineteenth
century—he told us it's all so meaningless we might as well be
extraordinary."
Several other
important subthemes underlie Three Studies. One is sexual, and relates
to Bacon's interest in the open mouth. The pleading figure in the middle
panel reflects the concept of "penis dentatus." This may be a
variation on the Surrealists' concept of "vagina dentata" or the
combination of sex and mouth.
In addition,
artistic influences may have led to the gloomily phallic Three Studies.
Bacon had a good knowledge of art history, and it is logical that Grünewald's
crucifixion paintings would have influenced him. There is little doubt that
the idea for the cloth bandage above the snarling mouth in the central figure
of the triptych was inspired by Grünewald's Mocking of
Christ (1503). Grünewald had also influenced Picasso's
earlier Guernica (1937).
BACON: One of the pictures I did in 1946, the
one like a butcher's shop, came to me as an accident. I was attempting a bird
alighting on a field.... I had no intention to do this picture; I never
thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on
top of another.
Bacon's public breakthrough was
with Painting (1946). Although it was hardly seen before it was
bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it is generally the painting
by which he is best known all over the world to this day.
At just under 40 years of age, Bacon had
arrived as one of the dominant figures in the art of his day. Painting (1946),
as art analyst Lawrence Gowing writes, "brought the ominous
incongruities, the dramatic fall of light around the umbrella and the
catastrophic implication all together for the first time." The scene
might be in a butcher shop where the carnivorous protagonist, no more a
butcher than a priest or judge, awaits his prey among the sides of meat
displayed around him.
Bacon's concern with the human condition may
be a clue to this work and his other paintings. As he told David Sylvester,
"the greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human
situation." Shortly before Painting (1946) was completed,
70,000 people had been slaughtered and approximately that same number died
later of the new manmade death, radiation sickness, from the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in April 1945. The umbrella looks suspiciously
like a mushroom cloud, and the judge or priest with the carnage of meat
surrounding him is the perpetrator of mass death.
Painting (1946) also shows Bacon's fascination with blood and
carnage. It is a gruesome replacement of the ornate throne of the traditional
state portrait. Bacon combines three of the major themes of his time—war, the dictator and dead meat—and suggests the bomb's sinister impact on
mankind's future.
While it may be true, as Bacon said, that
"you only need to think about the meat on your plate" to see the
general truth about humankind in his paintings, no modern artist has hammered
at the twentieth century human condition with more repetitive pessimism. Painting (1946)
also reflects Bacon's view of life as an accident and a spasm of brutality,
"suffering what cannot be explained because it has no meaning."
BACON: I think that man now realizes that he
is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out
the game without reason.
Bacon was a realist who tried to force
viewers to shed their shallow belief in the euphemisms of a glittering neon
culture that merely provides a distraction from the reality of nonmeaning.
Bacon's fascination for the irrational is evident in his imagery of
the abnormal and the impaired, which underscores a darker view of humanity—a humanity only partially evolved from an
ignoble, animal condition.
His paintings after the photos of Eadweard Muybridge such
as Study for Crouching Nude (1952) and the more
explicit Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from
Muybridge) (1961) reduce human beings to an ignominious animal state and
suggest evolutionary regression.
BACON: I realized when I was seventeen. I remember it very, very
clearly. I remember looking at a dog-shit on the pavement and I suddenly
realized, there it is—this is
what life is like. Strangely enough, it tormented me for months, till I came
to, as it were, accept that here you are, existing for a second, brushed off
like flies on the wall.
Bacon's 1953 Man with Dog, as contrasted with his Study
for Self-Portrait—Triptych (1985-86),
shows the artist in a hunched, tortured posture with legs coiled. Not only
does this reflect the crouching dog but it also seems to imply a connection
with his crouching nude of 1952. Bacon himself, thus, is a regressed animal
like us all, except that as an artist he was aware of his status and could
record it for the world to see.
Bacon's distorted and idiosyncratic images
bear eloquent witness to the events of the post-World War II period and more
generally to twentieth century humanity's capacity for mass violence. Bacon,
the artist as prophet, is the extreme voice of despair in which people are
totally dehumanized, blurred, decrepit banshees. Robert Hughes writes:
"In his work, the image of the classical nude body is simply dismissed;
it becomes, instead, a two-legged animal with the various addictions: to sex,
the needle, security, or power."
BACON: I am unique in that way; and perhaps
it's a vanity to say such a thing. But I don't think I'm gifted. I just think
I'm receptive.
Bacon emphasized the chance element in his
work, but when discussing it he unavoidably spoke in religious terms. Like
Duchamp and other artists, Bacon saw himself as a "medium": "I
always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident
and chance."
Speaking in much the same way as a painter like Rembrandt, who within
the Judeo-Christian tradition could readily accept the divine hand on his
work, Bacon would say: "I think that I have this peculiar kind of
sensibility as a painter, where things are handed to me and I just use
them." It's Bacon's choice of words—"handed to me"—that implies a personal force outside of
himself that he was quick to deny.
This is interesting and mystifying when one
realizes that much of Bacon's work dealt with religious icons and subjects,
such as Velasquez's portrait of the Pope. Bacon did not believe in an
afterlife but thought that art gave substance to life. That is how he
expressed his chaos of emotions and came to terms with life's confusion.
BACON: I've always thought that this was one of the greatest paintings
in the world, and I've used it through obsession. And I've tried very, very
unsuccessfully to do certain records of it—distorted records. I regret them, because I
think they're very silly... because I think that this thing was an absolute
thing that was done and nothing more can be done about it.
Bacon's Study After Velasquez's Portrait
of Pope Innocent X (1953) turns Diego Velasquez's powerful portrait of
Pope Innocent X Pamphili into a "screaming Pope." Bacon executed
the painting from a photograph. Study introduced an element of dislocation
from the primary image, a concept that greatly influenced modern art.
The Pope in Study seems a snare and a threat. He is held in
a skeletal cube—a boxed
hell without escape. "The picture assaults the power of the Church: it
is blasphemous," Sinclair notes. "It represents Bacon's heresy and
protests against the rule of the organised religion which he had known in
Ireland." This is a derisive view of the Catholic religion that Bacon
probably inherited from the Surrealists.
It is clear that the image of the Pope touched a deep division in
Bacon. On the one hand, he was fascinated with the man set above all others.
On the other hand, there was a desire to tear away at the pomp and pretence
of the high office of Supreme Pontiff—a self-protective illusion that Bacon
believed was at the core of all religious belief.
Bacon, thus, seems to project anxiety
concerning his own mortality as well as rage against authority in his
portrait of Pope Innocent X. "Painting," Bacon said, "is the
pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on the canvas."
Moreover: "One of the problems," Bacon said, "is to paint like
Velasquez, but with the texture of a hippopotamus skin."
With his 1962 Three Studies for a
Crucifixion, Bacon again returns to the subject of the crucifixion. Three
Studies (1962) literally reeks of blood and was painted under a
tremendous hangover from drinking. "It's one of the only pictures,"
Bacon later said, "that I've ever been able to do under drink. I believe
that the drink helped me to be a bit freer."
Sinclair notes that the "figures in the
three canvases were joined in the theme of the violence that men did to one
another by the power of sex and hatred. The body on the right, lying head
down, suggested an inverted crucifixion by Cimabue, which Bacon thought was
like 'a worm crawling... just moving, undulating down the cross.'"
With Three Studies, a self-generating quality of painting began
to emerge, which Lawrence Gowing believes changed the character of art. Until
1962, the date of Bacon's first exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London,
most of his paintings had been devoted essentially to simple embodiments.
From this point on in his work, figures are more often concerned together in
a simple episode or in an identifiable setting—a landscape or a townscape or a habitable
interior. The subjects are more often actions, whose purpose we may or may
not be allowed to construe. As Gowing writes: "Pictures like this
extended Bacon's art and his reading of human drama into a region of instinct
and unknowing, nervous awareness, a region seemingly unknown and unknowable,
which was quite new to modern figurative art."
BACON: There are very few paintings I would
like to have, but I would like to have Rembrandts.
Bacon understood the importance of art history. To this end, he paid
tribute to Rembrandt—"abstract
expressionism has all been done in Rembrandt's marks."
Rembrandt, however, lived in an age saturated
with Christian beliefs to which Rembrandt himself subscribed. This can be
seen in his classic crucifixion painting, The Raising of the
Cross (1633). Here we see Rembrandt at the base of the cross with his
eyes fixed on Christ. The message is that Rembrandt saw himself as one of the
many fallible people who had forced Christ to the cross.
Bacon's retort was that Rembrandt painted at a time when people were
still "slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities,
which man now, you could say, has completely cancelled out for him." In
other words, Rembrandt's culture believed in the existence of a personal God
who provided a solution—the
Crucifixion—for
humanity's problems.
That hope, to Bacon, had been lost and man
must "beguile himself." "You see," Bacon said, "all
art has become completely a game by which man distracts himself."
Distracted from what? The futility of existence, of course.
"We are born and we die," Bacon proclaimed, "but in
between we give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives."
Sex, food, body functions, the will to create—these all give some meaning, although varied,
to human existence. Maybe this explains in part Bacon's Triptych
Inspired By T. S. Eliot's Poem Sweeney Agonistes (1967). Bacon had been
reading Eliot's verse dramas and the famous three-part summary of the human
situation:
That's all the facts when you come to brass
tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
The center panel, with its lonely futility,
was left unpeopled while that on the right, derived from Muybridge's
wrestlers, offered Bacon's customary formulation for sexual passion.
In 1988, a few years before his death, Bacon
revisited the original Three Studies with a fresh, more defined
look at the crucifixion in Second Version of Triptych (1944). The
figures are still bound and appear to be only the projections of certain body
parts that he had defined in such works as Triptych Inspired by the
Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981). An uneasy sense of cruelty and despair
resonates from these late works. "Anything in art seems cruel," he
said, "because reality is cruel."
BACON: We nearly always live through screens—a screened existence. And I sometimes think,
when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time
been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.
In the deepest sense, Bacon's paintings are
about his knowledge that the inhabitants of his world are alive. To
understand Bacon the man, you must know the private damage and demons that
drove him to paint his form of despair and that even today drive onlookers to
their knees.
Bacon projected his nervous system onto his
canvases, and his scream is the scream of twentieth century humanity that has
debunked its past, tradition and values. Bacon's crucifixion of himself on
canvas expresses the pain and torment of guilt that seems to endlessly plague
modern humanity.
Bacon could feel the cold winds blowing
across the wasteland and he knew, or believed he knew, the only alternatives.
He sincerely believed we are all damned in the slaughterhouse of life.
BACON: I think that most people who have
religious beliefs, who have the fear of God, are much more interesting than
people who just live a kind of hedonistic and drafting life.... I can't help
admiring but despising them.... But I do think that, if you can find a person
totally without belief, but totally dedicated to futility, then you will find
the more exciting person.
In one of his later interviews, David
Sylvester asked Bacon, "Don't you think that any believing Christian who
felt that he was damned would prefer not to have an immortal soul than to
live in eternal torment?"
Bacon replied: "I think that people are
so attached to their egos that they'd probably rather have the torment than
simple annihilation."
Sylvester then asked: "You'd prefer the
torment yourself?"
Quick to reply, the great painter said,
"Yes, I would, because, if I was in hell I would always feel I had a
chance of escaping. I'd always be sure that I'd be able to escape.
A QUESTION OF ATTRIBUTION
Francis
Bacon was one of the great artists of his time, and one of the most
unpredictable. But is it really possible that even he would give 500 key
works away? And, if so, why?
LEE MARSHALL | CULTURE |
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY | SUNDAY
MAY 3 1998
CHRISTIAN RAVARINO,
an Italian-American journalist, has hundreds of drawings by the English painter
Francis Bacon. Some of them are in the boot of his Audi. But he's having
trouble with the central-locking system.
Bacon was not just
screaming popes and butchered triptychs, says Ravarino. He was not just
"the world's greatest living painter" - a label he was already
learning to live with when Ravarino first met him in 1980. He was also, says
Ravarino (who likes to talk), a great draughtsman. A great wielder of the
pencil and the blue Biro, on sheets of typing paper which his Italian friend
provided.
Bacon in Italy in the last
12 years of his life (he died in 1992, aged 82) is not an impossible
scenario. He travelled constantly, alone or with an ever-changing group of
friends; and travel, for Bacon, meant putting the Channel far behind him.
Bacon drawing is another thing altogether. The official line is that he just
didn't do it, at least not after his career as a painter had taken off.
Michael Peppiatt, a longtime acquaintance, and author of the 1996 biography
Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, is adamant that Bacon "did almost
no drawings - and the ones that we do have are very painterly. He was a
painter through and through."
The drawings owned by
Ravarino are currently at the centre of a legal wrangle in his home town of
Bologna. The case was instigated by his main customer, a Bolognese dentist
and art collector called Francesco Martani, who bought a job lot of around 50
drawings in 1992 for what Ravarino says was "a few million lire
each" (3m lire is currently around pounds 1,000). Ravarino says that he
was forced to sell them off in a hurry because his mother had just died and
he needed the money to pay the US death duties. "In any case," he
says, "they were by no means the best." A few years after his
purchase, Martani began to get cold feet. He says that he hopes the drawings
turn out to be authentic - but he is convinced that bringing in Italy's Art
Police (the Nucleo tutela del patrimonio artistico) and accusing Ravarino of
having sold him a bunch of fakes is "the only way of getting at the truth."
The case will rumble on for
at least another year. In the meantime Ravarino, like the Ancient Mariner, is
desperate to get the story off his chest.
Ravarino says that he first
met Bacon in Calderino, a village in the wine-growing hills west of Bologna,
in November 1980. The artist was staying in the holiday villa of a certain
Bernard Sellin (or Sellen), who claimed to be "a pediatric surgeon at
the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London". Ravarino was 28 at the
time. He was introduced by a friend of his mother's who knew both Bacon and
Sellin.
He got five articles out of
their meetings, including an interview published in Italian Penthouse in
April 1982. In 1996 he gathered these articles together in a book published
by a small Bologna press, with reproductions of some of the drawings and a
rambling afterword.
Later, when Bacon visited
the ski resort of Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Italian Dolomites, and again in
Venice, Ravarino was a hanger-on. He also talks of trips to Rome and Florence
"sometime in the mid- to late Eighties", including one visit to the
Uffizi Gallery during which Bacon tried to wrench Artemisia Gentileschi's
gory painting of Judith Slaying Holofernes off the wall. The police let Bacon
off with a warning. He couldn't see what all the fuss was about: "I
would have given them one of mine in exchange," he explained to
Ravarino.
SINCE THE early Eighties,
when Bacon apparently praised his boyish good looks and his pert bottom,
Ravarino has - by his own admission - gone to seed. In fact, it's difficult
to connect him in any way with the cherubic passport photograph he shows me,
dated 1972.
The frayed brown overcoat,
the scuffed supermarket trainers, the long hair, streaked with grey, the
puffy face - Ravarino looks like a method actor three months into preparation
for his role as Down-At-Heel Writer And Italian Friend Of Bacon. He drives a
clapped-out Audi with a rattling gearbox. He talks earnestly and incessantly
in great arcs of free association that lead from Velazquez to the Mafia. He
hangs a right when he sees a police car up ahead ("Shit, what are they
doing here? They don't normally wait on that corner"). But he can also
be calm and cultured, with the smooth, persuasive voice of a breakfast radio
host.
The only time I hear
Ravarino stumble is when I ask him if he ever had sex with Bacon. Um, well,
basically, the thing is ... he doesn't remember. Sorry? "You have to
realise just how much these people drank, and how much you had to drink if
you didn't want to offend them ... I was often in a kind of alcoholic
coma." He goes on to tell me a story about Bacon putting a rose on the
breakfast table one morning, in some hotel, he doesn't remember where or
when. Or why.
Ravarino - whose English is
far from fluent - holds an American passport. He also claims to act as an
advisor to the US Department of State, and talks of an uncle who works for
the Planning Organization Board - "the decision-making body of the
National Security Council, which controls the American President". He
writes the way he talks: leaping from one conspiratorial hub to another, even
when he is ostensibly discussing Bacon. Aldo Moro is in there, of course, and
the Kennedy assassination. So is the Pont de l'Alma in Paris, Blackfriars
Bridge in London and the omnipresent Licio Gelli (former head of Italy's P2
Masonic lodge). They're all connected, deep down.
Such things fascinated
Bacon, according to Ravarino, and he claims to have spent hours talking to
the painter about espionage, terrorism and the Mafia. In a long memoir he
wrote in 1995, Ravarino recalls an episode which took place in the Hotel
Danieli in Venice in 1991. Bacon was watching a TV interview with Mafia
godfather Michele Greco, and was enchanted by the fact that his Italian
nickname was Il Papa (The Pope) - so much so that he immediately ordered
Ravarino to send the man a drawing. Like most of the other Bacon drawings
that Ravarino claims to have posted to eminent personages (the former Italian
Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, among others), this one was stolen by an unscrupulous
assistant before it reached the great man.
The problem with Ravarino's
"Bacon and I" stories is that there are no photographs, no tape
recordings and few witnesses. No one seems to have heard of Bernard Sellin -
the surgeon friend Bacon was supposed to have been staying with in Calderino.
The Great Ormond Street hospital has no record of him. Paul Brass, who was
Bacon's personal doctor, never once heard Bacon mention Sellin. The other
important claim made by Ravarino - that at this time Bacon believed he was
dying of cancer, hence the "urgency" of the drawings - baffles
Brass. But he concedes that Bacon "did tend to worry about his
health".
Just as one is beginning to
believe in some magnificent fictional construct, a few Italian sightings come
to Ravarino's rescue. Calderino wine producer Carlo Gaggioli remembers a
visit to his cellars by a "very merry" group of foreigners,
including an older English artist. He has a drawing similar to those owned by
Ravarino, "which was given to me by the artist - or by Ravarino, I don't
remember. But they definitely gave it to me that same day." Bacon was
also spotted in Cortina d'Ampezzo, the ski resort where Ravarino claims to
have interviewed him "towards the end of the Eighties". Gloria
Pagani remembers Bacon's rowdy visit to her restaurant, La Siesta - which was
followed the next day by the gift of a drawing. And Vincenzo Lucchese, an
architect who teaches at Venice University, has testified that he saw Bacon
and Ravarino together at a Venetian Carnevale party "at the end of the
Eighties" (though Ravarino, in one of his few stabs at precision, sets
this meeting in 1991).
According to Ravarino it
was during this Venetian visit, when Bacon was around 80, that the artist
presented him with the bulk of the drawings. Bacon was staying with
"some rich English friends" who owned an apartment in Venice, and
Ravarino remembers that "he wasn't feeling very well".
As usual with Ravarino's
stories, the Venetian scenario comes complete with theatrical mise-en-scene.
"Bacon said to me: 'I told my friends that you would go round to the
flat to tidy up.' I was a bit put-out by this, but I said, 'Fine'. Then Bacon
said: 'But make sure you don't steal anything.' That was one of the few times
I ever got angry with him - I really blew a fuse. He quite liked it when
people shouted at him. Anyway, he said he'd been joking, and that he only
meant I should be careful with the crystal glasses. So along I go to the
flat, which is really something - Sebastiano del Piombo paintings on the wall,
the whole works. And I find that it's spotlessly clean. Then I notice a big
package sitting on a table, with a typewritten note: 'Per il dottor
Ravarino.' Inside were hundreds of drawings.
The last time he talked to
Bacon, says Ravarino, was when the artist rang him a few weeks later. When
Ravarino asked him why he had bothered to type out the note, Bacon replied:
"So you don't have anything on me. I don't want anyone to recognise my
handwriting. I don't want you to make this into a book. And I haven't decided
what I want you to do with the drawings yet."
So why, then, did Bacon
sign the drawings? Ravarino says that he talked the artist into signing them
"when I brought them to him in Rome". His chronology - unreliable
at the best of times - goes very fuzzy around this point. It's unclear, for
example, whether this "last meeting" took place before or after the
phone-call referred to above. "I was shaking all over. He was drunk, and
I was worried he was going to destroy them. Instead, he started signing them.
Some he initialled, some he signed with his full name, some just with an 'F'
- like those early paintings that were published recently in a book with a
preface by Milan Kundera - paintings which nobody had ever seen before."
Ravarino has certainly done his homework.
There is no doubt that
these are the kind of drawings a clever forger would turn out if he was
trying to "do a Bacon". They are all heads, done in two different
styles. The first type is aggressively pointilist, like a join-the-dots
puzzle for schizophrenics. Clustered entrails mess up the mouth and nose, or
hang down from the chin. The eyes are insect-like. One of these heads looks
like a child's drawing of a caterpillar; another like Darth Vader with acne.
The second type of drawing
is more fluent, more convincing. The bare essentials of a face have been
jotted down, and then overlain by long, rapid, curving strokes of the pencil.
The effect is that of long grass in a strong wind, seen from above, as in
Bacon's painting Landscape 1978. The focal point (always a face) is worked on
and worked over obsessively, nearly erased. The rest is clean, confident and
geometric: a suggestion of shoulders and collar, enclosed - in some cases -
in one of the box-frames that we recognise from Bacon's paintings.
Since Bacon's death in
April 1992, various "official" early sketches have turned up. A
group of four scrappy studies for paintings from the Fifties and Sixties was
included in the major Pompidou Centre show in 1996. More interesting perhaps
is the group of 42 works on paper acquired by the Tate Gallery earlier this
year. Dating from the early Fifties to the early Sixties, these include a few
sketches in ballpoint pen and pencil as well as others in gouache, oil paint
and ink. The style is not particularly close to that of the Ravarino
drawings, but the press release put out by the Tate to announce the
acquisition makes an interesting point: "Though few post-war works on
paper by [Bacon] were known, it has now become clear that this is only
because he did not wish the existence of this type of work to be revealed
beyond his own circle."
The works acquired also
include some pages from a boxing magazine overpainted by the artist.
Ravarino, too, has a group of sketches done on the flyleaves of various
English and Italian books. Sometimes these take up hints from their
surroundings: a rapidly sketched portrait on the title page of Reginald
Berkeley's The Lady With a Lamp seems a parody of the portrait of Florence
Nightingale on the facing page.
Ravarino believes that the
Bacon establishment has closed ranks to keep him out. If so, they have
understandable reasons for doing so. The Marlborough Gallery, which
represented the artist from 1958 onwards, has had to act on Bacon's behalf
more than once in the past when false or abandoned paintings turned up in the
marketplace. There is even an Italian precedent: in the mid-Seventies a group
of left-wing students in Milan painted and sold a number of fake Bacons,
using the proceeds to finance the Glorious Revolution.
Kate Austin voices the
official Marlborough Gallery line when she says that "stylistically it
seems impossible that these drawings are authentic. The hand is very tight -
it's certainly not Bacon's." She also claims that "the artist knew
about these drawings and was very upset about them". As for Ravarino,
she says that "it is debatable whether he ever knew Bacon
personally".
British art critic David
Sylvester was (and is) Bacon's Boswell. His conversations with the artist -
first published in 1975 - have become the Baconologist's bible. Sylvester has
also curated most of the important Bacon exhibitions since the artist's death
in 1992, including the recent Hayward Gallery show. He is emphatically not
part of the Ravarino camp; in fact, the whole story irritates him. "This
is about the eighteenth time I've been asked about these drawings," he
says. "They're fakes - you only have to look at them to see it. There is
absolutely no documentary proof that they are Bacon's - so in the end you
just have to trust your eye."
An assiduous collector of
testimonials, Ravarino has his own list of friendly critics and collectors.
His chief supporter is Italian writer and self-taught art critic Giorgio
Soavi, who has written a book about the whole affair, Viaggio in Italia di
Francis Bacon (Umberto Allemandi, Turin). Soavi has also bought two drawings
from Ravarino - so he could be said to have a vested interest. Soavi became
excited, he says, by "the fictional potential" of parts of the
story - including Ravarino's most extravagant claim, that Bacon was involved
in the death of a male prostitute in Rome - an "accident" which was
immediately covered up by the US secret services.
So convinced is Soavi that
the drawings are authentic that he agreed to appear as an expert witness for
the defence in the first Bologna hearing on 10 February. Paul Nicholls, an
English art dealer based in Milan, was enlisted by the court as a witness for
the prosecution. He declared that "the drawings in question were not
carried out by Bacon, and are foreign to his whole way of working".
Nicholls also believes that "this whole thing should be deflated. I
don't think it does Bacon any good.
More than once, Ravarino
himself refers to Bacon's legacy as a "curse". He says that his
next move will be to "go to England with a couple of hundred drawings
and take them around the most important critics". But he is reluctant to
do this, he says, because "it's depressing to think that I have to go to
ask a bunch of critics whether my story is true, when I know for a fact that
it is".
One gets the impression
that it is the way Ravarino has dealt with the drawings as much as anything
else which, in the absence of any definite proof that they are by Francis
Bacon, annoys the critics. There is an etiquette to authentication, and
Ravarino has not respected it. He has exhibited his drawings in third-class
galleries and hotels around Italy. He has published them in obscure local
magazines. He has given them away to lovers and politicians, and sold them
outside the gallery circuit at prices which, he says, range from pounds 1,000
to pounds 12,000. If the drawings were authenticated, the best could fetch at
least pounds 50,000. Ravarino is coy about numbers, but he hints that he has
more than 500 drawings still in his possession.
It would be easy for the
experts if Ravarino really was the likeable charlatan he appears to be. But
there's a problem here. Reliable witnesses saw Bacon and Ravarino together in
Italy, and drawings purported to be by Bacon were given away on those occasions.
Ravarino may, of course, have been going around with a Bacon look-alike who
was under strict instructions to get drunk and play the crazy Eengleesh
artist. Alternatively, he may have been tracking Bacon around Italy and
popping up the next day with forgeries to distribute to restaurant owners and
wine producers as gifts from il maestro. "Either way," says
Bolognese journalist Luigi Spezia, who has been following the case for La
Repubblica, "the man would have to be a genius.
So far the only person to
have approached Ravarino's claims with any degree of forensic rigour is the
writer and art critic Enzo Rossi-Roiss. He has been following Ravarino's
sales of the drawings since they began in 1981. He has photocopies of 150
drawings plus, in some cases, copies of the cheques paid for them. According
to Rossi-Roiss, Ravarino's own figures are too high: "He's been selling
off sketches for as little as 500,000 lire [pounds 170] each."
Rossi-Roiss is working on a book about the case, due out this autumn. He believes
Bacon did indeed visit Calderino in 1980, where he met Ravarino and left
behind a few drawings. He believes that Ravarino then appropriated these,
forged Bacon's signature, and used them as models for hundreds of fakes,
which were carried out by more than one artist - hence the difference in
style.
IN 1975, Bacon wrote a
brief tribute to Giacometti, one of the contemporaries he most admired, for a
show of his drawings at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. "For
me," he wrote, "Giacometti is not only the greatest draughtsman of
our period, but one of the greatest of all time." Giacometti himself
considered drawing to be fundamental to both painting and sculpture: "I
think only about drawing," he once said. French critic Jacques Dupin
believes that Giacometti's admiration of Bacon's paintings was tempered by
the fact that "he was uncomfortable that Bacon didn't draw".
If Bacon was prompted into
trying to produce finished drawings in the last decade of his life, his
decision to leave them in Ravarino-limbo could have been a reflection of his
own lack of confidence in them. At the same time, though, he would have been
reluctant entirely to destroy these traces of an activity in which his
masters - Giacometti, Picasso, Michelangelo, Guercino, Velazquez - all
excelled.
We know that by the time
Ravarino claims to have met him, Bacon was weary of the whole gallery circus.
In an interview published in Art International in the autumn of 1989 - soon
after one of his triptychs had sold in New York for US$6m - he said:
"The whole thing has become so boring and bourgeois. Art is just a way
now of making money.
Giorgio Soavi believes that
these drawings were left behind as a spanner in the works. At the end of his
semi-fictionalised account of the affair, he has a ghostly Bacon return to
earth to say: "I left them in the hands of this long-haired rocker
simply to annoy my dealers ... to take my revenge on them.
It could just be that these
drawings were left behind as a spanner in the works. Bacon loved using
calculated chance in his paintings, and the choice of such an unreliable
messenger as Ravarino as the repository of his final secret - or last laugh -
would do for his life what a careless smudge of paint did for a painting.
"I think that painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking
advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down," he wrote in
1953.
Up there in orbit, 500
drawings are still waiting for splashdown!
Francis Bacon
Hayward
Gallery, London UK
BY NEAL BROWN | FRIEZE | ISSUE
40 | 5 MAY 1998
Bacon’s work doesn’t comply neatly with
attempted divisions between portraiture and explorations of the body, and
this exhibition, The Human Body, is to a degree an artificial
contrivance, especially for an artist who in many ways considered the head as
just another limb on a torso. The works are hung strangely close to the floor
in the Hayward’s artificially lit lower galleries, against sad, grey walls
and a threatening dark ceiling. Light levels are low because of the artist’s
improvidence of technique and the consequent delicacy of the work: the raw
canvas he left exposed is vulnerable to darkening and embrittlement. Overall,
the repressive effect makes the works look gaily pretty and cheerful.
This is the first significant opportunity to
consider Bacon’s work since Michael Peppiatt’s critical biography of 1996,
and makes the artist’s rigid withholding of his co-operation from any
biographer understandable. Peppiatt is not party to the strange collaboration
between those that accord the artist a greater singularity than is the case,
and he makes an evaluation of Bacon that is neither characterised by either
adulatory homage (to a Soho Disneyland of romanticised Existentialism) nor by
kneejerk disgust. His book is more fondly querying of Bacon’s art than his
many (equally committed but perhaps more constrained, credulous, or
misinformed) predecessors. David Sylvester, who curated this exhibition and
wrote the catalogue essay, has begun - just - a well-earned relaxation from
the artist’s royal grip.
Details of Bacon’s upbringing, sexuality and
relationships have autobiographical correspondences in the paintings which
make them (in what would be an absolute anathema to the artist) much more
narrative than intended. Bacon’s deliberate insistence on a non-analytical
and non-narrative reading of his work (and potent enigma resulting from
this), is now less possible to sustain. For example, Untitled (1943
or 1944), a work never exhibited or published before, (a variant on one of
the triptych panels for Three Studies for Figures at the base of a
Crucifixion, 1944) seems particularly hectoring. Elsewhere, Bacon’s
narrative is by degrees inarticulate and confused, but certainly present.
This is most clearly seen in Triptych May-June 1973 (1973).
The painting depicts the undignified suicide of the artist’s lover in cartoon
strip style. The spiritual details of Bacon’s story of abuse, repressions and
counter-repressions may be seen, with increasing clarity, elsewhere in the
show.
Bacon’s outlook of religiosity (both
absolutist, irreducible intent and frequent religious subject matter),
politics and sexuality (of pain) may now be considered without constraint.
The various biographies, newly revealed work and the simple passage of time
allows us to consider him in relation to various traditions other than just a
Modernist one. These might include the art of the right wing, 19th century
Christian art, as well as the history of artists concerned with sexualised
control, such as Richard Lindner, or even Aubrey Beardsley. Bacon’s use of
raw canvas left in reserve is like Beardsley’s use of white paper, seen in
his illustrations of Edgar Allen Poe, for example. There may even be a case
for consideration of Bacon in relation to the English nonsense tradition in
literature.
Bacon’s often very beautiful, grandee
swirlings and sexualised skidmarks of paint are depictive of certain
principal categories of subject. These are either other right-wing libertines
like himself, or suicides and alcoholics - alcoholics, of course, just being
suicides in slow motion. The libertine theme, and its policy of non
intervention toward the emotionally or spiritually disadvantaged, can be seen
in the falling freemarket of souls on the canvases, and their hierarchy of
vulnerabilities in relation to each other, reflected within the structural
devices the artists used.
The good
paintings in this show have a continuing magic power, effecting an almost
involuntary response. As Bacon’s often strained theatrical intensity becomes
more painfully obvious though, his successes may perhaps be due more to his
fabulous colourist skills and consummate fluency with paint than his
existential pronouncements. As the duration of induced sensation in the
viewer becomes diminished, through habituation and an increased tolerance to
his devices, either complacency or a discriminating embarrassment at the
accrued defects in the paintings sets in.
The
Human Body further qualifies the reasonable objections
to be made against the grandeurs and pomp claimed for Bacon’s work, but it
also confirms his merits. Importantly, it also provides an opportunity to
reconsider Bacon’s considerable influence on much contemporary art practice,
and therefore to consider aspects of contemporary art practice itself.
Bacon’s
insistent references to Paul Valéry’s - ‘the sensation without the boredom of
its conveyance’ - is seen reflected in the repeated significance of
‘sensation’ in much contemporary art practice, and its analogues in advertising,
recreational drug use and the entertainment media. Bacon’s outsider status,
ruthless survival strategy and self mythologising, as well as his great
talent, also have correspondences in younger artists’ makings and marketings
of art, although many of these are now safely institutionalised themselves.
The bonds between Bacon and many contemporary artists may expose those
working in his wake to stresses and counterbalancings dependent on the rise
or fall of his retrospective fortunes.
Which Tate are
we in?
HUGH PEARMAN | THE
SUNDAY TIMES | 13
SEPTEMBER 1998
Interviewing Nick Serota, director of the
Tate Gallery, is what I imagine consulting the oracle at Delphi to be like.
Serota fills the role of interpreter, the one who put into measured but still
puzzling stanzas the frenzied utterances of the entranced Delphic priestess.
You go, you pose questions, you take note of the gnomic utterances, and then
you return home to try and work out what it all means.
You examine his words, line by line, and it
becomes possible to make an informed guess. Does Serota really say that he
thinks the hugely acclaimed new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a seriously
deficient museum? That our leading sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro, was a bit of a
troublesome old codger as a Tate trustee? That he expects the Government to
give him a lump-sum payment of £10m to buy new art for his new Tate Gallery
of Modern Art at Bankside? That he fears the crowds may vote with their feet
and decamp to international modernism in Bankside in 2000, leaving his
revamped Gallery of British Art at Millbank the poor relation? No, he does
not. He does not say any of these things directly. He is a master of the
oblique.
Neither does he acknowledge outright that the
Tate has a rather poor collection of classic European modernism, compared
with other leading museums - though he comes close. He does not say that the
annual conceptualists' shindig, the Turner Prize, has become a Frankenstein's
monster, distorting public perceptions of what the Tate and its collections
is about. He does not say that he regards the Chelsea studio of the late
Francis Bacon - which has now been snapped up by a Dublin gallery - as a poor
thing, not worth the Tate's patrician consideration. He does not admit in as
many words that some people half-expect him to move on, once the big London
reorganisation of the Tate has been completed in 2001. But despite not saying
these things - or not in those words, anyway - he touches on these subjects.
You are left with the impression that these may well be his views.
Now the Tate has commissioned the corporate
identity specialists Wolff Olins to come up with ideas as to how to present
the impending dual-identity London Tate and to come up with snappier, more
memorable, names than the two on offer at present: respectively the Tate
Gallery of British Art (Millbank) and the Tate Gallery of Modern Art
(Bankside). There is the potential for confusion, no doubt about it. Serota
says: "The question that's always asked is - where will I find Francis
Bacon, or Damien Hirst? - and the answer is really quite simple: in both.
What you will find here at Millbank is 20th century British art in the
context of a tradition of British art going back to 1500 - and there at
Bankside you'll find 20th century British art in the context of an
international 20th century".
All clear, everyone? Right: here's the Serota
line on the weaknesses in his international modern collection: "One
answer is that museums are only partly about the inherent quality of the
collection. As important, in my view, is the way in which they use that
collection. So you can have a brilliant collection, but display it rather
poorly, and your museum will not flourish." The implication being that
the Tate has a rather poor collection compared with some, but will display it
brilliantly: however, he does not say this. The remark puts into context his
desire for a £10m gift to buy new art for Bankside. "An imaginative
gesture of that kind would make a big difference," he muses, while
allowing he will probably be told to try the Lottery again, with uncertain
success.
The affair of Bacon's studio puts him
especially on guard. The Tate was never approached with a formal offer for
it, he says. He had sporadic conversations with John Edwards, inheritor of
the Bacon estate, but it never came to anything. Did he regret the loss, I
ask? He replies at a tangent. "The priority for us has to be showing
Bacon's paintings rather than his studio." He then praises the
"whole experience" of Brancusi's studio in Paris, or the Tate's
Barbara Hepworth studio and garden in St. Ives. So is the Bacon studio not up
to that standard, I inquire? Serota sits up and stares straight at me.
"Well - we'll see," he replies, with a short laugh.
Getting
to know you
Andrew Lambirth on the
value of interviewing artists as a means to understanding their work
ANDREW LAMBIRTH | EXHIBITIONS
|
THE SPECTATOR | 10
OCTOBER 1998
Recently rereading David Sylvester's endlessly fascinating
book Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson, first
published in 1975, reprinted 1995), I was struck anew by how easy it is to
assume that its effortless flow is due to the brilliance of Francis Bacon's
talk. However marvellous a conversationalist Bacon was, people do not talk
ordinarily in perfectly structured sentences filled with polished clauses.
The success of the Bacon inter- views lies first of all in Sylvester's skill
in asking questions, and then in his subtlety as an editor. However much he
may have adapted the text, he manages to preserve the artist's voice, by
identifying his speech rhythms and distinctive verbal habits. Thus the text,
carefully edited into coherence, still has enough rough edges to sound
convincingly like someone talking.
Compare another book of Bacon interviews — Francis Bacon
in conversation with Michel Archimbaud (Phaidon, 1993). This was
published posthumously (would Bacon have happily authorised it, I wonder?)
and was originally written in French, the language in which the interviews
were conducted. Bacon liked to speak French, but self-deprecatingly referred
to his 'patchy and inadequate grasp' of the language. He even went so far as
to state, in one of these Archimbaud interviews, that 'because I think you
can only talk about your work in your own language, or at least in a language
you have totally mastered, I've always felt that the conversations I have in
French would be limited'. Remarkable, then, that Archimbaud should have
persevered with a project so obviously doomed. The end result is a
distressingly trivial book in comparison with Sylvester's, rather
journalistic in tone, and crass through ignorance
Archimbaud covers a lot of the same territory as Sylvester
though less sensitively. His text is both less penetrating and less
revealing, but then Archimbaud quite evidently did not enjoy the same unique
relationship with Bacon as Sylvester did. On page after page of Sylvester's
book, trust, respect and genuine affection shine through; and they're mutual.
With Archimbaud, Bacon could be mischievous. At one point this famously
articulate artist comments airily (in translation, of course): 'Most of the
time when one talks about painting, one says nothing interesting. It's always
rather superficial. What can one say? Basically, I believe that you simply
cannot talk about painting, it just isn't possible.' Well, you can see his
point — he'd said it all already to Sylvester.
If David Sylvester's book has the true ring of authority, its
'narrative' is still susceptible to new discoveries. Bacon, like most artists
and indeed most people, recounted the version of his life which most suited
him. Since his death in 1992 it has come to light that Bacon, contrary to
popular belief, made drawings at different times (and very regularly, if we
accept all that have been brought forward as genuine) throughout his career.
Yet the Bacon legend admits of no drawings. There is a marvellous story
recounted against himself by the rather academic draughtsman, painter and
writer, and sometime Spectator art critic, Michael Ayrton. Ayrton had
once asserted that Bacon could not draw, and, encountering Bacon in a bar, he
rashly maintained his view. 'Is drawing what you do?' Bacon silkily enquired,
pausing before the kill: 'I wouldn't want to do that.'
A wickedly witty response on Bacon's behalf, and fuel for
the myth. In the Sylvester interviews, towards the end of the book, Sylvester
says: 'I suppose it's because you improvise so much that you're exceptional in
doing figurative paintings as big as yours without any kind of preliminary
drawing or oil sketch.' Bacon replies: 'Well, I sketch out very roughly on
the canvas with a brush, just a vague outline of something, and then I go to
work ...' No mention, you see, of any other kind of drawing, which we now
know Bacon frequently made. Does this evasiveness in any way invalidate or
cast doubt upon the veracity of the interviews? What is the truth? In the
end, it's always partial, it's always a matter of interpretation. The sheer
weight of comment and elucidation — of, dare I say it, wisdom — in the
Bacon/Sylvester dialogues, will continue to compensate for any lapses. As
Bacon said, 'all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts
himself. No doubt by modifying his own truth, Bacon was only deepening the
game.
Over the years I have learnt more from interviewing artists
about the practice of their art than from any book of theory or criticism.
Besides visiting artists' studios socially or to view new work, I also
conduct interviews for the National Sound Archive. This involves talking to
an artist about their life and work from the very beginning. What colour were
the walls at home where You grew up? What toys did you have? That sort of
thing, modulating into questions about first attempts at art and other
seminal experiences. The Artists' Lives section of the National Life Story
Collection is located in the British Library, and is available, with certain
restrictions, to any member of the public with a Reader Pass from the BL.
This is oral history at its best, replete with riveting digressions and
scabrous anecdotes.
Listening to tapes of an artist talking — the more
informally the better — is a little like eavesdropping. As you respond to
phrasing and inflection, you feel more closely tuned to the character of the
speaker than in most written dialogue. Written interviews often seem
deliberately constructed, edited or angled in a particular way. At the
opposite pole is the unexpurgated transcript: the worthy but rambling record
of every 'um' and 'er', the kind of document that earnest historians claim to
be more authentic than any edited interview. In fact, there's nothing more
tedious than most pure transcription: it's guaranteed to stifle the most ardent
enthusiasm after very few minutes. That's why the Bacon/Sylvester interviews
constitute such a glittering artefact.
One of their peculiar uses is as a benchmark for readers,
who can test Bacon's remarks against their own experience, or try to imagine
themselves in his place, or use him as a role model Good interviews are more
rewarding and more revealing in these ways than any biography — they have the
immediacy of (largely) unmediated response. Suzi Gablik in her remarkable
book Conversations Before the End of Time (Thames & Hudson, 1995)
demonstrates that dialogue is one of the most potent forms of cultural
exchange currently avail- able to us. In society in general, the art of
conversation has decayed somewhat; it needs now to be practised, renewed and
reinvented. It's a great civilising force, and we need as many of those as we
can get.
Surprise
faults and virtues
Francis Bacon: The Human
Body
(Hayward Gallery, till 5
April)
MARTIN GAYFORD | EXHIBITIONS
|
THE SPECTATOR | 14
FEBRUARY 1998
Asked who he thought was the greatest French
poet, Andre Gide famously replied, 'Victor Hugo, helas.' A considerable
portion of the British art-public might echo his words if asked to name the
most significant artist this country has produced in the last half century,
'Francis Bacon, alas.' He is widely regarded - by critics, as well as members
of the public - as an exponent of the Grand Guignol, indulging gratuitously
in violence and horror, a self-indulgent expressionist possessed eternally
with adolescent morbidity and existential gloom. In fact, few artists have
been so systematically and persistently misunderstood, as is suggested by the
exhibition Francis Bacon: The Human Body.
Of course, all artists look different as time
moves on, and it's over a decade since we in this country had a full look at
Bacon. A lot has happened since then. The artist himself has died. New
movements in art have appeared, and it has become apparent that Bacon is a key
reference point for Damien Hirst, leader of the Young British Artists, and
also for Gilbert and George (to whom the Young British Artists look up).
There have been grand-scale Bacon retrospectives in Paris and Munich (both
organised by David Sylvester, the curator of the present exhibition). Now we
in Britain have a chance to take a new look, not at the full range of Bacon's
painting, but at 20-odd attempts at a perennial subject - the human form.
What do we see?
There, at the Hayward, if one cares to look,
one can see a very different Bacon from the shabby visual shocker of so much
received opinion. On the walls of the gallery is evidence of a Bacon who
could be tender, grand, elegiac, a painter who was a highly individual kind
of classicist, as well as a unique species of realist. Not only does he have
unexpected virtues, he also has unexpected faults. It's not a gruesome
distortion that leads him astray - and he was an extremely uneven artist as
appears even in this fairly small and tightly selected show - but a tendency
to slip into Victorian academicism.
The way Bacon is rooted in tradition is quite
obvious - and a point to which he returned frequently in interviews. He was
an extremely learned painter, soaked in Velazquez and Rembrandt, Picasso and
Michelangelo. Nonetheless, it may come as a surprise to see how directly he
paraphrases the nudes from the Sistine Chapel ceiling in Three
Figures in a Room from 1964. In fact, all three are clearly his
lover of those years, George Dyer, although the central figure has a chance
resemblance to John Major. At the left, Dyer sits naked on the lavatory with
all the nobility of a figure on a temple pediment. In the other two panels he
reclines in the manner of Michelangelo's Ignudi.
There is, of course, a big difference.
Bacon's paint is smeared and spattered, Dyer's features and anatomy
re-combined in startling ways. But the aim of this is not expressionism - an
emotional effusion but realism. As Bacon said again and again, his object was
to make an image that would strike his nervous system with the force and
violence of experience. And this he believed he could do best not by making a
literal copy of appearances, but by conjuring up with swirling paint and
blurred forms something of the animal energy of real, living beings.
Here there is genuine Baconian shock. He was
a man of enormous energy - he claimed not to be able to relax - an asthmatic,
a drinker on a gargantuan scale, a liver of a disorderly bohemian life.
Clearly, he lived a great deal closer to the ends of his nerves than most of
us. Hence the impression of something wild caught on the hoof, perhaps about
to pounce, that many of his subjects have. Baconian man appears at his most
primal and disquieting in the marvellous Study for Figure II 1953/55,
seated in business suit and tie on a bed, his mouth open in a simian yell.
But it is one of the jobs of art to open our
eyes, and another to show us the world as the artist sees it. Bacon, when
he's on form, does exactly that. The shock comes from the fact that, as he
put it, most of us live surrounded by screens and tend to be offended by
'facts, or what used to be called the truth'. There is emotion in Bacon's
work, but it is not - as often said - easy disgust and revulsion. The mood of
his late Study for Self Portrait - Triptych 1985-86 is
deeply serious, filled with a sense of human vulnerability. The painter's
face seems to be being erased before our eyes, dissolved as if by some acidic
gas. The same is true of the Triptych May-June 1973 which is
concerned with Dyer's squalid suicide (he was found dead on the lavatory, as
foreshadowed in the earlier painting).
Those two triptychs are among Bacon's
greatest works. But the standard of the exhibits is by no means so uniformly
high. With the exception of that three-part self-portrait, the products of
his last decade are weak and oddly decorative (and, in the case of those
inspired by photographs of David Gower and featuring cricket pads, simply
odd). Earlier, he often missed. The combination he was after - classical
solidity of design, those writhing, feral figures - was inherently unstable.
The surprisingly dud Portrait of Lucian Freud 1951 suggests
why Bacon had such an aversion to cliched copying of appearances - he
obviously had a tendency to relapse into it himself.
There are outstanding absent paintings that
should ideally have been present in such a survey. But there are many
beautiful and revealing works on view in an admirably spacious hang. Study
from the Human Body, 1949 - a male nude seen from behind - reveals a
Bacon who could be tender and delicate in his use of paint. It suddenly makes
sense that Bonnard was his favourite 20th-century painter. Painting, 1950,
next door, a nude standing between patches of blue and red, in front of
stripes, as if in an early Rothko, explains why painters regard Bacon as a
wonderful colourist. The small Study of a Nude, 1952 - about to
dive into a cube of space - is magical and mysterious, more qualities one
might have thought unBaconian.
He is a difficult painter to get to know.
Immediate impressions can be deceptive, as can his own words. He always
claimed to make no sketches for his paintings, and to work in an
improvisational frenzy. But recently a number of such studies has turned up
and has been bought by the Tate, where the sketches will eventually go on
show. There may be more to find out still about Bacon.
Lady Thatcher is widely credited with
articulating a common view of Bacon, 'Not that horrible man who paints those
dreadful paintings.' But, taxed with this by the artist's biographer, the
late Daniel Farson, at The Spectator summer party of 1993, she
adamantly denied ever having said any such thing. On the contrary, she told
Farson, she was an admirer of his work. 'See, see, see,' she went on, jabbing
Farson in the chest, 'learn, learn, learn.' This is good advice, with Bacon
or any artist.
Francis Bacon
The man who put the pain into paintings
Oh-oh, it's that man again.
Mad Frankie's back in town.
But what, asks our Art
Critic, does he look like this time round?
TOM LUBBOCK | THE
INDEPENDENT | FEBRUARY
10, 1998
It's nearly six years since Francis Bacon died, aged 82, with a good 50 years
of painting behind him, and that might well be period enough for views to
settle. They haven't at all. Bacon unquestionably remains a presence, a
figure and a force to be reckoned with, but estimates of his work, even
positive estimates, diverge radically - and, by way of reintroduction, here's
the range, roughly.
There's the savage view (still probably the standard view), which sees in
Bacon's art an outcry of agony and a nausea of mortality, a terrible vision
of the human state generally, but with special reference to the 20th century
(the camps, the death of God). Or there's the skittish view, a kind of
irreverent take on the previous, which finds rather an expert flesh-creeper
and monster-maker, a shock-horror merchant with a macabre sense of fun. Then
there's the social view, which stresses a much more urbane and various talent,
a virtuoso player and portrayer of metropolitan-Soho life, a painter of wit
and character. Finally there's the sublime view, which praises the vitality,
the grandeur, the exaltation of his art, its ultimate life-affirmation in the
face of torment, its triumph of the human spirit. Here Bacon becomes
practically a candidate for a Nobel Prize.
It's hard to decide, and I'd like to. Bacon is obviously a big deal. But
whichever view you try out, the others seem to have truths that can't be
ignored. No doubt one could say the sheer range of possible responses is
itself a sign of Bacon's greatness, or of his abiding power to unsettle. But
that seems too easy a summary. Anyway, we now have the chance to look and
think again.
Francis Bacon - The Human Body is the rubric for the Hayward
Gallery' s mini-retrospective. It sounds pretty inclusive - what else did he
paint? - but actually the focus is tight. It means the full figure only. It
leaves out not just his landscapes and animals, but also his many head-portraits.
Curated by Bacon's foremost interpreter, David Sylvester, the show has five
triptychs and 18 single paintings, from 1942 to 1986. It's not a
comprehensive showing but it's enough: enough to bring the big unsettled
questions of Bacon's art jumping back to life.
For instance, you still need to ask, in a literal-minded way, whether Bacon
really does deal in images of stark violence, damage, torture, disgust and
rebarbitive horror. And you still have to ask, more elevatedly, if Bacon
really is in the great tradition of flesh-painting, the last in the glorious
line of Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velzquez. But simply to state the issues
suggests the peculiar Bacon-effect. Here's a painter who seems to mix torment
with high spirits, and high art with low art, and how the mix works out is
the crux. I can't adjudicate it; I can only throw out these miscellaneous and
rather contrary thoughts.
Start with a technical point. One thing that's strikes you, besides any
horror, is the straight, eye-teasing puzzle of these ectoplasmic swerves of
flesh, so physical yet so ungraspable. How's it done? What' s going on
exactly?
There seem to be three elements (I don't say they went down in this order).
The first is a quite solid and clear depiction of a face or body, albeit
often severely caricatured and fractured - something you could make a model
of.
The second: some very fugitive dissolves and fades, by which one part of the
flesh melds and sucks into another part, while others suddenly vanish away or
cut off into the void. You can see much of Bacon's work in the Fifties as
practising these shimmering lights and transparencies, which bring bodies out
of thin air and flick them back again. (Look at the Nude Study from
1951.)
Then the third element: brush swipes and blots and splashes, where the paint
no longer depicts anything, is just an energy, an attack, a twirl. But,
because these gestures of real paint take off from the gestures that mean
flesh, the effect is of the flesh literally breaking or smearing the picture's
surface, becoming tangible. So the painting is in continuous transition: real
paint - fugitive flesh - solid flesh, back and forth between them.
The great painterly tradition? No, I don't see it; rather, a brilliant
impersonation or promise of painterliness. You approach a Bacon expecting
rich rewards, but, at close quarters, the paint-work isn't interesting, is
often very crude; no touch. It's only interesting for the image it coalesces
into, its illusion of flesh-in-action. The intimacy only works long
distance.
The cartoon aspect: long ago, John Berger acutely noticed Bacon's likeness to
Walt Disney, his bounding lines and bouncy curves. Indeed, this is part of
his shockingness - the conventional invulnerability of the cartoon figure is
violated. On the other hand, the irrepressible vitality of Bacon's figures,
their "triumph of the human spirit", may just lie in their
resilient cartoonish ability to bounce back.
Or put that in modern art terms: the question is whether Bacon's bodily
"distortions" should register as form-variations, or maybe energy-
expressions - or as actual bodily harm. Do they give pain, or do they save
the figures from pain? Henry Tonks's delicate, realistic watercolours of the
faces of WWI wounded are incredibly painful. A fractured Cubist portrait is
totally painless, couldn't represent physical pain if it wanted. What is
Bacon? Cubism carnalised?
Bacon has his figurative tics, anatomical twists that become repetitive: so
often that same orbital explosion around the eye, that arc that sweeps the
cheek, the way the jaw swings out or the calf bulges, the dumpy feet. But
also he's the most inventive shape-maker, his blobs are terrific: look at the
satanic shadow that spreads in the central panel of Triptych May-June
1973, or the foetal lumpy thing on the right of Triptych -
Studies from the Human Body 1970 (and if you look at the dark area
where its face should be, you can catch, dimly, a perfectly realistic and
sweet toddler's face, as if it were floating inside).
The flat backgrounds, those stage sets in which Bacon's bodies are isolated,
are in really gorgeous, sumptuous colour-schemes (the opulent juxtaposition
of deep magenta and buff-grey in that 1973 Triptych, say). The
harmonies are superb - but the key is always, so to speak, C Major. One thing
that draws us to Bacon's pictures is that their dominant colours are so
straightforwardly attractive: great design; no pain there.
Would the bodies be so painful if they weren't coloured flesh-pink and
blood-red? If, like Frank Auerbach's, they were messed about, but
multi-coloured? But then the recurring combination is actually red, pink and
white, a strawberries-and-cream complexion, which can also be very tasty; or,
in Three Figures in a Room, 1963, the figure sitting on the loo
has a delicious peache-Melba mix; or sometimes it' s red, white and blue,
like a lambent tropical fish. Lovely stuff.
The big triptych format is boring, a short-cut to equilibrium and grandeur.
The props - the umbrellas, the cricket pads - which probably have only a
formal motivation, can look very silly.
Bacon often spoke of "illustration" as the thing to be avoided in
figurative painting, and was rightly sensitive to this word, because, if you
imagine away all the messing about, you're left with a very facile and
frankly cute illustrator; and in the later work this comes more and more to
the fore. He needed the disruption.
No good painter has taken Bacon as its example (his imitators are awful); the
only people his work has directly influenced in a profitable way are
cartoonists and illustrators - Scarfe, Steadman, Ian Pollock, H Giger's
designs for Alien, the monsters in graphic novels.
So what's the score between beauty, terror, energy, brilliance, slickness,
cruelty, invention, crudeness, gaiety, cuteness, good taste, silliness,
cliché, a fantastic box of tricks and something ineradicably memorable? Hm...
Maybe I'll know next time round.
To 5 April, Hayward Gallery, SBC, London SE1
(1071-960 4242)
AGONY
OR ECSTASY?
Francis
Bacon's work has been regarded as gloomy and nihilistic.
Martin Gayford hears a
different view
MARTIN
GAYFORD | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | 31st
JANUARY 1998
Walking round the
Tate Gallery, the critic David Sylvester came upon one of those wall texts
that galleries like to put up these days. This one announced that Francis
Bacon's work "strips life of purpose and meaning". So much for wall
texts, concluded Sylvester. The truth about his late friend, perhaps the most
significant British painter of the century, was very different. "The
paintings," he retorted, "are a huge affirmation that human
vulnerability is countered by human vitality."
A huge
affirmation? Can he really be talking about the painter of those screaming
popes? The creator of those feral figures copulating in a blur and splatter
of paint, those nightmarish creatures who cry out, sightless and appallingly
toothy, in the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion ? The portraitist whose subjects' features seem to dissolve
and re-combine in front of our eyes like Dr Jekyll in progress towards Mr
Hyde?
A widespread
opinion of Francis Bacon has been that he was an unremittingly gloomy and
gruesome painter (as in Mrs Thatcher's unauthenticated reference to "the
dreadful man who paints those horrible pictures" ). His celebrated Popes
of the late Forties and early Fifties were greeted as visualisations of the
agony of existential man beneath the shadow of the bomb. Some of the
painter's most publicised pensées - that we are
all, for example, Damien Hirst-style, lumps of meat - add to his reputation
as a nihilist.
He was and is, of
course, an unavoidable figure in post-war British art. Born in 1909, he did
not make his mark until he was in his mid- thirties; from that point, he rose
to become the most celebrated living British artist. A film about his life,
Love is the Devil, starring Derek Jacobi, is to be premiered at the Cannes
Film Festival in May.
All the same, for
many he remains, as Sylvester has put it, an "artistic leper" - a
painter too nasty, too violent to contemplate.
But there has
always been another view of Bacon, a view Sylvester takes. Those who knew him
are at one in describing the magical charm of his company, the exhilarating
excitement of his presence, his wisdom, his intellectual daring. (Among many
other things, Bacon was the presiding spirit of Soho, an outrageous bohemian
wit and drinker, and most distinguished habitue of the Colony Room.) Painters
discussing his work talk not about grand guignol, but about beauty and
classicism.
And who is in a
better position to judge Francis Bacon than David Sylvester? He is enormously
respected as a maker of exhibitions. As long ago as the Sixties he was dubbed
"Mr Art". Sylvester was Bacon' s friend for many years, the
Boswell-like collaborator on the famous book of Interviews with
Francis Bacon, and the curator of highly acclaimed Bacon exhibitions in
Venice, Munich, Paris and now one which is to open next month at the Hayward
Gallery.
Before the crates
of paintings arrived at the South Bank, and the final arrangement began, I
talked to him about Bacon - and how his view had changed since the painter's
death in 1992.
Sylvester
continues to reflect on his friend's character. In a recent essay, to
describe Bacon's character, he uses the images of Tiresias, the Greek seer,
who lived as both a man and a woman. The way in which the two sexes met in
the painter, Sylvester feels, "did more than anything else perhaps to
make his presence so famously seductive and to make him so peculiarly wise
and realistic in his observation of life".
Admittedly, all
this coincided with an attitude to existence as unsentimental as it is
possible to be. "When I'm dead," Bacon once remarked to the barman
at the Colony Room, "put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the
gutter." Asked by Lord Rothermere what he did, he replied: "I'm an
old poof."
As Sylvester puts
it, he "had a marvellously, what you might call cynical, but you might
also call simply realistic, view of how people behave towards one another. He
went through life enormously aware of the imminence of death. But that
heightened his sense of exhilaration at being alive. And I think it's there
in the painting - the sense that life is on the edge, but, at the same time,
it's wonderful to be alive."
In many ways, the
painter himself liked to live on the edge - he was a passionate gambler,
losing and, less often, gaining large sums at the tables. Famously, he was
thrown out of the family house aged 16 when his horsy, Army-officer father
found him dressed in his mother' s clothes. From then on, Bacon fearlessly,
often outrageously, did as he chose.
He was, as
Sylvester puts it, "interested in crisis. He would always tend to
consider how people behaved, or might behave, in an extreme situation, when
people's real quality was put to the test. So he was interested in violence
and the extreme. But I think violence, as against horror."
This love of
extremity was balanced by a fastidious, hypercritical streak - just as
important to him as an artist and a man.
"One thing
about Francis that I very much disliked was his tendency to dismiss the work
of virtually every other artist. He didn't like much art. He didn't even like
much of the art of the artists he most admired, such as Picasso, Velazquez
and Rembrandt. But then he didn't much like his own work, which was, in a
sense, the excuse."
Bacon himself
believed that the difference between artists was often not one of talent, but
of critical judgment, and he pruned his own work ruthlessly (once, finding a
painting of his own he didn't like on sale in a gallery, he is said to have
bought it on the spot for a large sum, taken it outside, and jumped on it).
"He was hard
to please. For example, we'd go out to dinner, and he' d pass the wine list
to me and ask me to choose. And, not wanting to spend too much of his money,
I'd often tend to choose claret from one of the great second growths of a
decent year, costing £80 - £100, something like that. And he would always
complain, and insist that the next bottle should be Lafite or Latour.
"It's
ridiculous to have a bottle of Latour opened and drink it immediately: it
should be decanted some time in advance. But there was none of that: he
always left it in the bottle and drank it immediately. He tended to love the
good things of life, but, at the same moment, to undermine them."
Bacon frequently
said that he would like to paint pictures that affected his nervous system
with the raw violence of life itself - what he once called, in a famous
phrase "the brutality of fact". "We nearly always live through
screens," he told Sylvester. "When people say my work looks
violent, perhaps I have been able to clear away one or two screens."
Simultaneously, he
wanted his art to have the formal structure of a Michelangelo. A tall order,
but sometimes he brought it off. Even when Bacon's figures seem to have been
assailed with a chainsaw, they may be beautiful, and in a strange way calm -
just as a grisly old master martyrdom may be, or Poussin's The
Massacre of the Innocents (one of Bacon's favourite pictures).
A lot of people
have missed that beauty. "I think Bacon has been misunderstood, "
Sylvester insists. "But, after all, most art is misunderstood because
people think it's like story-telling."
Sylvester takes
the case of the paintings which deal with the ghastly suicide of Bacon's
lover, George Dyer, found dead seated on the lavatory. "The thing about
them which is so amazing is that even when somebody is being sick into a basin,
there's a kind of serenity in the composition. This is the tradition of great
art."
He talks of how
Bacon has emerged as a "great colourist" when his work was seen in
natural light two years ago in the great exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in
Paris. In that Parisian setting, Sylvester saw something he had not expected:
a serene beauty of form and colour which he calls "Matissean
grandeur". "The realisation that there is Matisse there in Bacon,
as well as Picasso, has made me admire him more than ever in the last few
years."
Just as there are
unexpected aspects of the paintings, so too there were unpublicised
intellectual depths in the painter himself. In literature, Bacon's tastes ran
to the classical - but a harsh, tragic classicism. The Greek tragedian,
Aeschylus, was a favourite writer. But then, as Sylvester asks, "Who was
more terrible than Aeschylus? He always tended, when talking about
Shakespeare, to quote from Macbeth. He was involved in the tragic."
But, literary
parallels and high ambitions aside, how good was Bacon? Sylvester was
critical at the time of some periods of his work, and remains so. "But I
think, you know, that we mustn't judge artists by their batting average but
by their highest score. If you can make 200 in a Test match now and then it's
worth more than a solid average of 68.2 in county matches."
His final
assessment is that Bacon was perhaps the greatest European painter of his
generation, but not quite the equal of the great Americans Newman, Pollock
and De Kooning.
Bacon gambled with
paint, and didn't always win, but Sylvester admires his nerve. "I like
about Bacon that craziness and courage and lack of fear of being absurd. He
really didn't care what people thought. Well, he cared and he didn't care. I
think that's a tremendous force in an artist." So, as time goes on,
Bacon doesn't get smaller? The answer is clear: "Oh, he gets bigger, for
me. He gets bigger."
Self-preoccupied and revelatory, Francis Bacon faced Middle England with a
sensibility it could barely tolerate.
This
is raw, embarrassing, nihilistic.
JONATHAN MEADES | NEW
STATESMAN | FEBRUARY
6, 1998
Francis Bacon was sui generis. He didn't even
have precursors in the Borgesian sense of the word - meaning precursors who
were "created" by him, whose work is amended and endowed with
previously unperceived meaning because of what it has inadvertently
engendered. He does not cause us to scrutinise Velazquez in a new light
because the gap between Bacon and Velazquez is chasmic. Bacon didn't steal
the way great artists are supposed to. He took and joyrode and trashed. He
was indifferent to the status of his sources: they might be works of the
first magnitude, such as Velazquez's Pope Innocent X, or they might be
medical illustrations. They were reduced to mere catalysts.
Nor did Bacon have successors. There was no
school of Bacon. He fomented no fashion, suffered no disciples, occasioned no
print other than his own, went against the grain. He was a figurative
dissenter at the height of his powers during the hegemony of abstraction
(which he regarded, scornfully, as mere pattern-making). He was just about
inimitable.
This is a peculiar and rare situation, which
affects Bacon's posthumous reputation just as it affected his reputation
while alive. The history of painting and indeed of all creative endeavour is
so lopsidedly biased towards -isms, movements, bogus groupings and distantly
perceived alliances, that great originals are not so much overlooked as
demonstratively sidelined. They have no place in the pageant of progress and
continuous development. They inhabit culs-de-sac of their own making whence
they are occasionally dragged to join a platoon of convenience, such as the
School of London, which even by the extravagant standards of critical packaging
is spectacularly spurious. Nabokov's dictum that there is only one school,
the school of talent, is unexceptionable yet unheeded.
Bacon came from nowhere and led nowhere;
indeed he might have elected to take such a course. His boasts of bibulous
gregariousness and his aptitude for acquaintanceship hardly disguise his
solitariness nor his concomitant lack of solidarity with other painters. He
painted what he had to paint, what chose him. More wittingly, he painted what
other painters didn't. He disliked the illustrative, the "literary"
and the narrative as much as he did abstraction. It was the gap between these
poles that he occupied.
Bacon was, however, part of a tradition of
representational experiment and of painting as something more than drawing by
other means. He was even perhaps the culmination of that tradition, the last
great modern painter, a manipulator of marks and thence of sentience, of
visceral and dorsal antennae. He addressed the core questions of human
existence with a grotesque wit and a high seriousness that are entirely
atypical of English practice.
Wilde's contention that "English art is
a meaningless expression. One might just as well talk of English
mathematics" is neat but wrong. English art - I know, there are
exceptions - has tended towards the decoratively precise, the fastidious,
modest, untroublingly pretty, above all towards the slight. It is not for
nothing that the English medium was watercolour, with its unrivalled capacity
for suggesting no colour.
Bacon did more than fling a pot of paint in
the public's face. Technique, subject, sensibility: they may not have been
dliberately gauged to offend but they most surely did offend and continue to
offend to this day. A former editor of the New Statesman, the Sunday
watercolourist Paul Johnson, is particularly sensitive to Bacon's buggering,
blasphemous tours de force.
Middle England, that beige vacuum of dry
niceness where all that's interesting is beneath the carpet, can cope with
queers as long as they're camp and frivolous. But when they've got shit under
their fingernails and cock cheese behind their ears and are piled on top of
each other in sodomitical collisions which look like (and often are) war -
well, that's not on.
And it can also cope with the nonobservance
of religious rites - but to render the Virgin Mary as something between a
lamprey's sucker and a toothy foetus is going too far, even if the woman did
commit adultery with God.
That famous English tolerance has narrow
limits. It is hardly surprising that Bacon is much more revered in France, a
country less prone to squeamishness and more appreciative of (or more used
to) emotional candour and self-revelation.
It is arguable that Bacon never painted
anything but himself. When in La Nausee Jean-Paul Sartre
describes an ink bottle's box as a rectilinear parallelepiped, he is not
telling us much we don't know about such a box but he is, as Alain
Robbe-Grillet has pointed out, telling us something about the kind of writer
he is to use such a locution.
Bacon's portraits and self-portraits are
perhaps the least successful part of his oeuvre. Not because they fail to
achieve a likeness - despite the multiple mediations, the likeness is always
there - but because they are Bacon's genre paintings, his most stylistically
consistent works and the ones in which his propensity for
self-cannibalisation is most damagingly evident. Among the photographs and
prints he kept around him in his famously chaotic studio, the photographs
which were his perennial props, were several postcards of his own work which
he fed on with masturbatory indiscriminacy. This should not surprise us, for
this was a painter whose off-white taches across finished canvases were
expressions of emissive enthusiasm, of what the President of the United
States calls baby-gravy.
Bacon's auto-plagiarism in areas other than
portraiture had less deleterious consequences. Nonetheless the 1988 version
(or near copy) of the great 1944 Crucifixion Triptych is the
lesser work: it is slicker, more polished and it evinces a greater ease with
paint. But it lacks the terrible rawness of the original. The introduction of
more space around each figure renders the composition centripetal. The
backgrounds are now elaborated, defined and bereft of the garish, grating
poison orange of 1944.
It was the advent of this slickness and
smoothness in the handling of paint that marked the onset of Bacon's long
autumn - from the early 1970s onwards. But before that is 30 or so years'
work whose intensity and compelling reinvention of the human body reward
devoted scrutiny.
Of course Bacon represented humans as pieces
of meat. Of course he created unforgettable tableaux of epic sordor. Of
course he embarrassed both himself and his audience. But he did all this with
such energy, such nihilistic glee, such earnest and such concentration that
the work trespasses beyond the normal boundaries: not to say things that were
previously unsaid, but to address senses of which we were formerly insensible
and which politeness might bid us keep buried.
"Francis Bacon: the human body"
opened at the Hayward Gallery on 5 February.
The body and soul of Francis Bacon
Richard
Dorment on a show that reveals more than ever before about the tormented
artist's struggle for identity
RICHARD DORMENT | THE
DAILY TELEGRAPH | 7
FEBRUARY, 1998
I have never really liked Francis Bacon's
work. While I recognise his great gifts as a colourist and handler of paint,
the content of his pictures has always struck me as melodramatic and
self-pitying. But the exhibition that opens at the Hayward Gallery
tomorrow, Francis Bacon: The Human Body (until April 5), has
made me look again. By focusing on his figure studies, and isolating them
from his landscapes and portrait heads, the show brings us closer to Bacon's
complex and compelling personality than any I've seen so far.
In his representations of the human body,
Bacon, who died in 1992, was, of course, describing his own psychological
dilemma. What I hadn't realised is that he was doing so in images so precise
that they could almost be described as clinical.
Our sense of reality begins with our own
bodies. Contact with the real world starts in childhood with a struggle to
accept facts so basic that as adults we never give them a second thought:
that we are either male or female, for example, or that, belonging to one
sex, we can't belong to the other. The task of maturation in childhood is to
distinguish between our own bodies and those of others, to work out that our
bodies not only have weight and mass, but also boundaries, limits,
perimeters. Crucial to this lifelong struggle to achieve a separate and
secure identity is a sense of our own corporeal existence.
But look at the figures in most of Bacon's
paintings. There is no solidity in their wobbly outlines, no corporeality in
the way the bodies and faces are partially erased by smears of dragged paint.
The naked man sitting on the lavatory in the left-hand panel of the 1964
triptych Three Figures in a Room is boneless, distorted, and
looks as though his body could be poured into a container to keep him from
oozing away. His hands and feet don't end in contours, they simply fade away.
In their lack of substance, and in the
uncertainty of their perimeters, Bacon found in these figures a poignant way
to suggest the plight of a person whose body does not feel real. In their
contorted poses and blurred outlines, he suggests the exhausting - and
ultimately unsuccessful - struggle of such a person to create a sense of identity.
In most of these canvases, the figures are shown in isolation, as though the
effort is so all-consuming that it prevents contact or interaction with other
people.
Often, the bodies look flayed, or partially
dissected. In the most abject of them, it is impossible to know whether we
are looking at the inside of a body or the outside, as though the two had
become so confused in Bacon's mind that he hardly distinguished between them.
But sanity depends on learning to tell the difference between our feelings
(which are subjective and hidden) and our bodies (which have an objective
reality and are visible). And here what we know about the violence, drinking
and sexual excess of Bacon's life becomes relevant.
Without that fundamental distinction between
inside and out, feelings lead inexorably to deeds: anger is enacted as
violence, and the need for love experienced as desperation leading to
promiscuity. That is why these pictures are seeped in actual or potential
violence, even when a hideously maimed figure is physically incapable of an
aggressive act and is alone on the canvas; that is why both women and men
display their bodies in poses that suggest sexual surrender.
BACON himself denied that his figures were
based on his own body, but in his catalogue essay the critic David Sylvester
clearly implies that he doesn't believe it. Neither do I. My own feeling is
that, lacking a secure sense of his masculine self, Bacon had difficulty in
maintaining contact with reality. In the harrowingly honest self- portraits
that make up the great triptych of 1985-86, you see him alternate between a
masculine and feminine identity, sometimes tucking his legs primly under the
chair like a lady covering her knees with her skirt, at others emphasising
the massive arms, broad shoulders and macho boots. In other pictures it can
be hard to determine the sex of the person depicted.
"The two sexes met in Francis
Bacon," writes Sylvester, "more than in any other human being I
have encountered. At moments he was one of the most feminine of men, at
others one of the most masculine. He would switch between these roles as
suddenly and as unpredictably as the switching of a light."
All this matters because it affects our
interpretation of these pictures. If Bacon's figures are seen as broken and
defeated, once-whole bodies that are now decomposing, melodramatically
breaking up in front of our eyes, they are what all the cliches say they are:
the "cries of pain" that I frankly find tiresome and self-indulgent
in a great deal of Expressionist art, beginning with Edvard Munch. If instead
they are seen as embryonic shapes desperately trying - and failing - to form
a single, secure identity, then they speak of a universal human condition,
the aboriginal calamity with which we struggle all our lives - and this is
the stuff of the greatest art.
Too often, however, Bacon made the wrong
artistic decisions, and these tended to trivialise what should be paintings
of terrifying grandeur. At his best Bacon can create a sense of immanence
that Sylvester rightly compares with the monumental abstractions of the
American Mark Rothko. But in other works, as though frightened to cut himself
adrift from a tenuously held reality, Bacon constantly made the mistake of
adding naturalistic details to pictures that would have been stronger without
them.
It is interesting to hear how he justified
the addition of a hypodermic syringe in one of his portraits of Henrietta
Moraes. Claiming that its use was "purely formal", he described it
as "a form of nailing the image more strongly into reality". You
understand exactly what he meant, but it would have been as though Rothko had
added a little figure at the bottom of one of his canvases, because he didn't
trust the picture to hold together without it.
With five triptychs and 18 single canvases
dating from 1943 to 1986, this is the perfect size for a Francis Bacon
exhibition, avoiding the sense of repetition that for me marred last year's
retrospective in Paris. The show looks wonderful at the Hayward.
Distorted body of work:
It's
time to reassess the career of Francis Bacon
WILLIAM
PACKER | THE FINANCIAL TIMES | 7
FEBRUARY, 1998
Francis Bacon died
in 1992 at the age of 83. He came to himself comparatively late as a painter,
and little of his early work survives. But with the appearance in 1944 of his
triptych, Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucificion, which
has been in the Tate since 1950, his was immediately recognised as a
remarkable new talent. Nothing quite like it had been done before, and while
we can now see, from our more distant view, that he was less isolated in his
creative context than perhaps we once thought, he maintained his unique status,
first as enfant terrible, finally as it were maestro terribile, until his
death.
His, then, is
a reputation ripe for serious revision. There has been no major Bacon
exhibition in Britain since the full retrospective at the Tate (his third) in
1985, though there have been important exhibitions abroad in the meantime,
notably in Moscow, Venice, Munich and Paris. This latest study, now at the
Hayward Gallery, is therefore both welcome and timely. Small numerically, at
a mere 23 works, it is none the worse for that. Beautifully hung by David
Sylvester, Bacon's long-time apologist, it fills the broad, open spaces of
the lower galleries with astonishing ease and conviction. It is altogether a
spectacular show. But it does rather flatter to deceive. Questions hang over
Bacon in his work and reputation that must soon prove inescapable; but now,
any such exercise as this is still informed by the unquestioned assumption of
his absolute mastery. The effect is to deflect critical attention away from
the work for what it is - the actual paint, line, surface, formal structure
and so on - and onto its subject-matter and the emotional and subjective
response to it.
In his lifetime, such was the
force of his personality and presence that such deference could at least be
understood, even excused. But in the longer term it does him little favour,
for the uncritical acceptance of everything he did at an equal value actually
works against the particular qualities and achievements that made him the
artist he was.
I do believe
he was a true and remarkable artist, even a great one. And almost in spite of
itself, with a rarely-seen variation upon one image of that early
Crucifixion, here given an entire wall to itself, and then with a magnificent
sequence, hung along the longest wall, of eight paintings from the 1940s and
early '50s, this exhibition makes the very point. Indeed, it is made so sharp
that it can only then deflate the bloated pretensions of so much of the later
work, laid bare in all its flaccid complacency and formulaic
repetition.
A large canvas is an
impressive physical object, three together more impressive still, and even
more so with each element in its heavy gilt frame. So manifest a thing all
too readily commands the fetch across any large gallery, and does so here
time and again. But it is still all show: and when we look more closely into
such vast works as the Studies of the Human, the triptych of 1970, the
May-June triptych of 1973, or the single, portentously titled canvas, Oedipus
and The Sphinx after Ingres of 1983, the slackness of the drawing, the
inadequacy of the realisation, and the hackneyed, all-but-automatic
distortion, once looked-for, are unmissable. Once seen, they refuse to
disappear.
But to return
to those extraordinary early works is to have one's faith immediately
restored. For there indeed, in that fiercely gaping, flower-chewing creature
of the early Crucifixion study, or that strange cloaked figure stooping
beneath its umbrella (1946), or again (from the 1950s) the ambiguously
wrestling couple, or the figure passing through a curtain, we find again that
necessary visual tension that holds the image working upon our imagination in
eternal symbiosis with the manner and quality of its statement - that desiccated,
dragged surface of the paint, the nervous line, half-suggestion,
half-description. Most remarkable of all, perhaps, are the dark full-length
portrait figures of the 1950s, grey presences cast into a black space, with
Bacon for once allowing invention to spring from observation and the struggle
to see and know.
This show is
called The Human Body, though Bacon hardly referred in his work to anything
else – the animal paintings of the 1950s, and the occasional nominal
landscape the rare exceptions. To be so particular is of course to invite
particular enquiry, but this show says nothing beyond the truism that Bacon's
essential subject was indeed the body. In fact his true subject was himself,
not by any objective or detached approach, though the occasional
self-portrait does appear, but rather by subjective experience, a sense of
self-being, and being at that all-too-evidently in the flesh.
In the best of
the work there is a strength and poignancy to the realisation of this our
common predicament, that draws us at once into a deep imaginative sympathy
with the work. To recognise as much is to accept Bacon for the true artist he
undoubtedly was.
Adrift
in the gilded squalor of life
Francis
Bacon: The Human Body
Henri
Cartier-Bresson: Europeans
JOHN MCEWEN |
ART | THE
SUNDAY REVIEW | THE
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH | FEBRUARY
8, 1998
THERE is such a flurry of "museum" shows at the
moment that a mere mention must sometimes suffice. The double-bill of Francis Bacon: The Human Body and Henri
Cartier-Bresson: Europeans at the Hayward Gallery (until April 5) is the most
heavyweight; Bacon, even during his lifetime, internationally regarded as the
greatest British artist since Turner. His friend Cartier-Bresson, whose 1952
photograph of Bacon provides a catalogue frontispiece, has long been a
legend, every photographer's favourite photographer. Both shows consolidate
these claims.
The critic
David Sylvester, Bacon's Boswell, has curated and catalogued his friend's
exhibition with admirable spareness. Bacon had a well- known aversion to
explanatory words about art so he would surely have approved the economy of
the text, a dozen or so self-contained musings on the man and his work. And
the paintings are hung with an extravagant use of space, which emphasises
their solemnity. Bacon is popularly thought of as a painter of powerful but
ugly pictures of modern man in torment, but thresentation reveals how
magisterial his best work can be.
Bacon was a
grand man, in his courtesy, his disdain for politicking and sense of destiny.
The selection reveals that this grandeur was there from the start but grew
with the years, as did the other salient characteristic of his art - his ravishing
and inventive use of colour.
Colour bloomed
in his old age into triptychs of an ecclesiastical scale and lavishness, with
vivid figures convulsed against great spreads of magenta, lilac, terracotta
or, in perhaps the most stunning combination of all, the ochre and green
of Triptych - Studies from the human Body, 1970. No wonder he was
puzzled when even supposed admirers disliked his work. These Bacons,
especially the later works so badly under- estimated by the critics during
his lifetime, are above all sumptuously beautiful.
This - and the
extreme, even miniaturist care and pleasure with which they are painted -
makes them uplifting celebrations of life despite their often gruesome
subjects: figures stripped of dignity, reduced to animality, tortured by
guilt. "I believe in nothing but the sensation of the moment," he
said once. "I drift."
The remark
described his life but is an exact description of his method, with its
galvanised grindings of the brush and delicate drifts of sprayed tinges. Such
attention to hue and touch makes his equivalence with Turner all the more
apposite. Ambivalence is also in keeping with his delight in the "gilded
squalor" of existence. His favourite photograph of himself was Philip
Thomas's secret shot of him on the tube wearing a very expensive overcoat.
Bacon was a
dandy in the full Baudelarian sense; a man who made "a cult" of his
emotions, of "opposition and revolt", "of combating and
destroying triviality".
"Dandyism", wrote Baudelaire 150 years ago, "appears above all
in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful and
aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall."
What better
description could there be of the 80 years of British history Bacon lived and
painted through? He was indeed an aristocrat, by birth, nature and in the
scale of his talent. Turner heralds the industrial and imperial glory of
British power. Bacon no less magnificently symbolises its decline.
Bacon and
Cartier-Bresson are united by more than friendship. Both deal with realism
but often verge on abstraction, both are concerned with the Divine Comedy of
human affairs. Where they differ intellectually is in emotional range. There
is no disgust in Cartier-Bresson's sensuality and, unlike Bacon, his work is
full of humour. One of his funniest masterpieces is Ski lift, Switzerland
1991. The time is summer and a man, who might be the lift's operator, leans
against a concrete post apparently oblivious to a vast block of concrete
lethally dangling just above his head - the end-product of what looks like
the most elaborate mechanism for killing someone ever devised.
To make a
funny picture is the rarest feat in art, as anyone who has ever been to those
secular churches that we call galleries will know. And things are going to
get worse, with every object "accessed" (the Secretary of State for
Culture's buzz-word) in ways and terms dictated by the lowest common
denominator.
Thank God for
Cartier-Bresson. No need for explanations with him. The picture says it all.
Cartier-Bresson is a passionate advocate of visual education in schools. How
much better if Mr Smith had fought for the defence and extension of that,
rather than letting it be cut to virtual extinction. So much for "access".
This year
marks Cartier-Bresson's 90th birthday and London is doing him proud with a
series of museum shows throughout the year, beginning with the most general
at the Hayward Gallery, a retrospective of his work, carried out in various
European countries, including England and Ireland, from the early 1920s to
the present.
As he has
said, photography "appears to be an easy activity" and, when
practised merely to record in the normal way, it is. Nor has it changed in
origin, only technically, and Cartier-Bresson is not much bothered with
technique in the sense of gadgets. Taking a photograph for him "is
putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis".
It is no
surprise to learn that he looks at old master paintings more than photographs,
that he has always drawn assiduously and that he values intuition as highly
as Bacon or the Surrealists. "In photography, one must learn a visual
grammar. What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm,
the relationship between shapes and values. To quote Victor Hugo: 'Form is
the essence brought to the surface.' "
Cartier-Bresson is categorised as the master of the "snapshot",
taken with a pocket Leica; but it is what and when he snaps that
distinguishes him from his thousands of dull documentary followers. That is
where his visual education aids the precarious axis of head, eye and heart to
such unique effect.
His best
photographs are so perfect in their geometric proportion, so precise in the
rhythmic or dramatic positioning of figures - even to mere points in the
distance - it seems they must be pre-planned and posed. In fact I was told on
very good authority that his most famous photograph of picnickers, On the
Banks of the Marne, France 1938, was indeed a posed shot taken for Vogue.
I now have it on the authority of Cartier-Bresson that the only posed
photograph in Europeans is of a female-impersonating male prostitute between
two female prostitutes, taken in Alicante, Spain, 1933.
This
exhibition is an awesome and moving event, the summation of the photographic
life's work (next to come will be his drawings, at the Royal College of Art
in March) of the last survivor of the old masters of modern art, for whom
"genius" is not too strong a description.
Cartier-Bresson is his own harshest critic and reckons some of his best
photographs were his earliest and that an "exceptional" photograph
is always a rare event. His English pictures, typically for a Frenchman, are
the most disengaged and disappointing; but at his incomparable best these
images of our time are not just slices of life but glimpses of eternal truth.
Europeans
is published by Thames & Hudson
Alas, this Bacon is somewhat underdone
by Brian Sewell, The
Evening Standard, 12 February 1998
Francis Bacon,
painter, drinker, gambler, lecher, died in April 1992, almost six years ago,
but in spite of the general recognition that he is indisputably the greatest
of British painters of the post-war half century, only now are we offered an
exhibition that pays homage to his world-wide reputation as the last of the
old masters of the canvas and the brush.
Since his
death, Paris has bowed the knee to him with a major retrospective, Munich has
saluted him, and in Venice all the denizens of the contemporary art world
trekked to the Biennale of 1993 to see a valedictory exhibition with the
title Figurabile. It is a revised and smaller version of this last, the title
now The Human Body, with which we at last honour the debonair old boy at the
Hayward Gallery.
Twenty-three
works are too few. Bacon needs more with which to explain himself and be
explained, and impoverished by weak paintings the selection seems not only
small but ill-considered, random and superficial; nor is it helped by hanging
that is careless and disorderly. Many who have never seen an exhibition
devoted to Bacon will, drawn by his reputation, flock to see these pictures,
only to experience, not the expected wonder, astonishment and awe, but
disappointed questioning. Are these the pictures for which critics claim
Bacon as the last of the Renaissance masters, heir to the ancestral
traditions of all western art, the man whom Grünewald, Goya, Velasquez and
Degas would recognise as peer? Is this the great gambler with paint, the man
of such fine temperament and fierce self-criticism that he ruthlessly purged
his work of everything that he saw as the dross of inconclusion and
confusion? Is this the genius to whom David Sylvester, luminary of post-war
art criticism, has devoted so much selfless perception, subtlety and skill as
exegesist and apologist?
The answer to
all these questions is both yes and no; given only these pictures, Bacon's
reputation must seem absurdly inflated, the consequence of corporate delusion
on the part of critics, dealers, collectors and curators, but to those who
have pursued the painter since his first serious emergence onto the London
art market in 1949, and who saw in London and Turin in 1962 his first major
retrospectives, there is the Bacon possessed of a menacing and unruly talent.
In the work of little more than a decade, Bacon demonstrated in these
exhibitions the fierce fertility of his imagination - the screaming popes and
snarling dogs, the baboons, businessmen and buggers, the isolated heads, owls
and self portraits, the full-length nudes and images inspired by Velasquez
and Van Gogh. He demonstrated, for all the uncomfortable errors of drawing
and construction, that he could delve beneath the skin with the torturer's
contempt for pain, and that he had learned to handle paint with something
approaching mastery, the length, breadth and pressure of the loaded
brushstrokes accurate and powerful, containing all the essential information
about the structure, character and movement of the thing painted, as well as
its more obvious colour and texture.
Bacon turned
to the human body to make comments on the torments of our day that are
astute, perceptive and horrifying. His figures are often caged; the effect
can be as aloof and remote as the appearance of a bland politician on a
television screen, but the same device can turn into a trap, with its
violated occupant screaming for release. He defines small spaces on his
canvases within which his bodies must perform, the larger space often as
featureless as the backdrop in a fashion photographer's studio, described
only by a curve and change in colour; the performing bodies are human, but
often have animal references in the way they walk or lie or squat, often
distorted far beyond our ape relatives or translated into half-butchered
carcasses. Paired figures on a bed are never seen in any affectionate
contiguity, but always in attitudes of erotic violence; they stem from the
newspaper and magazine photographs of footballers, boxers and wrestlers that
Bacon so feverishly re-worked, bringing them close to hard-core pornography,
and then elevating them with his vision and painterly technique into
abstracted allegories with which he makes a savage, soulless, visceral
comment. He is the master of the solitary struggle, the emptying of bowels
into a lavatory pan, the clenched reaction to an unseen act of violence, the
tension of the little death of masturbation - these are the narratives to
which he reduces the traditions of Christ's crucifixion and the martyrdom of
saints, the ferocious secular images of the nihilist to whom the past is a
necessary instrument.
The 23 works
in this exhibition range from 1944 to 1985, with such considerable gaps (particularly
in the late Fifties, early and late Seventies, and early Eighties) that they
offer no clear picture of Bacon's development, either as painter or in
temperament. The newcomer to his work will recognise that the earlier
paintings are rich and robust in texture and colour (orange a favourite)
unevenly applied, the forms sculptural (recalling Moore and Picasso), the
details graphic (in something of Sutherland's manner). By the end of the
Forties, the paint had thinned, much of it applied to raw canvas in the long
vertical parallel strokes that were the mannerism of his friend Denis
Wirth-Miller, with whom he is known to have worked on shared canvases; the
limbs, buttocks and musculature of nudes are drawn with the brush - though
Bacon has long been said, in ignorance and error, never to have drawn
anything - and the volume of the figure and the fall of light are then
sketchily described with short dabs of the brush within these outlines. By
the early Fifties, he had begun the smudge that within 10 years was to become
the smear - the deliberate spoiling, particularly of faces that, according to
Sylvester, suggests disintegration and the consuming worm, though to others
it must seem an illogical and futile vandalism of work that is often an
extraordinary fusion of intellectual and painterly devices - but then, from
time to time, Bacon was given to futile and disruptive pictorial clichés.
In the
Sixties, he produced a series of thoroughly unpleasant images of figures, distorted
and contorted, the familiar poses of the classic nude rendered gauche and
even indecipherable, set against coloured grounds from which almost all the
traces of the comparatively rough painting of the earlier work had been
eliminated. As the surfaces became a more and more immaculate and delicate
fusion of oils and water-based pastels, caressed with his fingertips as
colour was rubbed into texture, leaving much raw canvas bare, varnishing
impossible, the protection of plate glass became essential, adding layers of
accidental illusion with reflections that embrace the spectator and the
lights and other pictures in the gallery - an effect that pleased Bacon and
that he deliberately sought. Throughout this course he developed mannerisms
of drawing and brushwork, some of which became permanent, so that in the late
work the vile terribilità was replaced by a vile serenity that was
effortless, accomplished, familiar, and empty of all but a contrived
emotional charge, the work of a man who had become an exquisite hack.
David
Sylvester, too, shows signs of exhaustion with his role as managing director
of the cottage industry that Bacon has become for him. His catalogue is not a
continuous text compensating for the paucity of pictures, but a series of world-weary,
disconnected musings from which we learn that Bacon admired Bonnard and
dreamed of sharing a canvas with Karel Appel (what a disorderly conjugation
that would have been, with Bacon's delicacy drowned by the Dutchman's wild
impasto). Bacon's art, he tell us, is not companionable, by which he means
that his pictures should not be shown in partnership with those of
Giacometti, Balthus or de Kooning, though they might fit well with Warhol's
images (and with Augustus Egg, perhaps?). Why did Bacon persist in painting
figures at three-quarters life-size? - Sylvester asks. Why indeed? But why
ask, if after a lifetime spent playing Boswell to Bacon's Johnson, he cannot
answer? And why damn other men's books on Bacon for their reproductions in
colour when his own illustrations in black and white are of ill-cut details
overblown, smeared, smudged and useless? This catalogue is no more than an
indulgence to an acolyte so long soaked in the theology of Bacon that his
perception has grown stale.
This disappointing
little exhibition is paired with one of Cartier-Bresson's photographs;
claiming no artistry, compassionate, intuitive, incisive and observant, he
is, though only by these of Bacon's tokens, much the better artist.
Exhibitions: How to freeze the human body
TIM
HILTON | THE INDEPENDENT | FEBRUARY
15, 1998
ONE'S FIRST impression of the Francis Bacon
retrospective at the Hayward Gallery is that it's by an even and uniform
artist - and we also leave the gallery with this feeling, for his paintings
lack variety, and depend on an internal scaffolding that was obviously
habitual. No one is better qualified than David Sylvester to put on a Bacon
exhibition. He has hung the paintings with his usual style and fine
judgement. However, this show is less exciting, and also less informative,
than the one that Sylvester devised for the Museo Correr at the 1993 Venice
Biennale.
The full title of the Hayward exhibition
is Francis Bacon: the Human Body. It contains nothing but figure
paintings. Fair enough, for Bacon was above all a painter of the human
presence. On the other hand, his art was more diverse than the display we see
at the Hayward. This is not a large show. It occupies the Hayward's three
lower galleries (Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs are upstairs) and
contains only 23 works. The intention must have been commemorative rather
than historical. The installation does not attempt to give any step-by-step
account of the artist's career. The atmosphere is hushed, even funereal. It
seems that Sylvester has organised a final memorial to a painter who was also
a personal friend, trying to communicate decent grief in a majestic and also
private way.
I have never seen a Bacon exhibition that
looked quite as sombre. There's an atmosphere of sacramental repetition which
comes both from Bacon's subject matter and his pictorial habits. A feeling of
death is inescapable. One cannot imagine any Bacon painting without some
sense of disaster, doom or terminal illness.t's a puzzle to know how he
maintained this mood. Surely Bacon was helped by the camera? There are
numerous stories of the way he liked to paint from a photograph of the model,
even though he or she was sitting for him in the same room. I think this was
because the photograph had frozen a previous aspect of the model, never to be
recovered.
For Bacon, the camera was a convenient
portable mortuary. It fed his imagination with images of life that had been
and gone. Usually, one can tell whether a portrait has been painted from a
photograph. In a Bacon picture this is more problematic. First, he wasn't a
portraitist in the normal sense of the word: he didn't aim to reproduce the
way a person looked. Second, he couldn't draw, so there was no hope of
alighting on any telling feature or making his smeared and inexpert paint
more precise. In numerous ways Bacon was a handicapped artist.
Photography helps his handicaps, even turning
inadequacies into the hallmark of a personal style. Note, for instance, the
characteristic distance between Bacon and the person he paints. It is not the
space between easel and model but the distance established by the camera when
a person is photographed from a few feet away (I think, of course, of the
domestic camera of 40 years ago). Hence the paradox of Bacon's paintings of
the nude, whether male or female. They depict intimate situations but are not
intimate pictures. He could never give character to his subjects. Instead, he
generalised them. Such generalisation was the route to his familiar blend of
pomp and pessimism. No doubt unconsciously, Bacon wished to be an academic
artist. Just like an academic, he would not dream of straying from a format
that he had established to his own satisfaction. See, for instance, how many
paintings in the Hayward measure 198 x 147 cm. They constitute by far the
majority of the works in the exhibition.
Bacon found this size and upright shape
around 1950, and scarcely deviated from it until his death in 1992. His
smaller paintings (not in the present show) also have identical shapes and
sizes. He never used a landscape-shaped canvas. The only way of making this
format a little more inventive was to put three paintings side by side. There
are five triptychs in the exhibition; that is to say, 15 linked though separate
paintings, for they are individually framed (and always in the heavy gold
that Bacon preferred). The triptych form spreads interest sideways, but still
these 198 x 147cm canvases have the same general look. There's a body at the
centre, rather smaller in size than one would expect from a figure painter,
hunched or writhing; and this body is surrounded by an armature of lines that
might represent cages, glass boxes or sanatorium equipment. These lines are
also reminiscent of the style of interior design that Bacon practised in the
late 1930s, before he became a painter. Incidental motifs include beds,
couches, light bulbs and hypodermic syringes. The best of these pictures
is Sleeping Figure (1974). And yet I am not overwhelmed, or
horrified, or even particularly engaged.
Bacon has a reputation for making the
spectator shudder. He gained this sort of fame in the early 1950s, when he
first became widely known. Today, we have seen so much more violent and
deliberately unpleasant art that it is hard to imagine how Bacon became
controversial. Was it because of his screaming Popes, or his evidently
homosexual couplings, or because his paint quality seemed so negligent?
Whatever the answer, it's clear that Bacon's early work is more authentic
than are most of the paintings he produced after the mid-1960s. Whatever the
continuing dramas and tragedies of his personal life, Bacon's paintings fail
to trap the viewer after 1969. In that year he was 60. General fatigue,
booze, and lack of self- criticism probably contributed to his decline as an
artist. People remember him as a generous man who laughed a lot, bought
champagne for everyone, and could afford to spend a lot of time at the gaming
tables. He was none the less nervous about life in general. Perhaps his position
as an old master of modern art helped Bacon to keep his equilibrium. His
paintings certainly maintained a stately presence. Rather unfairly, painters
of a later generation said they were nothing but bombast. It is true that
there are slack passages, and also that his brush could not follow the
contours and volume of the naked form.
The most surprising work in this exhibition
is also its earliest, a variant of the right hand panel of the triptych Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (which is in the
Tate, though not in the Hayward show). This little work on board was painted
in 1943 or 1944 and has never previously been exhibited or reproduced. It's a
war painting. Bacon the artist was a child of the Blitz. Asthmatic, he did
not see military service but experienced the fires in London and imagined the
sufferings of people elsewhere. One of his professional aims was to be
recognised as a European rather than a British artist. If we were to put his
Forties and Fifties pictures alongside the work of post-war establishment
artists such as Graham Sutherland, Ceri Richards or Keith Vaughan, I have no
doubt that Bacon would chase them off the wall. The ferocious Figure Study II
(1945-6) proves that he then had no equal for daring and emotionalism. But it
was a theatrical use of emotion that led to Bacon's undoing. In the theatre,
you rehearse, perform many times, pitch your voice at the same level and know
how to generate applause for the same exits and crescendos.
Visual artists should not proceed with
similar dramas. Bacon (who was influenced by theatre) did. He was not
sufficiently thoughtful. Compulsive gamblers never are, and Bacon's gambling
was not merely a part of his character but a continual danger to his vocation
as a fine artist. Above all he should have thought about colour. Bacon's
palette is unmediated and, especially in his later years, vulgar. His pinks
and buffs give us a higher form of vulgarity, to be sure, yet we are always
convinced that his paintings are those of a rich man delivering a certain
sort of goods to other rich people. They have an air of great wealth and
squandered talent. I like the paintings - squarish, not 198 x 147cm - of
Lucian Freud and Henrietta Moraes. They show that Bacon needed to match
himself against vivid characters who were likely to talk at him while he
looked at their photographs.
Francis Bacon: the Human Body: Hayward Gallery, SE1 (0171 960 4242), to 5 Apr.
Bringing home the Bacon
The work that set the auction record for a
living British artist is on show at the Hayward, reports Colin Gleadell
COLIN GLEADELL
| CULTURE |
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | 28
FEBRUARY, 1998
It has been said that if Lucian Freud's Large
Interior, W.11 (After Watteau) sells as anticipated in May for $2.5-$3.5m, it
will achieve the highest auction price for a living British artist,
superseding David Hockney's Grand Procession, which sold for $2.2m in 1989.
But, historically, the highest auction price
for a British artist living at the time of sale was set, also in 1989, when
Francis Bacon's Triptych May-June 1973 realised just over $6m. Within a year,
three large single canvases by Bacon had exceeded $5m each. Bacon was then
80, and died three years later.
To put these prices into a wider context, they placed Bacon above
Henry Moore (record: $3.7m, 1990) and Dubuffet ($4.7m, 1990), trailing only
Giacometti ($6.4m in 1988) in the post-war European market. It is astonishing
to think that these prices were also on a par with Picasso's post-war work at
the time, and that, in relation to the rampant market for American
contemporary art, they were ahead of Warhol and Twombly, on a par with
Lichtenstein and led only by Pollock ($10.5m), Johns ($15.5m) and de Kooning
($18.8).
By coincidence, Bacon's $6m
triptych is in the current exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and its
presence with a number of works that have recently been through the
salerooms, or are available privately for sale, prompts a consideration of
the past, present and future of his market.
In his meticulous and
perceptive biography, Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma, Michael Peppiatt
punctuates the narrative with skeletal references to the flowering of Bacon's
fortune.
ame came late by today's standards. He was 36 when, in 1945, some
paintings at the Lefevre Gallery were singled out for critical acclaim, one
of which was to become the first purchase by the Tate in 1950. Two years
earlier, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had made its first acquistion
through the Hanover Gallery, which represented Bacon until 1958, during which
period prices were between £150 and £600. The Study from the Human Body,
1949, lent by the National Gallery of Victoria to the Hayward, would have
cost no more than £400 when purchased in 1953.
By 1962, Bacon had transferred to the Marlborough Gallery. The stock
of paintings it acquired from the Hanover Gallery were valued at roughly
£1,500 each, but from this time evidence of price movements are from the
salerooms only, and seem to have moved in response to major public
exhibitions.
Within eight years of his first retrospective at the Tate in 1962, and
in the build-up to the survey at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, saleroom prices
had reached £26,000. Following an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in
New York in 1975, they rose to £90,000.
In response, Bacon is quoted by Peppiatt as saying: "Time is the
only critic. The prices mean nothing. No one will know if my things are any
good for another 50 years."
None the less, £180,000 was paid for a triptych now in the Beyeler
Collection in Switzerland, and, at the time of the Tate's second
retrospective in 1985, London dealer Ivor Braka paid a new record £420,000
for a landscape.
In May 1987, the $1m barrier
was broken twice, with the Swiss dealer Jan Krugier bidding $1.6m for a large
Study for Portrait, a price that was eclipsed several times in 1989 and 1990.
Since then, however, the pattern has changed. A large Portrait of George
Dyer Staring into a Mirror, sold in November 1990 for $3.9m, made only $1.4m
in 1995, and a 1953 Study for Figure in a Room, sold in 1989 for $2.1m, was
one of an increasing number of unsold large figure subjects when it failed to
reach $1m in 1994.
Of the pieces currently at
the Hayward, the 1951 Study for Nude, was sold way below estimate at £460,000
in 1991, and the 1953/5 Study for Figure 11 was unsold in 1995 with a £1m low
estimate.
What looks like a crisis in
the market for Bacon's large figure paintings (considered his most important
and the subject of the Hayward show) is contrasted with the relative success
of the small, less disturbing paintings, which have been finding a ready
market. A catalogue-sized Study for Female Figure, for instance, trebled
estimates in 1996 when it sold to hotel chain heiress Heidi Charmat for
£255,000.
Yet specialist dealers
maintain that, privately, Bacon's market is healthy. Designer Donna Karan,
for example, has recently bought a large painting for $3m, which is well in
excess of any Bacon sold at auction in the last six years.
If single paintings and
triptychs from the Hayward show with unpublished price tags between $4m and
$8m are sold, it will support the view that the salerooms are being left
behind in this market.
As for the future, the American market still needs persuasion. Referring
no doubt to the parallel between Bacon and de Kooning, the specialist dealer
Massimo Martino, who sourced two paintings for the Hayward exhibition, says:
"If Bacon was American, his work would make $20m." With three
projected Bacon exhibitions under consideration in the US, this pipe dream
might yet become reality.
Their Inward Parts
CHRISTINE SCHWARTZ HARTLEY | BOOKS
IN BRIEF | THE NEW YORK TIME | SUNDAY,
MARCH 29, 1998
At first, there
seems to be no trace of a smile in Francis Bacon's Study of Henrietta
Moraes Laughing' (1969), one of many portraits of Moraes that Bacon
(1909-92) painted over the years. All one sees is a distorted face with
eyelids closed over deep-set eyes, the face in shades of white, ocher and
black, overlaid in patches with marks in red and magenta like bloody
fingerprints. Yet in the mangled lower half of the face (where violent white
brushstrokes and superimposed volumes compete for attention and hint at
turmoil), the viewer eventually can distinguish what may be a row of pearly
white teeth; to their left, perhaps, is Moraes's restrained smile a moment
before (or after) laughter; to their right, an ominous black patch, like a
bullet hole.
With 233 colour
reproductions illustrating Bacon's variations on a theme - series of three
(or two) studies for a portrait or self-portrait, single portraits and
studies, diptychs portraying different subjects, as well as details of all of
the above - BACON: Portraits and Self-Portraits (Thames and
Hudson, $60), by France Borel, a Belgian art historian, provides ample
opportunity to examine the ways the artist had of delving into his subjects -
friends, lovers, admirers and himself. Most of these approaches appear
violent, involving painterly renditions of flayed skin; cheekbones, jaws and
necks defined by savage brushstrokes; hollowed eye sockets; torn ears;
extreme dislocation of features, all in a riot of spurting colours, except
for one constant: the portraits' solid background. Again and again, Bacon
returned to the same subjects - Moraes, George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne,
Lucian Freud, Peter Beard and Muriel Belcher - in an effort to capture and
convey their inner turmoils, secrets, beauty and mortality.
He directed the
same relentless attention to his own features (his ample cheeks, his squarish
jaw) with the same purpose. In one series from 1967, his face seems to be
sucking itself in; in a 1979 study, the contours of his eyes and lips, and
the line that joins his nostril to the corner of his mouth, are ghoulish,
drawn in purple on a bluish-white face; and in a 1980 series, bloody marks
cover large areas of his emaciated self-portrait. In his introduction, Milan
Kundera writes that Bacon was in search of an ''infinitely fragile self
shivering in a body.'' As this book makes clear, Bacon's search never
ended.
FROM 'BACON PORTRAITS AND SELF-PORTRAITS'
Reputations
on the line
BRIAN
FALLON | THE IRISH TIMES | APRIL 1, 1998
Pierre Bonnard and
Francis Bacon may be suffering from posthumous downgrading, if reactions to
two recent exhibitions of their paintings in London are anything to go by.
Yet, both remain artists of the highest rank For some reason, or combination
of circumstances, the Bonnard exhibition at the Tate Gallery does not seem to
have touched off as positive a reaction as might have been expected.
Attendance has been quite high - on my own visit there I sometimes found it
hard to see the paintings properly because of intervening heads and bodies;
but the enthusiasm scarcely compares with what the Monet exhibition of a few
years ago generated. Some people even claim to have found it all rather an
anti-climax.
It was always on
the cards that Francis Bacon would pay posthumously for the rather feverish
and uncritical praise heaped on him in his middle and later years. He took
New York by storm, he was almost idolised in Paris (very rare for an English
painter) and near the end of his life he enjoyed a triumph in Leningrad.
Virtually every public gallery which could afford to buy him did so, and he
was widely acclaimed as the greatest living painter, whose round face became
as familiar through photographs as Picasso's sombre gaze and bald head.
Bacon the artist
became almost submerged in his personal legend - the flaunted homosexuality,
the drinking and drugging, the Soho pub-crawls and the semi-recognisable
portraits of his friends and fellow-bohemians. Some of his encomiasts reached
heights or depths of nonsense, particularly those who claimed that he was
really a religious artist, the painter of "God's absence." The
fading clichés of Existentialism were also dragged out to prove that he was
the painter of le néant and the Void, expressing modern man's spiritual
alienation and anxiety and psychological loneliness. (To be fair to the
artist, he himself never made any such claims and in general avoided
pseudo-metaphysics).
Human nature,
however, likes to tear down what it built up, so that the Hayward Gallery
exhibition has been getting some stick, and an anti-Bacon tone seems to be
surfacing in various places (about ten years or so ago, I noted a similar
reaction against Ben Nicholson). It is called Francis Bacon: the Human Body
and carries a eulogistic catalogue by Bacon's old buddy David Sylvester, who
has curated the exhibition. Many or most of the pictures are familiar, which
is no surprise considering the number of Bacon retrospectives there have been
in recent decades, and the proliferation of books and articles about him.
My own feeling is
that they represent - to be blunt- a very mixed bag, and that Bacon was an
exceptionally uneven painter who rose or sank in inspiration from one work to
the next. His whole method of working could scarcely have produced anything
very different from this shifting level. He was a gambler who cultivated
chance and the creative accident, he didn't make drawings
(certainly I have never seen any) and preferred to 'attack' the canvas in
order to find his crucial image through the sheer potency of paint, he was a
'bout' worker rather than a regular, disciplined one, and he probably relied
too much on photographs to trigger off his imagination. Bacon was also, of
course, a semialcoholic, like Augustus John, and alcohol and painting go
badly together since artists need not only unclouded brains, but steady
hands.
All this may
explain why he was at times such a bad, slovenly technician, forcing the
paint brutally and clumsily rather than making it obedient to his vision. It
is also undeniable that he was rather a poor pictorial architect, relying on
certain devices which he repeated a good deal. In the earlier work, that of
the Fifties and early Sixties, he often enclosed his figures in a kind of
spectral 'box'; like luminous wires. Later, he placed them in a circular
space rather like a small stage set, often against a monochrome background -
Henrietta Moraes, in one 1963 painting, sprawls naked on a bed with a
purple-violet background and a black foreground. And in the big triptychs, he
relied on tension and contrast rather than on constructive power.
Bacon was also an
uncertain colourist, capable of achieving some utterly original effects
alongside much tonal dullness and sheer bad taste. His paintings are, for the
most part, miniature dramas or stage-settings, close to the Theatre of the
Absurd and Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, and they also exude an
atmosphere close to film noir with its mood of big-city menace. In fact, his
Paris influences are strong, including those of Giacometti and middle-period
Picasso. Though a certain percentage of the Hayward show already looks dated
or tired, and a number of works (including most of the triptychs) now seem
inadequately realised, the originality and rather sinister spell of certain
pictures are still hypnotic in their impact. Even now that their old shock
element has largely evaporated, the Fifties paintings have a shadowy, tense,
slightly menacing tonality and ambience which remain unique, while certain of
the later works have a compelling power and originality. For example,
the Figure in Movement from 1978, and the Oedipus
and the Sphinx after Ingres, from 1983, must rank among the genuine
masterpieces of their time; both stop you in your tracks. Bacon may sometimes
give the effect of a man shooting in the dark, but he does so at a target
which he alone could have envisaged.
THERE'LL
ALWAYS BE A LONDON
DOUGLAS
CRUICKSHANK | SALON | MAY 13, 1998
"It's a
monstrosity," the cabby tells me. He's talking about South Bank Centre,
the massive architectural calamity perched next to the Thames at the end of
Hungerford Bridge. We've just pulled up in front. The Centre is a giant
concrete arts and theater complex built in the 1960s. The cabby is right.
It's magnificently ugly. One building is the Hayward Gallery, where I'm about
to catch the last day of Francis Bacon: The Human Body, a major
retrospective of paintings by the artist - he died in 1992 - whose emotionally
ferocious oils make the work of Hieronymus Bosch look like Muzak for the eyes
in comparison. The show has attracted over 120,000 people in its two-month
run. As I walk in, there are about 400 waiting in the ticket line, all of
whom glare at me bitterly as I skip up to the will-call table, collect my
previously purchased ticket and leisurely saunter into the gallery, glancing
back just once with a guess we've learned a little something about planning
ahead haven't we now smile. They all look back at me with a consolidated
interstellar death beam, but it's too late, I'm already inside.
Bacon's work is
majestic and wrenching - famously so. But the dazzling nightmare solemnity of
his subject matter - the screaming popes that most people know him by, and
the anguished figures, some based on the early sequential photographs of
Eadweard Muybridge - is lightened and made bearable, even beautiful, by
Bacon's eloquent use of colour. Standing in the middle of a room surrounded
by his giant gilt-framed canvases makes it possible to imagine what the
woodcuts of Japan's ukiyo-e period might have looked like if they'd been
conjured in the nether world by an Irishman under siege from the hellhounds.
Still, though
Bacon's imagery is often grim, it can also be funny, bittersweet and bawdy in
the street opera sense of Kabuki. Often the paint is applied so sparingly
that there is a distinct Shroud of Turin effect (if the
Shroud could shriek), as if the faces or figures were photographically
blasted onto the canvas the way silhouettes were imprinted on the walls of
Hiroshima by the flash of the atomic bomb. However, the detonation in this
case took place inside Bacon's ground zero brain. "I would like my
pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them," he once
remarked, "like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and
memory trace of the past events as the snail leaves its slime." And they
do.
Bacon's works head for the U.S.
DOMINIC CONNOLLY | ASSOCIATED
NEWSPAPERS | 28
AUGUST 1998
THE MAN who inherited
the bulk of Francis Bacon's estate has agreed to transfer work by the
artist worth tens of millions of pounds from London to be sold in New York.
John Edwards, Bacon's long-time companion and the artist's sole
beneficiary, has withdrawn Bacon's estate from Marlborough Fine Art in
Mayfair and handed it to the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Manhattan.
The
move is a massive blow to London's art market, already reeling under the
pressure of high VAT and the prospect of a new European tax. No one
connected with the move would discuss why it happened, but it is believed
that Mr Edwards and Marlborough had a row.
Evening
Standard art critic Brian Sewell said: "These things don't happen
without a falling out." He said works sold in America incurred less
tax than those sold in the UK, and added:
"It's
a shrewd move. It's another nail in the coffin of the London art market and
a rather dramatic one at that." Bacon's works, which have reached
prices of £3.9 million, were handled by Marlborough for almost 40 years. Mr
Sewell said: "Francis was quite content with Marlborough's treatment
of his paintings and showed evidence of being quite fond of the people
there."
Tony
Shafrazi is currently preparing for an exhibition of an undisclosed number
of the artist's paintings at his gallery. Mr Shafrazi denied Mr Edwards and
Marlborough had had a row. "There's no falling out," he said.
"Things move on. The estate has decided to exhibit the works with us.
I don't know why.
"The
Marlborough gallery has done years of wonderful work with Bacon. We owe it
to the estate to carry on this job."
The
Department of Culture, Media and Sport said there were no restrictions
governing the export of works less than 50 years old. A spokesman said the
present rules prevented the Government from intervening even though Bacon
was widely regarded as one of the finest British artists of the 20th
century. Mr Edwards was handed the artist's £10.9 million fortune when
Bacon died in
1992.
Mr Edwards had regularly accompanied Bacon on visits to pubs, clubs,
restaurants and casinos before the artist's death from a heart attack at
the age of 82.
Mr
Edwards, a former East End publican, now lives in Suffolk but still keeps
Bacon's South Kensington flat. He was unavailable for comment. Bacon's life
is due to come under the spotlight with the cinema release of a film - Love Is The Devil - based on the biography The Gilded Gutter Life of
Francis Bacon.
The
film, which stars Derek Jacobi as Bacon, has already attracted controversy
because of its sexual content. It also had to be made without showing any
of Bacon's paintings or drawings after Marlborough Fine Art refused the
producers permission.
Bacon's
controversial paintings have failed to win over everyone. He used to tell
the story that
Margaret
Thatcher replied to being told that he was Britain's greatest painter by
saying: "Not that horrible man who paints those dreadful
pictures."
Bacon,
in turn, cared little for politicians and turned down a knighthood. He was
well known for his socialising and hard drinking in Soho. He once summed up
his life as: "Going from bar to bar and drinking and that kind of
thing."
He
was born in Ireland to English parents and was banished from home at 16
when they became aware of his homosexuality. He started painting in 1929
but destroyed nearly all of his earlier works. In the Seventies he met Mr
Edwards in Soho's Colony Club. When Bacon died Mr Edwards said that the
artist's spartan two-room South Kensington home would eventually be left to
the nation. Marlborough Fine Art refused to comment.
Francis Bacon studio,
with his last works, is given to Hugh Lane Gallery by heir
FRANK KILFEATHER | THE
IRISH TIMES | MONDAY
AUGUST 31 1998
The studio of the internationally-renowned artist Francis
Bacon has been donated to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in
Dublin by Mr John Edwards, his sole heir. Bacon was born in Dublin but
lived most of his life in London.
The bequest is considered the most important to the gallery
since it was established by Sir Hugh Lane in 1908. It is seen in the art
world as a major coup for Ireland.
The studio in South Kensington
is being dismantled and reconstructed in Dublin just as Bacon left it. The
studio walls are covered in murals; even the door has paintings on it.
There is also an Aladdin's Cave of half-finished canvases,
books, drawings, notes, easels, old brushes, an abandoned table and the
cracked circular mirror which he used for his self-portraits. One of the
most important items is an unfinished self-portrait of the artist.
The Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands,
Ms de Valera, welcoming the bequest, said: "This generous gift is an
important contribution not just to the Hugh Lane Gallery but to Irish
cultural life. I would like to express my appreciation of the generosity of
John Edwards, whose representatives I met earlier this year."
The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Mr Joe Doyle, described it as
a great coup for Dublin and the Hugh Lane Gallery.
"John Edwards's very generous bequest is a
significant addition to the cultural life of the city. Francis Bacon was
born in Dublin and we are delighted he has returned."
Ms Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery, said
the contents of the studio chronicled the private world of Bacon, making
the gift the most important archive on the artist. It would be a
cornerstone of the gallery's collection.
"As well as the studio we have received Bacon's last
unfinished self-portrait, which was on the easel when he died . . . This
painting will go on public view for the first time in the gallery on
Tuesday, September 1st".
Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909. His parents had moved to
Ireland from London after their marriage in 1903. His father ran stables in
the Curragh, Co Kildare, and young Bacon's life is understood to have been
lonely and his formal education patchy.
The family moved to and fro between Ireland and England,
eventually settling in Abbeyleix, Co Laois. Tensions between father and son
grew and Bacon left home in 1925.
|
Making Bacon Sizzle Again
RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN | THE
DAILY TELEGRAPH | 9
1998
DON'T take your Aunt Edna to see Love Is the Devil, because
she won't like it. The title
may suggest a Mills & Boon novel, but it's actually what used to be
described as "an art film", and unsuitable for matinee audiences. The subject is a
dismal episode in the louche private life of the painter Francis Bacon
(who died in1992), told in a style much influenced by Derek Jarman, with
fancy camera-work (much
of it emulating the distorted perspectives of Bacon's own paintings), a weirdly pulsating
soundtrack, and images of extreme sexual depravity and blood-stained
violence.
But what will more deeply upset Aunt Edna - who, being no
fool, will probably
end up acknowledging that the film is also beautifully made and emotionally powerful - is that
the role of the foul-mouthed, masochistically
homosexual Bacon is played by her favourite actor, that nice Sir Derek Jacobi, always
so good at Chichester Festival Theatre and so amusing on the box as that
medieval detective monk Cadfael. Now what does Sir Derek think he is up to,
taking his trousers off and bending over for punishment in such very dubious
company?
In fact, he's ventured into X-certificate territory
once before, he confesses. Thirty years ago, he appeared in a raunchy
film called Blue Blood, based on the orgiastic goings-on of the present
Marquess of Bath. "It also starred Oliver Reed. I had long hair and did
some naked sex scenes," Jacobi
recalls with amusement. "No, it wasn't my finest hour."
Fortunately, it only ever appears nowadays on obscure satellite channels at
2am, well past Aunt Edna's bedtime.
Love Is the Devil (which
opens on 18 September) is a vastly superior affair that has already won
enormous praise on the film-festival circuit and looks set to win Jacobi a
further raft of awards and plaudits. With some help from the hair and make-up
department, his physical likeness to Bacon becomes so close that it's
surprising to discover he wasn't writer-director John Maybury's first choice
for the role (the honour originally fell to Malcolm McDowell, who
subsequently withdrew), and that he has little taste for Bacon's visceral,
embittered painting. "Oh, I've always found it striking, but it's not
the sort of thing I'd want on my walls," he says. "Bonnard is more
my style."
Nevertheless he jumped at the challenge, mainly because he
was so impressed by Maybury's total command of the subject. John is a painter
himself and seems to know it all from the inside. He's the sort of director
an actor can feel complete confidence in." But he didn't find the part
easy, and struggled to find a way into an exceptionally complex and neurotic
personality.
"Bacon's not really 'me' at all," Aunt Edna may
be relieved to hear. "I don't think I would have liked him one little
bit if I'd ever met him, and I certainly don't have a drunken Colony Club side
to my life. But I suppose we're both loners, both creative artists living in
the imagination: perhaps that became the starting-point."
There was a lot of research too. "I looked at his art,
of course, read all the books, talked to those who knew him, watched the
videos and a South Bank Show interview." A major source of information
was the last of Bacon's great Soho cronies, Daniel Farson, author of The Gilded Gutter Life of
Francis Bacon and a consultant to the film, who sadly died shortly
before it was completed. But
the character Jacobi finally came up with isn't an exact impersonation.
"I'm not Rory Bremner. I tried to copy Bacon's body language, and I
picked up some of his mannerisms, like the tic he had of clearing his throat
the whole time. But I can't quite do his voice - very high-pitched and
aristocratic, he even
said 'where' for 'were' - and developed my own approximation of it."
Love Is the Devil focuses on Bacon's relationship in the
Sixties with a petty crook called George Dyer (strongly played by Daniel Craig).
Their affair is known to have involved an intense sexual compulsion, with
Dyer as the dominant partner, but what degree of companionship they also
enjoyed is unknown.
"It went on for ten years or so," explains
Jacobi, "and although in public Bacon would get drunk and attack Dyer
quite cruelly, my feeling is that must have they got on domestically at some
level. I don't know how much overt affection there was between them, but it's
my instinct as an actor to put some warmth into a character, and I think
that's what emerges in the film."
Dyer eventually commits suicide, unable to live with the
gap between his own uselessness and Bacon's acclaimed genius. It's a
depressing story, from which nobody emerges with much moral credit: did Jacobi
find any redemptive light at its end? "Only that some extraordinary
paintings of Dyer came out of it all. But perhaps that's not enough."
To date, Jacobi hasn't had a particularly exciting film
career (though he retains great fondness for Christine Edzard's Little
Dorrit, in which he played Arthur Clennam), and he's plainly thrilled by the
buzz about Love Is the Devil. Suppose he hits the jackpot, and ends up being
tempted to prostitute himself for a million dollars to some ghastly Hollywood
epic? "I'm afraid I would have no hesitation in saying yes to any such
call."
Nevertheless he remains one of those actors who feels the
need to return to live theatre at regular intervals, "partly because if
I don't, I worry I may lose the knack of it altogether." His last stage
appearance was in the 1996 Chichester production of Uncle Vanya; his next
foray into the West End will be a new play by Hugh Whitemore (who wrote
Breaking the Code, in which he gave such a memorable performance as the
tormented mathematician Alan Turing), due for the end of this year.
Further down the line, he knows that King Lear awaits, and
he'd like to have another bash at Prospero: "But I've already appeared
in 29 of Shakespeare's plays, so I'm not exactly desperate on that
front."
His most recent television success is Cadfael. "There
are two more episodes waiting to be shown, but that will be the lot. I've
enjoyed it enormously, but I'm not sorry - the situations were beginning to
repeat themselves, and that's a point when as an actor I begin to feel
uncomfortable. The great joy of Love Is the Devil is that it wasn't repeating
anything, and I didn't feel uncomfortable at all."
Donation a coup for Ireland
AIDAN DUNNE | THE
IRISH TIMES | SEPTEMBER
02, 1998
The
donation of the contents of Francis Bacon's studio to Dublin's Hugh Lane
Municipal Gallery represents a remarkable coup not only for the gallery but
for the country. It also leaves London's Tate Gallery with egg on its face,
if reports that it looked the gift horse in the mouth when it originally
received an offer prove to be correct.
The
notion of recreating an artist's studio in a gallery may sound slightly
perverse, and in the case of many artists the exercise would be fairly
pointless. A studio at its most prosaic is just a place of work, and what
counts is the work done there, not the place. Some studios, however, acquire
a certain mystique, and the so-called School of London painters have done
rather well in the mystique stakes. There's Lucian Freud's spartan interior
with its bare boards and over-stuffed couch, Frank Auerbach's crumbling, icy
chamber with its outside toilet and, not least, Bacon's messy domain. The
room in Reece Mews where he worked from 1961 until his death in 1992 is
famously crowded and chaotic.
But
it's not just, as appearances might suggest, a product of the disorder
attendant on an anarchic lifestyle. It is in itself a nutritive mulch out of
which blossomed the strange visions of his painterly world. Unlike Freud,
Bacon preferred to paint from secondhand sources - he said the slight removal
from reality of a photograph spurred him all the more to try and capture the
real - and the books and photographs that litter the studio are the raw
material of the paintings. So much so that a catalogue of this jumbled
archive would undoubtedly shed great light on his references, his working
methods and his thought.
To
some extent this has already happened in the documentation of his use of an
Eisenstein film still, Muybridge's The
Human Figure in Motion, an old medical text book on radiography and John
Deakin's photographs of Henrietta Moraes, but there is certainly much more to
be learned. The primary importance of the donation is likely to reside in
this material, together with the striking physical presence of the working
environment, with its paint-encrusted furniture and fittings, its walls and
doors pressed into service as impromptu palettes. Beyond the apparent chaos,
Bacon's output was monitored and well documented so it is extremely unlikely
that, for example, there would be a treasure trove of neglected works
languishing in a corner.
With
the exception of a single unfinished self-portrait, the work that remained in
the studio is likely to be not so much incomplete as abandoned and rejected -
sometimes violently, for he was known to slash unsatisfactory paintings with
a razor. That the studio is being preserved reflects well on John Edwards,
the sole inheritor of Bacon's estate.
At
the time of the artist's death, a value of £60 million was mooted, though a
much more conservative £11 million was eventually agreed. The discrepancy had
to do with the unpredictability of the market value of paintings. About a
year and a half later, Edwards spoke to Bacon's biographer, Andrew Sinclair.
"I am going to keep the house and studio exactly as it is," he
said. "I am going to live in it until I die and then donate it to the
nation when I pop off. Then it's up to them what they do with it." It
didn't quite work out like that, but in all essential respects he has been as
good as his word.
Bacon back in a city that still ignores
Saturday Profile: Francis Bacon
ROISIN INGLE | THE IRISH TIMES | SEPTEMBER 5, 1998
If Picasso had
been born in Dublin, would we have erected a plaque to mark his place of
birth? It is a question that seemed poignant after reports that Francis
Bacon's messy London studio is to be dismantled and reconstructed in the Hugh
Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art - right down to every last spent tube of
cadmium red. The answer of course is yes. Similarly, in most other countries
in the world, 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin 2 (then a private nursing home),
where Bacon was born, would be adorned with a discreet piece of brass.
Engraved on it would be Francis Bacon, artist, born in this house, October
1909. As it is, the house is now occupied by O'Rourke, Reid and Co
solicitors. Not surprisingly, a receptionist in the office this week said she
had no idea that such a luminary breathed his first somewhere in the
building.
Such sniping is
not to suggest that Bacon, hailed as one of the most intelligent men to ever
hold a brush, ranks quite up there with Picasso. He is generally regarded as
one of the most significant painters of the 20th century but one critic
thought he ranked more alongside Stanley Spencer than the revered Spanish
painter.
The combination
of flamboyant genius and what some politely describe as an emancipated
lifestyle, however, meant he was afforded mythical status long before he
died.
He lived in
Ireland for 16 years. His father was a horse trainer, with whom Francis had a
somewhat strained relationship. He seldom if ever visited the country after
he left but it did hold some endearing memories. In a rare interview which
took place in his small house in London's West End he told Irish Times critic
Brian Fallon he could still remember the tramp of hooves and the ring of trumpets
as the British cavalry trained at the Curragh Camp.
The strain grew too much to bear. At the age of 16 his
father ejected Francis from the house in Laois. He had been caught trying on
his mother's underwear. The tapestry of myths surrounding Francis Bacon was
already being designed.
From Ireland he
went to Berlin and then to Paris. While on the continent he began to
appreciate art and in Paris saw an exhibition of Picasso whom he later
accepted was an early and solitary influence. When Bacon himself began to
paint seriously, though, his single-minded originality was never in question.
He started off designing furniture when he returned to London to supplement a
£3 allowance sent weekly by his mother. Between the first World War - as an asthmatic
he was exempted from military service - and the second World War he began to
develop as much as a bohemian as a painter.
Fame found him
before his artistic genius had blossomed. He was a central figure in the Soho
set. The Colony Club, which was frequented by an elite arty crowd including
poets George Barker and Sydney (W. S.) Graham was his stomping ground. He
held an enviable position within Muriel Belcher's club. "She was a
unique woman," he told Brian Fallon. "She thought I knew a lot of
monied people, so she said she would pay me £10 week to bring them in and all
drinks paid." By the late 1940s, the Screaming Popes series had singled
him out as an artistic force to be reckoned with. He was self-taught, he
claimed, and left much to chance in his work. According to critic Michel
Leiris, his paintings "help us, most powerfully, to feel the sheer fact
of existence as it is sensed by a man without illusions".
To others they
were profoundly disturbing, his stark triptychs coming decades before the
bisected formaldehyde creations of Brit Art's Damien Hirst. Gaynor Duffy, an
artist with a site dedicated to Bacon on the Internet, said his preoccupation
with headless torsos and hanging flesh "suggests he studied Grays
Anatomy whilst high on something".
He was feted in
the art capitals of the world and contracted to Marlborough Fine Arts. The
prices for his work soared and by the 1960s he was part of the existentialist
movement - a roving intellectual with a fondness for the writings of Yeats
and Beckett. The media coverage of him was extensive and world-wide but in
the main unsolicited.
A typical day for
Bacon would start with furious painting. He did not draw but painted directly
on to the canvas, sometimes merely raising his brush and splashing at it for
inspiration. Lunch would be in Soho seafood restaurant Wheelers, where he
would stand everyone champagne. His generosity and antipathy towards the
immense fortune he was amassing were legendary. Later he and his friends
would retire to the Colony Club for more champagne. A spot of gambling
usually followed. One Irish Times letter writer suggested that he had picked
up his gambling habits in a Baggot Street bookies and added that despite his
British parentage his preoccupation with sex and religion were uniquely
Irish.
Bacon's
homosexuality certainly piqued the public's interest although he was not
known to flaunt his sexual orientation often. Once though he did turn up at
an exhibition with a string of the type of tough-looking men he preferred
trailing behind. There are stories that he often paid for this predilection
with severe beatings. He also had his share of perfectly stable
relationships, although his boyfriend, George Dyer, killed himself the night
before Bacon's retrospective in Paris in 1972. In the late 1970s he met John
Edwards, now his sole heir. It is he who has donated the studio to the Hugh
Lane Gallery. He said the Tate turned it down. The Tate says it was never
offered the studio. Bacon died and was cremated in 1992. His life story has
been made into a film, to be released before the end of the year, in which
Derek Jakobi takes the title role.
And now a slice of Bacon is coming home to a country he
never really cared for, to a city that does not deem him significant enough
to mark his place of birth.
In the art world
it is seen as a major coup but one can't help speculating that if ashes could
spin, that's what Francis Bacon's would be doing.
Love Is the Devil
RICHARD WILLIAMS | FILMS |
THE GUARDIAN | 18
SEPTEMBER 1998 1998
I came out of John Maybury's Love Is the Devil, which is
rather coyly subtitled "Study for a portrait of Francis Bacon",
feeling I'd never seen a film that makes such direct and illuminating
connection with the eye of an artist. On the other hand, I didn't know
Francis Bacon, so I can't tell whether the story Maybury tells us is true, in
the literal sense. That bothers me. But if you want a brilliantly sustained
imagining of how, according to some of the best available evidence, Bacon saw
his world, and how he rendered that vision on to canvas, then Love Is the
Devil is a very remarkable film indeed.
Their first encounter is handled with deft humour. When
Dyer falls through the skylight, an amused and aroused Bacon invites him to
bed. Maybury, best known for his design work on the films of Derek Jarman and
his video clips for the likes of Neneh Cherry, Morrissey and Sinead O'Connor,
gets the narrative off to a good start, and handles the tricky combination of
story and reflection - in other words, the life itself and the life
transmuted into art - with lucidity and a sure sense of cadence.
Adrian Scarborough as the creepy Farson and Karl Johnson as
the pathetic Deakin make a fine pair of stooges, and a witches' chorus is provided
by Tilda Swinton as the foulmouthed Muriel Belcher, Anne Lambton as the
perceptive Isabel Rawsthorne and Annabel Brooks as the cheerily libidinous
Henrietta Moraes. Unwise cameos by the painter Gary Hume and the fashion
journalist Hamish Bowles – as a Moraes conquest and a limp-wristed David
Hockney, respectively – momentarily contradict but cannot do real damage to
the prevailing seriousness of an exceptional film.
Entering an Empire of Pain
KRISTINE
McKENNA | THE LOS ANGELES TIMES | SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11,
1998
A star was born when I, Claudius premiered
on PBS in 1977. A 13-part adaptation of Robert Graves' saga of corruption in
the Roman empire, the BBC series starred British actor Derek Jacobi as a
stuttering, twitching boy who grows up to be emperor. Jacobi was 37 when the
series was shot and was already an acclaimed stage actor in England. He was
virtually unknown to Americans, however, who were thunderstruck by his
exquisitely nuanced performance. It seemed unlikely that Jacobi would ever
get a screen role as meaty as Claudius, so it's not surprising that he's
devoted most of the last two decades to theater, much of it classical. A part
worthy of Jacobi's talent came his way in 1994, however, when a scruffy young
painter named John Maybury offered him the lead in a low-budget film about
Francis Bacon.
Anyone who knows a bit about modern art knows
that this is a lot for an actor to take on. Born in Dublin in 1902 to British
parents, Bacon began painting in the '20s, and by the '40s had developed his
signature style. Imbuing human flesh with the quality of flayed meat, Bacon's
paintings are tormented evocations of loneliness, isolation and the human
capacity for inflicting pain. Regarded as one the most significant artists of
the 20th century, Bacon is credited with bringing the human figure back into
painting at a point when it had been almost totally eclipsed by abstraction.
Alcoholic and a sadomasochist, Bacon had a rather untidy personal life. It
was there, however, that Maybury found the linchpin for his film, Love
Is the Devil, which focuses on Bacon's affair with George Dyer, a petty
criminal who was the subject of some of the flamboyantly homosexual artist's
greatest paintings. The affair ended in 1971 with Dyer's suicide.
Amateurs obviously need not apply for the job
of portraying this complex and brilliant man, but Maybury never dreamed
Jacobi would take it on. 'I assumed he was way too grand for my little movie,
but I sent him the screenplay anyway,' the director says. 'He responded that
it was one of the best screenplays he'd read in years and would love to do
it. Needless to say, I was thrilled.'
Dining on the patio of a West Hollywood
hotel, Jacobi, 59, comes across as elegant and self-effacing to a fault.
Having recently sat enraptured through the entirety of 'I, Claudius,' a
reporter tells him she'd knight him herself if Queen Elizabeth II hadn't
already done it. He threatens to blush. Jacobi's modesty demands that he
change the subject, so he says, 'When I met John, my instinct told me he was
totally on top of his subject. John's a painter himself, so he knew what he
was doing, and he wrote a very literate, intelligently structured script.'
The film is essentially a chronicle of the
disintegration of Dyer, who's played by Daniel Craig in his first major role.
Maybury recalls that 'Daniel was extremely intimidated when he heard that Sir
Derek Jacobi would be playing Bacon - in fact, I had to beg him to take the
part.' 'It's true I was nervous, but thank goodness John persuaded me to do
it,' says Craig, who's currently in Africa shooting Hugh Hudson's I
Dream of Africa with Kim Basinger. 'It's always a danger to meet
your heroes, but Derek was fantastic. He threw himself into it completely and
was an absolute sweetheart.'
Having lined up his cast, Maybury then had to
contend with some self-appointed keepers of Bacon's flame who were determined
to derail the film. 'The most problematic people were those who've made
careers off their connection with Bacon,' says Maybury, whose film went into
development two years after Bacon's death in 1992. 'John Edwards [Bacon's
sole heir] gave his full support, but the Marlborough Gallery [the former
executors of Bacon's estate] forbade us to show any of his paintings. Edwards
eventually took the estate out of Marlborough's hands because they were being
destructive on several fronts. [Critic] David Sylvester also said that if I
used one word from some interviews he'd done with Bacon that he'd sue me off
the planet.'
These constraints were matched by constraints
Maybury imposed on himself. 'There was no point in doing a bio-pic because
there are documentaries on Bacon,' he says. 'Nor did I want to make a dodgy
film about painting. I focused on the relationship with Dyer because the
paintings of George are my favourite. George Dyer is like Manet's 'Olympia.'
He's one of the great icons of 20th century art, yet it's as if he never
existed. He has no family I'm aware of, and very little is known about him.'
Maybury was free to take poetic license with his characterization of the
mysterious Dyer, but such was not the case with Bacon. The subject of three
biographies and several documentaries, Bacon was an intensely social man, and
Maybury discovered an endless parade of people who'd crossed paths with the artist
and had an anecdote to tell. 'Bacon was very much on the scene, and I often
saw him at parties and bars,' recalls the 40-year-old director, who was born
in London and attended art school there from 1975-80. 'As a student, I lived
in a squat in Kensington around the corner from his studio, so I'd see him at
the tube station, too. There he'd be, this funny, mad little queen.'
As to how Jacobi and Maybury arrived at their
interpretation of the artist, Maybury says, 'We watched tapes of TV
interviews Bacon had done, and decided Derek shouldn't attempt a pantomimic
impersonation of Bacon. Derek doesn't do Bacon's voice, for instance, which
had a plummy, upper-class sound, and occasionally lapsed into Cockney for
effect. If Derek had attempted to do Bacon's voice, the picture could've
slipped into something comedic. What he did instead was master Bacon's body
language, his funny little gestures and mannerisms.' Jacobi says the
transformation was unsettling. 'Bacon wasn't a looker, so it was a bit
disconcerting how easily I was made to look like him,' he says of the artist,
who brushed his teeth with sink cleanser and colored his hair with boot
polish. 'What concerned me more than how I looked, however, were the scenes
that show Bacon painting. We've all seen bio-pics of painters, and when the
actor picks up a brush and approaches the canvas, the heart sinks because you
know that what you're about to see won't be believable. So, there are only
two scenes where I'm painting, and the canvas is always off screen in those.'
Shot in 6 1/2 weeks for $900,000, Love
Is the Devil looks astonishingly good considering its budget. Lit
with naked lightbulbs - a recurring image in Bacon's work--the film has an
artificial, overtly cinematic look. Images flutter, blur and dissolve into
grotesque distortions. 'A film about a visual artist should be visual, so we
were extravagant with the production design,' Maybury says. 'My production
designer, Alan MacDonald, and I spent a long time looking at Bacon's
paintings, and they told us how the film should look: the claustrophobic,
airless environments, nicotine stains, the skin tones--it's all in the
pictures. 'We restricted the colour palette of the film the way Bacon does in
his paintings, and devised all sorts of visual tricks. Some images are shot
through large chunks of glass, others are shot with a boroscope lens, which
is a scientific tool usually used for studying nature.' Curiously enough, all
this flash converges to create a film with a morbid weight remarkably
evocative of Bacon's art.
'Francis was pessimistic about life, and
often said it was 'nothing but a short period of consciousness between two
blackouts,' ' Jacobi says. 'I agree with him about the blackouts, but not
with his dismissal of life. Life is filled with suffering, but it's also
miraculous and wonderful. He prided himself on his wit, but his wit was
always tinged with the lash, and I wouldn't want to have been a friend of
his,' Jacobi adds. 'I doubt we would've gotten on well because there was an
element of the monster in Francis. That, of course, had its roots in his
horrendous childhood. He was physically, emotionally and mentally abused by
his father, and the only person who gave him any love was his maternal
grandmother.'
Such was not the case for Jacobi, who adored
his parents. 'My father [Alfred Jacobi] left school when he was 14 and
managed a department store, and my mother [Daisy Jacobi] was a secretary
prior to her death in 1980,' Jacobi says. 'Neither of them had any knowledge
of the theater, but they were wonderful people who were totally supportive of
me. I have no idea where my appetite for acting came from because I wasn't an
especially self-confident child, but as far back as I can remember, that's
what I wanted to do.' Making his stage debut at 19 as Hamlet in an English
National Youth Theatre production, Jacobi was awarded a full scholarship to
Cambridge. He made his professional stage debut in 1960 as a member of the
Birmingham Repertory Theatre, where he spent three years. Sir Laurence
Olivier spotted Jacobi playing the lead in a Birmingham production of Henry
VIII, and invited him to join the National Theatre Company, where Olivier
was director.
'It was astounding to get to work with him,'
recalls Jacobi, who was with the National from 1963-71. 'It's an example of
the luck that's dogged my career; this is a profession with 85% unemployment,
so to get to work is luck.' It was through Olivier that Jacobi made his film
debut, in a 1965 adaptation of 'Othello' that was staged by Olivier, who
starred in the film, and directed by Stuart Burge. A few years later came 'I,
Claudius,' and a new chapter of Jacobi's career began. Among those who came
to revere Jacobi while watching I, Claudius was Kenneth
Branagh, who subsequently worked with Jacobi in several plays and three
films, including Branagh's 1989 directorial debut, 'Henry V.'
'Derek has an amazing facility for naturalism
and for lyric poetry,' says Branagh, who's currently in L.A. shooting a
western. 'I saw him on Broadway in the 1984 production of Cyrano de
Bergerac, and I remember thinking at the time, 'This is what great acting
can do--it can transform an entire room.' It really was as if Derek was
unveiling Cyrano's soul.'
Critics have theorized that part of what
makes Jacobi such an effective actor is that he doesn't project a strong
persona off-screen that conflicts with the characters he plays. 'I suppose
it's true,' Jacobi says and sighs, 'but it's only because I simply don't have
the facility to be a celebrity--and it's too late to get it now.' Jacobi
laughs heartily when one comments that it's never too late to sell out. 'No,
I don't think I can sell out because I don't know the script,' he replies. 'I
marvel at actors who go on chat shows - I could never do that because I don't
have the gags. I'd be totally intimidated.' This could prove problematic in
light of the shift Jacobi hopes to make in his work. 'I've spent most of my
career in classical theater and television, but for the last third I'd like
to work in film. That may require compromises of a sort I haven't had to make
thus far, but at the moment I'm prepared to make them.'
Next year, Jacobi can be seen in Up
at the Villa, Philip Haas' adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novella about
a group of people in Florence, Italy, before World War II. 'I play a sort of
Quentin Crisp character,' says Jacobi, who co-stars with Kristin Scott
Thomas, Sean Penn, Jeremy Davies and Anne Bancroft. 'I haven't played many
villains, but that may be my forte in movies,' Jacobi says. So, was Francis
Bacon a villain? 'Francis was a masochist who needed to be hurt sexually, but
on an emotional level he was quite sadistic. He had to know he was destroying
George Dyer. Everyone saw the state George was getting himself into, and
people warned Francis that he was dangerously unstable. A villain? I don't
know about that. But what he inflicted on George was far more destructive
than physical pain.'
Inside an Artist's Mind In a World of Torment
By STEPHEN HOLDEN | FILMS REVIEW
| THE NEW YORK TIMES | OCTOBER 7, 1998
Anyone who subscribes to the sentimental fallacy that great
artists are nicer people than the rest of us (the reasoning goes that because
they supposedly feel more than ordinary mortals, they must be nobler and more
caring) hasn't met many great artists. If anything, the reverse tends to be
true: the obsessive pursuit of an artistic idea more often than not involves
a ruthless tunnel vision that screens out anything that isn't useful to the
work or to the career.
"Love Is the Devil,'' John Maybury's searing portrait
of the English painter Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi) at the height of his fame
in the 1960's, is one of the nastiest and most truthful portraits of the
artist-as-monster ever filmed. Its story of the colossally self-absorbed
painter a self-destructive younger lover, George Dyer (Daniel Craig), begins
when Bacon awakens in his studio one night to discover a burglar on the
premises. Sizing up the thief as an appetizing piece of rough trade, Bacon
makes a proposition: if the robber sheds his clothes and comes to bed with
him, he promises, he can have anything he wants. The next thing you know,
they're a couple.
Bacon craves being totally dominated by other men, but the
most you see of him acting out this fantasy is in an early scene where Bacon
kneels over a bed while George knots a belt around his fist and aims a
lighted cigarette at his bare back. Later in the film, he attends a boxing
match where he watches intensely as one fighter smashes the other in the head,
splattering a jet of blood onto Bacon's ecstatic face.
But the movie also makes clear that the dynamics of
dominance and submission work both ways. Outside the bedroom, Bacon is
relentlessly controlling of his lover, who falls to pieces. Bacon refers dismissively
to George as his ''odd job man,'' and locks him out of the house when he's
entertaining other sexual partners. When George tells Bacon he loves him, the
artist wonders out loud what bad television show those lines came from.
Bacon is similarly high-handed with his circle of friends,
whom the movie portrays as a viperish nest of supercilious hangers-on.
''Champagne for my real friends; real pain for my sham friends,'' Bacon
caustically announces in one of several scenes of nocturnal carousal.
When a young painter who idolizes Bacon begs him to come
see his work, Bacon retorts that the young man's taste in neckties is proof
he couldn't possibly have any talent. In Mr. Jacobi's uncompromising
hard-edged performance, you can feel the cold fury burning behind Bacon's
glare.
What makes ''Love Is the Devil'' more than a disturbingly
rancid love story is John Mathieson's brilliant cinematography, which
saturates the film with Bacon's corrosive artistic vision. Although ''Love Is
the Devil'' doesn't show any of Bacon's work, the look of the entire film
resembles a Bacon painting.
Acidic lighting throws the characters' faces into harsh
relief, often shadowing their eyes and making their flesh appears to crumble.
Certain images become Baconesque diptychs and triptychs through the use of
mirrors. Some scenes are photographed through distorting lenses that stretch
faces into sinister masks that dissolve and decompose. In a recurrent fantasy
image of George, he is a flayed, bloodied figure leaping from a diving board
into the void.
Here and there, the movie stumbles, and you can sense the
budgetary constraints (a trip to the United States is indicated only by a
picture of an American flag in the background). But in presuming to take you
inside the mind and heart of a major artist, confronting the demonic aspect
of the human condition, ''Love Is the Devil,'' which opens today at the Film
Forum, goes as far and as deep as any movie has dared.
LOVE IS THE DEVIL
Written and directed by
John Maybury; director of photography, John Mathieson; music by Ryuichi
Sakamoto; production designer, Alan MacDonald; produced by Chiara Menage;
released by Strand Releasing. At Film Forum, 209 Houston Street, South
Village
Another Look at Bacon
Newfound Canvases Shed More
Light on a Master
By CAROL VOGEL | THE
ARTS | THE NEW YORK TIMES | MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1998
For several weeks, the
basement of Tony Shafrazi's Soho gallery has been transformed into a
makeshift photography studio where scores of high-wattage lights and
large-format cameras mingle with paintings of mostly distorted, screaming
figures.
The paintings are
unmistakably by the hand of Francis Bacon, the Irish-born artist best known
for his macabre, twisted images, according to two leading Bacon experts.
There is Bacon's well-known figure of a pope boxed inside the canvas, crying
out as if trapped in his own anxiety; there is also a triptych of blurred
wrestling figures, half human, half animal, and a brilliantly coloured
landscape that recalls the flat, heavy brush of van Gogh.
The subjects are
familiar; variations on these Bacon paintings hang in the collections of
major museums around the world, and in the last decade some have fetched as
much as $6 million at auction. And the works at Shafrazi's gallery are
considered an important find, although the circumstances of their discovery
are mysterious.
The artist was
thought to have destroyed some of them before his death in 1992. Some were
found rolled up in his cluttered London studio, others at a local framer
where Bacon used to store paintings and supplies.
Their existence
has been a carefully guarded secret for nearly two years. John Eastman, the
lawyer for the Bacon estate, said he did not want to let the world know about
the works until he had a plan for how to handle them.
Many will go on
display on Oct. 31 at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery on Wooster Street.
Besides Shafrazi,
who was recently asked to represent the artist's estate along with the
well-known London gallery Faggionato Fine Arts, only John Edwards, the
artist's friend and sole heir, Eastman and two of the world's leading Bacon
experts have seen the paintings.
Ten are from the
1950's, one is from the 1960's and the rest are from the 1980's and 1990's,
including the triptych of abstracted figures.
David Sylvester,
an English art historian, curator and author of a book of penetrating
interviews with Bacon, who recently saw 11 of the 17 works, said, "Two
are absolute masterpieces, and most of the rest are very interesting."
One of those two is Study After Velázquez, a 1950 image of a screaming
pope set against a gray striped background that resembles a curtain. The
other is Study for Landscape After Van Gogh, from 1957.
Sam Hunter, a
professor emeritus of art history at Princeton University who has written
extensively about Bacon, said he was thunderstruck when he saw some of the
works. "They're very powerful," he added. "I think these works
are a real find."
New Territory For the Dealer
Sylvester said he
believed many of the newly discovered paintings were works the artist
considered unfinished. For that reason, other experts who have not seen the
works question how important they are, believing that some may be paintings
the artist discarded. Bacon was often dissatisfied with his work, and until
the 1960's he routinely destroyed some of his best paintings, Sylvester said.
It seems strange
that they have been revealed only now, six years after Bacon's death.
Stranger still, many experts say, is the choice of Shafrazi as the dealer
handling the estate, instead of the Marlborough Gallery, which had
represented Bacon since 1958.
Edwards is
notoriously reclusive and speaks through Eastman, a Manhattan lawyer whose
clients include Paul McCartney, his brother-in-law; Rosie O'Donnell and Billy
Joel. Eastman also represents the estate of the painter Willem de Kooning.
"Eighteen
months ago, these works were uncovered and sent to Marlborough, who
immediately turned them over to John Edwards," Eastman said. Since then,
the lawyer has taken charge of putting things in order. In August, the estate
gave the contents of Bacon's London studio, in a mews house in South
Kensington, to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, where
the studio is to be recreated and opened to the public in 2001.
Shafrazi became
the estate's dealer at the request of Edwards, Eastman said. The two first
met in 1970, and both were friends of Robert Fraser, a London dealer, who
died in the late 1980's.
Among
contemporary art experts, both the choice of Shafrazi and the reason
Marlborough lost the estate and the artist are a source of curiosity and
speculation. No one close to the estate was willing to speak for attribution.
Officials at the Marlborough Gallery have little to say.
A spokeswoman in
New York said, "Marlborough's association with Francis Bacon came to an
end with his death." She added, "Marlborough International has the
largest stock of top-quality paintings by Bacon in private hands, which they
acquired directly from the artist during his lifetime." The directors of
Marlborough's New York and London galleries would not comment further.
Eastman also declined to discuss the change of galleries.
Shafrazi, born in
Iran, wanted to be an artist and studied at the Royal College of Art in
London before coming to New York in 1969. In the 1970's, he helped Cameron
Diba, the director of the Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art, put together
its vast collection. In 1974, he became notorious as the artist who walked
into the Museum of Modern Art and spray-painted the words "Kill Lies All"
across Picasso's "Guernica." He was charged with criminal mischief.
In 1979, Shafrazi opened his first gallery, and within a few years he had
made his reputation handling talents like Donald Baechler and then-hot
graffiti artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf.
"Last night
I stayed up until 4 in the morning poring over pictures," Shafrazi said
recently, gazing at the lineup of Bacons on his basement walls. He also has
boxes of carefully preserved and documented photographs from Bacon's studio,
which have become a source of information about the paintings. "Every
day I discover new things," he said. "So much of this is uncharted
territory."
Mystery, Myth and Monetary Value
Shafrazi said he
was not sure how many works he would show until he actually began installing
the exhibition. But among the most important will be two 1950's studies after
Velázquez. One is the image Sylvester calls a masterpiece; the other shows a
screaming man sitting with his legs crossed, an outline of his foot drawn as
if it were kicking out of the canvas, perhaps the artist's metaphor for the
soul.
Also on view will
be the Landscape After Van Gogh, as well as Two Figures in the
Grass, also from 1950, a frenetic painting of crouching figures contained in
a box-like configuration, a well-known spatial device in Bacon's work. As in
the studies after Velázquez, the foreground has long streaks of paint like a
curtain. A white arrow points toward an unrecognizable head. Arrows and
circles - devices the artist used to lead the eye - keep cropping up as
Shafrazi studies the paintings. "The longer you look at these, the more
you see," he said.
A tattered cover
of an old magazine that features Ayrton Senna, the Brazilian race car driver,
haunted Shafrazi, who recognized Senna's face in the last figure of Bacon's
1991 triptych.
"Bacon was
one of the first artists who acknowledged the cinema and photography,"
he said. "As early as 1949, he was looking at the world through
magazines. The next artist to do that was Warhol."
Like Warhol,
Bacon was surrounded by mystery and myth. He had a dark view of life. (One of
his best-known sayings was "You can't be more horrific than life
itself.") This view was reflected in his sharp wit and the twisted figures
he depicted on canvas. Stories and speculation about Bacon's work - how much
of it he destroyed, what remains that hasn't already been snapped up by a
museum or major collector - and sordid tales about his private life have
continued since his death.
A new
film, Love Is the Devil, starring the English actor Derek Jacobi as
Bacon, has stirred up more interest, although it deals little with art and
more with Bacon's penchant for masochistic homosexual relationships, drinking
and violence.
As is generally
the case with artists' estates, no one will say precisely how much art is
left, both in the estate and in Marlborough's stock, for fear of devaluing
the work. But people close to Bacon's affairs estimate that Edwards inherited
art worth $100 million. These values vary depending on where the artist's
work is on offer.
Though long
heralded in Europe as one of the greatest postwar artists, Bacon has never
been so popular in America, despite several major exhibitions here. Two years
before his death, a retrospective of his work opened at the Hirshhorn Museum
in Washington, then traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and to
the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In January,
another retrospective, with 74 works, organized by the Trust for Museum
Exhibitions in Washington, is to open at the British Center for Art in New
Haven. It is to travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the California
Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Modern Art Museum of
Fort Worth.
Shafrazi and
Eastman see their job as giving Bacon more exposure in the United States.
"This is an
estate post-taxes, so it's not a matter of creating a market to raise
money," Eastman said. As a result, few of the works in Shafrazi's show
are for sale. Rather, both dealer and lawyer see the exhibition as public
relations. "It's about showing the public what we've discovered,"
Eastman said. "And about creating an aura."
Portrait of the artist as a cruel man
By JAN STUART | FILM | ARTS & MEDIA |
THE
ADVOCATE | OCTOBER 13, 1998
Those of
us who cannot afford to buy art take endless pleasure in entertainments that
portray artists as unworthy of the money we can't give them. From Lust for
Life to I Shot Andy Warhol, artists are shown as emotional adolescents who
create their own rules - mopey, mercurial, obsessive, enamoured of the
brawling hoi polloi, and noncommittal in affairs of the heart. "Artists
are bizarre, fixed, cold," sang Seurat's lover Dot in Sunday in the Park
With George. And And that was a compliment.
If she
pined after Francis Bacon instead, she might have downgraded the
"cold" to "cruel." This is a man who, upon finding his
lover unconscious on the floor, coolly checks the fellow's breath with a
compact mirror and then flops in a chair to begin the tedious wait for him to
stir. This is a man who watches his lover toss in the agony of a nightmare
rather than wake him up.
John
Maybury's Love Is the Devil is a nihilist's wet dream, a portrait
of the artist as an aging man without a redemptive bone in his body. As
played with poisoned fangs by Derek Jacobi, Bacon is a prince of darkness who
has constructed an inverted world in which, as one friend says, "no good
deed goes unpunished." A public sadist and a bedroom masochist, Bacon
shudders with orgasmic pleasure at the taste of a boxer's blood on his face
or the tragic spectacle of the Odessa Steps massacre in The Battleship
Potemkin.
Love Is
the Devil zeroes in on Bacon's destructive relationship with George Dyer, a
hunky, unsophisticated thief with whom Bacon traded a home and hefty
allowances for modeling rights and kinky sex. (For a change, the artist's
muse is not of the opposite sex, a convention of the genre that even gay
writer Christopher Hampton couldn't resist in Carrington.) Dyer (a
devastating Daniel Craig) is a rough-hewn angel doomed from the moment he
falls, quite literally, from the skies and into Bacon's life.
"Welcome
to the concentration of camp? says Bacon as he introduces his new boyfriend
into his vipers' nest of drinking buddies, and the Nazi resonance is
altogether apt. Bacon and his grotesque circle annihilate everyone around
them as well as each other: They are grown-up versions of the little monsters
who disemboweled cats in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.
This "twilight world of unhappy poofs" perfectly embodies the
spirit of horror-equals-pleasure that informed Bacon's aesthetic.
Maybury
was denied access to the paintings by the artist's estate, a lucky
happenstance as it resulted in a stunning deployment of slow-motion,
fisheye-lens, and fun-house-mirror effects to re-create the disturbing mood
of Bacon's canvases. The result is perhaps the most sensual evocation of an
artist's milieu since John Huston's dazzling nightlife tableaux for the
opening of Moulin Rouge.
But
Maybury's trendily impressionistic structure of short, time-hopping scenes
(the film is subtitled Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon) is thin
camouflage for the film's basic cliché. For all its visual elan, this is
yet one more take on the heartless artist and his neglected muse. As it bangs
home the ironic contrast between the public acclaim and the private tortures,
Maybury's film eventually collapses under the weight of its redundancy. I'd
trade all of Love Is the Devil's gorgeous cruelties for a single shot of
Bacon trapped in the purgatory of a supermarket checkout line, waiting for
the manager to bring the override key.
Stuart
is theater critic and senior film writer for Newsday.
For services to hedonism
Clancy Gebler Davies | Associated
Newspapers | 22 October
1998
The Colony Room Club, Soho's infamous watering hole for
artists of all descriptions, is marking its half-century with a suitably
bizarre exhibition - including this bronze head, which contains the ashes of
its model.
At 50 years old the Colony Room Club has survived longer
than many of its members - but then membership of this Soho drinking den was
never the sort of thing you'd want to own up to on life insurance forms. So
it's a relief for those of us sick of hearing that Soho isn't what it used to
be to find the Colony in surprisingly good shape after all those years of
serious service to hedonism.
It is marking its birthday vigorously by putting on an
anniversary art exhibition with work from members such as Damien Hirst and
Justin Mortimer who weren't yet born when it opened. This is both a
celebration of the club's remarkable longevity and a follow-up to the 1982
Michael Parkin exhibition which showed works by members Francis Bacon, Lucian
Freud, Frank Auerbach and Eduardo Paolozzi. Club proprietor Michael Wojas
hopes it will show just how wrong the infamous late Soho drinker and diarist
Jeffrey Bernard was in 1996 when he said that "hardly anyone worthwhile
goes to the Club any more".
By that time Bernard was wheelchair-bound and could no
longer ascend the well-hidden, rickety stairs to the small first floor room
in Dean Street - barnacled with paintings, photographs and dubious
"objets d'art" (like the perished mink-tail-t r i m m e d jockstrap
and the foot-long phallic candle behind the bar) - where such industrial
quantities of alcohol are consumed by such a motley collection of drinkers
masquerading as writers, painters and ne'er-dowells that it seems astonishing
that anyone ever gets anything done.
But the Colony Room has always been as rich in artists as
it has been in piss-artists - some combining both roles - since founder
Muriel Belcher paid Francis Bacon £10 a week and free drink to procure rich
customers for her new club back in 1948 - an era immortalised in member John
Maybury's recent film starring Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon, Love is the
Devil.
Now Francis is dead and Lucian Freud prefers to prowl
pastures new, but a new generation has joined the Colony to be seen happily
propping up the bar and falling down the stairs. It has become a
watering-hole of BritArt stars such as Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin
and Daniel Chadwick as well as the older guard including Barry Flanagan,
Patrick Caulfield, David Remfry, Chris Battye, Nic Tucker and others, many of
whom have drunk there for years and whose work adorns what you can see of the
bilious green walls - and all of whom are in the show.
For Damien Hirst the Colony was a revelation - literally
so. "There's no sign of it from the street, and I was amazed it was
there. I loved it as soon as I walked into the room. I felt at home. It was
fantastic. Artists like it so much simply because artists like
drinking."
By the
time Hirst pitched up the stairs, Ian Board, famously ferocious and
foul-mouthed, had taken over from Muriel. "I think I was too drunk to be
frightened," says Damien, "but meeting Ian for the first time was
pretty terrifying - and also pretty amusing as long as you weren't on the
receiving end."
But the Colony Room has always had a reputation for
nurturing its artist members, as a haven for those either drowning their
sorrows or celebrating some triumph, and the mantelpiece always sports a row
of invitations to members' private views. Hirst liked it so much that he
chose to film his inter-view for his first Turner Prize nomination at the
club, a move which, according to Michael Wojas, the club's barman before he
took over on Ian Board's death in 1994, the artist blames for losing him the
prize that year (he got it in 1995).
"Damien had been up at the Colony getting very pissed
the evening before," recalls Michael, who is nursing a port and a
hangover, "and he seemed rather fragile during the filming next
lunchtime. He had to start talking about his work and Ian listened for a bit
and then said, 'Actually, it's a load of bollocks, isn't it?', which was
broadcast on the Channel 4 show about the Turner.
"That would have been quite good now," thinks
Michael, "but at the time it was a bit much. Damien was very shaky. I
had to keep feeding him large whiskies."
Since then Michael and Damien have become firm friends and
Damien's son Conor is the youngest person ever (at eight days) to have
visited the seamy Dean Street den, being granted honorary membership to mark
the occasion.
Damien has also added one of his spot paintings to the
club's rather eccentric art collection. At first Michael covered it in
clingfilm to protect it from the dense fug of fag smoke, but now it is clad
in bubblewrap, which Michael says "makes it look more interesting".
But instead of just putting that in the show (with or without the bubblewrap)
Damien decided to create a new piece, one he feels complements the club's
"living-room" feel.
"I went out with Damien on a little drinks binge to
various places," explains Michael, "finally got the chance to talk
to him about the show, and at about six in the morning he came up with the
idea of three flying ducks in formaldehyde. We both went, 'Yes, yes, that's
it!' and when I asked him if it was possible he said, 'Don't be silly, it's
done. I've had the idea, it's just a phone call now.'"
Called Up, Up and Away, the ducks weigh half a ton each in
their glass cases - and would probably demolish the club if anyone tried to
show them there.
Perhaps the secret of the Colony's success and longevity is
that it has always been a mixture of the famous, the infamous and - by far
the largest group -those who couldn't give a damn. Princess Margaret has
popped in, columnist Taki got thrown out and David Bowie is the only person
to have survived asking for a cup of tea (not that he got it).
"In the old days Lucian Freud and Lord and Lady Muck
would be mixing with Brian the Burglar and barrow boys from Berwick Street
Market," says Michael, "and Francis Bacon and Dan Farson were
particularly fond of them. The club is just too small not to mix and I've
reflected that by using the hot-shots of the day with people who have been
members of the Colony for quite a few years but aren't so well known."
Damien is not the only one to have made a special place for
this show - so have Marc Quinn, Danny Chadwick, Brian Chalkey, Kathy Dalwood
and Catherine Shakespeare Lane. Kathy has made special anniversary club
ashtrays (her father Hubert made the last lot) which Michael Wojas dare not
put on the bar as they cost a fortune to cast, and Catherine's photo-montage
triptych uses the infamous snatched photograph of Francis Bacon's body on a
mortuary slab which will, no doubt, upset as many people as it is intended
to.
Lisa Stansfield, the Rochdale-born chanteuse and Colony
Room regular, has also contributed a piece designed to ruffle a few feathers.
On a small square canvas painted in the trademark murky green paint which
covers every surface of the club (and which Michael Wojas had the temerity to
lighten one shade when he redecorated last year), Lisa scratched a
four-letter word beginning with 'w' and proudly presented it to the Colony a
few years ago. "I think it was Lisa's comment on the contemporary art
scene at the time," says Michael.
The singer was one of many with the coveted round, green
invitation to the private view at which an enormous quantity of Absolut
disappeared and which turned out to be one of the biggest Soho events in
years - even though it was held in Clerkenwell.
She was there, tears rolling down her cheeks, with Michael
Wojas, most of the artists in the show and many club members to witness the
laying to rest of her friend Ian Board's ashes. They were taken from their
temporary home in a Sake jar above the club's till and poured by artist Kate
Braine into the head which she had sculpted of this irascible,
raspberry-nosed demon before it was sealed and returned to the club, a move
contrary to Board's last wishes.
"He wanted me to chuck his ashes out over Dean Street
or roll them up and smoke them in a joint," explains Michael. "If
I'd chucked them out the window they would have gone into just one person's
plate of spaghetti, so I phoned the club's solicitor and asked if there were
any laws or by-laws about scattering human remains on a public highway.
"I thought I'd tip them through the club's air
extractor, but the solicitor said I could only do it if I didn't tell anyone
and Ian would have hated that, but I think he would have approved of
this."
He
surely would have. It was the end of an era - and the beginning of a new one.
LOVE
IS THE DEVIL
By ROGER EBERT | REVIEWS |
THE CHICAGO SUN TIMES | NOVEMBER 20, 1998
I knew that the pI knew that painters Francis Bacon and
Lucien Freud, the writer Jeffrey Bernard, the disgraced Vogue photographer
John Deakin and Farson himself had frequented the club, along with such
celebrity visitors as Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris. In a time when the
London pubs closed in the afternoons and again at 11 p.m., it was a place
where you could get a drink pretty much whenever you waned one.
I didn't climb the stairs. I felt too acutely that I didn't
belong. I was not and never would be a member. No matter all the books I'd
read, all the things I thought I knew about the Colony Club, I would be seen
as a tourist, a foolish grin on my face. That was something I could not
abide. I stood on the street and looked upstairs, and walked on.
"Love Is the Devil," the new film by John
Maybury, takes me at last up those stairs, and
back in time to the decades when Francis Bacon presided over a scruffy
roomful of bohemians--some rich, some poor, some gay, some straight, all
drunks. The movie is loosely inspired by Farson's The Gilded Gutter Life of
Francis Bacon, which documents the life of the greatest modern English
painter as a dour and bitter ordeal, the bitchiness relieved intermittently
by a good vintage and the Dover sole at Wheeler's. (Bacon liked a crowd at
lunch and didn't mind picking up the check.
To look at a Francis Bacon
painting is to get a good idea of the man who painted it. In the era of
Abstract Expressionism, he defiantly painted the figure, because he wanted
there to be no mistake: His subject was the human body seen in anguish and
ugliness. Flesh clung to the bones of his is models like dough slapped on by
a careless god. His faces were often distorted into grimaces of pain or
despair. His subjects looked like mutations, their flesh melting from
radiation or self-loathing. His color sense was uncanny, his draftsmanship
was powerful and unmistakable, his art gave an overwhelming sense of the
artist.
There are no paintings by Francis Bacon in "Love Is
the Devil." Permission was refused by the estate. What are they waiting
for, a film that shows him as a nice guy? It is an advantage to the movie,
actually, to do without the actual work; Maybury doesn't have to photograph
it devoutly, and the flow of the film is not interrupted by our awareness
that we are looking at the real thing. Instead, Maybury and his
cinematographer, John Mathieson, make the film itself look like a Bacon. They
use filters and lenses to distort faces. They shoot reflections in beer mugs
and ashtrays to elongate and stretch images. They use reflections to suggest
his diptychs and triptychs. A viewer who has never seen a Bacon would be able
to leave this film and identify one instantly in a gallery.
Bacon is played by Derek Jacobi (Claudius in Kenneth
Branagh's "Hamlet") as a cold and emotionally careless man, a
ginger-haired chipmunk who occupies a studio filled with the debris of his
art. (He worked from photographs that fell to the floor and built up into a
mulch beneath his feet.) One night while he is sleeping, a burglar breaks in
through the skylight. The paintings inside are worth millions, but this
burglar, named George Dyer (Daniel Craig), knows nothing of Bacon or his
paintings. He's looking for pawnable loot. Bacon awakens and makes him a
deal: "Take your clothes off and come to bed. Then you can have whatever
you want."
He stays on as Bacon's lover. Bacon is a masochist in
private, a sadist in public; at first he is touched by George's naïveté
("You actually make money out of painting?") but eventually he
tires of him. George is neurotic, always obsessively scrubbing his nails, and
when he threatens suicide, Bacon leaps to the attack, referring to "the
beam in the studio screaming to have a rope thrown over it."
Whether "Love Is the Devil" is an accurate
portrait of Bacon, I have no idea. It faithfully reflects the painter as he
is described in Farson's book, which is cited as a source for the movie. No
one who has seen a Bacon painting expects a portrait much different from this
one. From glimpses of the same Soho haunts in books by the late, celebrated
drunk Jeffrey Bernard (whose weekly column in the Spectator was described as
the world's longest-running suicide note), I recognized Belcher and Board and
all the others who used the Colony Room as a refuge from an outer world in
which they were always two or three drinks behind.
The
vindication of Bacon's Canadian
Handyman's
hoard of harsh and lurid sketches finally accepted as the work of late
British artist Francis Bacon.
JOHN
HARLOW | THE TORONTO STAR | NOVEMBER
22, 1998
The
lost works of London artist Francis Bacon, kept by his Canadian handyman, are
to be restored to their rightful place in the painter's oeuvre.
The "Joule
hoard", 500 sketches and drawings disowned by Bacon experts since the
artist's death six years ago, have been accepted as genuine by his heir.
As
recently as six months ago, the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) in
London scrapped plans to become the first British gallery to show the
sketches because it suffered last-minute doubts about their authenticity.
Bacon used the sketches as tryouts for greater works such as the Screaming
Popes series.
Many
other galleries, including the Tate in London, also shunned the revelatory
collection, bowing to the influence of the leading expert on Bacon, art
historian David Sylvester, who maintained that the Soho artist never needed
such sketches.
It
has taken a specialist magazine, Art Review, to change all that with
plans to publish hitherto-unseen pictures from the collection this week. This
has prompted lawyers acting for the Bacon estate to stake a copyright claim
to the pictures and thus acknowledge their authenticity.
The lurid and harsh sketches are held in a bank by Barry
Joule, a Canadian who lives in London and France and was Bacon's plumber and
general handyman for many years.
He
claimed that Bacon gave them to him shortly before his death, saying:
"You know what to do with these'' - Bacon's code for a gift. Joule said
Bacon asked him to destroy many other sketches because, like Picasso, he did
not want the outside world to know how he worked.
Joule
offered to donate the entire collection to a Bacon museum that fans wanted to
create in the artist's mews studio-flat in the Kensington section of London.
That
offer has lapsed with the wholesale removal of the flat to a museum in
Dublin, where Bacon was born.
Even
with an uncertain background, dealers were willing to pay up to $4 million
for the sketches, which are largely contained in a diary given to Bacon by
his nanny in the 1940s. Now the value will increase, but Joule said he did
not want to profit from them: "I merely want them recognized as part of
Francis' work, which the estate appears to be finally doing.'''
John
Butcher, London spokesperson for the estate, said that John Edwards, Bacon's
sole heir and last lover, did not necessarily accept Joule's title to the
works, which may have to be determined by a court.
"We
have not yet seen the works held by Mr. Joule, but at the moment we are
accepting that they are probably by Francis Bacon,'' he said last week. David
Lee, editor of Art Review, said this was a significant breakthrough for
the estate, which has become more active in protecting Bacon's legacy since
it replaced the Marlborough Galleries in London with an aggressive New York
dealer.
"We
are not getting involved in the question of who owns these works, but we
think they have been hidden away long enough and will fascinate anyone
interested in one of the most important British artists of the century,'' Lee
said last week.
The
scene is set for a long legal battle between Joule and the notoriously
reclusive Edwards, who is represented in New York by John Eastman, a
Manhattan lawyer whose clients include his brother-in-law, Sir Paul
McCartney, singer Billy Joel and talk show host, Rosie O'Donnell.
Anguished
Existential Cries That Rattle Scared Icons
By
GRACE GLUECK | ART REVIEW | THE NEW
YORK TIMES | FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1998
In Velázquez's 1650 painting of Pope Innocent
X, the worldly pontiff sits calmly in his regal chair, radiating confidence
and power. Three hundred years later, as portrayed by Francis Bacon in “Study
After Velazquez” (1950), Innocent X is a frantic
figure in his surplice and biretta, trapped behind a drab gray curtain that
hangs in stiffened folds. A helpless prisoner, his mouth is open in a
horrifying scream. Bacon's forceful, iconoclastic appropriation makes the Pope
a victim, no longer the supreme interpreter of God to man but a symbol of
existential anguish, caught up in the era's cataclysmic events.
Obsessed with what
he considered one of the greatest portraits ever made, Bacon
(1909-1992) did about 30 versions of Velázquez's “Innocent,”
dragging him headlong into the terrible 20th century. “Study
After Velazquez” and a companion canvas, “After Velazquez II” (also from 1950), are recently
found paintings from the series, long thought to have been destroyed by the
artist. They are the centerpiece of “Francis Bacon: Important Paintings From
the Estate” at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. The two,
never before exhibited, are from a planned group of three canvases, the third
of which is unaccounted for.
In the second painting, the
howling Pope has become a businessman in a dark suit, one leg crossed over
the other, slightly obscured by a boxy curtain of red stripes. At the bottom
is a diagrammatic cage, as in Bacon's earlier Pope study, that separates the
Pope from the viewer while at the same time inviting entry. Bacon derived the
open mouth from such images as the shrieking, wounded nursemaid in
Eisenstein's 1925 film “The
Battleship Potemkin, and the primal scream of a mother torn from her child in
Poussin's “Massacre
of the Innocents” (1630-31),
described by Bacon as “probably the best human cry in painting.” And possibly he drew from the terrified,
whinnying horse in Picasso's “Guernica” (1937).
Although presumed lost, nearly 50 years later the two pope paintings turned
up in the warehouse of an artists' supplier in London, where Bacon had
sent them along with other paintings to have new canvas stretched on their
frames. Whether he had given orders to destroy the originals or not, the
supplier had saved and stored them. The discovery coincided with the transfer
of the Bacon estate, long handled by the Marlborough Gallery in London, to
the Shafrazi gallery, a shift that this show celebrates.
The rediscovered “Innocent”
paintings are the standouts of the exhibition, which includes a dozen other
works dating from 1949, the year of Bacon's first one-man show, to 1991. The
popes and other angst-ridden canvases of the 1950's, depicting morphed and
creepily contorted grotesques that seem to comment on the despair of the war
years and after, are the most compelling.
In “Crouching Nude on Rail” (1952), a hunk of human flesh
hangs like a side of meat between two curving steel supports, its ghostly
head bowed, its arms almost joined to the rails. The pallid pink of the flesh
is tempered by gray; the vague background of vertical lines that splay out in
diagonals at the bottom of the picture is similar to that of the pope
paintings. The image was derived from a figure in a photographic motion study
by Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904). But there is something Beckett-like in
Bacon's rendition. It seems to speak of both the end and the tenacity of
human hope.
“Two Figures in the Grass” (1950-53)
depicts a pair of struggling nudes, again confined by a sketchy cage, on a
ground of slashing blue-green brush strokes. The dun-colored figures are
ambiguous, amorphous and hard to read; are they fighting, making love or
devouring each other? They were inspired by Muybridge's photographs of
wrestlers and by trips Bacon made to Africa, where he saw animals in the
wild. One could infer that they, too, have to do with the negative view of
humanity that pervaded the postwar period. But if they evoke the disasters of
war and oppression, they also reflect a rebellion against the legacy of
Western art that saw the human figure in ideal terms. Bacon, of a classical
bent but influenced by Picasso and Surrealism, liked the shock factor of
attacking traditional icons.
A rare shift from his
preoccupation with the figure is “Study
for Landscape after Van Gogh” (1957),
a highly charged canvas that shows three bare (and, come to think of it,
humanoid) trees in a field of tall, windswept grasses. The intensity of van
Gogh's emotional renderings is conveyed by urgent, diagonal brush strokes and
a complex color orchestration: blue-green, whites and yellows for the
grasses, with touches of berry red, on an ocher field. Behind the stark,
severely pruned trees lies a long, low line of bushes topped by a sky of
exhilarating blue. To match passions with van Gogh is a challenge indeed; in
his chutzpah Bacon rises to it.
The most recent work in the show is the cinema-screen-size “Triptych” (1991),
painted in the smoother, more relaxed but harder-edged style that is the
hallmark of Bacon's later paintings. The triptychs exploit his interest in
serial imagery and also suggest mock altarpieces. Each panel of this one
combines a stark Minimalist format with lush figure drawing. In each, a
big black square is placed at the top of a blank tan field. In the two end
panels, a smaller square within the black one bears the likeness of a head
painted from a photograph; at left, the sexy Brazilian race-car driver Ayrton
Senna; at right Bacon.
Each photographic head sits
on the bottom half of a male nude, one leg within and one outside the black
square. In the middle panel lies a crumpled nude figure, part of it hanging
out of the square in a pool of black, a reprise of an image Bacon had used
before in referring to the suicide, in 1971, of his friend and model George
Dyer. As a whole, the triptych is a beautiful example of a personal script
staged with clever stylization. But for all its ingenuity, it lacks the
impassioned tension of Bacon's earlier works.
An estate show is not a retrospective, although this one gives a robust look
at the basics of Bacon's work. It's surprising how, after all these
iconoclastic years, his paintings no longer seem such a distance from the
classic figurative tradition of Western art.
Francis Bacon:
Important Paintings From the Estate is at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 119
Wooster Street, SoHo, through Jan. 16.
A
Convulsive Beauty That Defies the Laws Of the Natural World
By
JOHN RUSSELL | ART REVIEW | THE NEW YORK TIMES | 25 DECEMBER 1998
The year 1998 in the
galleries could not have ended better than with the small, provocative and
hugely rewarding mixed exhibition at Cheim & Read. Organized and
commented upon by Jean Clair, the director of the Picasso Museum in Paris,
the show is strong on sheer astonishment. It has no one focus, but darts back
and forth through the history of ideas.
In that context, Mr. Clair has a prodigious agility. Who
else would have spotted the affinity between Homer's Penelope at her loom and
an artist of our own day, Louise Bourgeois, ''weaver, mender, spinner and,
from the outset, a person raised in the art of high and low warp''?
This is
how it stacks up. On the left, as we come in, a long line of busts of men and
women stands high above us. They were sculpted in lead by Franz Xaver
Messerschmidt (1736-83), an Austrian sculptor of the Baroque period. Normally
to be sought out above all in the museum in Bratislava, capital of Slovakia,
they have never before been seen in such numbers in this country.
Sweet and silky as the modeling of these busts may be, every one
subverts our expectations. These are people who are at odds with themselves
and with life. By convulsive sneezing, yawning, weeping, grinding their teeth
and emphasizing their disquiets, they eat away at our own self-satisfactions.
''Our pain,'' they seem to say, ''will one day be yours."
It is a fact of life, though one often passed over quickly, that
pictures that travel a lot get tired. So this show is all the stronger for
the loan from a private collector of an early painting by Francis Bacon that
has rarely been seen.
It is a variant, raised to a new dimension of terror, of the figure
on the right in the ''Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion'' (1944) in the Tate Gallery in London. This picture has never
been subjected to the enormous familiarity of the Tate ''Studies.'' It has
not been gaped at, year by year. It has not been reproduced, large and small.
Still less has it been shunted from country to country. For that reason this
is one of the rare occasions on which a new public can recapture the original
shock of the Tate ''Studies.'' And we can even guess, this time around, what
the hideous creature is having for lunch.
These works have not been chosen at random. Somewhere in time
between Messerschmidt and Bacon, there was incorporated into the
possibilities of art what Mr. Clair calls in the catalogue ''a tremendous
repertory, a warehouse filled with the new models of the contemporary
world.'' He continues, ''Once assembled and deciphered, they would become
what the statues of antiquity had been to academic teaching: the foundation
of a new science, a science not of the beautiful but of the true."
That repertory came to a certain extent from learned or
pseudo-learned theoretical studies. But it came above all from the medical
museums that were created at the end of the 19th century in Paris, Turin and
elsewhere. Doctors, psychiatrists and neurologists felt it their duty to put
on view the heterogeneous masses of material that had come their way. What
had been produced by men and women locked up in asylums and prisons often
seemed to justify the Surrealist war cry that ''beauty will be convulsive, or
it will cease to be."
The pre-eminence of hysteria was a matter not of dogma but of
universal evidence. The neurologist Jean Martin Charcot published an
elaborate iconography, complete with photoengravings, that was widely bought
and read. Freud's ''Studies on Hysteria'' (1895) got in early. There was the
literature. There was also the terrifying evidence of individual cases.
As Mr. Clair puts it in the catalogue: ''What bodily pattern
commands the hysterical individual when he transgresses the laws of anatomy?
For hysteria does indeed defy these laws.'' He continues: ''The living
organism displays a stupefying plasticity. The deformations and distortions,
the incredible combinations to which modern art has accustomed us, cannot but
reflect this revolution of the mind."
These sensational effects do not occur in good order, or at any
appointed time. But there are artists who can maintain these transgressions
at a high level of intensity. One of these is Ms. Bourgeois, whose ''Arch of
Hysteria'' (1993) is one of the great exemplars of its kind. It looks very
well in the present exhibition. In it, as Mr. Clair says, ''the living
organism displays a stupefying plasticity.'' Another, more recent piece,
''Cell: Hands and Mirror'' of 1995 displays Ms. Bourgeois at the top of her
powers as a wordless, motionless dramatist whose work stays with us in the
way that the last scene in great theater does.
Despite its title, this is not ''a Bourgeois show.'' It is an
exploration of the ''libertarian dynamics'' that have dominated so much of
20th-century art. Bizarre objects of many kind abound, but they share a
certain collegial liberty. And we come away convinced that in this particular
field Bourgeois is still the great artificer.
'Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt: A
Juxtaposition of the Three Artists'' remains at Cheim & Read, 521 West
23d Street, Chelsea, through Jan. 9 (closed today through Tuesday).
THE
SUPREME PONTIFF
IMPORTANT PAINTINGS FROM THE ESTATE
DAVID
SYLVESTER | TONY SHAFRAZI GALLERY | NEW YORK | 31
OCTOBER 1998-16 JANUARY 1999
Francis
Bacon’s first painting of a pope was Head VI of 1949, a head‑and‑shoulders
image which already presented the inspired conflation between the Velázquez
portrait of Pope Innocent X and the close‑up of the nanny shrieking
from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. While that
conflation was often repeated, not all Bacon’s popes have open mouths, nor
are these necessarily shrieking. There are times when the open mouth looks as
if it is silent, is the mouth of an asthmatic trying to take in air or that
of an animal in a threatening or defiant pose.
Furthermore,
not all Bacon’s popes are based on the portrait of Innocent X, though most of
them are. He had a tremendous drive to make variation after variation on this
image. Velázquez was his preferred painter and this particular portrait could
have been expected to have an especial appeal to him in that the paint is
freer and looser and the whites more flickering than in any other Velázquez,
almost as in a Gainsborough. But Bacon never in fact saw the work in the
original, not even when he spent some weeks in Rome in 1954; he knew it only
in reproduction, and reproductions convey no hint of its freedom of handling.
Was Bacon, then, drawn to this particular Velázquez by its
subject? The Pope is Papa and Bacon had very strong feelings about his
father. ‘I disliked him, but I was sexually attracted to him when I was
young. When I first sensed it, I hardly knew it was sexual. It was only
later, through the grooms and the people in the stables I had affairs with,
that I realized that it was a sexual thing towards my father.’ Painting popes
in their isolation could well have been, among other things, a way of
bringing back his father, of spying on him, of demolishing him. Bacon
believed or said merely that the Velázquez Pope was ‘one of the greatest
portraits that have ever been made’ and that he was obsessed by it because of
‘the magnificent color of it.’ But in the forties and fifties he toned down
the magnificent scarlet to a muted purple. It was not until the sixties that
he was able to bring himself to match the scarlet.
Of
all the innumerable popes, the greatest, it seems to me, were painted at the
beginning—Head VI and then the earliest of the versions in which the
Pope is shown seated, Study after Velázquez, 1950. Behind the Pontiff is
a heavy curtain with deep parallel folds; a second curtain, attached to a curved
rail, is spread out across the foreground. This curtain, of course, alters
the composition radically. The Velázquez is a seated three-quarter length
portrait, cut off at the knees, and therefore still a medium close‑up.
This Bacon Pope is cut off just above the knees, but then the foreground
curtaining intervenes and, animated by the thrust of its radiating folds,
pushes us back and creates a gap like an orchestra pit between audience and
scene. We are made to keep our distance.
The figure is at once monumental and evanescent. Its
majestic composure is frayed at the edges by a flicker that could mean both
an emanation of its own nervous energy and a bombardment by pressures in the
atmosphere. The mouth is immense in power and anguish. As we zoom in, it
threatens to engulf us, to swallow us up. This is a mouth that is breathing
in, or trying to. It is uttering no sort of cry. It is open and silent.
Magnificent and
vulnerable, this personage has the withdrawn look of many Velázquez
portraits, for instance, of the late head‑and‑shoulders of Philip
IV in the National Gallery, London—and not only the withdrawn look but the
elongated Bourbon features. Velázquez is also there in the beautiful dryness
of the paint. For me, this picture’s closest rival among the three‑quarter‑length
popes is the gorgeous version done in 1953 which belongs to Des Moines, one
of those Bacons that is peculiarly evocative of Titian, a painter in whom
Bacon was not greatly interested. When we were talking about Titian once, he
said: ‘When I think of the Pope painted by Velázquez, of course.
ART GUIDE Galleries: SoHo
THE
NEW YORK TIMES | JANUARY 8, 1999
* FRANCIS
BACON, Important Paintings From the Estate, Tony Shafrazi
Gallery, 119 Wooster Street, (212) 274-9300 (through Jan. 16). Velazquez's
1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X so fascinated Bacon (1909-1992) that he did
some 30 versions of it, recasting it into his own 20th-century terms. Trapped
behind vague screens or curtains, the popes are seen screaming in existential
anguish, worlds away from the confidence and power that Velazquez's
''Innocent'' radiates. Two long-missing paintings from this series are
included in this show of more than a dozen works from the Bacon estate, dated
from 1949 to 1991. There is also an exhilarating landscape after Van Gogh
that matches his painterly passion. Although not a retrospective, the show
gives a robust look at the basics of Bacon's work (Glueck).
A Few Prized Obsessions
Curator Hugh M. Davies brings together a
series of Francis Bacon's papal portraits from the U.S. and abroad to form an
intimate exhibition.
LEAH OLLMAN | ART & ARCHITECTURE |
LOS ANGELES TIMES | JANUARY 10, 1999
SAN DIEGO —In the summer of 1953, British painter Francis Bacon
invited his friend, art critic David Sylvester, to sit for a portrait in the
"gilded squalor" of his studio. Sometime during the fourth sitting,
Sylvester's likeness mutated (as Bacon's images were prone to do) into a
sombre, ghost-like portrait of the pope. Obsessed as he already had been for
years with a portrait of Pope Innocent X painted by Velazquez in 1650, Bacon
launched feverishly into a series of eight variations on the papal portrait.
Twenty years later,
the series itself sparked a new obsession. Hugh M. Davies, director of the
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, was just beginning research for his
doctoral dissertation on Bacon in 1973, when he noted to himself that the
papal portrait series of 1953 had never been exhibited in its entirety. The
notion of organizing such a show gestated quietly until just a few years ago,
when Davies actively started to hunt for the eight paintings, which had
landed in both private and public collections, in the U.S. and abroad.
Through aggressive courtship and delicate pressure, Davies negotiated the
loans, with the eighth lender signing on only last fall, to avoid, he said,
"being the skunk of the party." Next Sunday, Francis Bacon:
The Papal Portraits of 1953 opens at the museum's main facility in
La Jolla.
"It's the longest series in Bacon's career," Davies explains
from his office facing a panoramic expanse of the Pacific. "It's the one
series that dates from what I consider his strongest year. It's when he
really hit his stride. The intersection of his technical ability and his
vision were at a critical moment. And this is the subject which was the
signature theme of his career."
Bacon (1909-1992) made his first painting in response to the Velazquez
in 1949, and continued with the theme, off and on, through 1972, painting a
total of 25 versions of the papal portrait. A photocopied chronology of the
paintings is taped to the wall in a small foyer outside Davies' office, and
will be reconstructed in an information gallery as part of the show.
Most of the
paintings by Bacon resemble the Velazquez in structure, with the pope in
traditional vestments, seated in a chair trimmed with gold finials and turned
at a slight angle away from the viewer. Bacon made the image his own, made it
work directly and violently on the nervous system, as he put it, through his
distinctively raw handling of paint, veiling the figure behind curtain-like
stripes and often painting him with his mouth agape in a frozen scream.
A self-professed nonbeliever, Bacon was legendary for disavowing any
social content in his work, preferring to link its violence and
"exhilarated despair" to his own psyche and not to the human
condition in general or the horrors of the 20th century. Though he was
fixated on the image of the pope (as well as the crucifixion), he denied that
his paintings had anything to do with religion.
"Some people say that the pope [represents] Bacon's father, and
he's wrestling with the whole Oedipal thing, which is probably true,"
Davies says. "Other people have said the obvious, that this is a very
powerful masculine figure in feminine clothes--laces, a dress and pretty
colors. There is something hilarious, particularly to a gay man" - as
Bacon was - "to see the pope in drag."
Bacon himself said that the Velazquez image haunted him, that he was
obsessed with the grandeur of its color and the role of the pope.
"Pope Innocent X was the most powerful man in the world at that
time, in 1650," Davies says, recalling conversations he had with Bacon,
"and it is a very powerful, official portrait. He was a very strong
individual, but also very corrupt, and Velazquez shows you that. What is
brilliant in the portrait is that you can look at this guy's face and see
that he misused his power. He's so haughty. Velazquez pleased the client and
at the same time passed on the fact that the guy's corrupt. It's all
there."
Bacon, who never attended art school, taught himself to paint by
looking at Velazquez, Rembrandt, Van Gogh. He loved "the glitter and
color that comes from the mouth" and hoped one day, he said, "to be
able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset." But he was also
intrigued by the power of photography and its various manifestations, such as
film and X-ray imaging.
"I see every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in
shifting sequences," Bacon once said, accounting for the feel of
cinematic progression in his serial work. He often quoted 19th century
photographer Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering motion studies of humans and
animals. The scream motif, too, originated from a photographic source, a
scene from the 1925 Eisenstein film "Battleship Potemkin," in which
a nanny who has lost control of her young charge is seen in a tightly framed
close-up, her eyeglasses askew and her mouth stretched open in an agonizing
cry.
Licor-ish allsorts
OLIVER BENNETT | THE
GUARDIAN | SATURDAY 16 JANUARY, 1999
For half a century, the tiny
Colony Room bar has been a second home to some of the great names in British
art. Today, the faces have changed, but its boozy charm remains.
You walk
up a dingy, stygian stairwell into a small, slightly claustrophobic room full
of paintings, posters, yellowing cuttings and artworks. A piano lies on one
side, a bar the other. The green carpet has fag burns all over it. If the
ageing banquettes could talk, they'd insult you.
This is the Colony
Room, a private-members club in London's Soho that recently celebrated its
50th anniversary. It is a small and rather intense place, with an
intimidating reputation for rudeness.
Its walls - where they
can be seen behind the jumble of artworks - are painted bright green, which
compounds the sense of being in a world apart; one that is either restful,
womblike and gemütlich, or intense and claustrophobic, depending on your
bent.
The
Colony has a small but unique position in British post-war culture, despite
being a place that, as its incumbent manager, Michael Wojas, puts it, is
"just a front room with a bar in it".
It is
best-known for being the second home of Francis Bacon - much of John
Maybury's recent film about Bacon, Love Is The Devil, was filmed in a Colony
Room set. It has also been the bar of choice for Lucien Freud, Michael
Andrews, the Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde, the Johns Deakin and Minton,
Barry Flanagan, Frank Auerbach, Patrick Caulfield; many of whom became known,
to use Ralph Kitaj's 1976 soubriquet, as the "School Of London".
Over the years, it has also attracted
bibulous journalists such as Dan Farson and Jeffrey Bernard, as well as a
rich, maverick pageant: odd names include Tom Baker (the best ever Doctor
Who); Labour MP Tom Driberg; Suggs from Madness, and his mother; actor Trevor
Howard; singer Lisa Stansfield. "Licorice Allsorts," is Wojas's
word for them, and he adds that "everyone is treated with equal
contempt". The Chairman (a regular who wishes to be called just that)
calls them "non-conformists". Like other places with arty-boho
reputations, such as Paris's Les Deux Magots, the Colony has international
word-of-mouth.
"Sometimes
students from art schools or abroad turn up in groups to look around,"
says Wojas. Unlike Deux Magots, however, it is not on tourist heritage
trails. You can't just walk in, which is why, says George Melly, "it
hasn't turned into a place where a coffee costs £40". Not even its 250
members, who currently pay £75 a year, can all come at once; it is far too
small.
It has a
certain heaviness of atmosphere, which, says Wojas, divides its visitors.
"They either walk in and go, 'Wow, this is brilliant', or sit there with
their head in their hands." In his waistcoat, dark glasses and scar up
one cheek, Wojas is continuing the club's reputation for colourful proprietors,
as the luminous figure in Colony legend remains Muriel Belcher -
"A handsome, Jewish dyke," as one member recalls - who started the
club in 1948 and ran it till her death in 1979.
"She
had been running a war-time club called the Music Box in Leicester Square,
got together some independent means, found the room and secured the 3pm-11pm
drinking licence," says Wojas. "Pubs closed at 2.30pm then, and you
had to have somewhere to go." That club licence persists to this day,
and, while London's opening hours have been liberalised, a sense of iniquity
in the afternoon still pervades the Colony. It somehow turns the day into
night, rather than Soho's new glossy pubs, which turn the night into day.
Belcher
had a charisma that attracted people, and the Colony's older clientele still
refer to it as "Muriel's". "Its reputation was all initially
down to her impact," says Melly. "Muriel was a benevolent witch,
who managed to draw in all London's talent up those filthy stairs. She was
like a great cook, working with the ingredients of people and drink. And she
loved money."
Belcher
attracted many gay men to the club - a lot of them brought in by her Jamaican
girlfriend, Carmel - and the Colony became one of a few places where it was
safe to be openly homosexual. Julian Cole, who, with Akim Mogaji, is making a
film about the club, says, "She realised the power of the pink pound in
the Fifties, 30 years before everyone else. It was a forerunner of gay
Soho."
Eminences
such as Christopher Isherwood drank here.
But, as
Wojas says, "It has never been a gay club as such. It is better to have
a mix." Ian Board [Belcher's successor from 1979 to 1995] was
homosexual, and used to say, "I don't mind those poofs, as long as they
keep their distance." The same dyspeptic formula applied to artists.
"There's always been that tendency, probably due to Francis," says
Wojas. "But it would be really boring if it was just artists talking
about art all night long. Muriel always said, 'I know fuck all about
art.'"
By some strange symmetry, the Colony Room
now attracts the Sensation! generation of Young British Artists (or YBAs, as
the acronym has it). Members include Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Marc
Quinn, while Sarah Lucas once worked as a bartender here for a couple of
months. "It just came about as an idea between me and Michael
[Wojas]," she says. "I'd been going there for quite a time, and had
always liked the way it has been going on for so long and was that
traditional and historical." Their patronage has helped to renew the
Colony.
"Two-thirds
of the selection committee are young artists, which is lovely," says the
Chairman. Indeed, the youngest member is Damien Hirst's son, Connor, given an
honorary membership at three weeks old.
Could
this be an example of what the art critic Matthew Collings, in his YBA
chronicle, Blimey, calls "retro-bohemianism"? All the Colony's
manifestations of Fifties épatant la bourgeoisie - the boozing, the smoking,
the swearing - have now been given a certain continuity. "They're paying
homage to Francis," says Melly. "People are nostalgic about the
idea of old Soho, and the Colony is the last of the lot."
Also, the
club retains the allure of discovery. Art dealer James Birch, who recently
put on a 50th anniversary Colony Room show at his Clerkenwell gallery, says,
"It's like a secret society, which is why Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons
and Dennis Hopper all wanted to go there when they came to London."
Perhaps
it should be made an annexe of the Tate Gallery, as over the years it has
built up quite an art collection, including a nicotine-stained Michael
Andrews mural (there is an Andrews painting at the Tate called The Colony
Room) and various newer pieces, including Gavin Turk's blue plaque, made for
his graduation show. But space is limited. "When Damien [Hirst] wanted
to give us a picture, I said you've got to size it accordingly," says
Wojas, who keeps the overspill at his home.
The real
thread that runs through the Colony's 50 years, however, is drink. "In
the Fifties, we drank all day long and went to Muriel's every day," said
the late Henrietta Moraes, an ex-Colony regular. "Muriel was a very
powerful personality. She was so funny, and could keep up the wit for hours
at a stretch. She sat on a mock-leopardskin high chair, and she would vet
everyone that walked in." Fatefully, one of those people was Francis
Bacon.
"There was an immediate
affinity," says Wojas. "Francis didn't have money at that time, but
he had an outrageous streak."
Belcher
had good antennae for interesting people, gave Bacon free drinks in return
for new custom and established the Colony's close-knit member profile.
"She loved money, and people who spent money," says one
long-standing regular. "'Put your hand in your handbag,' she would
cry," recalls the Chairman. Older members also recall her as
kind-hearted, raising funds raised for the local school and ailing confrères.
She also
established a cult of rudeness. Belcher's favourite word was
"cunt", delivered in ringing tones, and a hierarchy of insults
ensued. "'Cunt' was a term of abuse, 'Cunty' was meant
affectionately," says the Chairman. "And if she called you 'Mary',
you were really in." Men would be called "she". "Muriel
made everything sound good, even when it wasn't exactly a Wildean
epigram," says Melly. "She was camp, and the very delivery of camp
makes your sentences sound witty." The Colony thus became a kind of
anti-Cheers, where everyone may have known your name but instead called you
"cunty".
When
Belcher died, her protege, Ian Board, took over, and the Colony sustained its
withering reputation. "You had to be resilient, and you'd gain
respect," says the Chairman.
"If
you weren't tough, it was harsh. There would be cries of 'boring'."
Melly
says Board was as rude as Belcher, but not as witty, and many walked out,
despising the place and its large, red-nosed proprietor. Now, though the
Colony retains a forbidding edge, those days are gone.
"The
people here are very friendly and interested in new people," pleads
Wojas, and members laud it as a place where strangers talk to one another.
"It's gentler now, and that's not such a bad thing," says the
Chairman.
In the
early Eighties, it had a sticky patch. "Ian was finding it
difficult," says Wojas. "He was worried about whether he could
cope, and was drinking very heavily. Also, the generations changed one lot
had died and drifted off, and the younger ones hadn't yet come along."
This coincided with the era when Soho's new members clubs such as the Groucho
and Black's were opening. The landlord wanted to change its use, and a
petition was drawn up to save it.
But then new
members started to come, and, at Francis Bacon's funeral wake-cum-party at
the Colony in 1992, a new generation became evident. "The fucking worms
crawled out of their holes, but the extraordinary thing is that the younger
generation came in full fucking bloom," recalled Board in Dan Farson's
biography of Francis Bacon, A Gilded Gutter Life. When Board died in 1995 -
"He had a scarlet nose, just like WC Fields," says member
Christopher Moorsom, "and when he died his nose went white" - he
received huge obituaries, and it showed that the Colony had become a national
institution.
The world
has changed outside, but the Colony has militantly remained the same: no late
licence, cocktails, draught beer, coffee, tea or ciabatta sandwiches - though
Wojas admits, he "begrudgingly serves the odd glass of mineral
water". As for Soho, Wojas says that he doesn't particularly like it on
Friday or Saturday night any more. "All those drunken idiots on their
night out up West."
The
Colony now lures acolytes and drinkers with the promise of an oasis of authenticity
in the midst of office London. And all the people who walk in - some drawn by
its reputation, some drunk, some thinking it's a clip joint - will be subject
to the same routine.
"I
sit on the perch [as Belcher's chair is still called] and suss each person as
they arrive," says Wojas. "You've got to catch them at the door.
Once they're in, you've lost them."
A
Brighter Side of Bacon Glints Amid the Darkness
By KEN JOHNSON | ART REVIEW | THE NEW YORK TIMES | FRIDAY, JANUARY
29, 1999
NEW HAVEN, JAN. 22 — After
closing for a year to spruce up its Louis Kahn-designed home, the Yale Center
for British Art has reopened with a trio of exhibitions devoted to three
giants of modern British art: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Henry Moore. The
last two are minor sideshows: one dedicated to Mr. Freud's etchings, the
other a survey of small bronze studies for monuments produced by Moore from
the 1930's to the 1970's. But the Bacon show, an imperfect but ultimately
dazzling 60-painting retrospective, makes a trip to Yale well worth it.
The Bacon exhibition, whose curator is Dennis Farr, the director
emeritus of the Courtauld Institute of Art's galleries in London, starts with
a rare piece from the 1930's, a small, ghostly, abstracted Crucifixion, and a
couple of full-size studies for Bacon's 1944 triptych ''Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.'' This was the work that horrified and
disconcerted viewers when it was exhibited in London in 1945 and put Bacon,
then in his mid-30's, a self-taught painter with little formal education, on
the map of the British art world
In one of the panels, a fleshy, dinosaurlike creature with a long
serpentine neck and a gaping, toothy maw snaps at a bouquet of roses thrust
in its face by an unseen hand. With its intense orange background and richly
sensuous paint, this work introduces the primary poles of Bacon's art: the
comically melodramatic horror and the seductive surface.
If you identify Bacon mainly with his ''Screaming Pope'' of the
1950's, several versions of which are included here, you may be surprised
that the most compelling part of the exhibition is devoted to the last two
decades of Bacon's life, when he produced a series of big, vibrant,
wonderfully animated triptychs. (He died in 1992 at 82.) Compared with his
late output, the works from Bacon's early years seem dour and constricted. A
better selection might have changed that impression, but in any event, the
''Screaming Pope'' is still his most memorable creation from the early
period. Attaching a face, taken from the image of a wailing, bloodied woman
with broken spectacles in Sergei Eisenstein's ''Battleship Potemkin,'' to a
three-quarter-length sitting portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez, Bacon
created a great 20th-century icon, a crazy, evil father figure for a mad
world.
Still, the screaming pope image is like an editorial cartoon. Bacon is
famous for abhorring illustration, but that is what most of his work from the
1950's resembles. Tormented men isolated in dark spaces, lone dogs or
spectral sphinxes dressed up with artfully blurry brushwork serve all too
obviously as symbols of existential dread
At the end of the 1950's there was a shift. In a catalogue essay,
Sally Yard suggests that this may have been partly inspired by Bacon's
exposure to new American painting, Barnett Newman's in particular. Bacon
disapproved of pure abstraction, but increasingly at this point, his
expanding canvases give themselves over to fields of unmodulated color. From
here on, it is hard to see Bacon as the artist of ''isolation, despair and
horror,'' as he is characterized in an exhibition brochure. He seems more a
joyfully, wickedly perverse hedonist, which is what he was in real life, too
In ''Portrait of George Dyer Talking'' (1966), Bacon poses his
subject, who was his lover at the time, naked on a stool at the center of an
empty room under a bare, dangling light bulb. Oddly, a sheaf of papers splays
out at his feet. The man is a melting, lumpy mass of flesh made of sinuous
brush strokes and his eyes bug out, as though he felt trapped within his own
body
But if this is horrible, it is not reflected in the environment: a
rosy, pink-hatched rug; a curving violet rear wall and a moss-green ceiling.
Take away the figure and the light bulb and you'd have a wholly pleasurable
60's-style Color Field painting. With the figure, you have a voluptuous,
hallucinatory cartoon of desire on the brink of gratification
The earliest of the triptychs, a triple portrait of Mr. Freud, was
made in 1969; the last, executed in 1988, is a version of the 1944
Crucifixion triptych in which the harsh orange of the earlier piece has
become a deep velvety red and the bestial figures have been softened to
diaphanous chimeras. The triptychs all measure 6 1/2 by 15 feet and occupy
most of one floor of the exhibition, to glowing and almost disorientingly
enveloping effect. They are deceptively clear yet oddly confounding amalgams
of color fields, erotically distorted or fragmented bodies and sharp, linear
articulations of space, with, here and there, pieces of furniture or
still-life objects
In the portraits, the repetition of the picture of a man on a stool in
an empty room three times, with only slight variations, creates a powerful
formal amplitude and a clinical gaze that recalls the sequential photographs
of Eadweard Muybridge, an important influence on Bacon's visual imagination
But the most engaging of the triptychs offer enigmatic narratives,
sequences of disquieting glimpses like lurid images from barely remembered
dreams or nightmares. In one from 1970, two naked Muybridge-inspired men
grapple on a round green bed; in flanking panels, shadowy figures look in
from open doors and bizarre, misshapen homunculi, barely evolved from puddles
of dark paint, seem to writhe on the floor. It's all embedded in a great
field of intense reddish-orange and, contrary to the sense of Dionysian
urgency, the overall composition is one of symmetrical elegance, almost Asian
in its exactingly balanced delicacy
That each panel of the triptychs is contained by a shiny gold frame
and isolated behind a great sheet of glass may bother viewers who want to get
closer to Bacon's dry and thin yet sumptuous surfaces. But the grandiose Old
Masterish framing is in keeping with the Bacon vision, which always embraced
extremes of high estheticism and low carnality
It is unfair that Mr. Freud's etchings should be viewed alongside the
Bacon show. As a painter, Mr. Freud shares with Bacon, his old friend, a
fascination with the body and a huge ambition for the medium. It would be
interesting to compare directly his aggressively painterly, warts-and-all
realism with Bacon's deftly edited surrealistic expressionism. But this
presentation of the Paine Webber collection of all the 42 prints Mr. Freud
has made since taking up etching in 1982 does not show him to best advantage.
With the exception of a formally and psychologically impressive head of
''Lord Goodman in His Pajamas,'' the works are wooden, doggedly laborious and
colorless exercises in the drawing of inert models
As for Henry Moore, it's a relief to turn away from the vacuous,
overly familiar biomorphic Cubism of his reclining nudes, fallen warriors and
mothers and children to Bacon's nasty, delirious beauty
''Francis Bacon: A Retrospective,'' ''Lucian Freud: Etchings From the
Paine Webber Art Collection'' and ''Henry Moore and the Heroic: A Centenary
Tribute'' remain at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, at
High Street, New Haven, through March 21. Information: (203) 432-2800.
Conversion of a
Skeptic
By VIRGINIA BUTTERFIELD | SAN DIEGO
MAGAZINE | FEBRUARY 1999
We are seated in the director’s office of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego,
looking out at the La Jolla ocean view. I am puzzled by an exhibition due to
open, “The Papal Portraits of Francis Bacon.” I know it is dear to the heart of museum director Hugh
Davies, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on this very subject and who has
waited a long time to bring these eight portraits together.
“Why did Bacon paint the same portrait eight times? Why was
he so fascinated with this subject?” I ask.
“Because if you
were painting a portrait,” Davies explains, “wouldn’t you like to see it from all
directions? And in all moods? And also because it was a series. Think of
Warhol and his Marilyn Monroes. It was the influence at that time—the early ’50s—of films and photography.”
“But to do a portrait over and over
again, with the same clothes, the same pose—but different heads. The heads are very different. Were
they different models?” The heads are distorted—one, toward the end, with an agonized, shrieking mouth.
Bacon
began with Diego Rodriguez da Silva Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, done in 1650. “It was a perfect painting,” says Davies. “Enthroned in papal garb, the pope was the most powerful
figure of his day. Yet look at his cruel eyes.
“Bacon knew the painting only in reproduction. He never
wanted to see the original.” But haunted
by the image, by its perfection, he sought to reinvent Velázquez’s painting.
During
the summer of 1953 in London, while attempting to paint a portrait of his
friend David Sylvester, the 43-year-old Bacon transformed the picture into an
image of the pope. Over the next two weeks, working feverishly, he completed
the seven variations comprised in the series. In the intervening 45 1/2
years, they have become landmarks in art history, symbols of the post-war
age.
The
papal figures appear to be set in a glass box in a dark ecclesiastical
setting. Pope I is a static image; Pope II is a profile; the face of Pope III
is blurred; Pope IV’s features are almost
indistinguishable. Pope V has a kind of sneer; Pope VI’s mouth has dropped open; Pope VII is screaming; and Pope
VIII throws his arms up in a defensive gesture. The image always changes. The
hands become balled fists; the open mouth and mangled pince-nez come from
Sergei Eisenstein’s screaming nurse (with one eyeball
shot out—from the film Potemkin). The final Pope
throws his hands up as if to say, “That’s it. Enough.”
No
one quite knew how to take these paintings. A critic wrote: “Bacon has tried ... for one continuous cinematic impression
of his Popes—an entirely new kind of painting
experience.” Another wrote that it looked like
the Pope had been strapped into an electric chair.
While a student at
Princeton, Davies became enamored of Bacon. He offered to write about him in
his doctoral dissertation but was told he needed to have access to the artist
because of the scarcity of material about him. As a result, he arranged for
16 interviews while he studied at the Courtauld Institute in London. Davies
found Bacon to be an intelligent man, articulate about world affairs, a pleasure
to talk to.
His
studio was an absolute mess, says Davies. But his home was a model of
perfection. As the artist would prepare to leave his studio—full of brushes and props and baskets, boxes and cans,
piled untidily on one another—he would carefully
remove every spot of paint from his hands. “You know painters who leave the paint where it will show,
on their hands and clothes, so people will know they’re painters,” says Davies. “Well, Bacon was the opposite.” If he was going out to dinner, he presented himself
accordingly.
“My
relatives in England thought I was wasting my time,” Davies says. Very
few people had heard of the artist. At the time, there were only two books on
Bacon (Davies, along with Sally Yard, has since written a third, Bacon,
published by Abbeville Press as part of the Modern Masters series). Davies
kept up his friendship with the artist, seeing him again and again over the
years—and always admiring his work.
“How can you like things that are so
ugly?” I ask. “The legs end in deformed bones; the heads are bashed
in or daubed with enormous smears.”
“Ugly?” asks Davies
in surprise. “It’s all a matter of perception. I would never use the
word ‘ugly’. When I first saw a Bacon painting, I thought it the most
interesting thing I’d ever seen. Among all the ‘pretty’ art, I could
hardly wait to see more. I can hardly wait for his paintings to get here. I
could sit and look at them forever.”
But, I protest, the subject matter is grotesque. Faces
simply don’t exist. A mouth is all one can see, usually at the end of a
pole-like formation. It snarls; it wails. Bacon himself described his
compulsion: “I have always been very moved by the movements of the mouth and
the shape of the mouth and the teeth. People say that these have all sorts of
sexual implications...”
Davies
and I look together at Bacon’s Painting,
1946 of a powerful, brooding figure with a huge, bull-like neck. Behind him
is a split carcass, suspended like a crucified human body. A railing is
skewered with cuts of meat. Because the painting was purchased by a famous
dealer—for perhaps only $2,000 —Bacon’s reputation was
made. He immediately took off for Monte Carlo, so the story goes, where he
made a killing at the tables. He took a small villa and squandered his money
in two weeks, having a splendid time and making many friends. Fine, I say. But the painting is
ghoulish.
Davies sees much more in it than I do. The figure is a dictator with a bloody
mouth, he says. He is in the same pose as the Popes, but the setting is
different. An umbrella probably refers to Neville Chamberlain. The figure
reflects Bacon’s familiarity with news photos of Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich
Himmler and Benito Mussolini, as well as of Franklin Roosevelt in his cape at
Yalta. The headless carcass hanging above him is the crucifixion, which
fascinated Bacon as an emblem.
“Was he religious?” I ask.
“No, he was not religious. He was an atheist.
But the emblem fascinates him.”
“Was Bacon anti-Pope? Did he take a position on the subject?”
“He wasn’t referring to any particular Pope, although he had been raised in
Ireland and knew the lore. The Crucifixion was curious to him—as a myth—as
all artists are confronted with this myth.”
I begin to see my revulsion as superficial. Bacon’s portraits of Isabel
Rawsthorne are not necessarily hideous—though nothing like the model herself.
Rawsthorne was a lady who kept a bar where young servicemen drank. She had a
habit of tossing her head, a motion Bacon caught in a famous portrait that is
largely a smear—such a smear, it obliterates her face. But that was his
objective. In her portraits, scraped, blotted and dragged strokes of paint
obscure her nose and mouth.
IT IS DECEMBER, and Davies has sent for the eight paintings from Switzerland,
England and the United States, plus a ninth, Study, done in February 1953.
His emissary is waiting in London, as we speak, to accept the European works.
The photo on the cover of Davies’ book is called Self-Portrait 1969, and it,
too, shows a grossly distorted mouth. This seems to be a recurrent element in
Bacon’s work. Davies and I argue about the face.
“I can see the wonder of the eyes,” I say. “But the mouth?”
“Ah, that’s the part I love,” says Davies. “He’s taken a red sweater and
daubed the chin—you can see the ribbing of the sweater—and maybe used the
little caps on the paint tubes to make two round objects at the chin.” But
it’s the smear he loves.
Bacon himself said it best: “I think if you want to convey fact, this can
only be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what
is called ‘appearance’ into image.”
“Once in a while, in this business, we get to travel to Europe,” Davies says.
But it’s not all glamour. The emissary must keep the paintings in view at all
times. He must wait in a hotel in London, accompany the paintings to the
cargo section of a plane, meet them at unloading out on the tarmac, see them
safely into the cargo area of the airport, watch them loaded on a truck and
then ride with the truck across the country to California. He can’t let them
out of his sight, because “They might stand in the rain at the airport, or
perhaps the hot sun,” says Davies.
He’s thinking of how he will exhibit the paintings. He will build a small
room within the Farris Gallery, so that if you stand.
in the center, you will never be more than 14 feet from a painting. They will
hang on eight walls, with the final painting inspired by Velásquez on a ninth
wall just through the door. Two auxiliary works, gathered for the show, will
complete the offering.
“And how do you imagine people will react to them?” I ask.
“That remains to be seen. If they see them as you do, without knowing the
history and the value, they won’t like them. If they see them as I do...” His
voice trails off.
There will be a video to introduce the painter to the audience, as well as an
on-line presentation, and there will be other educational functions. One is a
gathering of curators—about 150—from around the country. People will talk,
and the word will get out.
Once, in the fall of 1953, it was planned that all eight of Bacon’s papal
paintings would be shown at the Durlacher Gallery in New York City, but only
five portraits (numbers I, II, IV, V and VII) were included in the show. This
exhibition in the United States was very well received, both critically and
with sales, and the paintings were dispersed. Four are now ensconced in major
public collections in the United States (the Museum of Modern Art, the
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and
the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College). The remaining four are in private
collections: one in the United States and three in Europe.
The present exhibition, on view only in San Diego through March 28, brings
this series together for the very first time since they were painted by Bacon
in 1953. It has been endorsed by a major grant from AT&T, a California
Challenge Grant from the California Arts Council and a Federal Indemnity
Grant from the National Council on the Arts & Humanities, and has received
support from the British Council in London.
Go see them. Take along Davies’ book, so that you may know the history of the
artist (1909-92). And with luck, your own introduction to the meaning of
violence will improve with the experience.
Art: Private View
Francis Bacon,
Tate Gallery, London SW1
JAMES HALL | CULTURE | THE INDEPENDENT | SATURDAY
13 FEBRUARY 1999
Francis Bacon may have been the leading light of the so-called School
of London, but he always stood out from his fellow figurative painters thanks
to his disdain for drawing. Whereas Auerbach, Freud, Kitaj and Kossoff had an
almost religious devotion to pencil and paper, Bacon, who was self-taught,
gave the impression that he always charged up to a bare canvas and chucked
paint on with alcohol-fuelled abandon.
But in 1996, four years after Bacon's death,
it was discovered that he had been economical with the truth. The enfant
terrible had, in fact, made preparatory drawings throughout his career, and
some had been given to the writer Stephen Spender, and to another friend of
the artist. More than 40 of these sketches - made in pencil, ballpoint pen,
gouache and oil paint - have now been acquired by the Tate, and will be shown
alongside their collection of paintings by the artist. It will be a
revelatory show all right, but disappointing, too: it surely can't be long
before we're told he was teetotal, celibate and a fan of the Queen Mum, too.
Francis Bacon, Tate Gallery, Millbank, London SW1 (0171-887
8000) to 2 May
Art world torn
over Bacon's sketches
LOUISE JURY | NEWS | THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY |
SUNDAY 14 FEBRUARY 1999
ONE OF
the closest friends of Francis Bacon has become embroiled in an extraordinary
feud with the lawyers acting for the artist's estate. They have begun legal
action, demanding that he hand over a collection of 500 drawings given to him
when he and the painter were neighbours.
The
lawyers claim that the artist would have wanted them destroyed because he
always denied making such preparatory sketches, and that the neighbour, Barry
Joule, was "in blatant breach of Bacon's trust" by preserving them.
Despite the criticisms made of him, the row
lends support to Mr Joule's claim that the works are by Bacon. Last year the
Tate Gallery in London refused to display the collection, rejecting its
authenticity. David Sylvester, a leading Bacon expert and Tate adviser,
disputed its provenance.
John Edwards, Bacon's former companion, inherited the bulk
of the estate. Mr Joule, Bacon's neighbour for many years until the artist's
death in 1992, believed the works were given to him as a present.
"Francis was always very categoric. If he wanted
something destroyed, he was very straightforward about it. Over the years I
destroyed many paintings for him that he didn't want kept." But on this
occasion, Bacon said: "You know what to do with it." Mr Joule said
he had understood that the works were his to do what he wanted with them. He
added: "If they claim that it was Francis's wishes to destroy them, are
they going to destroy them? Certain scholars are saying it's a very important
archive."
Legal action permitting, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in
Dublin intends to show parts of Barry Joule's collection in an exhibition
early next yea
The estate's lawyers, solicitors Payne Hicks Beach, last
week refused to discuss the claim on the material. Tony Shafrazi, the owner
of the New York gallery now handling Bacon's works, did not return calls
David Sylvester has said that many of the pages must have
come from Bacon's studio because they included personal photos and material
others could not have possessed. But he added: "I am among those who
cannot see Bacon's hand in the rather banal brushstrokes and scratchings on
these pages."
Yet Mr Joule believes his archive is as significant as the
nearly 40 works — bought by the Tate for a rumoured six-figure sum last year
— which go on display at the gallery this week.
He has his supporters. David Lee, the editor of Art Review
magazine, said: "The interesting thing about the show coming up at the
Tate is the opportunity it will present to compare the works they paid a lot
of money for with the ones they rejected.
Both the Tate and Joule collections contain sketches which
appear to relate to known paintings. This raises the prospect that Bacon
deliberately misled biographers and interviewers by denying that he ever
sketched for his large post-war oil paintings
The first many people knew of any sketches was when four owned
by the poet Sir Stephen Spender were shown at an exhibition in Paris in 1996.
They, too, are to be shown in the Tate show.
But Dr Matthew Gale, curator of the exhibition, said:
"When people asked Bacon in a direct way, he simply said he didn't make
drawings or sketches."
The Tate's works were bought last year from Paul Danquah
and Peter Pollock, friends of the artist in the 1950s and 1960s. The sketches
seem to have been done quickly and show figures crawling, crouching and reclining.
Dr Gale said it was unclear whether they were preparatory drawings for the
giant oils or sketches carried out afterwards as a route to creating new
works.
What seemed certain was that Bacon's post-war works were
more carefully planned than had previously been thought.
Also acquired by the Tate were photographs and a book in
which Bacon wrote lists apparently of potential subjects.
Dr Gale said: "That gives the impression to me, at
least, that he is looking at his old paintings and thinking of reworking
them for new paintings.
An art
expert, who did not wish to be named, said the Joule material appeared very
"puzzling and disturbing" and different from the Tate works.
"All I would say (about the Joule archive) is it really does deserve
significant inquiry rather than dismissal.
One of
the possibilities to be explored, the expert said, was whether Bacon might
have encouraged one of his lovers to experiment on art with him.
Bacon Is the Star of Yale
Reopening
By WILLIAM ZIMMER | ART | THE NEW
YORK TIMES | SUNDAY, 28 FEBRUARY, 1999
IF the structural changes made to the Yale Center for
British Art's building in New Haven are almost imperceptible to visitors,
it's clear that the three exhibitions in the gallery's reopening after a year
of construction and repairs give the place a dynamism that shouts its
comeback.
The shows have an obvious common thread; they are devoted
to three major British artists of the 20th century whose art was once
controversial: Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Henry Moore. The Bacon
exhibition is drawing the most comment and rightfully so. It is a splashy
retrospective containing about 70 paintings.
But the earliest, from 1933, is a small Crucifixion whose
bony figure derived from Surrealism presages Bacon's patented distortion of
the human body. Bacon (1909-1992) evidently found his potent idiom early, and
progressed by stuffing it with more raw, tortured energy. What might be
called early surrogates for familiar human figures include not only the
Sphinx but also animals, especially a baboon given a remarkably evanescent
silvery fur coat.
The 1952 painting of the baboon is called a study, yet it
measures 78 inches by 54 inches. The expansive size of postwar American
paintings is often remarked on, but Bacon more than holds his own on any
scale of expansive. The public's fascination with the writhing and contortion
of Bacon's figures might have obscured the realization of his brilliance as a
colorist
The plight of his figures is made all the more harsh when
played out against backgrounds often tropically hedonistic. Bacon's sense of
theater has always been recognized; his characters are often confined to what
seem like cramped, dimly lit stages, or circus arenas — and sometimes barred
windows are indicated.
In addition to illuminating the anxiety of modern life, or
perhaps to intensify it, Bacon occasionally savaged art history masterpieces,
the most famous being variations on Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X.
Bacon's pope is an angry prisoner of his office. Van Gogh is evoked twice in
the exhibition; his wistful idealism is offset by the climate in which Bacon
places him, largely indicated through an intense red and green.
In 1982 Bacon painted ''Oedipus and the Sphinx after
Ingres,'' which he heats up through a shocking pink background. Oedipus's
foot, injured when he was a child, is still bandaged and bleeding in Bacon
but the painting contains an annoying device: Bacon tended to indicate
significant parts of a painting by either putting a circle around them or
pointing at them with an arrow. But Bacon mastered the multi-panel mode,
which he began to explore in the 1960'S.
Sometimes he does triple the intensity. An early portrait
triptych, ''Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (On Light Ground),''
features his longtime partner and illustrates Bacon's peculiar brand of
distortion. He smears paint to get a Picasso-like look, and Dyer looks like
he's been subjected to something more than an analytical faceting of form; he
looks as if he's been beaten up. To some extent most of Bacon's figures share
this sensation of a pummeling.
Doing what made him a singular painter seems to have come
easy for Bacon in the 80's. Paint isn't used in such a bravura way, and his
tormented expressions seem to have acquired ball bearings.
Lucien Freud, who was born in 1922, is sometimes seen as a
successor to Bacon because his figure paintings are exaggeratedly fleshy. But
his more decorous etchings — 42 from the collection of Paine Webber having
the bad luck to share a floor with part of the Bacon show — have a different
emphasis. Freud's line is firm, and the figures, even the grosser ones, seem
solid and oddly alike. About the only variety in the show is a thistle,
masterfully rendered, and a small tattoo on a woman's arm
It's not so much the similarity of the figures that goads a
viewer to hurry through the show, but the fact that most of the figures loll
about. An alert self-portrait is a rare exception to the general soporific
mood.
It's tempting to say that, in the explosion of art, Henry
Moore is relegated to the entrance lobby. But that space is advantageous
because its dimensions allows viewers to circumnavigate the sculptures, and
if any sculpture needs to be seen in the round, it is Moore's.
The show, which marks the artist's centenary, is titled,
''Henry Moore and the Heroic.'' A couple of the most compelling pieces
reflect this: they evoke soldiers of ancient Greece who have fallen in
battle. Representing the bronze age, they are made of bronze with a green
patina. A related work is ''Helmet Head, No. 3'' from the center's
collection; a head with vigilant eyes lurks out through an opening in the
front of the shell.
But another strong theme, peace, is the counterpart of war.
The exhibition is especially strong in family groupings, including tender
Mary Cassatt-like mothers and children. In other hands such sculptures would
be sappy, but the heroism attributed to Moore affects these works, too.
The exhibitions of works by
Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Henry Moore remain at the Yale Center for
British Art in New Haven through March 21.
Court
Cuts Gallery's Ties To Francis Bacon Estate
By
WARREN HOGE | THE ARTS | THE
NEW YORK TIMES | TUESDAY, MARCH 23, 1999
LONDON, March 22 - Marlborough Fine Art, the gallery that
handled the artistic management of the British painter Francis Bacon for
virtually his entire career, has had all association with his estate ended by
England's High Court.
In a decision that has gone unreported until now, Justice
David Edmund Neuberger ruled in late December that an executor of the
multimillion-dollar estate who was a director of the gallery should be
removed and replaced by a new independent representative.
The new trustee is Brian Clarke, 45, a well-known British
architectural artist who was a friend of Bacon and of John Edwards, 49, the
painter's closest friend, to whom Bacon willed his entire estate. Bacon,
widely accepted as the greatest British painter of his generation, died of a
heart attack at the age of 82 in 1992.
Mr. Clarke had been responsible for shifting the
representation of Bacon's works from Marlborough to Faggionato Fine Arts in
London and the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York, an arrangement that drew
sudden attention last October when the Shafrazi Gallery mounted a show of 17
previously unseen Bacon paintings and photographs of his famously cluttered
London studio. Marlborough's loss of the prestigious Bacon account and the
reasons behind it became a subject of curiosity and speculation among
contemporary art experts in London and New York.
Mr. Clarke would say only that lawyers looking into the
administration of the estate had found "certain anomalies" in
actions by Marlborough that compelled them to take their court action.
They had become alert to possible problems when, on making
their first inquiries to Marlborough London, Bacon's gallery since 1958, they
were told that the Bacon paintings were being handled not in London but by
Marlborough Liechtenstein.
The explanation set off alarms since the Liechtenstein
office had been central to a scandal in New York in the 1970's over the
estate of the American painter Mark Rothko that led to the ousting of
executors; heavy fines against Marlborough; the conviction of its head, Frank
Lloyd, for tampering with evidence and the end of its membership in the Art
Dealers Association of America.
Liechtenstein is also known as a place that affords
corporations high levels of secrecy and protection against demands for
disclosure.
The Rothko case exposed sinister inner workings in the
supposedly genteel art world and cost Marlborough its pre-eminence in
contemporary art. Among other abuses, Marlborough was found to have sold
paintings to favored clients at less than market value and to have collected
inflated commission.
Lawyers for the Bacon estate are busy in four European
countries and the United States tracking assets that the estate believes
should go to Mr. Edwards. "They are currently putting together a case
that may at some point in the near future come to court," Mr. Clarke
said.
His whole purpose, Mr. Clarke said, was to "get John
everything that Francis left him."
The principal lawyer for the estate, John L. Eastman of New
York, said in a telephone interview from St. Barts that "the defining
question for the estate is what is there beyond what we already have."
The argument presented to Justice Neuberger for the removal of Valerie
Beston, a director of Marlborough London, was that entrusting fiduciary
responsibility to an official associated with the gallery whose actions were
being examined by the estate presented a conflict of interest.
Neither Mr. Clarke nor Mr. Eastman would specify what
activities of Ms. Beston's or the gallery's they had questioned.
Geoffrey Parton, a director of Marlborough London, said the
gallery would not discuss any aspect of the Bacon estate. Mr. Parton said
"no comment" six times during a brief telephone conversation on
Monday, including to questions about whether Ms. Beston had been a Bacon trustee
or was a director of the gallery. Court documents confirm that she was both.
There were originally two other trustees of the Bacon
estate, Gilbert de Botton, a financier well known in art collecting circles
who was a former director of Marlborough Zurich, and Dr. Paul Brass, Bacon's
personal physician. Mr. de Botton never took up his commission, and Dr. Brass
was replaced in the same Dec. 18 action that removed Ms. Beston. Dr. Brass,
Mr. Clarke said, had acted "impeccably" but was simply overwhelmed
by the size and complexity of the task.
Mr. Clarke and Mr. Eastman both resisted putting any value
on the overall Bacon holdings. Individual paintings have fetched up to $6
million, prompting outsiders to estimate the worth of the whole estate at
more than $100 million
The estate has paid its taxes and does not need to raise
any money with sales of major works. "We may sell a number of pictures
as time goes on, but we have no plans for any kind of big sale," Mr.
Clarke said. "Not even a small sale, for that matter," he added
Bacon's friends have found that the painter was even more
prolific than they had known.
"Even though everybody thought that they'd been
through the studio with a fine-tooth comb, we found a number of paintings
dating from the 50's," Mr. Clarke said. "Since Francis died, I had
been in his studio probably a hundred, a hundred and fifty times, and I had
missed them. John Edwards had missed them."
The studio where Bacon worked for the last 30 years of his
life was a giddy jumble of half-finished canvases, books, rags, drawings,
notes, twisted paint tubes, encrusted brushes and broken furniture with bare
bulbs dangling from the ceiling and smears of paint on the doors and walls.
It occupied two rooms of a South Kensington mews house and is being disassembled,
measured, catalogued and documented for reconstruction in Dublin, where Bacon
was born and spent the first 16 years of his life.
It will be reassembled in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery
of Modern Art for public show beginning in 2001. The dismantling has been
done in archeological fashion, with highly detailed and enumerated placement
charts so that the creative chaos that Bacon wrought in London can be
precisely recreated in Dublin.
More Bacon works emerged when Barry Joule, 44, a Canadian
writer who was one of the painter's neighbors, came forth with 500 oil
sketches, drawings, and worked-on photographs from 1945 to 1965 that Mr.
Bacon had given him.
There have been reports in the British press of disputes
and threatened legal action between the estate and Mr. Joule, but Mr. Clarke
said that Mr. Joule shared the estate's interest in abiding by the painter's
wishes that Mr. Edwards receive everything.
He said that talks with him were "perfectly
amicable." Mr. Joule agreed with that characterization, saying,
"Things are being worked out in a friendly fashion."
Last year the Tate Gallery purchased 42 similar works on
paper from the 1950's and 60's in gouache, oil paint, ink, ballpoint pen and
pencil from Paul Danquah and Peter Pollock, friends of the artist, and the
estate of Sir Stephen Spender. The works, compelling early visions of the
twisted figures, blurred faces, screaming popes and butchered carcasses that
were to become Bacon's signature repertory of postwar angst, are on display
at the Tate until May 2.
Mr. Edwards, a reclusive and simple man currently living in
Southeast Asia, was Bacon's closest friend for the last 16 years of his life.
Born within the sounds of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church in East London
and therefore a genuine Cockney, Mr. Edwards never learned to read or write
and maintained a relationship with Bacon that friends described as filial.
Mr. Clarke said he became involved four years ago when Mr.
Edwards approached him perplexed about delays and problems in dealing with
the estate. "He asked if I would help him to try to understand why the
estate was not being wound up, and he asked me to become his power of
attorney. I thought it would be a very short thing, but after a while I
discovered that there were, let's say, certain anomalies, problems without
the resolution of which the estate could not be wound up.
Mr. Clarke took on the assignment without the knowledge of
the executors, and when he found the task more daunting than he had anticipated,
he turned to Mr. Eastman, a lawyer with broad experience in the worlds of art
and entertainment. Mr. Eastman's sister, Linda, the wife of Sir Paul
McCartney, had been a friend and collaborator of Mr. Clarke's, and the
photographs of Bacon's studio that were displayed in New York last fall were
the last pictures she shot before her death last April.
While he declined to get into the details of his
preoccupation over Marlborough's management of Bacon, Mr. Clarke explained
why he thought the painter's estate required special attention.
"Francis Bacon was famously disinterested and
uninterested in money," he said. "He lived the life of an
essentially simple man in a tiny bed-sit that was heated when very cold by
leaving the gas door open. He had a tiny kitchen that contained an open bath,
and a room with a bed and a chest of drawers.
"He was the last great existentialist. If you are an
art gallery representing such a man whose chief legatee can neither read nor
write and hasn't even had his own lawyer until recent years, your fiduciary
obligations are all the greater because such a man could be described as
'easy pickings.' "
Bacon: the rough guide
He always denied their existence. But do the drawings really dispel
the myth of his paintings' spontaneity?
TOM LUBBOCK | CULTURE | THE
INDEPENDENT | TUESDAY 2 MARCH 1999
Because something has been kept secret, needn't mean it
holds a secret. Francis Bacon always said that he never drew, he only
painted. But since his death in 1992 a lot of pictures have turned up that
undermine this claim. Their value and status are still disputable and the
smallish show at the Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon: Works on Paper, is, in some
ways, premature. Still, the topic is obviously of note to anyone interested
in Bacon, and this glimpse is worth catching. What sort of revelation it
offers is another matter,
The drawings at the Tate are dated to about
1957-61. A good moment: Bacon was about 50 years old and - a late beginner -
on the brink of what is now seen as his mature style. There are pencil
sketches on paper, and oil-paint sketches on paper, and Biro sketches on
paper. There are also a couple of examples of his drawings over photographs,
where Bacon has taken a photo-reproduction from a book or a magazine and
worked over it in paint, sometimes completely obliterating it, sometimes
altering it only slightly.
Now, there's nothing here that could be
called a finished drawing. Almost all of them are figure studies, quite loose
sketches, generally involved with working out some body pose or - if that
sounds too anatomically correct - some body shape. Some of them can be
related, and quite closely, to paintings; some not. And though it would be
presumptuous to say that they're just what you would expect Bacon's drawings
to look like, I don't think anyone seeing them will get a big surprise, or
say "wow, so that's how he drew".
No. They figure. And as for the altered
photos - well, they're interesting, because they show Bacon disrupting an existing
image, and in his paintings he's often disrupting his own images - but
they're almost not news. We know from photos of his studio and his interview
with David Sylvester that he worked from, and among, torn-out and trampled-on
photos - Eisenstein film stills, Muybridge motion studies, fine-art
reproductions, natural history shots. The fact that he worked on them, too,
doesn't seem such a big difference.
I don't say these drawings lack value or enlightenment.
They're often graceful in the way that Bacon himself was graceful. They stress the
cartoony side of his art, which is always worth stressing. But I do say: if
we'd known them all along, I don't think we'd now give them a lot of
attention. And if you're looking for revelations, you have to see them in
quite another way.
You may remember a TV programme on Channel 4
last year about a large haul of these drawings-over-photos, in the possession
of a friend of the artist. They're not in this show. But these, it was said,
the Tate had at one point taken an interest in - they were offered without
charge, apparently - but then the gallery got cold feet, and the affair was
made to sound mysterious and conspiratorial, as if the Tate wanted to hush up
the very existence of these pictures.
The problem, I gather, is that another,
non-Bacon hand had been detected in the pictures, and that made them dodgy.
But now it's thought possible that this other hand belonged to Bacon's
boyfriend of the time, and that the drawings aren't so much inauthentic as
collaborative. Whatever value that might give them, it seems likely that many
visitors will have seen the programme, and could do with more information
here. All we get is a tiny mention in the catalogue - "substantial
quantities of comparable material have recently been attributed to the
artist" - a briskness that suggests the issue remains tricky.
The TV programme, of course, and others, too,
have gone on to suggest that the existence of any Bacon drawings is more than
tricky, it's damned awkward. It wasn't just that the old dog had been caught
telling lies. No one could be surprised or shocked by that, as such. And it's
not that Bacon mightn't have had good reasons for keeping his drawings quiet.
As David Sylvester says in his preface, he probably didn't think they were
much good in themselves, and he didn't want to encourage an irrelevant
interest in his creative process, as opposed to his painting.
Fine. But he may have had bad reasons, too.
And what's suggested is that discovery of these drawings touches his
paintings very damagingly. By denying them, Bacon was really trying to deny
the fact that he had a creative process at all. For didn't he always claim to
work in an entirely unplanned and quasi-random manner? And doesn't the power
of his art involve a sense of this spontaneity? But these studies and
try-outs sink that story - and expose the painting as a kind of con. That's
the dreadful secret they reveal.
Not quite. But it is a slightly difficult
issue. I think the right answer goes like this. The above line of thought is
quite wrong; the existence of the drawings damages the painting not at all.
But on the other hand, Bacon himself probably believed something rather like
that, and it was a reason for him to deny his drawings. After all, the Bacon
myth, partly self-constructed, tends to picture the artist as fighting drunk,
flinging himself and several pots of paint at the canvas. There follows a
great Andy Capp-style dust-up, a cloud of energy with hands, brushes, rags,
and sponges flying everywhere. At the end of it all, things settle, and there
on the canvas is the image - the skid-mark of the impact, so to speak.
What I'm getting at is that Bacon did
half-want to elide the act of painting. There are all those vivid and
memorable phrases in the interviews with Sylvester - about making images
straight off his nervous system, or leaving a trail like a snail leaves its
slime, or making images that didn't look as though they'd been interfered
with. They don't all say the same thing, but the general idea is of images that
emanate, materialise, just happen - sort of splurge themselves out of him.
And the thing is, you can half-believe it,
too. Bacon's images do have paint skid-mark aspects, and the bodies he
depicts have lost their boundaries and they blend into those skid-marks; and
then you can imaginatively transfer this feeling on to the painter's own body
and its contact with the canvas. This, indeed, is the illusion the paintings
often achieve. Bacon is careful to conceal any traces of too deliberated
paint-work - and conceals them in the same spirit as he concealed his drawing.
But remember, it is an illusion, and he is
careful. True, the paintings have randomly thrown splats of paint in them,
and wild strokes, but they are incorporated very cunningly. This spontaneity
is, unavoidably, a matter of work. And the existence of drawn studies should
be no more of a revelation to us than the "revelation" that Bacon
was an extremely skilful operator.
If you really wanted a posthumous revelation
about Bacon's art, that would be its subject: Bacon's skills in operation,
and operating in one particular area. For there's one notable omission from
the Tate's drawings. There are body studies, but there are no head or face
studies. I suppose half Bacon's fame rests on what he did to heads and faces.
Who wouldn't like to see how that was done? So the revelation I'm imagining
is a hitherto undiscovered reel of film, close up on the middle of a Bacon
canvas, showing the artist doing his first strokes, his solid modelling of
forms and then his blur-smears, dissolves and sudden fade-outs, his chancy,
flung blots and splashes and his seamless blending of them into the image,
his finishing touches. Bacon-wise, I can't think of a more valuable or
curious document. There's almost certainly no such thing. But you never know.
'Francis Bacon: Works on Paper', Tate
Gallery, Millbank, London SW1 (0171-887 8000). Daily to 2 May, admission free
Court
cuts gallery’s ties with
Francis Bacon
By CATHERINE MILNER | ARTS CORRESPONDENT | NEWS | THE
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH | SUNDAY, APRIL 4, 1999
MARLBOROUGH Fine Art, the gallery in London that
represented the painter Francis Bacon for more than 30 years, has had its
ties with the artist's estate severed by the High Court.
When he died in 1992, Francis Bacon left everything he
had—an estate worth more than £61 million—to John Edwards, an illiterate
recluse who was Bacon's friend for the last 16 years of his life.
At the end of last year responsibility for the artist's
work was moved from Marlborough Fine Art to Faggionato Fine Arts London, and
Tony Shafrazi in New York, after Mr Edwards detected what are described as
"certain anomalies" in the way the account was being handled.
In a separate move, the High Court ordered the removal of
all the trustees of the Bacon estate, including one who had also worked as
one of the directors of the gallery, Valerie Beston.
Although it is unclear what the anomalies are, lawyers in
four European countries and the US are said to be tracking assets that
trustees believe "should go to Mr Edwards."
Power of attorney has gone to Brian Clarke, an
architectural artist, who was a friend of both Bacon and Mr Edwards and is
now the sole executor of the estate—replacing all the trustees including Dr
Paul Brass, Bacon's doctor, and Gilbert de Botton, a financier.
Lawyers were alerted to possible anomalies by the
disclosure that many of the Bacon paintings have been sold not in London but
through another Marlborough Gallery outlet in Liechtenstein—a place favoured
by a number of art dealers because it allows businesses to conduct their
affairs in great secrecy.
Since Bacon died a number of works have come to light that
were unknown when he was alive—hidden in his studio, or stored at the framer.
According to Mr Clarke, in an interview published this week
in The Art Newspaper, his main intention is to ascertain the full extent of
the estate, and "to get John everything Francis left him".
He said: "We have a group of lawyers working in
several countries putting together a case that may, at some point in the near
future, come to court.
"The will was straightforward: John Edwards gets
everything, and it is now my job to make sure that that happens."
The fact that Mr Clarke has been interviewed in the art
press has suggested to some that he is seeking information about the
whereabouts of Bacon paintings that may not have been recorded.
"Even though everybody thought that they'd been
through the studio with a fine tooth-comb, we found a number of paintings
dating from the fifties." Mr Clarke is reported as saying.
Georgina Gibbs, a representative of the gallery, said
yesterday that Marlborough Fine Art had "never knowingly retained or
withheld any work that belonged to the estate. We have provided the
information required about the archives. We don't know what they want.
"Because he sold works himself directly it was a lot
harder to catalogue things—the Marlborough did not know the extent of the
estate."
Although the exact value of the estate is difficult to
ascertain, a single painting has exchanged hands for more than £3.7 million,
and there are also large sums to be made from reproduction and copyright fees
for postcards, books and films.
Richard Moyse, solicitor for Ms Beston, said that he
"didn't know what the claim would be" and that all queries should
be addressed to Marlborough Fine Art's solicitors, who did not comment.
Acting on behalf of Mr Edwards is John Eastman, a New York-based lawyer and
the brother of Linda McCartney.
"Whether we take Marlborough Fine Art to court will
depend on how they respond." was all that Mr Eastman would say last
week.
Final friends: Francis Bacon, left, his sole heir
John Edwards
Hugh
Lane gallery profits from 'ghastly misunderstanding' over
Bacon studio
CULTURE
| THE IRISH
TIMES | SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 1999
Last September Mr John Edwards, the sole heir
of the internationally-renowned artist Francis Bacon, donated the painter's
studio to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin. Yesterday he visited the
gallery for the first time and met the Lord Mayor, Mr Joe Doyle, and the
gallery director, Ms Barbara Dawson.
When it was announced last year, the donation was greeted
as one of the most significant in the history of the State. Bacon, who was a
wealthy man from the sale of his work, lived and worked in spartan conditions
in Reece Mews in London.
His cramped studio was cluttered and untidy, its walls
spattered with paint. It will be painstakingly reconstructed in the Hugh Lane
Gallery exactly as he left it and opened to visitors in 2001.
Meanwhile, in June next year, the gallery will feature a
major exhibition of his paintings, curated by the leading authority on his
work, Mr David Sylvester.
Bacon died in 1992, and Mr Edwards was his closest friend
for the last 16 years of his life. This is his first visit to Ireland, though
there is a family link: his maternal grandmother, Rosie O'Shea, was born in
Dublin.
A Cockney who never learned to read or write, he has been
described as shy to the point of being reclusive. He was accompanied by the
artist Brian Clarke, a friend of both his and Bacon's, who since late last
year has been the sole executor of the Bacon estate.
"I think it's an extremely important event for
Ireland," Mr Clarke said later. "And it's very appropriate. I'm
convinced Francis would have loved it. After all, he was born here, and he
said once that he couldn't come back until he was dead - the fuss would be
too much."
Mr Clarke also said the estate was totally behind the Hugh
Lane in carrying through the reconstruction of the studio and various related
exhibits. "It's the intention of the estate that as much material as
possible relating to Francis and his studio finds a home in the Hugh
Lane."
But is it true that the studio was offered to the Tate
Gallery in London before it was offered to the Hugh Lane?
It is extremely difficult to put a value on the estate, of
which Mr Edwards is the sole beneficiary, partly because it is dependent on
the art market and partly because its full extent is a matter for
speculation. Previously unknown paintings and drawings have already come to
light.
Last December the High Court in London dramatically removed
the existing executors and appointed Mr Clarke as sole executor and
"personal representative" of the estate. The court also severed the
estate's links with Marlborough Fine Art, the gallery which represented Bacon
for over 30 years.
In fact, since last April paintings from the estate had
been handled by the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York and Faggionato Fine
Arts in London.
These moves follow the appointment of Mr John Eastman as
principal lawyer for the estate, and for Mr Edwards. Mr Eastman, a
high-profile New York arts lawyer whose clients have included the painters
Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, is the brother of the late Linda
McCartney. He and his associates are currently engaged in tracking assets of
the estate in several countries.
Mr Clarke did not want to be drawn on the nature of the
disagreement between the estate and Marlborough, though the revelation that
Bacon's works were being handled by Marlborough Liechtenstein, and not by
London, is said to have caused alarm. "I will say that, should the Bacon
estate enter into any litigation, I confidently expect that it would be successful."
Francis Bacon
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, USA
RONALD
JONES | FRIEZE
MAGAZINE | ISSUE 46 | MAY
1999
History
gives and it takes away. The number of verified Rembrandts has diminished
recently, while the importance of Francis Bacon has increased with the
discovery of several paintings. When history ‘gives’ in this way, it creates
the same sense of surprise as being given a second car. The inevitable
historians are trotted out, glowing like proud new mothers. For this
exhibition, Sam Hunter, David Sylvester and John Russell have written the
exhibition catalogue. Discrimination from a special jurisdiction is required:
that old time religion, connoisseurship, must be dusted off and put into
service. Three questions are asked in quick succession: A. Are the pictures
genuine? (beyond a doubt); B. What were the artist’s final intentions towards
works of art that were not acquired from him during his lifetime? (the key
question); C. What do they add to the oeuvre? (because they always add up to
something).
The most engaging paintings from this ‘new
vein’ are from the 50s and early 60s, a period when Bacon was known routinely
to destroy canvases with which he wasn’t satisfied. Amongst this group are
four relative spellbinders: Study for Nude Figures, Study
after Velázquez, Study After Velázquez II (all c.1950),
and Pope and Chimpanzee (1962). All of these explore the
howling subjects with which Bacon struggled - Existentialism, Abstract
Expressionism and the primal drama of a world newly acquainted with the Bomb.
The Velázquez studies and the Pope/chimp canvas in particular elaborate on a
theme that especially preoccupied Bacon: the obliteration of faith by
instinct.
The painting of Innocent X’s screaming face,
(Study After Velázquez II) flickering between the grey ribbons
cascading all around him (which better recalls Titian’s Portrait of
Archbishop Filippo Archinto, 1561-62), broadcasts unbridled terror. But
whereas Velázquez so perfectly depicted Innocent’s hands at ease on the arms
of his magnificent throne, Bacon presents them like the white-knuckled hands
of the condemned prisoner in the electric chair whose Christian serenity has
seized up at the instant of the switch, unsure of what is poised to take
over. It’s an awful truth that faith is always vulnerable. In Pope and
Chimpanzee, feral instinct is hurled toward the personification of Catholic
faith. The clinging savage viciously grapples with an inert papal body
crowned by a holy, repulsive, mangled face: faith made mush.
These pictures are undoubtedly part of
Bacon’s oeuvre, but what part? Where will they finally find their place in
the language of Bacon? One of them, Study after Velázquez II (1950)
was assumed destroyed. And now, either through oversight or Bacon’s revised
artistic insight, it is here with us and he is not. Is it useful and
appropriate to ask if this discovery causes any revision of our appreciation
and understanding of Bacon. I think not; these paintings don’t add up to
enough to justify a revision - they’re not as substantial as those that
formed our judgements of Francis Bacon so many years ago. It is clear that
the new Study After Velázquez (1950) is not as realised or even rectified
as Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X made
just three years later, and that Figure in Frame (1950) adds
little to our understanding of Dog (1952). In the final
analysis, if there are breaches in the oeuvre, these pictures do nothing to
illuminate them.
High
Life, Grim Work
HILARIE
M. SHEETS | BOOKS
IN BRIEF | THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW | SUNDAY,
AUGUST 22, 1999
''In a painting that's even worth looking at, the image
must be twisted if it is to make a renewed assault upon the nervous system,''
Francis Bacon (1909-92) once quipped, hinting at the core of his brutal,
visceral, distorted portraits of man and beast and shrieking popes. His
friend and biographer Michael Peppiatt and two art historians, Dennis Farr
and Sally Yard, build a revelatory composite portrait in FRANCIS BACON: A
Retrospective (Abrams/ Trust for Museum Exhibitions, $65).
Yard's cogent essay gives essential biographical
information: Bacon was thrown out of his home at the age of 16 by his father
after being caught in his mother's underwear, and thereafter moved
peripatetically among the homosexual underworlds in Berlin, Paris and London,
where he finally settled. He was a notorious high liver and an atheist who
found in subjects like the Crucifixion a way to convey man's butchery. Farr
points out that Bacon, who was assigned to clear corpses from bombed houses
during World War II, had plenty of ready-made examples for his Crucifixion
studies. He also underscores how fiercely Bacon controlled his images,
destroying any he thought unsatisfactory and forbidding written commentary on
specific paintings (Farr provides such analysis here, with each color plate).
In rousingly animated prose, Peppiatt recounts how Bacon
was able ''to transmute paralyzing amounts of drink into creative energy,''
rising at 6 each morning to grapple with his canvases while his companions
(including Peppiatt) were incapacitated. And while Bacon excoriated religion,
Peppiatt trenchantly observes his near-religious fervor about painting,
belying nihilistic statements Bacon was prone to make like: ''I have nothing
to express.'' Hilarie M. Sheets
"Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard,"
by Francis Bacon (1975).
Francis Bacon’s Modernism
ANDREW BRIGHTON | CRITICAL QUARTERLY | VOLUME
42, ISSUE 1 | APRIL 2000
In the summer of 1950 the American art critic Sam Hunter
visited Francis Bacon's studio. In the seeming chaos, Hunter found newspaper
clippings, magazine illustrations and reproductions torn from books. He
assembled and photographed them. They included photographs of Himmler and
Goebbels, street fighting in Petrograd in 1917, a hippopotamus from Stalking
Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa, stills from A History of
British Films 1896—1906 and a
reproduction of Grünewald's Christ Carrying the Cross. All these
images were sources for Bacon's paintings. There was one image never used in
his paintings; it was a photograph of Charles Baudelaire by Nadar.
1
Francis Bacon had his first one-person exhibition in 1949.
Lawrence Gowing described its impact on painters.
It was an outrage. A disloyalty to the existential
principle, a mimic capitulation to tradition, a profane pietism, like
inverted intellectual snobbery, a surrender also to tonal painting, which
earnestly progressive painters have never forgiven. It was everything
unpardonable. The paradoxical appearance at once of pastiche and of
iconoclasm was indeed one of Bacon's most original strokes.
Artists are the most virulent critics of art that
transgresses current aesthetic mores. As Leo Steinberg pointed out in his
essay 'Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public', they have more
invested in how things are or should be in art than anyone else. The
investment is in both the assumptions that prompt their work and in the
particular knowledge and skills deployed in its production. In other words,
to ask why one artist offended others requires a reply that shows contesting
convictions and cultural capital. In Sam Hunter's photograph we see sources
for Bacon's knowledge and skills; in the photograph of the author of Les
Fleurs du Mal and Intimate Journals we glimpse a source of his
conviction.
The painterly intelligence and courage of Francis Bacon's
paintings of the late forties and up to the mid 1950s lie in Bacon's use of
his own ineptitude and his limited painterly virtuosity. He recognises the
affective power of the pictorial transgressions in his stumbling facture of
conventional form and space. He exploits the seductive plasticity of silver
grey to black, that sense of form made by laying lighter tones onto dark.
This is intelligent because of the acuity of his attention to what he is
doing. It is courageous because the whole enterprise is entirely reliant on
his ability to find something in the paintings that saved them from looking
like the work of an under-trained painter working from photographs. That was
what he was. Francis Bacon was rare amongst artists with major reputations.
He did not attend art school. The many paintings he destroyed were the
paintings that gave him away.
2
Michael Polanyi argues in Personal
Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy that
skill is the deployment of tacit knowledge. It is by imitation and repetition
that skill is acquired. It is not grasped, as, for instance, is mathematics,
by learning the principles for practice. Riding a bike or swimming are
instances of tacit knowledge. If I say I know how to ride a bike, it does not
mean I can tell you the physics of bike riding. I can show you how to ride a
bike but it would be very difficult to tell you how. The activity of painting
deploys the accumulation of skills that comes from imitation and practice.
How a painter acquires and develops their skills is obviously a fundamental
determinant of their work.
Up to the latter half of the nineteenth century, training
for painters would begin with drawing classical statuary. By this method the
fundamental gestalt, the way of structuring how one constituted an image, was
indebted to and embedded in classical models of posture, gesture, expression
and anatomy. Increasingly by the end of the nineteenth century art students
were taken straight to nature and the life room to draw from the nude model.
Copying was a denial of progress and truth. Ruskin's Christian realism
haunted the English art school pedagogy right through to the 1960s. Art as
the grasping of God's order in nature was re-jargonated as 'the structure of
form'. There was a moral rectitude; a notion of honesty, in delineating
appearance with accuracy.
Bacon learnt to draw and paint from photography, not just
from photographic images of people and things but from photographic reproductions
of paintings. Sam Hunter's photograph gives us the tip of an iceberg. Bacon's
pictorial sources traversed mediums and traditions. From medical textbooks on
diseases of the mouth and positions in radiography to Michelangelo drawings,
from Degas pastels and paintings to Muybridge photographs of bodies in
movement to Rembrandt's paintings, reproductions of Velazquez's, and
photographs he commissioned of lovers and friends. His knowledge of his most
single important source in twentieth-century art, Picasso's biomorphic work
in the late 1920s and early 1930s, must have been heavily dependent on
reproductions.
For the
traditionalist figurative painter of Bacon's generation, light and dark and
the movement of brush marks are there to articulate the linear location of
form, to give a sense of a volume in a space established by line. They paint
as if photography had never happened. Photographs are mere mechanical indexes
of light and dark upon a surface and lack, if I remember my art school's
teachers well, structural understanding. Bacon's portraits of the early
fifties take this superficiality to an extreme; they are like direct imprints
of the head upon the canvas, something like the Turin Shroud.
Bacon escaped a way of painting that had its roots in delineation
of the inert human body. He worked by synthesis of images, memory and
observation rather than the linear analysis of appearance. In this sense
Bacon's methods were closer to the academic model than to the realist
pedagogy of twentieth-century art schools. But his gestalt, his way of
structuring images, was embedded in lens-derived images. The most important
feature, because it runs right through his work, is that it is built upon the
depiction of bodies in motion. There are many gestures, postures, facial
expressions, and bodily movements in Bacon's work that are rare or unknown in
the work of other painters, even those who use photography. It is as if the
draughtsmanship of the conventionally trained painter carries within it a
search for the immobile body and the limited vocabulary of positions and
expressions that a model can hold for extended periods of time.
Bacon was to develop as primarily a tonal painter up to the
mid 1950s. He painted directly onto raw brown canvas. Since the Impressionists,
most artists have painted onto smooth white primed canvas. It maximises the
vivacity of hue but can deprive dark tones of depth. The brown of the canvas
supplied Bacon with a mid-toned ground. Up to the Impressionists, most
painters worked on canvases primed in a mid-tone. It gave the key tone
against which dark and light tones were disposed. Bacon painted, in other
words, in this respect as if Impressionism had never happened.
3
Bacon was then a pictorial reactionary. Recognition of this
was not limited to London progressive artists in the late 1940s reported by
Lawrence Gowing. Clement Greenberg was the most influential critic of Bacon's
generation; they were born in the same year, 1909. Greenberg's formal
analysis was derived from the technical tradition of Matisse brought to
America by the painter and teacher Hans Hoffman. In Greenberg's argument the
common characteristic of the most compelling modern art is that it addresses
the aesthetic sensations particular to its physical medium. Modernist painting
expels all that is merely habitually expected of art. In Greenberg's terms,
Bacon was not a Modernist. Bacon, he observed, was attempting to make art in
a redundant grand manner. In a 1968 interview Greenberg said:
I go for his things at the same time that I see through and
around them. It's as though I can watch him putting his pictures together . .
. I behold the cheapest, coarsest, least felt application of paint matter I
can visualize, along with the most transparent, up-to-date devices . . .
Bacon is the one example in our time of inspired safe taste — taste
that's inspired in the way in which it searches out the most up-to-date of
your `rehearsed responses.' Some day, if I live long enough, I'll look back
on Bacon's art as a precious curiosity of our period.
While Greenberg does not argue aesthetic progress, he does
argue the progress of aesthetics. Science-like, modern criticism has refuted
the ground of past aesthetic judgements even though the judgements of what
was of value were often right. But there is a historically contingent
imperative to authentic modern art. Modernist sensibility arises out of the
character of modern thought, out of its ever stricter and narrower requirement
for 'the empirical and the positive'. The unity of the picture plane, that is
the unity of optical presentation of the painting's material reality, as a
flat surface was the essential characteristic of Modernist Painting. It acts
within a scepticism towards metaphysics, towards all claims to factuality,
authority or meaning not based upon reason or evidence.
Greenberg's Modernism is a historicist account of modern
art's development. The pictorial devices recognised in his teleology connote
hope in modernity: the Impressionists' dissolving of weight and abolition of
tonal modelling, the declared materiality and shallow pictorial space of
Synthetic Cubism and the visual purity and non-figured paintings of Mondrian.
These painters painted onto white primed canvas. Bacon painted into his
mid-toned canvases to evoke weight, darkness, depth and the human form.
Bacon's paintings were informed by and articulate a
different kind of Modernism. His sources of conviction were more indebted to
Modernist literature than art. 'The ontological view governing the image of
man in the work of leading Modernist writers', wrote Georg Lukacs in his book
The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, is that 'man is by nature
solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human
beings'. Lukacs's book includes discussion of Franz Kafka, James Joyce,
Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett and makes reference to T. S. Eliot; all
authors whom Bacon read, Eliot being of particular importance. The majority
of Bacon's paintings depict single figures often in the fractured perspective
of a linear space frame. The figures are isolated painterly incidents within
flat planes. When there are more figures in the same canvas, they are not
integrated into the same pictorial space, they are separate energised
islands. There are exceptions — the most frequent are figures merged in the
act of buggery. In energetic coupling, they do make an incident of shared
space. For Bacon, the ahistorical body in extremis is the essential brutal
fact left by the death of metaphysics. His idea of the 'empirical and the
positive' was untouched by the overviews of progressive historicism.
4
The artists' reaction to the 1949 exhibition reported by
Gowing was not universal. Wyndham Lewis, 'that lonely old volcano of the
Right' as George Orwell called him, was eking out his income by writing art
reviews for the Listener. The totality of his work constitutes the single
most important and serious confrontation with modernity by any British artist
in the first half of the century. The same claim can be made for Bacon's work
in the second half.
Lewis wrote:
Of the younger artists none actually paints as beautifully
as Francis Bacon. I have seen paintings of his that remind me of Velasquez
and like that master he is fond of blacks. Liquid whitish accents are
delicately dropped upon the sable ground, like blobs of mucus — or else
there is the cold white glitter of an eyeball, or of an eye distended with
despairing insult behind a shouting mouth, distended also to hurl insults.
Otherwise it is a baleful regard from the mask of a decaying clubman or
business executive — so decayed that usually part of the head is
rotting away into space. But black is his pictorial element.
Lewis in an earlier article had described Bacon's paintings
in taking a swipe at Sir Alfred Munnings and the Royal Academy. He concluded,
'there are, after all, more things in heaven and earth than shiny horses or
juicy satins. There are the fleurs du mal for instance.'
References
Lawrence Gowing, 'Francis Bacon', National Museum of Modern
Art, Francis Bacon: Paintings 1945—1982 (Tokyo,
1983), 21.
Leo SteinberG, Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its
Public, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art
(London, Oxford, New York, 1972).
Clement Greenberg, '1968: Interview Conducted by Edward
Lucie-Smith', in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism,
volume 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957—1969,
ed. John O'Brian (Chicago and London, 1993), 278.
Georg Lukacs, 'The Ideology of Modernism', The Meaning
of Contemporary Realism, trans. J. and N. Mander (London, 1963), 20.
Wyndham Lewis, 'Round the Galleries: Francis Bacon', Wyndham
Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913—1956, ed.
Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (London, 1969), 393±4.
Hunt for ‘missing’ works of Francis Bacon
CAL McCRYSTAL | THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY |
MARCH 12, 2000
THE DEATH of Francis Bacon, arguably
Britain's most distinguished 20th-century artist, is proving as controversial
as his life. As art experts struggle to sort out and catalogue the cluttered
contents of his London studio, lawyers are investigating the whereabouts of
Bacon paintings claimed by his estate and willed in their entirety to John
Edwards, Bacon's loyal friend for the 16 years preceding the artist's death
in 1992.
The first effort has involved a team of archaeologists and
conservators painstakingly excavating the jumble of the small, spartan South
Kensington flat where Bacon lived and worked. The contents, along with the
paint-streaked internal walls, have been shipped off to the artist's native
Dublin where they have been meticulously reassembled for exhibition in
November at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art - a donation from
Mr Edwards. (Some of this material can be seen exclusively in our Culture
section.)
But the legal spur to discovery is equally intriguing. It concerns the
London gallery which had handled the artistic management of the painter for
virtually his whole career - an association which the High Court terminated
more than a year ago. Mr Justice David Edmund Neuberger ruled that all the
executors of Bacon's multi-million-pound estate should be removed and
replaced by Brian Clarke, the well- known British architectural artist who
was a friend of Bacon and of John Edwards.
Since then the effort to ensure that Mr Edwards, now 50 and living in
south-east Asia, receives his inheritance has become a legal wrangle of
immeasurable proportions, involving the gallery which represented Bacon for
most of his working life: Marlborough Fine Art in London, and a Marlborough
company in Lichtenstein. Marlborough also has galleries in New York, Spain,
Zurich and Tokyo. One of the deposed executors was Valerie Beston, also a
director of MFA.
Just as the jumbled contents of Bacon's studio were colourfully
spattered with daubs of paint, so the conflict and the background to it are
liberally spangled with the names of celebrities, some of them deceased.
Among them are Sir Paul McCartney, his late wife Linda and her brother, the
New York arts lawyer John Eastman. (His clients have included Willem de
Kooning, Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell.) Mr Clarke is a friend of Sir
Paul's. Mr Eastman is Mr Clarke's American lawyer. Mr Clarke has asked Mr
Eastman to take up the case.
Within the canvas, too, are the American abstract expressionist Mark
Rothko who died in puzzling circumstances almost exactly 30 years ago; the
11th Duke of Beaufort, currently chairman of Marlborough; and some of the
biggest names in the international art scene, including the former
Marlborough boss - an unsavoury Viennese dealer who changed his name from
Franz Kurt Levai to Francis Kenneth Lloyd and who died in 1998 with his
reputation in shreds. The Queen herself is not left out of what is a confused
and disturbing, picture.
Even the prestigious The Art Newspaper has difficulty
interpreting it. Brian Clarke told that journal: "I knew Francis since
the late 1970s - we were friends - but my long-term and great friendship has
been with John Edwards. At John's request I have been given his power of
attorney for a considerable time and then I agreed to help out with the
estate."
As the estate's personal representative, appointed by the High Court,
Mr Clarke has the necessary authority to administer and tie up the estate,
and see that Mr Edwards - a chronic dyslexic who lived with Bacon but was not
his lover - gets what is due to him. "I was assuming that it was a
simple matter of resolving a number of outstanding issues and then the estate
would be wound up," said Mr Clarke, "but before very much time had
passed it was clear that it was a much more complicated affair than I had
first realised." He found that the estate "is more extensive in terms
of its holdings of paintings than has generally been assumed.
"Even though everybody thought that they had been through the
studio with a fine-tooth comb, we found a number of paintings dating from the
1950s," continued Mr Clarke. "Since Francis died, I had been in his
studio probably a hundred times, but I missed them, and John Edwards missed
them. It was such chaos in there and one was very frightened of moving too
much for fear of disturbing things."
It was then that an approach was made to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery
of Modern Art in Dublin's Parnell Square. With Mr Clarke's approval, Mr
Edwards donated the entire studio and contents to Bacon's native Dublin.
"[The Hugh Lane gallery] came to disassemble it archaeologically,"
Mr Clarke said. "But when they dismantled this extraordinary thing, we
found these paintings. It also turned out that there were one or two works in
other places - paintings that the Marlborough Gallery never saw that came out
of that studio that we didn't know existed; John Edwards didn't know they
were there. It is undeniable that the body of work that is in the estate
constitutes the greatest collection of Bacons in the world, and it contains
some unequivocal masterpieces."
By the time the Dublin studio is open to the public in November, more
may have surfaced from the second effort at finding the complete oeuvre. That
investigation will almost certainly examine the role of Frank Lloyd who ran
Marlborough Fine Art and its international network of galleries since the end
of the Second World War. The son of Austrian antique dealers, he fled the
Nazis and went to Paris, and thence to England where he and a fellow Austrian
refugee opened the Marlborough Gallery in London. By 1950, Lloyd had gained
(as he put it himself) "some class, some atmosphere" by appointing
as a director David Somerset, later to become Duke of Beaufort.
Royalty and gossip columnists attended Lloyd by the score. The Queen
came to one of his gallery benefit nights. Venture capital poured into
Marlborough from rich jet-setters, among them Fiat's Gianni Agnelli, shipping
magnates Ragnan Moltzau (Norway) and Onassis and Goulandris (Greece), the
Brazilian publisher Assis Chateaubriand and the Rothschilds.
Lloyd told his salesmen: "If it sells, it's art." He later
declared: "I collect money, not art." He offered artists advances,
staggered payouts and shielded them from the tiresome facts of business. He
signed up such giants as Mark Rothko, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Oskar
Kokoschka, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland and, of course, Francis Bacon.
The Rothko affair was to inflict enormous damage on Marlborough's
reputation. A 1974 book, The Legacy of Mark Rothko, about the
American artist's suicide four years earlier and the epic legal battle over
his effects describes what occurred. According to a New York court petition
by a daughter, Kate Rothko, her father's executors gave Marlborough
"virtually absolute control of the market" for Rothko's paintings
and "drastically limited the supply of money available" to the
estate, "prevented" Rothko's children, committed themselves to
paying "unconscionably excessive" commissions, and "compounded
the fraud" upon the estate. Further, the court petition said, the
executors and Marlborough "wilfully and deliberately concealed from all
other persons interested in the estate" the details of these agreements.
During the litigation, Rothko paintings were ferried out of the
jurisdiction to Canada, despite a court injunction forbidding Marlborough
from squirrelling them away. It took a private detective to track them down
and force their return.
In 1975, with the Rothko case still unresolved, a Francis Bacon
exhibit opened in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Lloyd and his wife were
there to share Bacon's limelight and approbation. A few months later, the judge
handed down a decision in favour of Kate Rothko. He removed the three
executors and cancelled the estate's contracts with Marlborough, ordered the
return of 658 unsold paintings and assessed damages and fines which included
a $3.3m (pounds 2.1m) fine against Frank Lloyd and Marlborough for violating
a court restraining order by shipping 57 paintings out of the country. This
was later increased to $3.8m after a recount showed five more paintings had
been in the illegal shipment.
The Rothko story, wrote its author Lee Seldes, was "one of legal
legerdemain, camouflages and cover-ups, destruction of incriminating evidence
... the laundering of records, funds, and paintings. It ruined lives and
reputations, wrecked long-term friendships."
The Bacon story remains - like his legacy - to be seen. According to
John Eastman, the principal lawyer for the estate, "the defining
question for the estate is: what is there beyond what we already have?"
Gallery Accused of Cheating Prominent Artist
CAROL VOGEL | THE NEW YORK TIMES | 22 MARCH
2000
The international art gallery that was at the center of one of the art
world's most spectacular scandals - the plundering of the estate of Mark
Rothko - was accused in court papers in London yesterday of cheating a second
prominent artist, the British figurative painter Francis Bacon, and
systematically defrauding him and his heir.
In papers submitted to the High Court, an English court that can be
overturned by the Law Lords, lawyers for the estate of the artist who died in
1992 after a turbulent life, charged that the gallery, Marlborough
International Fine Art, consistently undervalued many of Bacon's paintings,
which it bought outright from him and quickly resold for substantially higher
prices, and could not account for the whereabouts of many other paintings.
The lawyers estimated the losses at tens of millions of dollars but
said a total could not be established because Marlborough quickly moved
documents out of Britain and seized photographs of the disputed paintings
when it became clear that a court case was at hand.
Georgianna Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the Marlborough London gallery,
said that Bacon's relationship with Marlborough was not a passive one and
that the artist was aware of the gallery's activities and transactions on his
behalf. She also said the gallery has provided access to all the records the
estate's lawyers have asked for. ''But any other documentation relevant to
the claim will be disclosed during the course of the court action,'' Ms.
Gibbs said. She said the documents that were moved out of Britain were papers
that were returned to the gallery's Liechtenstein branch. Robert Hunter, a
lawyer for Marlborough International, said he could not comment directly on
the allegations because of the litigation.
The papers paint a complex picture of how the suit alleges the gallery
took control of the most minute aspects of Bacon's financial and personal
life - to the point of paying his laundry bills and handing him spending
money - and then used this grip to deprive him of the true value of his work.
According to the lawsuit, the Marlborough connection continued after his
death, when a director of Marlborough's London gallery was named an executor
of his estate and ran it to the detriment of Bacon's sole heir, John Edwards,
an illiterate and reclusive cockney who now lives in Thailand and with whom,
friends say, he had a filial relationship.
Bacon's paintings of distorted, anguished figures fetched as much as
$6 million at auction and made him one of Britain's most celebrated postwar
artists. His own life was as openly tortured as his art. ''You can't be more
horrific than life itself,'' the artist was fond of saying.
He cultivated a bad boy reputation, speaking freely about his abuse of
alcohol, his homosexuality, his penchant for gambling and his kinship with
gangsters. Born in Ireland, he lived most of his life in a rundown mews house
in South Kensington, London, with bare light bulbs, a tub in the kitchen, and
paintings and photographs strewn everywhere.
Unlike some artists who change galleries periodically throughout their
careers, Bacon put all his faith in Marlborough, which represented him from
1958 until his death of a heart attack eight years ago at 82. For much of
this time Marlborough reigned over the contemporary art scene as one of the
leading international galleries with branches in New York, London, Geneva,
Madrid and Vaduz, Liechtenstein.
But the Rothko scandal shook it from its pedestal. In 1983, Frank
Lloyd, Marlborough's founder, was convicted of evidence tampering and
sentenced to community service in connection with the 11-year case in which
Marlborough and the executors of the Rothko estate were found to have engaged
in a conflict of interest in selling and consigning Rothko's work. Mr. Lloyd,
who died two years ago, the gallery and two executors were fined $9.2
million.
Many of the charges made by the lawyers for Bacon's estate involved
activities that they said took place during the same time period as many of
the Rothko transactions. Indeed, Mr. Lloyd, as well as his son Gilbert, a
director of Marlborough, were named in the suit filed yesterday. Two other
directors of Marlborough were also cited, the Duke of Beaufort and Gilbert de
Botton.
Bacon's will, which he wrote a year before his death, was a three-page
document drawn up by Theodore Goddard, a London law firm which represented
Marlborough. In it he left his estate to Mr. Edwards. Bacon appointed three
executors: Valerie F. Beston, a director of Marlborough Fine Art, London;
Paul Brass, his doctor, and Mr. de Botton, chairman of Global Asset
Management. Mr. de Botton declined to take up his role as an executor.
The papers contend that Marlborough bought paintings outright from
Bacon for well below fair market value and sold them for several times as
much within months. A 1958 agreement filed with the court shows that
Marlborough estimated the value of Bacon's paintings based on size - $462 for
a painting 24 by 20 inches and $1,176 for one 78 by 65 inches. John Eastman,
the lawyer for the estate, said an artist of Bacon's stature would get far
more: about 70 percent of the price the gallery anticipated getting from a
buyer.
According to documents, the gallery valued one painting, ''Statue and
Figures in the Street,'' from 1983, at $250,000 in January 1984. Four months
later it paid Bacon $66,371, about 26 percent of that amount, the documents
show.
In one case, the papers said, two sets of books were kept on the sale
of six paintings at the time of the artist's death in 1992, for $2.5 million.
One set kept in the gallery's Liechtenstein office indicated that the money
Marlborough used to pay the estate for the paintings came from Bacon's own
Swiss bank account.
Ms. Gibbs said she could not comment on any of the valuations and
referred all such questions to Mr. Hunter.
In many other cases, Mr. Eastman said, the gallery has not provided
records of its purchases.
Marlborough furnished Mr. Eastman with records covering some
transactions over a 20-year period, but he said many of these were incomplete
or lacked documentation.
Ms. Gibbs said that Mr. Eastman had been given access to all the
records but that it is difficult to determine exactly what is in the estate.
''Marlborough has accounted for everything they were aware of,'' she said.
''Who knows if it's all been found and there won't be more,'' she
said.
Underlying the charges is the close relationship between Bacon and
Marlborough. Ms. Beston was his link to the gallery before becoming executor,
which Mr. Edward's lawyers say was a conflict of interest. Ms. Beston, who
stepped down as executor with Mr. Brass, was not sued. Attempts to reach Ms.
Beston were unsuccessful.
Records show that Ms. Beston had the power to sign checks on Bacon's
primary checking account and to give him money when he needed it. Brian
Clarke, an artist who is now executor of the estate, said that it was Ms.
Beston's job to keep Bacon away from distractions and that she kept a brown
envelope in the gallery for spending money for him, which he would often use
to gamble.
Ms. Gibbs said Ms. Beston's relationship with Bacon was a close one.
''It was Bacon who appointed Ms. Beston as one of his executors,'' she said.
In a statement submitted to the court, his accountant, Hugh Thornton
Brown, said Bacon signed his tax returns before the figures had been filled
in. Mr. Brown became Bacon's accountant at the suggestion of Theodore
Goddard, which also represented Marlborough. He said Mr. Brown, who prepared
Bacon's taxes for 19 years, never met the artist, relying on Ms. Beston's
information.
‘Lost’ Bacon to be sold at auction
FIACHRA GIBBONS | ARTS CORRESPONDENT | THE
GUARDIAN | SATURDAY 6 MAY 2000
One of
Francis Bacon's earliest and best "scream" pictures, which was lost
for nearly 40 years, could fetch £1.8m when it goes under the hammer next
month.
Study for Portrait (Man Screaming) disappeared
in 1962 after being bought by one of Europe's most secretive collectors. The
only evidence of its existence was a black and white photograph in one of the
artist's old catalogues.
The mysterious connoisseur, whom Christie's would only
describe yesterday as a "very, very private" person, has now put
the painting up for sale. Brett Gorvy, a Bacon specialist at Christie's, said
that Bacon experts had presumed the painting, inspired like many of Bacon's
works by photographs of Himmler and other fascist leaders bellowing at their
supporters, had been lost or destroyed.
"A dealer in Geneva sold it. Only a very small number
of people knew who bought it and certainly none of the Bacon community knew
anything of its whereabouts," he said. "It's an amazingly dramatic,
intense and tormented picture, showing an authority figure descending into
quite bestial rage.
"He painted it in 1952, which makes it very early and
rare, at a time when he was alternating between doing pictures of these
hole-like mouths and the earliest of his screaming popes."
Mr Gorvy said that the work was seminal in the development
of that series, Bacon's most famous, based around Velasquez's Portrait of
Pope Innocent X.
Bacon became obsessed with a book on diseases of the mouth
in his twenties and his fixation intensified after seeing the famous close-up
shot of the screaming nurse in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film, Battleship
Potemkin.
Dublin-born Bacon, who died of a heart attack in 1992, was
the most influential British artist of the last century. His reputation has
been further enhanced by a series of huge retrospectives in America over the
past year.
Man Screaming will be
sold at Christie's in London on June 28.
‘Lost’ masterpiece by Bacon to fetch £1.8m
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | SATURDAY 6 MAY 2000
A LOST
masterpiece by Francis Bacon, the British artist, which for years was only
known to collectors from a black and white photograph in a book, is expected
to sell for up to £1.8 million in London next month.
Study for Portrait (Man
Screaming), which was painted by Bacon in 1952, disappeared a decade later
when a collector bought it for just £3,000. For almost 40 years, the only
evidence of its existence has been the photograph in the definitive catalogue
of Bacon's work. The picture, which depicts a tormented man screaming into
the face of the viewer, is to be sold at Christie's in London on June 28.
|
The
picture is expected to fetch between £1.4 million and £1.8 million. Brett
Gorvy, director of Christie's 20th century art department yesterday, said:
"This is a tremendously exciting work last seen by the public some 40
years ago. It is one of the most powerful examples from an important series
of portrait heads that Bacon painted in the early Fifties."
|
My brushes with Bacon
Art critic David Sylvester was friends with
Francis Bacon for 40 years. During that time, he recorded many of their
conversations. Here, he introduces a selection of the artist's previously
unpublished thoughts - about sex, about God, and about cricket...
DAVID SYLVESTER | THE OBSERVER | SUNDAY MAY 21 2000
I'm not sure whether I was Francis Bacon's concierge or his butler, but
intrusive strangers certainly believed that I had the entrée to his domain. I
used to get calls from famous photographers saying that they were great fans
of my writing and could they take my picture. I knew what was coming if I
didn't speedily decline. 'Would it by any chance be possible to photograph
you in Francis Bacon's studio and then perhaps do the two of you together if
he happens to be there at the time?' The comedy of being importuned in this
way was a nice bonus for having done a book called Interviews with Francis
Bacon, which had been widely translated.
My relationship with Bacon began in 1942, when I was 17 and
had just become interested in painting. One of the books I absorbed was
Herbert Read's Art Now, a veritable bible first published in
1933. It reproduced a Crucifixion, painted that year by a young artist with
the name of the great Elizabethan writer, and this painting therefore stayed
in my mind, although the artist had disappeared from view. But at the end of
the war, new works by him started to appear in galleries. They were
sensationally disturbing and widely considered worthy of the Chamber of
Horrors.
It was in 1949 that I realised he was not only an arresting
image-maker but very much a painter, and I started saying so in print. I also
met him by chance and was soon seeing a good deal of him. In 1951, I was
asked to give a talk about his art for the BBC's Third Programme , my first
substantial radio talk. I described him as the most important living painter,
by which I didn't mean he was the greatest, but the most relevant to the age.
I was told afterwards that Harman Grisewood, head of the Third Programme, swore
that it would be a long time before I did another talk for them.
Bacon and I became quite close friends. We drank and dined
together, went dog racing together and shared off-course bets on horses. I
also sat for him a few times, helped him to write a short piece in praise of
an older artist, Matthew Smith, and acted as his agent in selling works to
dealers behind his accredited dealer's back when he urgently needed cash. I
idolised him as a man - this never stopped - and until 1956, I loved his work
unreservedly. But I thought it then took a wrong turn and I became rather
alienated from his current production. I was also put off by the way he
jeered at the work of abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock: my own
pantheon had plenty of room for them both.
So between 1957 and 1962 I stopped writing about him; nor
did we see much of each other. In 1962 he had a retrospective at the Tate,
and as art critic of the New Statesman, I had to review it at
length. I wrote with admiration but reservations and dismissed the work of
the past few years, but concluded that he had returned to form in his latest
piece, a big Crucifixion triptych.
Shortly after, the BBC radio Talks producer, Leonie
Cohn, who had commissioned that 1951 talk and had lately got me to do
interviews with several American Abstract Expressionists and also with
Stanley Kubrick, asked me to interview Bacon. I said I wasn't sure whether
Bacon would agree, as he didn't readily give interviews and may not have
liked my review of his show. But he did agree, and the result was brilliant,
producing passages endlessly quoted since, such as: 'What is fascinating now
is that it's going to be much more difficult for the artist, because he must
deepen the game to be any good at all.'
Four years later I was asked by Michael Gill to interview
Bacon in a BBC TV film he was making. This time we were quite aggressive at
moments. I asked tougher questions than last time and he accused me of liking
abstract art because I was a slave to fashion. But we were now seeing a lot
of each other again and we were both saying that it would be interesting to
do more interviews, especially if we could talk as we did among friends,
without having to think of a lay audience. So we did some private recordings
at my flat and then we decided to publish a book of interviews. This happened
in 1975, and Graham Greene wrote that it was 'an exciting document which can
rank with the journals of Delacroix and the letters of Gauguin'.
We went on recording interviews, some for ourselves, some
for TV, one for an audio company. We published an enlarged edition of the
book in 1980 and a further enlarged one in 1987. Meanwhile, they got
translated into about 10 languages; I don't know whether any of the
translators managed to create an equivalent for the amazing vividness and
rhythmic power of Bacon's talk. The reason we went on doing interviews for
about 25 years was that Bacon loved getting involved in theoretical talk
about art. This is a rare thing in English artists, who tend to poke fun at a
custom so French. And it's a key aspect of Bacon's personality which is not
sufficiently emphasised in most accounts of the man.
His love of talking about art made the recordings easy. The
hard part was the editing. Interviews with artists, even when they have Bacon's
turn of phrase, tend to sprawl and repeat themselves; I wanted the printed
version to be economical in exposition and coherent in structure. I therefore
did most of the editing in collaboration with Shena Mackay, whose work as a
fiction writer suggested that she was the ideal person to help to achieve
that.
Now, if one is aiming for structural coherence, a lot of
the best things said are not going to fit in anywhere; so they get left, so
to speak, on the cutting-room floor. I was always aware how much was being
lost in this way and had it in mind to return to the transcripts, retrieve
some of the best rejected bits and publish them torn from their context as
fragments of talk. The ones that follow are The Observer's
selection from my selection.
Bacon on Bacon
Francis Bacon I love watching the idiocy of other
people, and of myself. And they can watch my idiocy. David
Sylvester People you know and people you don't know, passing
people? FB Yes. I love passing people. I
love going to towns and places where I know nobody at all but very quickly
talk to them. It's so easy to talk to them. DS You
can't really imagine living outside of town, can you? FB I
can't imagine lying on the seashore, for instance, for hours, like people can
do, with the dumb satisfaction that the sun is shining on them. That I
couldn't do at all. DS And what about, say, moving to
the country to work? FB That would be impossible
for me. DS Why's that? FB Because
I like crowds. I mean, I'd rather be in a station than in the country. [1975]
DS Do you at all enjoy the kind of star
quality which you have always had when moving among people? FB That's a
thing that you are not conscious of yourself at all. I have no idea of what
impression I make on other people. DS You
have not been conscious that, when you come into a bar, you immediately
become the centre of attention? That is something I have seen happen ever
since I have known you, which means before you became famous as a painter, so
it wasn't influenced by that. FB Perhaps I was drunk and
garrulous, had a lot to say. I think it can only be for that reason. I
certainly am not conscious of those things. This is not false modesty; I am
just not conscious of it. [1984]
DS Did you go to the theatre when you were
younger? FB I drifted from bar to
bar. DS And when did you start
gambling seriously? FB Well, I have always been
brought up with it, because when we were very young, we used to be sent to
the local post office to put on bets. So, as I was brought up in that sort of
atmosphere in Ireland of everybody gambling, I suppose that that influenced
me. I don't know. Perhaps I would have been a gambler in any case. [1984]
DS It's often said about you by hostile
critics that your work reflects a feeling of disgust about human beings and
of self-disgust. FB Well, I may have, I may very
often be very discontented and loathe myself but I'm not trying to bring that
out. In any way whatsoever. Nor have I a disgust with life. Life is all we
have. I mean, here we are for a moment. [1984]
Bacon on religion
FB Of course one knows how very potent
some of the images of Christianity have been and how they must have played
very deeply on one's sensibility. And after all, one believes in the ethics
of Christianity, or a great number of them, without actually believing in the
practice of the Church. DS You believe in the ethics
of Christianity? FB Well, I think that they
are a carry-over of Greek ethics really, and I think that so far a better
code of ethics for the Western world hasn't yet been found, though of course
the religious side of it is something I can't accept. DS But
then at the heart of Christianity is the idea of salvation and of a life
after this life in which one gets punishment or reward for what one has done
here. FB I think you can accept the
ethics without believing that the good you do will be rewarded or the evil
you do will be punished. [1966]
Bacon on work
FB The only thing that really keeps me
going on is that I want to work - but work, I may say, for no reason. I just
work; it still excites me to work. You see, unless you have religious
feelings or something of that kind, how can you not think that life is
totally futile - and becomes more so with age, because it hasn't got the
pleasures of youth? Probably the only thing, although I know it has no
meaning, is that I like working. I like the possibilities of invention and
the possibilities of something happening. Not because I think they've got any
value, but because they excite me. [1979]
FB I know that teaching is one of the
methods by which many artists survive, but how can you teach? In a period
when there is no tradition, there is nothing to teach. You can teach your own
attitude. The only thing that I can understand for art schools would be for
them to have a few extremely intelligent people whom the people who are
striving to be artists of some kind can come and discuss their problems
with... But many people have to teach because they can't make the money out
of their work. In my own case, even when I could earn no money, I never
taught. Except that once a friend went to the West Indies and he asked me to
take his job for three months at the Royal College of Art, which I did. It's
true to say that I did it very badly. I didn't often go there; there was
nothing I could teach them whatsoever. DS And
what effect did that have upon your own work? Did you feel it was just using
energy which you needed for your own work, or...? FB Not
especially, because it was only for three months. Otherwise I would never
have done it. I'd rather go out and just do a job working. After all, I can
cook, I can clean floors, I can earn my money that way. It would use physical
energy, which would be so much more interesting than mental energy. Because
I've got plenty of mental energy, because I never stop thinking, myself.
After all, I think about painting. Not that I think thinking finally helps,
and yet it does. [1975]
Bacon on books
DS What are you mostly reading
nowadays? FB Well, you know, I read
generally the same thing over and over again. I very often read translations
of Aeschylus; I read Proust; I read anything that comes to my hand. Or any
rubbish as well. DS What rubbish do you
read? FBWell, most things are rubbish.
So I can't tell you exactly what rubbish. There are piles of rubbish and very
little stuff that is any good. DS Do
you read Shakespeare a lot? FB I read a certain amount,
yes. I'll tell you what I really read: things which bring up images for me.
And I find that this happens very much with the translations of Aeschylus,
and with Eliot. For some reason I read them, and when I read them another
time, a different image comes up. I mean, I don't say that these images are
really to do with the poems of Eliot or even with the plays of Shakespeare,
but they open up the valves of sensation for me and so images drop in like
that from reading those things. It could happen just as easily from reading
any of the trash. So it doesn't really make much difference. Except that I'm less
bored by those than I am by the trash. DS In
the same way that you can be influenced by a news photograph or you can be
influenced by Velazquez? FB Exactly. Exactly.
Exactly. [1984]
Bacon on Michelangelo
FB Do you think Michelangelo was an erotic
artist or not? DS Very. But almost
embarrassingly. I find the Slaves almost embarrassing in the longing they
conveyed for these boys. FB He was, after the Greeks,
the great male voluptuary, wasn't he? He made the male body really
voluptuous. DS But with the Greeks, you
feel that the artist has had these boys, and with Michelangelo, that he'd
just longed for them. And that's one reason why I find there's a morbid
quality in Michelangelo which doesn't stop him from being the greatest artist
of our civilisation. FB I think that Michelangelo, from
what one knows about all of his history, had a deeply morbid side to him. But
it's more voluptuous than the Greeks. Because I think in those Slaves the
longing is more poignant than anything you find in Greek art. [1973]
Bacon on cricket
DS As to working from documentary
photographs, one interesting case of this was your recent use of a photograph
of David Gower batting: you translated the pads to the legs of a headless
male nude. FB Well, I have often seen
cricket, and cricket is such an important game in this country, I am very
conscious of it. When I did this image I suddenly said: 'Well, I don't know
why, but I think that it's going to strengthen it very much and make it look
very much more real if it has cricket pads on it.' I can't tell you
why. DS The painting is in Paris,
and some French people I know, while very much admiring it, have been
extremely puzzled by what the figure had on its legs. Some of them thought
they might be bits of Etruscan armour. FB Don't
the French have games in which they use pads? They're deformed cricket pads,
in any case. DS I take it that your
attitude to bringing in the cricket pads was rather like the attitude you
took about 20 years ago when you brought that armband with a swastika into a
Crucifixion triptych. When I asked you whether the presence of the swastika
had a meaning for you and also whether you were concerned that people might
take it to have a meaning, you said the swastika was there simply because the
armband had been in the photograph you'd used and you'd put it in without
thinking about how it might be interpreted. Did you have the same attitude to
bringing in the cricket pads? FB It
wasn't quite the same. You see, with those enormous crowds that have so often
been filmed and photographed at the Nuremberg rallies, I had seen all these
people, and they all had armbands on with the swastikas on them, and I wanted
that in this image: it was stupid to put in the swastika, but there it is. I
didn't think about it, I didn't think that people would interpret it all the
different ways they have. But with the cricket pads, I didn't put them in
because I am particularly interested in cricket; I did so because it made the
image more real. [1982]
Bringing home the Bacon
NEWS
| THE IRISH TIMES | SATURDAY, MAY 27 2000
Suddenly it seems as if Dublin has become Francis Bacon
city. His observation that he would like to return to the city of his birth,
but could probably only do so after he was dead, has been borne out. First
there was the event that set the bandwagon in motion: the sensational
donation of the artist's studio, by his sole heir John Edwards, to the Hugh
Lane Municipal Gallery. There was talk of a treasure trove of Bacon material
fossilised in the layers of stuff that had accumulated like geological strata
in his Reece Mews studio. A team of archivists was enlisted to disentangle
and document an estimated 10,000 separate items. Hints were dropped about the
possibility of other Bacon gifts following the studio.
Then IMMA joined in, with its current exhibition of works
on paper from the archive of Barry Joule, Bacon's neighbour, long-time
friend, helper and archivist. The Oisin Gallery, meanwhile, bought and put on
display an early Bacon canvas - a relative rarity since he destroyed most of
his early work.
And now, next week, from June 1st, the Hugh Lane celebrates
its coup in winning the studio with a major retrospective exhibition of Bacon
paintings that will run throughout the summer.
Francis Bacon in Dublin, curated by the quintessential
Bacon expert, David Sylvester, offers an unmissable opportunity to assess the
work of the man generally described as the most important British artist
since Turner.
When he died, a little over eight years ago in Spain, his
body was cremated without ceremony or mourners, as he had requested. By the
time of his death, he had reached an unassailable plateau of renown.
Detractors could carp about self-parody and Grand Guignol as much as they
liked: his status as one of the 20th-century's great artists was, and for the
moment remains, secure.
The core of his artistic achievement lies in his treatment
of the human figure. There is something undeniably compelling about his
visualisations of the human body as a kinetic blur of flesh and meat, and of
heads as jumbled, contorted masses, often coiled around the black orifice of
a mouth that frames a scream. It is customary, and indeed reasonable, to view
the extremity of his imagery as reflecting a century of horrors. For his
part, he said he painted crucifixions not as religious subjects but as
examples of human behaviour. John Berger remarked disapprovingly on his
tendency to epater les bourgeois, protesting that we were looking at his
paintings rather than at the sites of real atrocity.
While he had a taste for the macabre, Bacon consistently
maintained he was not trying to depict horror. What he was after was
something different, something encapsulated in his often quoted phrase,
"the brutality of fact", or his frequently expressed wish to bypass
the eyes of his viewers and communicate directly with the nervous system.
Certainly, an undercurrent of violence runs through his work and sometimes
takes centre-stage, from the urgent, sexual wrestling of Two Figures (1953)
to recurrent images of wounded flesh, blood soaking through bandages and
discarded syringes, or the grisly pile of blood-soaked clothing in the
central panel of the Triptych inspired by T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes
(1967).
FOR the most part, the violence is inwardly directed, self-contained,
a condition of the flesh. Fascination and loathing mingle in his views of
bodies, whether alone; collapsed in racked, incoherent heaps; or fixed in
strained, muscular poses; or in pairs, fiercely grappling in fumbling, messy,
carnivorous sexual encounters. Ejaculatory spurts of pigment splashed across
the canvas became a stylistic trope.
He trawled an eclectic range of sources for imagery:
medical textbooks on diseases of the mouth and radiography, a still from
Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a postcard reproduction of Velasquez's
portrait of Pope Innocent X (which inspired one of his most celebrated series
of paintings), photographs of apes and other animals, Muybridge's sequential
studies of The Human Figure in Motion, newspaper and magazine cuttings,
photographs of friends snapped by John Deakin, a crucifixion by Cimabue,
which he provocatively described as being like a worm crawling down the
cross. Many of these images attained an iconic status relating specifically
to the use he made of them.
He exploited not just photographic imagery but the
pictorial syntax of photography in bravura demonstrations of painting's
capacity to appropriate its codes. There was, and still is in some quarters,
a widespread assumption that there is no point in painting the human subject
now that we have myriad forms of photography at our disposal, but Bacon was
one of the figurative painters who proved that there is a level of realism
beyond the photographic, while being in no way anti-photography.
On the contrary, he was fascinated by the way photography
offered new ways of looking - the way, for example, radiography revealed the
skeletal armature. A disembodied spine becomes mysteriously visible in one
painting in 1975, but more often he offers gross, fairly visceral anatomical
intrusions. In contrast to the livid, fleshy intensity of the figures,
though, the backgrounds in his paintings are flat and cursory. They are
overtly theatrical spaces furnished with a few minimal domestic props (he
rarely ventured out-of-doors in his pictures), including the trademark bare,
dangling light bulb and light switch, a mattress on a metal-framed bed, some
items of modernist furniture, perhaps ones he had designed himself in the
1930s, and a toilet bowl or basin.
Broadly speaking, whereas in most Western representational
painting the spaces between things serve to integrate figures and ground, in
Bacon's work the background spaces systematically isolate the figures. They
are as exposed as actors on-stage - a condition often emphasised by the
superimpositions of a cage-like grid - and subjected to an intrusive,
forensic scrutiny.
Despite the apparent bleakness of his
painterly vision, backed up by his firm, uncompromising rejection of notions
of deity, afterlife and transcendent purpose, Bacon was not usually a gloomy
person. Friends, ex-friends and enemies all attest that he was one of those
individuals possessed of a crackling, electric energy, that he was an
energising presence. It was instantly noticeable that the atmosphere came to
life when he wandered into one of his habitual Soho haunts, chiefly the
French Pub, Wheelers seafood restaurant or Muriel Belcher's Colony Room, and
not only, as Bruce Bernard remarked, because "nearly everyone likes
being bought champagne and lunch". The bar staff at the French Pub liked
him "for reasons only loosely connected with commerce", and
"the real pleasure of these occasions was the spectacle of care being
banished with such elan". There is a plausible view, though, that his
spectacular generosity was also a peculiarly effective way of controlling
people, and on occasion he could turn, especially on friends.
Those places in Soho, with visits to gambling
clubs, formed Bacon's daily routine from about 12.30 p.m. Prior to that he
painted, from early in the morning, usually with a hangover, which, he said,
gave him the necessary clarity of mind. Even into his 70s, he was a dapper
figure, with a liking for leather jackets and tight trousers. He hated
growing old and, for as long as he could, behaved as if he was young. He
bemoaned the fact that, though he could still attract younger men through the
sheer force of his personality, once they heard his age, he never saw them
again.
Physically
and mentally resilient, he sustained a life of perpetual excess and recurrent
personal tragedy. His romantic life was, with a few notable exceptions, a
sequence of disasters, including his involvement with Peter Lacy, a
self-destructive alcoholic. There are echoes of the tragedy of Joe Orton and
Kenneth Halliwell in his ill-starred relationship with George Dyer, though in
the end Dyer didn't kill Bacon, just himself, taking a fatal overdose and
dying wretchedly, on the toilet, in a hotel in Paris on the eve of the
opening of Bacon's retrospective there. Bacon never really got over that. The
suicide is graphically depicted in Triptych May-June 1973, two years after
the event. With uncanny symmetry, the telegram telling him of Peter Lacy's
death had arrived on the opening day of his first retrospective at the Tate.
Without
question, Bacon's sexuality informs his work, though for a long time this was
politely ignored with references to universality and the human condition. The
paintings attest that he was an intensely sexual person. The story goes that
he was banished from the family home, aged 16, when his father, an ex-army
officer who trained horses on the Curragh, discovered him wearing his
mother's underclothes. He maintained a fondness for wearing women's
underwear, and was particularly fond of fishnet stockings.
He
confessed that he was sexually attracted to his volatile, domineering father.
It is therefore tempting to see, in his penchant for bruising sexual
encounters, a ritualised re-enactment of that attraction, together with the
requisite punishment for acting on it, but that is probably a gross
over-simplification. He had few qualms about following his sexual impulses
wherever they led him.
In the mid-1950s,
when he was spending much of each year in Tangier, then home to Paul Bowles,
William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg, the British Consul-General, Bryce Nairn,
became alarmed that the artist was repeatedly being mugged in the early hours
of the morning. He asked the chief of police if he could do anything, and he
promised to look into it. A few weeks later he called on Nairn and reported
that, alas, there was nothing to be done: Monsieur liked being beaten up.
There is, though, quite another side to his personal
relationships. Much of his social life, including his long, exceptionally
harmonious friendship with John Edwards, whom he more or less adopted, seems
related to an orphan's instinct to form surrogate families around himself. On
one occasion when someone asked him what he would be if he hadn't become an
artist he replied: "A mother". And late in life, against the odds
and his own expectations, he found a new admirer, a prosperous, handsome
Spaniard less than half his age, with whom he embarked on a fulfilling
relationship.
The critic Peter Fuller typified those who were ultimately
repelled at the apparent nihilism of his work, its determined lack of
affirmation. The paradox was that Bacon, a conventionally gifted painter,
took on some of the most spiritually charged subjects of western art, but in
what has been described as a mood of "negative certainty". Fuller,
who felt that it was the artist's duty in a secular age to cling to and
promulgate even the illusory comfort of belief, could not in the end accept
such bleak directness. Yet there is something so honest and unassuming about
Bacon's work, which is always local and direct, that it amounts to a kind of
affirmation in itself.
Francis
Bacon in Dublin is at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery from June 1st to August
31st. The Francis Bacon Studio is expected to open to the public towards the
end of the year. Some material from the studio will be on view during the
exhibition.
Francis
Bacon was born in a Baggot Street nursing home on October 28th, 1909. His
parents were English: Anthony Bacon, an ex-British army officer and horse
trainer, and Christina Firth, whose family was in the steel business. Francis
left the family home in Co Kildare in 1926, after a row with his father. With
a small allowance from his mother, he lived first in London, then Berlin and
Paris.
An
exhibition of Picasso's drawings prompted him to paint. In London he designed
modernist furniture and carpets and also painted, exhibiting his work in
various group shows throughout the 1930s. He destroyed most of his early
work. Forced out of the Civil Defence because of his severe asthma during the
second World War, in 1944 he painted Three Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion, a startling triptych which established his reputation and caused
an extraordinary outcry. After visiting South Africa in 1950 to see his
mother and sisters, he met Peter Lacy, an ex-fighter pilot, and embarked on a
long, difficult relationship with him, spending much of each year in Tangier.
In London he became a fixture in Soho, where he was at the centre of a
close-knit social scene.
He
began a 20-year friendship with Lucian Freud, which eventually cooled. His
work won gradual acceptance and acclaim throughout the 1950s, including an
invitation to exhibit in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1954.
From 1960, he showed with the Marlborough Gallery, and the following year
moved into Reece Mews, his base for the rest of his life. His small,
paint-spattered studio there became a symbol of his approach to life and art.
In 1962, the Tate Gallery held its first
retrospective of his work. The following year, he began an intense, fraught
relationship with George Dyer, who inspired some of his best figurative
painting, and who died two nights before the opening of a major Bacon show at
the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. He first met John Edwards in 1974 and they
remained friends for the rest of Bacon's life. Despite his advancing age, he
kept up a hectic pace, working, drinking and gambling, and was honoured with
numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. When he died, of a heart attack in
Madrid in 1992, he left everything to John Edwards.
Life works
Critic ANTHONY CRONIN looks back on the art and attitudes to life and death
of his friend Francis Bacon before a keynote exhibition in Dublin
ANTHONY CRONIN | THE SUNDAY TIMES | MAY 28, 2000
The Irishness of other people is always
a subject of great interest to the Irish. It is not always of equivalent
interest to the people themselves.
Francis Bacon displayed little interest
in whatever degree of Irishness he may have had, and he was certainly not
overly conscious of it. Indeed, so oblivious was he of such a strain in
himself that he might even use a phrase such as "you Irish" when
something one said or did amused him.
When, after he died, I read an obituary
in which Paul Johnson claimed his painting reflected "an Irish fear of
death", I remembered such an occasion. He had unexpectedly arrived at my
flat in Battersea one afternoon with the Indian poet Dom Moraes. Possibly
because Dom had just been reporting on the Chinese invasion of Tibet and had
said he had seen people die, the conversation turned to death in general.
Bacon chose to regard what he saw as my
reluctance to let go of some sort of belief in the afterlife as particularly
Irish, and he was greatly amused by it. His own attitude, as expressed over
the gin at the kitchen table that far-off afternoon, was succinct and simple:
"When you're dead, you're dead."
Which does not mean Johnson was not, in
some sense, right, though it is worth remarking that Bacon is one of those
painters who, rightly or wrongly, tempt critics into seeing their work as
always being "about" something large and important, whether that be
"the human condition", loneliness, sex, existentialism, death or
despair.
Most of his titles for paintings are
quite exact and humble. I distinctly remember the paintings now famous as
"the Popes" or "the Cardinals" being originally called
simply "Six Studies after Velazquez". And this is what they are,
variations on the theme of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, a
painting that would lend itself to just as much discourse about the human
condition, or the weakness and terror of the rich and powerful, as Bacon's
works do - though it does not perhaps reveal the terror or expose the
weakness of the supposedly great as much as Titian's portrait of Pope Paul
III with his nephews, or even Raphael's unshaven Leo X with cardinals de'
Medici and de' Rossi.
But the modernist Bacon was,
incidentally, the last to deny the greatness of certain old masters, though
he always spoke of them in painterly terms. Neither was he one of those
painters who affect to believe that their art cannot be talked about and that
other people (and writers particularly) cannot understand it.
He came into the French pub in Dean
Street one forenoon, fresh from a morning's work and, as usual, entirely free
of hangover, and told me he had just that morning "discovered the
secret" of painting. A cautious Irishman, ready at all stages for
temporising smalltalk, I was astonished at the directness and sincerity with
which this information was imparted, but at this distance of time I cannot,
alas, say in so many words what the secret was, only that it had something to
do with Frans Hals and his way of painting lace.
Whether his painting was unconsciously
or on some other level influenced by anything that may be called "an
Irish fear of death", he, of course, made no secret of the fact that he
was born in Ireland (at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, where there is a
commemorative plaque) and that, apart from an interval in London during the
first world war when his father worked for the War Office, he was brought up
here, not leaving until he was about 16.
Perhaps the most revealing story I
remember him telling about his early childhood in Ireland concerned a maid or
nanny - I had the impression of a sort of Irish mother's help - who was left
in charge of him for long periods when his parents were absent from the
house. She had a soldier boyfriend who came visiting at these times and, of
course, the couple wanted to be alone.
But Francis was a jealous and endlessly
demanding little boy who would constantly interrupt their lovemaking on one
pretext or another. As a result, she took to locking him in a cupboard at the
top of the stairs when her boyfriend arrived. Confined in the darkness of
this cupboard, Francis would scream - perhaps for several hours at a time -
but, as he was out of earshot of the happy courting couple, in vain.
He claimed he owed a great deal to that
cupboard, and when I quoted WH Auden's recipe for the upbringing of poets -
"As much neurosis as the child can bear" - he was intrigued and
delighted. It might be over-solemn and stretching interpretation a bit to derive
particular works from these experiences, but his paintings are frequently
about people confined, trapped one could say, in some strange box or limited
space, some of them evidently screaming.
Although there is a temptation to see
these and other Bacon works as narrative, to invest them with a circumstance,
a story and even a moral, what makes them unforgettable are the pictorial
terms in which the predicaments of his people are conveyed. Our response is
governed by the curved brushstrokes that create those curious concavities in
the faces of his subjects and by the inexplicable effect of the almost dry
brush dragging paint across an unsized canvas.
In the years in which I had some
acquaintance with him, the late 1950s and early 1960s, he gave the impression
that he had come to terms with life and was determined to enjoy it. Despite
his determination and ability to enjoy himself, however, there is no doubt
that his work takes a bleak and, to use the fashionable phrase,
"disturbing" view of the human condition.
More than almost any other significant
artist of the 20th century, he lived in his time, and his time was post-war.
His work of those years is contemporary with Samuel Beckett's, with the atom
bomb and with the knowledge of the holocaust, a time when illusions were
stripped away and reality was confronted as perhaps never before (or since?).
Francis told the American photographer
Peter Beard: "I haven't any morals to preach. I just work as closely to
my nerves as I can." A gambler and, in his youth, a man frequently
dependent on rich homosexuals, he had lived on his wits and, doubtless, his
nerves for long periods. He continued to do this as a painter, pushing each
work as far as it would go, and destroying it if it did not succeed.
In a way I find entirely admirable, he
was a gambler through and through, always prepared to cut his losses. He had
a gambler's readiness for the worst, and, it is hardly necessary to say, a
gambler's zest for it too.
Bacon and Egos
CATHERINE
FOLEY | THE IRISH TIMES | SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 2000
It has been an arty week, pink banners fluttering along the
Liffey quays heralding the arrival of the Francis Bacon exhibition at the
Hugh Lane Gallery, which hosted an opening party on Wednesday evening for a
modest 1,000 guest.
Dublin City Manager, John Fitzgerald, who hails from
Galbally, Co Limerick, is bursting with proprietorial pride. The show, which
runs until the end of August, is remarkable enough but there is also the
reconstruction of Bacon's studio to look forward to, which should be finished
by November.
Barbara Dawson, the gallery director, appears as usual in a
vivid streak of colour. The "cadmium orange" Indian-style dress is,
she explains, inspired by Francis Bacon who often used this colour in his
work. She reminds us that the artist, who died eight years ago, was born in
Dublin in 1909. "He always had an ambivalent relationship with his place
of birth," says Mary Freehill, Lord Mayor of Dublin.
Charlotte McDonnell (12) who is here from Ballsbridge with
her parents, Aiden and Anne McDonnell, is also honouring the great artist by
wearing shocking pink Buffalo shoes.
Pat Murphy, chairman of the Arts Council, is a long-time
Bacon fan. "I've always admired him," he says. "Even though
some of his imagery is tough stuff, his expression is very strong, original
and very beautiful.
Denis O'Brien, chairman of ESAT and sponsor of the
exhibition, chats to its curator David Sylvester, who is acknowledged as a
world-wide authority on the artist. Bringing a hint of Mediterranean sun to
the evening is the Le Brocquy family - Louis, Anne Madden and their son
Pierre.
Margaret and Desmond Downes are here also, preparing to
leave in time to catch the opening of a new play The Last Days of God by
Colin O'Connor at Theatre Space@Henry Place. It is co-produced by their son
Alexander with Conor McPherson and costume design is by their daughter Lucy.
Sacred monster, national treasure
The Guardian Profile: David Sylvester
He is the most influential critic of the past
50 years and a champion of modern art. But he hates his own writing, would
rather set up exhibitions and wishes the public would stay away from
galleries.
Nicholas Wroe on the iconoclast who is an
unashamed elitist
NICHOLAS
WROE | BOOKS | THE GUARDIAN | SATURDAY 1 JULY 2000
David Sylvester's influence on the post-war British art
world is unparalleled, as art critic, installer and curator of exhibitions,
and as an administrator. He wrote his first article about drawing for Tribune
in 1942 when he was only 18. Now aged 75 - think Orson Welles for both his
profile and effortless projection of rumbling gravitas - he has just
published the definitive account of his friend Francis Bacon's career and
staged an exhibition of his work in Dublin.
In the intervening years his role as confidant, adviser,
interpreter and arbiter of taste has made Sylvester's contribution to shaping
the artistic landscape unique. Because of his efforts the Tate has in its
collection whole swathes of work that it could not possibly afford to buy
today. It was he who almost singlehandedly alerted a hostile British artistic
establishment to the importance of post-war American artists. He has sat for
Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon and worked for Henry Moore. If anyone
prepared the ground for the explosion of interest in contemporary art over
the last decade it was David Sylvester.
"David is the only sacred monster that has ever
existed in the English art world," says the artist Howard Hodgkin.
"He has that kind of grandeur." Tate director Nicholas Serota first
met him in the early 70s and says they have remained close. "He was a
powerful influence in making me think internationally and has been enormously
encouraging in terms of trying to acquire work for the collection. He is an
incredible treasure for Britain."
The usually tight-lipped collector and gallery owner
Charles Saatchi makes an exception for Sylvester and throws the dictionary at
him. "David Sylvester is charming, crotchety, effusive, enigmatic,
opinionated, receptive, vivacious, languid, sharp, romantic, perceptive and
cuddly. He is the finest installer of art exhibitions in the land and his
writing is so delicious he should be doing cook books."
With the recent opening of Tate Modern - categorised as
Britain at last making its peace with modern art - this should be Sylvester's
moment. For long periods his has been a lonely voice speaking up for the
merits of modern and contemporary art. Now is his vindication. But far from
celebrating the acceptance of contemporary art into the mainstream of British
cultural life, Sylvester finds himself made gloomy by the prospect. "One
really doesn't want to be in a gallery with more than a few people. This is
the great problem with art. A big audience is no good for it."
His friends speak of an Eeyore-like temperament, edging
towards melancholy. Added to this, in recent years his health has not been
good. He had a heart attack in the early 90s and was diagnosed with cancer of
the colon in 1998, for which he has recently undergone surgery. He also has
diabetes.
"At these huge exhibitions, like the Monet in London,
or the Vermeer in the Hague, they are so packed there is no pleasure in going
to them." But what about the benefits of being exposed to great art?
"The whole education argument is crap." Encouraging a new
generation of art lovers? "I hate museums cluttered up with children. I
was turned onto art by a simple black and white reproduction and that was
enough," he continues. "I am all in favour of taking films and
reproductions of art into schools and of decent television programmes. But
one doesn't necessarily have to sit in front of masterpieces."
Fellow art critic Richard Dorment says this is typical of
Sylvester. "David would have loved to celebrate unambiguously the
opening of the Tate but he says what he thinks needs to be said. He is in
nobody's pocket and the fact that he doesn't like the new Tate gallery is an
example because he deeply likes and admires its director Nicholas Serota."
Serota acknowledges that he doesn't pull his punches. "But friends like
that you always need. He is always refreshing to talk to. He constantly
questions what artists are doing and his own judgment."
Sylvester's stance is that the most effective way for a
society to consume its fine art is not through better access to galleries but
through diffusion via the applied arts. "I don't think it matters a fuck
whether people go and look at Mondrian or not, because they live among
furniture and wallpaper and cars and everything else that has been influenced
by an earlier moment in the fine arts. Even if fine art has a tiny audience
of rich people, ultimately it affects the whole of society, and that is where
it really validates itself socially." Television commercials are a prime
example. "They are unbelievably brilliant and exciting and they come out
of avant garde film making. You just do not need millions of people going to
museums. You already have many more millions living in environments created
by the followers of the artists in the museums. That is the role of art in
society."
Sylvester was born in 1924 in Hackney. His parents owned an
antique shop in Chancery Lane and another shop selling silver. He and his
younger sister were mostly brought up by nannies, although during the 1930s
the family struggled financially and "the maid's room suddenly became
the lodger's". He recalls his father as a rather conventional man, while
his mother was a more hedonistic figure who went to the ballet and the theatre
and was a ballroom dancer of professional standard. "She liked her fun
and would go off to Paris for a few days whenever she felt like it."
The family had originated in Russia and Poland, and when
David was a child "like many Jewish families" in London they left
the east end for north west London. His father was a prominent Zionist -
Sylvester himself now has an increasingly rabbinical appearance and demeanour
- although he preferred spending his time with gentiles. Near the end of
their lives Sylvester's mother said to him that "your father's tragedy
was that he was an anti-Semite".
The art dealer Leslie Waddington compares Sylvester to
Isaiah Berlin: "he has one of those wonderful Jewish renaissance minds.
It is a rarity in English life." Sylvester says he was "dragged
along " by his parents' Judaism but did not engage with it. In his early
20s he was on the verge of converting to Catholicism but pulled back at the
last moment. "It still seems a very civilised thing to be," he
says. "I admit I have broken two or three noses in my time but I don't
really believe in revenge. The idea of turning the other cheek as given in
the Sermon on the Mount still seems a notion of extraordinary beauty."
His first school was Vernon House prep in Brondesbury,
London. At 13 he went on to University College School in Hampstead whose
alumni include four-minute miler Roger Bannister, former Tate director Alan
Bowness, and Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail . "Vernon House was
where I received all my education," he says. "UCS was just masturbation."
At 15 he was asked to leave, before he had taken his school certificate. He
spent a year buying and selling gold and silver to jewellers. "I made
more money than I ever have since."
Coming from a family that dictated if he wasn't top of the
class it was a disgrace, he cultivated his ambitions elsewhere. First he
wanted to be a cricketer. When he realised he wouldn't be good enough he
turned to jazz. "I wanted to be a composer and arranger. I listened to
records in school, starting in 1934. I missed Duke Ellington at the London
Palladium but did see Coleman Hawkins at the Phoenix Theatre." His
introduction to art came at 17 when he saw a black and white reproduction of
Matisse's La Danse. Jazz was put to one side as he painted 10 hours a day for
a year before he realised, "I was no good at it".
Then, at 18, he submitted on spec an article on drawing to
Tribune. It was published and soon after they asked him to review a French
painting on loan to the National Gallery. He began to write regularly for the
magazine under the mentorship of the literary editor George Orwell, although
the editor, Aneurin Bevan, found his style too "heavy with
Latinisms".
He had now embarked on a writing career, but it was
war-time and the services called. He failed a medical for the army and became
a teacher instead. "It was absolutely 'Decline and Fall'. I didn't even
have the school certificate but they were desperate for masters. I loved
teaching. I knew the mistakes made by people who taught me so I tried to be
more understanding."
He started writing a book about the psychology of art and
after the war nearly reactivated his academic career when he won a
scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge to read moral sciences - philosophy
and psychology. He chose the college because Wittgenstein was still teaching
there, but before Sylvester even started he knew it was another career that
was beyond him, and he didn't take up his place. He did think he could write
about art, however. Over the next half century he produced a stream of art
journalism and broadcasting, wrote about sport and films, and produced key
books on Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, René Magritte and Giacometti. He is the
only non-artist to be awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale but
still admits to a lack of confidence about writing.
His friend Grey Gowrie, the former arts minister, says he
can spend hours on the phone agonising over a single word or phrase. "If
I didn't know better I would think I had a heavy breather," says Gowrie.
"There can be what seems like 20 minute silence before he declares,
'it's David'. You assume he is going to announce imminent bankruptcy or news
of a death, but it's usually a prelude to a fascinating discussion."
Sylvester has had two abortive sessions of analysis and
says he has "wept on the couch at things that have been done to my
writing by American editors. They have totally destroyed the rhythm of the
prose and changed the meaning." Precise meaning is everything in a
critical approach that is based on a scrupulous, obsessive attention to the
work at hand. The art historian Frances Spalding has noted his, "dogged
examination of his own sensations in front of art. Though he is often acute
on the relationship between a work and the period in which it was made, he is
less interested in history than physical presence; it is the impact a
painting or sculpture makes on us that he tries to catch - how it affects the
head, heart and guts."
Sylvester says his "fate was sealed" after
watching Arsenal versus West Bromwich Albion in 1935. Arsenal won 4-1 and he
went home and wrote a report on it. "That's been my life; seeing
aesthetic experiences, other people doing the work, and then completing the
experience by writing about it. The way I write is a bit like St Teresa of
Avila writing about being fucked by God. I do try to describe the actual
experience of looking at the work. "
A piece written about an installation by the American minimalist
sculptor Richard Serra at the Tate in 1992 typifies this approach. The work
consisted of two large steel blocks and Sylvester describes his experience as
he approaches the work. He first thinks that the blocks are the same height
and then, as he gets closer, he realises that this is an illusion. But how
many other critics would then point out that what he had described only
applied to people between five foot six and six feet tall? This is not mere
pedantry but part of an intriguing observation about the subjectivity of our
response to art. Serra says Sylvester has the ability to ask questions that
other people don't.
Sylvester has maintained close links with artists ever
since he visited Paris in 1948, where he met Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,
Picasso's dealer. Kahnweiler secured him an introduction to Giacometti whose
work was then, "the one thing that seemed to matter". Sylvester
became close to Giacometti and started writing about him. It is a sign of his
assiduousness/prevarication that a book did not actually appear until 1994.
He briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a dealer himself
because he so much admired Kahnweiler, but abandoned it when he realised that
when a dealer sells something to a customer for a profit, "he genuinely
feels he has done the customer a favour. I, on the other hand, felt as if I
was somehow taking advantage of the buyer. But I suppose my primary emotion
about every thing is guilt." He says he really would have liked to work
for a rich person with a small private museum where he could do all the
buying and installing. "I love using my eye to choose things and to
install things. And I think it would have been rather good for anyone who
asked me to do it as well."
In 1950 he met his wife-to-be, Pamela Briddon, a
schoolteacher who was then a student at London University. They had three
daughters, Catherine, who has two children and who Sylvester describes as,
"a very good potter"; Naomi, who works as a publicist for a
publisher; and Xanthe, who has one child and is a freelance sub-editor who
worked for many years for Time Out. Pamela enjoyed art but was not as keen on
contemporary work as her husband. They lived in a flat in Putney where
Sylvester was a keen gardener, cultivating roses particularly. The three
girls had to share a bedroom and Pamela, increasingly fed up with the lack of
space, would take the children off on month-long camping holidays to Spain.
When Sylvester bought a larger house in Wandsworth he kept the flat as his
office. The marriage gradually came to an end over a period of years, with
minimal trauma, say his children, as he spent more and more time at the flat
and less in the new house. They eventually divorced in the early 80s.
He also has a daughter from a relationship with the
novelist Shena Mackay, conducted while she was married to someone else.
Cecily Brown was born in 1969 and now lives in New York where she is an
acclaimed artist.
Sylvester says he is "neurotically preoccupied"
with his daughters and is proud that he has good relationships with them. He
had first met Mackay when she worked in his parents' shop. Cecily didn't know
he was her father until she was 22. She used to see a lot of him but when
they started going to art galleries together and she called him her best
friend he began to feel uncomfortable. "I went to an analyst with Shena
to discuss how to tell the family. We didn't want it to be too much of a
shock to her sisters or to my daughters. I do most things wrong in my life
but with regard to the timing of telling Cecily I think I did quite
well."
From the mid 80s until late 90s his partner was the art
historian Sarah Whitfield. He is still close to Whitfield and says he was
virtually a step-father to her daughters Saskia and Sophie. "But now I'm
just a lonely old bachelor," he says. "Sarah says it suits
me."
His career as installer of exhibitions came about because
of his relationship with Henry Moore, about whom he had written a couple of
articles for the Burlington magazine. Moore asked to meet him and Sylvester
became his secretary, but says, "it didn't work too well because while
there was a pile of letters to be answered we would get involved in some
aesthetic discussion". In 1951 the Tate staged a Moore exhibition which
he was invited to curate. He had visited Wakefield with Moore, who had shared
some ideas as to how sculpture should be shown. "Choosing and installing
that exhibition excited me more than anything and it remains to this day the
thing I like doing best." Sylvester's reputation as an installer extends
beyond painting and sculpture. He has also been acclaimed for exhibiting
Islamic carpets. "I don't feel I have a talent for writing, but when
installing I feel at home in the way that someone who drives racing cars
feels at home behind the wheel."
His approach hasn't changed much over 50 years. He likes to
provide lots of space around works and acknowledges a tendency towards
symmetry. It was once pointed out to him that at two separate sculpture shows
he had, unconsciously, used exactly the same configuration. "This was my
natural rhythm. I don't like my prose style but I do like my installations.
If you're writing you see your own personality crystallised on paper and it
is a horrible sight. But with an installation there is somebody else's great
work and you don't look at the installation but at the work itself. But that
work is combined with your rhythms."
He made his name as a writer in the 1950s and says one of
his prime motivations was to counter the influence of John Berger, who was
then setting the art critical agenda in the New Statesman.
"He was a brilliant writer, a compelling personality
and a great force. I always envied his writing but I felt he was wrong,"
says Sylvester. Berger says now that they were "very fierce
opponents", but while Sylvester didn't have an artist's eye, "he
did have a collector's eye, and was one of the first people to realise what
was new about very many artists and to explain it".
Sylvester objected to what he saw as Berger's promotion of
a popular but "retrogressive" movement by some painters and
sculptors as "back to the figure". In a satirical article Sylvester
postulated a "Kitchen Sink School" of painters, noting that
"the graveyard of artistic reputations is littered with the ruins of
expressionistic painters whose youthful outpourings once took the world by
storm." The label was almost instantly co-opted to describe the
groundbreaking drama and fiction of the period.
Speaking up for modern art then was hazardous. Sylvester
faced editorial pressure but says what sustained him was the force of his own
physical experiences with art. "It was as if people were attacking
fucking but you knew you enjoyed fucking. It was as simple as that. I got the
most tremendous physical excitement from looking at modern art."
His habitual self-criticism and insistence on treating work
on its merits as he sees it has meant he has never become boxed into critical
positions. It was only in the 1980s that he changed his mind and decided that
Picasso was a greater artist than Matisse. Howard Hodgkin once recalls him
writing about a sculptor in the early 60s. "David said he was 'probably
a very great artist'. A little while later he wrote about his next exhibition
saying 'I thought he was the greatest English sculptor under 35 with red
hair, but I was wrong'. The man's career never recovered. It might be
completely apocryphal but it's still true somehow."
Alongside Sylvester's distaste for what he sees as recent
populist developments in art he retains a faith in strong centralised
institutions. "The BBC was a very enlightened patron of modern art. My
talks with American artists in the 60s are invaluable documents. The
interviews with Francis Bacon came from the BBC. We even did an interview
with Giacometti in French. The treatment of art on television is now at a much
lower intellectual level than it was in the 1950s." He dismisses
anti-elitist arguments and complains that delegating power to the Arts
Council regions has weakened arts administration. "There is an elite.
But it is not rooted in class or wealth or privilege. At any one time there
are only five or six people who can really spend public money well, be they
right, left or centre."
Sylvester's politics were formed in the aftermath of the
second world war. "I was to the left of the Labour Party but that changed
after Czechoslovakia in 1948 [when the communists took control]. I didn't
even wait for Hungary in '56. I saw that you can't get into bed with the
communists without getting clap." He has since voted Labour, Liberal and
Conservative, and briefly even had high hopes for the SDP. He says he is
probably still a Gaitskellite because he maintains a belief in
nationalisation, but Grey Gowrie sees him as a singular sort of floating
voter.
"At the last election he said, 'I'm in an absolute
rage. They've redrawn the boundaries and I don't want to vote Tory but I
suppose I'm going to have to vote for Al Clark.' I said to him that it was a
human right not to vote for Al Clark but David said, 'the problem is he is
such a fucking good writer.' He might not have done it in the end but he did
make me laugh."
Sylvester admits to voting Conservative in the 60s, when he
lived in Putney, just to stop a man who would have been arts minister in a
Labour government. But his politics and artistic leanings had been exploited
some years earlier when he had been invited on a State Department-sponsored
trip to America in 1960. In an odd sideshow to the cold war the CIA was
covertly sponsoring the cultural magazine Encounter and promoting
abstract expressionism as an example of western freedom. Sylvester is
untroubled that he might have been used. "Jolly good for them. But
no-one ever told me what to write or say."
His introduction to the American art scene coincided with
his arrival in Paris. After going to a jazz club to see Charlie Mingus he was
introduced to Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Philip Guston. He later made
contact with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He says that, broadly
speaking, over the last 40 years his primary interest has been contemporary
American art.
He is currently editing his interviews with artists over
this period. He has at the same time managed to produce, with Sarah
Whitfield, the definitive five-volume catalogue raisonné of Magritte, not an
artist you would normally associate him with. It was a monumental project and
while he says he does love the work, "the fact remains that I spent
years of my life, like Swann, on someone who was not my type".
Someone who very much was his type was Francis Bacon.
Sylvester first wrote about Bacon in the late 1940s and they soon became
friends. Sylvester was his self-appointed Boswell and undertook a series of
landmark interviews in the 50s and 60s. The show currently on in Dublin is
the fifth he has staged of Bacon's work. His new book about Bacon is
dedicated to the composer Harrison Birtwistle who says that Sylvester's
conversations with Bacon are among the most interesting things written on
creativity. Birtwistle has dedicated a piece of music to Sylvester and says
he is having a, "sort of intellectual love affair with David. Dedicating
a piece to him was a way of describing our friendship." Sylvester has
asked Birtwistle to read the cricket poem "At Lords" by Francis
Thompson at his funeral.
Although he never staged a Bacon show during the artist's
lifetime, every show since has taught Sylvester something new about the
artist. The biggest revelation has been in Dublin. "I think the pictures
look like 18th-century portraits in English country houses. And that is very
true to Bacon's background. He had a typical upper-class background and grew
up in Irish country houses. In Dublin, in these neo-classical rooms, the
pictures look wonderful, they look like their true selves. Seeing them there
it as if he has come home."
In his 1996 collection of critical essays, About
Modern Art, Sylvester regretted the exclusion of artists born after 1945
on the same basis that he regrets, "becoming useless at tennis".
But this is no slight to the BritArt generation. He says there are,
"some seriously talented artists. I think Damien Hirst is pretty hot.
Rachel Whiteread is a very good artist. Jenny Saville [who is painting him
for the National Portrait Gallery] is very good, as is Douglas Gordon."
But whatever their strengths, Sylvester is adamant that
encouraging queues of people to see their work is not the way forward.
"Of course it is nice to see artists making some money," he
explains. "So many of the artists from my generation struggled. But I
think there is a price to be paid for it. I'm a bit ashamed of being the
subject of a piece like this. It's a symptom of a bad state of affairs. You
are only coming to see me because art is so popular but I wish there was less
interest. Perhaps the answer is for art to become unfashionable and un-loved
again."
• Francis Bacon in Dublin is at the Hugh Lane Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, until August 31
Looking Back At Francis Bacon is
published by Thames & Hudson at £29.95
Different
strokes
The
coupling of works by Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso, his inspiration, opens
parallel inquiries into their art, writes Medb Ruane
MEDB RUANE |
THE SUNDAY TIMES | APRIL 02, 2000
Pablo Picasso
spent the summer of 1927 at Cannes, in the south of France. Not for the first
time, he was involved in a delicate domestic situation. In January that year,
he had met 17-year-old Marie-Therese Walther outside Galeries Lafayette, the
Paris department store. In June, the 46-year-old artist became her lover.
The same summer, an 18-year-old youth
was polishing his sentimental education with a trip to Paris. Francis Bacon
experienced an epiphany when he saw Picasso's drawings at the Paul Rosenberg
Gallery. "They made a great impression on me," he later reported.
"I thought afterwards, well, perhaps I could draw as well."
What Bacon recalled in particular were
the extraordinary paintings and pen-and-ink drawings he thought he saw there.
Huge bathers with monumental sex organs waded through mythic waters or
frolicked on beaches with palpably carnal intent. The works were celebrations
of paint, and life. Their power fed Bacon's awkward soul.
In fact, Picasso's bathers had not
appeared in the show. While Bacon was visiting the exhibition, Picasso was
busy painting them, working out his passion for Marie-Therese and
simultaneously denying it to his wife, Olga. Bacon's memory was faulty, but
his impressions were correct: this was a turning point in the careers of both
men. For the rest of his life, Picasso's exuberant, fantastical artistry
would stalk Bacon's every creative step.
The coupling of these two provocative
visions at the new galleries of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin is
prescient. Set in the deputy master's house of this former old soldiers'
hospital, the galleries open a doorway into 20th-century art practice that
IMMA's main residence could not previously accommodate. The rooms are
domestic in scale, fostering the sense of a personal space where you can look
and think without the pressure to move along. What you see are two separate
shows, with works on paper, especially newspaper, by Picasso in the
ground-floor rooms, while works on paper attributed to Bacon hang upstairs.
The difference between the exhibits is that between a tango and a military
two-step, with Picasso's paper works more interesting by a mile. That may not
be Bacon's fault.
Picasso could not be still. He never
stopped working, even when he was eating or sleeping or making love to one of
his many mistresses. Beloved as soon as he was born at Malaga in 1881, he was
drawing and painting by the age of seven, encouraged by his mother, Maria
Picasso y Lopez, and his artist father, José Ruiz Blasco. Love came as easy
as art did. Picasso enthralled women and men almost before he could walk. He was
a veritable prodigy: by 16, he was working on a commission in Madrid and
convinced of his capacity for greatness. Picasso, Bacon figured, was closer
than any other contemporary artist to "the core of what feeling is
about".
Bacon was different. His parents didn't
particularly like him, and his social class made him queasy. Born at Baggot
Street, Dublin, in 1909, he grew up in a dysfunctional family that occupied
various big houses in Kildare. Given the rebellious times, the family often
felt under siege. Eddie, his father, was a stiff- upper-lipped former army
officer fazed by the presence of a sensitive, asthmatic son. He was cruel and
brutal, leaving Francis with a taste for sadomasochism that led him into
perilous situations.
Bacon worked hard at his art but didn't
want people to know. Ahead of his time, like Picasso, in understanding the
value of spin, he created a public persona who slept all day, caroused all
night, and then dashed off paintings.
He boasted that he was untutored,
wanting to foster a sense of himself as a painter without academic aims. The
truth was different. His carefully crafted works drew on first-hand
observation of great artists, from Poussin to Picasso, and his philosophy on
art was culled from literature and myth-Shakespeare and Joyce enthralled him.
IMMA's exposition of the two opens
parallel inquiries into their work. It is not strange to show the two
together: Picasso was Bacon's benchmark of what a great artist could be. With
the forthcoming opening of his studio material at the Hugh Lane Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, Bacon is about to head the race to be the
British Picasso.
The visual incongruity of the two lies
in the widely differing standards applied to their material, however. The
Picasso works show the Spaniard at his most frantic and eclectic. Some of it
is playfully bold: scribbles and doodles on what look like immediately
available surfaces have that draw-a-moustache-on-a-hero quality.
That throwaway aspect makes the Picassos
seem accidental, as if he used the material when nothing else was at hand.
But the ground from which it springs is the same passionate interest in the
world that inspired his Guernica, as well as his earlier Cubist
collages using newsprint. The frantic pace of global communications is
anticipated in the layering of drawings upon stories, of visual puns on
verbal comment. Like the work of great news reporters, the Picassos here
stand as first drafts for the history that came next.
The second-rate value of the material
attributed to Bacon is all the more apparent in that context. Bacon was
ruthless about destroying his less-than-great work and sources. Some scraps
of this putative material - which comes from an archive named not after Bacon
but after the man who collected it - are probably genuine remnants, but as a
whole the material looks and feels bogus.
There's a graduate student quality about
it that offers evidence of so many concerns ploughed by so many artists that
you can't but wonder about its veracity.
Many of the themes appear in Bacon's
official body of work - the sense of damage, the fascination with decay, the
homoerotic appeal of sporting heroes. You could find the same concerns
in many other artists' notebooks. Perhaps their very ordinariness contributes
to the myth of St Francis being fostered by various dealers and interests,
taking up where Bacon left off. But here they look like false relics. Perhaps
the most damning feature is that they are not very interesting to view.
Picasso: Working on Paper and The Barry Joule Archive -
Works on Paper Attributed to Francis Bacon, IMMA, Dublin, until July and
August (01-6129900)
Books: A critic saves his Bacon
The
Independent, June 18, 2000
David Sylvester began writing and broadcasting about his
friend Francis Bacon as long ago as 1948, so his new book is at the end of a
long series and is, among other things, a significant part of the history of
radio. There were no fewer than 18 recorded interviews between the two men.
Of course, we are now given matter that we have heard and read before. None
the less, this is surely the best of the critic's studies of the artist.
It's personal, retrospective and gloomy, combining art
criticism with biography. The use of conversation is interesting, though the
chats were far too grave, at least when Bacon and Sylvester were on the air.
There's a simple reason for the over-pompous tone. Sylvester has always
believed that he was privileged to have the friendship of a man who, because
he was a genius, uttered profound truths. A difference in age may have
affected Sylvester's respectful attitude. The painter was born in 1909, the
critic in 1924. So Bacon was the senior figure by a decade and a half and
must have been an influence on Sylvester's understanding of the world.
Though not of the same generation, they did have past
experience in common. Both had known Hitler's war and grew up in the art
world when Picasso was in full production. They had smelt the smoke and seen
the lurid light of the bombing, and then learnt of European atrocities.
Subsequently, in peacetime London, magazine reproduction showed them new
things by the master painter of the century, a European whose terror and
tenderness came along with incomparable
technical gifts.
As Sylvester says, Picasso was Bacon's first master. He
cannot say that, by comparison, Bacon was uninventive, nor that he was a
wretched draughtsman who was maladroit with a paintbrush. Picasso gave Bacon
a hint or two rather than lessons. Then the Anglo-Irish painter fashioned his
terribilita from numerous personal troubles. Bacon's truly telling paintings,
belonging to the late 1940s and early 1950s, are in a profound sense post-war
works. They are given eloquence, but are also deformed and stunted, by the
destruction of life and culture in the years before they were painted.
This helps to explain Bacon's desire, even compulsion, to
distance himself from his subjects. From the first, he insisted that his
paintings should be glazed. The glass kept a barrier between the work and its
spectator. Even though a model was posing in the studio Bacon would prefer to
look at a photograph rather than the person he was painting. He was more
inspired by reproductions of art than by art itself. Many of his images were
taken from magazines, film stills or pornographic photos.
And then he tried to paint like an old master. I have mixed
feelings before the paintings because of Bacon's ambition to be
grandiloquent. This coincided with agonies of failure and dissatisfaction he
could scarcely control. Sylvester has excellent comments about the way that
Bacon destroyed successful as well as botched canvases. He has a first-rate
visual memory and describes paintings he once saw and which then disappeared,
either because Bacon burnt them, or because they were spirited into the
criminal world that their creator so liked, or because they were covertly
sold (with Sylvester's assistance) to pay gambling debts.
Big debts went with big prices for the pictures. Bacon had
elevated views about his art and his position within world painting culture.
His slurred egotism has been inherited by Sylvester's commentary. In this
book, without much explanation, Bacon is compared with Picasso, Matisse,
Titian, Velázquez and Michelangelo as though he naturally belonged in their
company. He did not. This fact is apparent to nearly everyone who studies the
history of art, or who looks at paintings side by side. It is less easy to say
anything definite about Bacon's intellect. When he writes about his friend's
painting, Sylvester invokes the old masters. When he describes the painter's
knowledge of books there is a similar litany of greatness. Aeschylus is
mentioned, often, and Shakespeare, Racine and TS Eliot. I don't query - what
would be the point? - whether Bacon studied the work of such writers, or
dipped into them, or remembered a quotation. But I believe that Bacon's mind
did not rise to their level.
Sylvester avoids the often-told tales of life in Soho. One
doubts whether a good book about Soho can ever be written, for bohemians are
never intellectuals, though intellectuals sometimes have bohemian
characteristics. Nobody from Bacon's Soho world, though they were often nice,
or rather loveable people, ever engaged with the life of the mind. Once you
stepped over the threshold of Muriel Belcher's Colony Club you could feel
your intelligence draining from you by the second. The place smelled of death
and its habitues seemed to be at a permanent wake.
Sylvester has been to some drinking clubs in his time but
is genuinely an intellectual, with a more interesting mind than Bacon's. Thus
his book is frustrating. We are more curious about its author than its
subject. The effect of reading Sylvester on Bacon is to make one long for
Sylvester's autobiography. We can't have a biography. No one would dare to
set about the task. Sylvester likes to keep secrets and lacks small talk. His
silences are as intimidating as Harold Pinter's, whose background and
press-day tastes he partly shares, and his confidences are as suggestive as a
poet's. Which poet? I don't know, but it wouldn't be an English one.
Bacon and Sylvester have been very foreign Londoners. Bacon
thought, until his death, that Paris was the centre of world art. The
post-war Sylvester could have become a French writer, if Paris had provided
the right outlets. But he found a home for his voice in London. Sylvester's
expression, to this day, is based on the culture of the early Encounter
(whose first, best years in the 1950s coincided with Bacon's rise to fame)
and the BBC's Third Programme. A 20-minute talk in a concert interval was a
space in which no intellectual or artist could justify or explain an opinion.
There wasn't time. But the tone was always high and the listener was beguiled
by the speaker's voice, the vocal suggestion of personality.
The book as a whole has the flavour of the Third Programme,
which is to its advantage. Most of the old intellectuals of the Third
Programme have now departed to more elevated airwaves. Sylvester's mind is as
lively as ever it was, and his writing perhaps more eloquent. I guess that
the thought of Bacon's early paintings gives him a vital link to his young
manhood.
However, those "early" paintings after 1947 were
done when Bacon was in his thirties. He had been robbed of the pleasure of
being a young artist by the war, and also by some of his characteristics.
Bacon dealt in rough- trade at a time when homosexuality was illegal. He was
an alcoholic and a helpless gambler. These traits are evident in his
prematurely aged painting, with its slovenly love of danger and risk-taking.
Sylvester is good about sexual and personal matters. He hazarded that Bacon's
series of screaming Popes were really portraits of Bacon's father. The artist
didn't say yes to this conjecture, but neither did he say no.
Bacon disliked his father but was sexually attracted to
him. It's certain that some of the agonies of his personal life are
represented in Bacon's art. We know some of the often squalid details. In
Paris, the petty thief who was Bacon's lover dies while sitting on the
lavatory. In London a wicked woman, once beautiful, expertly squeezes a
syringe to get more heroin into her veins. Other things are obscure. Little
is known of Bacon's gambling addiction. His activities in Africa have never
been explained or chronicled.
Since he is a good art historian, Sylvester always returns
us to Bacon's paintings. In his book are photographs of paintings that
haven't previously been reproduced. He says that "lost" or unknown
paintings keep turning up. Indeed they do. A rent boy steals a painting from
Bacon when the artist is drunk. He gets scared the first time he tries to
sell the picture and gives it to another boy to "look after". Then
the second boy's mother finds, say, a rolled- up screaming Pope under her
son's bed and gets into a panic, for she twigs what it is. Quite a long book
could be written about Bacon and crime. I was surprised to learn that he
didn't like Genet. Sylvester should have told Bacon to persevere with this
wonderful writer.
Looking Back at Francis Bacon is
about crime, both the petty and the metaphysical varieties. On the petty
side, Sylvester is anxious about lost paintings. We can't understand Bacon
without a full catalogue. On the metaphysical side, Sylvester states that
Bacon was an "old-fashioned militant atheist."
What does he mean by "old-fashioned" in this
context? Bacon was not a rational humanitarian in the line of Wells or
Huxley. I thought that he believed in the existence of God, and that God is a
criminal. Does not this view accord with the spirit of his paintings?
Artist Bacon 'had a Swiss account to dodge
income tax'
By HUGH DAVIES | THE DAILY
TELEGRAPH | 04 JULY, 2000
FRANCIS BACON, arguably Britain's most distinguished 20th
century artist, allegedly kept a Swiss bank account to shelter large chunks
of his income from tax.
The
claim surfaced when details of payments made to Bacon by his gallery,
Marlborough Fine Art, were sent to the English lawyers of his estate,
according to an article to be published in the magazine Vanity Fair. The
estate is in the throes of a legal battle with the gallery, claiming that it
wrongfully exploited him over more than 30 years.
Bacon died
in 1992, aged 82, leaving his £11 million estate to his closest friend, John
Edwards, 50, an illiterate east Londoner and his constant companion for the
last 18 years of his life. The estate claims that Marlborough, one of
Britain's most prestigious galleries with its worldwide representative
Marlborough International Fine Art based in Liechtenstein, should be presumed
to have exercised "undue influence" over the artist, who died from
a heart attack in Spain.
It
identified 33 works, known to have been painted between 1972 and 1981, worth
as much as £30 million, that allegedly do not feature in the gallery's
accounts. Michael Shnayerson, the author, said that the gallery's
"partial payments" to the Geneva bank were legal for its
Liechtenstein branch. It was also above board for Bacon to establish the
account. But failing to declare the payments to the Inland Revenue as taxable
income broke the law.
The
magazine suggests that a reason why Bacon never left Marlborough was that he
feared no other gallery would agree to the arrangement. An old friend of the
painter high in the art world is quoted as saying: "He was perhaps less
happy than he seemed." Did he feel trapped? "Yes, that's the nub of
it." The art critic Brian Sewell said that Bacon once told him that he
would rather be in the hands of Marlborough than in those of "an
incompetent honest man.
"What
he said is that he preferred a third of a million pounds rather than half a
million pounds. And what he said is that the prices were constantly being
pushed up by Marlborough in a way that they would never be pushed up by
anyone else. However little he got in broad percentage terms, it was still
more than he'd got if he went with anyone else." Mr Sewell dismissed the
idea that Bacon was naive and being taken for a ride: "Francis was no
fool."
The Vanity
Fair article, to be published in Friday's edition, quoted sources which
appear to be close to the gallery, as saying that Bacon was hardly naive
about what Marlborough was making from his work, or how his finances were
handled. According to the magazine, in 1992 Bacon "got himself mixed
up" and had all of his money from paintings - "the full £4.2
million" - sent to Switzerland, then, realising he needed to show some income
in the UK, he asked for a portion to be sent back.
He
allegedly had his Swiss banker return £1.6 million to Marlborough. The sum
was then forwarded to his British account. A Marlborough source claimed that
as for the missing paintings, they had all been identified. In most cases
Bacon gave them away or sold them himself. Liz Beatty, a representative of
the estate, said last night that she would have no immediate comment on the
claims.
Sensation, awe and unease
JOHN
McEWEN | BACON IN DUBLIN | ART | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | 6
AUGUST, 2000
It is lucky that Francis Bacon's South Kensington studio,
where he worked for the last 30 years of his life, did not end up in the
Tate, because it would have looked like just another example of installation
art. Instead it has been shipped piecemeal for preservation as a shrine to be
opened next year in a refurbished annexe to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin,
the city of his birth. A survey of his career selected by the supreme
authority David Sylvester, Bacon in Dublin Bacon in Dublin at the Hugh
Lane Gallery (until August 31), acts as an important prelude to this event.
Bacon
lived in Ireland almost exclusively until he was 17, his father having moved
there to train horses; so it is the country of his formative years. A friend,
Doreen Molony, recalled how he was fascinated with butchers' shops and how
"to this day" (1977) she saw "evidence in his paintings of
hanging carcasses". And there was a maid who used to lock him in a
cupboard when her boyfriend came to visit, a trauma to which he said he was
deeply indebted—the source perhaps of his obsession with contortion and
restriction.
Moreover,
although not Irish, he behaved a if he were. There was nothing he enjoyed
more than a good "craic over a jar", and his whole attitude
to life was based on gambling: "I was brought up in that sort of
atmosphere in Ireland of everybody gambling, I suppose that influenced me. I
don't know. Perhaps I would have been a gambler in any case."
His
passion for roulette and painting mirrored this attitude, each governed for
him by chance and instinct. Certainly the Irish are delighted to adopt him as
one of their own. Posters advertise the show with the alternating slogans:
"It will create awe." "It will create a sensation." And
for the cabbies it is "Good for Franny" and a case of "brining
home the Bacon".
This is
Sylvester's fifth major Bacon exhibition since the artist's death, each
deliberately revealing a different aspect of the work. In the course of
curating the Dublin show, he came increasingly to agree with what the painter
Rodrigo Moynihan used to say in the early 1950s—that Bacon's pictures had a
curious affinity with 18th-century English portraiture by the likes of
Reynolds and Gainsborough—another legacy of the painter's Irish childhood
perhaps, since these are the sort of pictures he would have seen in the
Georgian country houses in which he grew up. It is a view at odds with the
popular conception of Bacon as a painter of horror and squalor; and his own
disappointed conviction that people did not like, or really appreciate, his
pictures.
In the
elegant Georgian setting of the Hugh Lane it is the portraits that have pride
of place—grand and painterly as they are in the manner of the 18th-century
full-length; and seemingly made-to-measure for the walls of the ground-floor enfilade,
stripped of the permanent collection in his honour.
In this
context it should be recognised that Bacon had an 18th-century as well as an
Irish side to his character: the gambling, the dandy's disdain for
convention, the rational attitude to religion: "when you're dead, you're
dead". He would surely have got on like a house on fire with Sheridan or
Charles James Fox or Gainsborough, although he did not suffer from clients as
he never painted commissions—in that sense he is very much not an
18th-century portraitist.
At the
Hayward Sylvester confined the selection to figure paintings, releasing them
from the narrow confines the artist preferred and placing them in wide-open
spaces—a monumental test they triumphantly withstood, confirming his
greatness as a colourist and the ultimate achievement of the triptychs.
But for
Dublin, where two side galleries afford the chance to show smaller works, he
survey the full range, in subject as well as date—from the small Crucifixion
1933, the most important early painting, to the large, barely outlined
figurative self-portrait which was on the artist's easel when he died. It was
typical of Bacon's dismissal of half measures that he painted small or large
but hardly ever in the intermediary size preferred by dealers and
collectors.
The most
sensational aspect of the show is the inclusion of seven paintings from the
artist's estate, six of which have never been exhibited before. Most are
unfinished works dating from 1949 to 1952.
Bacon
was such a meticulous painter, whatever the scale, that to see an unfinished
work is lightly shocking—especially when glazed and in a gilded frame. But
artfully integrated in the first room their complementary size and sombre
palette ensure a suitably impressive opening.
Some are
sketchier than others but Bacon never destroyed them, as he always did
anything he considered sub-standard, and Study after Velasquez awas
"unfinished", and accordingly never shown during his lifetime, only
because it was intended as part of a triptych. It is from the famous
"screaming pope" series and, in Sylvester's opinion, possibly the
most powerful. Bacon, to his regret, thought it had been destroyed, whereas
it is now revealed to have been merely "lost" in storage.
Bacon's
evolution as an artist might be described as from the general to the
specific: from grey to colour, from "untitled" subjects to often
named portraits, frequently self-portraits for want, as he said, of a sitter.
It is also a story of growing mastery and grandeur by a sublime tragedian. As
obsessed with technique as Gainsborough, Bacon's methods became less crude as
his reliance on solemn geometry and the impact of colour grew, and his
delight in the game of chance and nuance deepened.
Two
cabinets at the entrance connect the show with the studio by containing some
of the source material stored on the database. One discovery is a photograph
of the French statesman Poincare, copied for the face of Study for a Pope
III; and there is ample evidence of the inspiration derived from
illustrations in medical books—X-rays and the circles for enlarged details;
faces ravaged by disease.
On a
lighter note, in every sense, there is a photograph of his much-loved nanny,
Jessie Lightfoot. It proves that the choice of the pseudonym Lightfoot when
he worked briefly as a butler was not quit as inspired an example of his wit
as one had thought. Never mind—it is still a perfect name for a butler.
Allied
with the catalogue and Sylvester's newly published Looking back at Francis
Bacon T(Thames & Hudson) with its revised over-view, previously
unpublished scraps of taped conversation and corrective biographical note,
this latest show marks the apogee of a unique and momentous association.
Francis
Bacon’s Tangled Web
Eight years after his death, Francis Bacon,
perhaps England’s most acclaimed painter since Turner, is at the center of a
major scandal. John Edwards, a former pub manager who is the painter’s heir,
has sued Bacon’s longtime dealer, Marlborough Fine Art. Examining charges
that the gallery cheated both the artist and Edwards, its chicanery shielded
by a token Liechtenstein branch, Michael Shnayerson finds that all the
parties in this scandal may have had hidden motives, including Bacon himself.
BY
MICHAEL SHNAYERSON | VANITY FAIR | AUGUST 2000
Francis Bacon has come to stay in an old stone building in
Dublin.
The widely declared “greatest British painter since
Turner,” once condemned by Margaret Thatcher as “that awful artist who paints
those horrible pictures,” died in April 1992. But his spirit is here, in the
Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, to which his humble London studio
has been brought, bit by carefully recorded bit. A team of eight
archaeologists disassembled the site, noting the placement of every crumpled
photograph and paint-smudged book in a three-dimensional grid. Now four
curators are logging each of the studio’s roughly 10,000 items into a
computer database. This is a first: no artist’s studio has ever been
enshrined in quite this way before.
The visual links are fascinating, if inscrutable. A
torn-out magazine photograph of monkeys with open mouths may have helped
inspire Bacon’s “screaming pope” series. An old radiography text has drawings
encompassed by frames and set off with arrows—both signature icons of many
Bacon paintings. A large cutout picture of the head of one of Bacon’s lovers,
George Dyer, appears to have served as a stencil for portraits of the “rough
trade” thug. In November, Bacon’s studio will emerge from the boxes and
folders, complete with walls and door, as a permanent installation, like one
of those dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. It
will be re-created just the way it was: dirty and messy.
These, as it happens, are also apt words to describe the
lawsuit filed by Bacon’s estate against the artist’s longtime dealer,
Marlborough Fine Art.
The lawsuit’s charges suggest the sort of art-world scandal
not seen since ... well, since the last time Marlborough was accused of such
chicanery, by the estate of painter Mark Rothko, in 1971. Indeed, the
superficial similarities between the two cases, and the fact that Marlborough
stands accused of cheating Bacon during the same period it grossly underpaid
Rothko’s estate and was fined by a New York Surrogate Court judge more than
$9 million for doing so, suggest to many observers in the art world a
likelihood of guilt on the gallery’s part—though such guilt would be no less
shocking for that.
To some, the Bacon case seems, if anything, more egregious,
because the painter appeared so trusting of the gallery during his more than
three decades of representation by it, and because the younger male friend
who inherited Bacon’s estate—estimated to be worth between $50 and $100
million—is a shy, uneducated Cockney whose work experience, before meeting
the painter, consisted of helping his older brothers run a string of pubs in
London’s East End. But the picture that has emerged in the press—of big bad
Marlborough hornswoggling the hapless illiterate—may be almost as distorted
as one of Bacon’s portraits, given the gallery’s own, surprisingly
persuasive, version of events. Imagine, instead, a real-life version of the
board game Clue, in which a crime may have been committed in the drawing room
and every character in the house has a motive.
Including the deceased.
From outside, 7 Reece Mews appears just as it did when
Bacon worked there. It’s hard to locate, which is one of its charms: you take
a tiny street off London’s Old Brompton Road, then look for the arrow that
points to a cobblestoned court of brick-walled former stables. Though plain,
the mews is a lovely sanctuary in South Kensington. Inside No. 7, obviously,
nothing remains as it was. Now that the archaeological excavation is done, a
work crew is sheetrocking the walls, finishing the transformation of Bacon’s
studio into a sleek apartment where Bacon’s heir, 50-year-old John Edwards,
will stay when he comes to London from his large country farmhouse in
Suffolk, or from his home in Thailand.
By the time Bacon moved to this address in 1961, his
critical reputation was established, though he remained, at age 51, a painter
of modest means. That was fine by him: all his life he had a disregard for
money that verged, literally, on the criminal. As a young man he moved from
one small apartment to another, often without paying the rent due. As his
paintings started selling, he loved having a wad of bills in his pocket to
blow on gambling in private dens, or champagne at the Colony Room, a seedy
Soho bar where he held court almost every day (the gleefully profane manager
there, Muriel Belcher, had been shrewd enough, when she first saw how
charismatic he was, to pay him £10 a week just to show up), or oysters at
Wheeler’s fish restaurant, where he invariably picked up the check for a
group that often included painters Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. After he
bid his artist friends good night, he liked to spend money on young men who
indulged his desire to be beaten, whipped, and sodomized—a lifelong acting
out, it was sometimes said, of the physical abuse he’d received from his
quick-tempered fool of a father, a military man who bred horses in Ireland.
Otherwise, Bacon spent little money on himself, and the
studio reflected that. A steep wooden staircase with a rope banister led up
to a bare kitchen and tiny bed-sitting-room with lightbulbs dangling from the
ceiling. The adjacent studio was as chaotic as the apartment was stark. Its
door was a palette of paint smears—as close, Bacon liked to joke, as he ever
got to abstract art. Within lay piles of what appeared to be garbage: torn
newspaper and magazine pictures, creased photographs of the friends he liked
to paint, and hundreds of unwashed, discarded paintbrushes in buttered-beans
and orange-juice cans. On his easel would be the next of his startling yet
strangely beautiful portraits, the features of his subject stretched to the
grotesque and rendered all the more striking by the streaks and gobs of
excess paint that Bacon flung onto the canvas with inspired daring.
Three years before his move to Reece Mews, Bacon had left
his first dealer, a mannishly dressed lesbian named Erica Brausen, to sign
with London’s hottest gallery for contemporary artists, Marlborough Fine Art.
It was a move made less to burnish his career than to settle a £5,000 gambling
debt that Bacon felt Brausen would be unable to pay off for him. In return
for his signing a 10-year contract, Marlborough advanced him the money
against current and future paintings, with the price of each to be determined
by its size. A painting measuring 20 inches by 24 inches was valued at £165
($462), while one of 65 inches by 78 inches was valued at £420 ($ 1,176);
these were two sizes that Bacon favored. According to the contract, the
painter would try to supply the gallery with £3,500 ($9,800) worth of
pictures each year, and would be represented exclusively by Marlborough,
which would also handle all his finances—acting, in effect, as his manager.
Four decades later, Bacon’s estate would start asking
pointed questions about that arrangement. Why, its complaint asks, was an
artist so cavalier about money allowed to sign a binding contract without
independent legal representation? Why was the pay scale for an artist of
Bacon’s stature based on measurement, and why did it not include a provision for
paying Bacon a higher percentage of the retail price of his paintings if
their market value increased over that 10-year period? Why, though
Marlborough was required by the agreement to give Bacon an accounting of the
paintings sold, did it appear never to do so? And why, the estate began to
wonder, were Bacon’s paintings not sold in London, but through Marlborough’s
notorious Liechtenstein branch, Marlborough AG?
At the outset, Bacon had no cause to complain. New York
dealer Richard Feigen had staged a show of Bacon paintings in Chicago. “I was
getting $1,300 for the most expensive paintings,” Feigen recalls ruefully.
“The others were priced between $900 and $ 1,200.” No one was necessarily
buying them. The Marlborough deal gave Bacon his market price for 8 or 10
paintings a year—guaranteed. It also put him in the hands of Frank Lloyd, the
most brilliant English art marketer of the postwar period.
Lloyd, born Franz Kurt Levai near Vienna in 1911, had
started Marlborough after World War II with a fellow Austrian refugee, Harry
Fischer, naming it for the Duke of Marlborough to lend it an air of grandeur.
The “old uncles,” as Bacon would come to call them, chose to deal in top-tier
modern art, much of it acquired discreetly from highborn British families brought
low by the war. For entrée, they relied on a junior partner, David Somerset,
the future 11th Duke of Beaufort.
By the time he signed Bacon, Lloyd had fashioned
Marlborough into a powerhouse that had virtually cornered the market on
undervalued European painters of the early 20th century—such as Klimt and
Schiele—while cosseting and promoting contemporary artists as no other
gallery did. As efficient as an investment bank, Marlborough gave artists
advances, staggered payments, and handled all their finances for them. Henry
Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Oskar Kokoschka, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland,
and Lucian Freud—all were excited and proud to be Marlborough artists. Many
gave their art to the gallery on consignment, receiving nothing until a
painting was sold. But Bacon wanted ready cash, so the gallery bought his
paintings outright.
Lloyd’s shrewdest stratagem was to establish the branch in
Liechtenstein. It was little more than a mail drop, but Lloyd and Fischer
bought and sold much of the art they handled through Marlborough AG; that
way, both they and their clients could exploit loopholes in English tax laws.
“The legal avoidance of taxes was an integral part of the growth of
Marlborough,” explains one longtime London dealer. “Lloyd’s real purpose in operating
the gallery,” says another, “was to move currency around. It was much more
efficient, he found, to move currency around by paintings than any other
way—and they made money on the paintings, too!”
Why did other galleries not follow Marlborough’s lead? The
first dealer laughs. “Laziness . . . and social responsibility. I think one
should pay taxes.” By the mid-1970s, Bacon’s paintings were sold exclusively
through Marlborough AG.
The paintings would be picked up in groups every few months
by a Marlborough factotum named Valerie Beston, who soon came to play as
large a role in Bacon’s life as he played in hers. Not only did “Miss B,” as
Bacon fondly called her, log the new paintings into a record book and arrange
for their sale by Marlborough AG, she also handled his mail, paid his bills,
even dealt with his laundry. “Valerie was very, very attached to him—a kind
of love,” says Michael Peppiatt, whose 1996 biography of Bacon, Anatomy
of an Enigma, is, to date, the definitive one. “It was a major thing in
her life, it was her raison d’être. It was like a shrine to Bacon in her
office—photos and mementos.” For legal matters, Miss B steered Bacon to
Marlborough’s solicitors. According to the estate, the solicitors, in turn,
recommended the accountant Bacon used to prepare his tax returns.
At some point, Bacon established a Swiss bank
account—almost certainly with help from Marlborough AG, though how much
remains unclear. Into this account the gallery began to make partial payments
for paintings it bought from the artist. For the Liechtenstein branch, this
was a legal maneuver. For Bacon, as an English resident, establishing the
account broke no law, either. But failing to declare Marlborough’s payments
to the English Inland Revenue as taxable income did.
Midway through his 10-year agreement, Bacon chose to
exercise an escape clause. Yet he stayed on as a Marlborough artist without a
contract for the rest of his life. To those who side with the gallery in the
Bacon case, this is the point that undercuts the estate’s legal action.
Bacon, they argue, was pleased with how he was treated by Marlborough; if he
hadn’t been, he would have left. Anyway, they say, he should have been
pleased. In addition to paying him up front for his work, Marlborough was
organizing major shows for him and meting out paintings in a carefully
controlled way at steadily rising prices to establish him as a major artist.
“He did mention to me,” says one old friend, “when that
contract was up, ‘I just can’t be bothered to go anywhere else. I can’t be
bothered. I’ll stay with them.’”
“Francis once said to me, ‘I’d rather be in the hands of a
competent crook than in the hands of an incompetent honest man,’” recalls art
critic Brian Sewell of the Evening Standard. “What he said,
and this shows the shrewdness of Francis, is that he preferred a third of a
million pounds rather than half of half a million pounds. And what he said is
that the prices were constantly being pushed up by Marlborough in a way that
they would never be pushed up by anyone else. And so however little he got in
broad percentage terms, it was still more than he’d have got if he went with
anyone else.”
“He implied they’d been so good for him and put him where
he was that he was grateful for that, and didn’t want to change,” says art
historian Sam Hunter, recalling a conversation with Bacon about Marlborough.
“And he was very loyal by character.”
There is, however, another interpretation for why Bacon
never left Marlborough. Perhaps he feared that no other gallery would funnel
money into a Swiss account as Marlborough did, enabling him to shelter a
sizable chunk of his income from English taxes. Perhaps, too, the account put
the painter in a vulnerable position. “He was perhaps less happy than he
seemed,” suggests one old friend of Bacon’s who occupies a high enough
position in the art world to be a sort of Deep Throat for the Bacon saga. Is
that to say Bacon did feel trapped? “Yes, that’s the nub of it,” says this
source, “but I can’t say any more.”
Lending credence to this theory are mentions, in a 1978
book, The Legacy of Mark Rothko, by Lee Seldes, of Swiss
accounts established by Marlborough for another of its artists at roughly the
same time. Like Bacon, Rothko had a Swiss account for partial payments from
the gallery, in his case to avoid U.S. taxes. Seldes suggests he may have
been haunted by the gallery’s knowledge of his illegal act. “Those who know
about such things in the art world say that Marlborough often offered collectors
as well as artists kickbacks deposited in numbered Swiss bank accounts,”
Seldes writes. “If so, these arrangements might have made severing one’s ties
with Marlborough . . . quite difficult.”
The Rothko case is mentioned only in passing in the Bacon
complaint, but it hardly needs to be stressed, so striking are the parallels
it depicts. To some in the art world, the only mystery is why Marlborough
hasn’t already settled out of court with the Bacon estate: perhaps, goes the
reasoning, Frank Lloyd pulled the same tricks with Bacon that he did with
Rothko’s estate.
Those tricks, as prosecutors proved in 1975, included
influencing the estate’s executors with blatant perks, to nudge them into
selling some 100 of Rothko’s paintings to the gallery for a low lump sum of
$1.8 million, then reselling them for windfall profits. When a U.S. judge
called a halt to the sales, Marlborough ignored him, making numerous sales
covertly. When the judge returned a $9.2 million penalty against it, the
gallery tried to smuggle a trove of Rothko paintings out of U.S.
jurisdiction, first shipping them from New York to a Canadian warehouse, then
trying a dead-of-night maneuver to fly them to Liechtenstein. But
prosecutors, alerted by an anonymous tip, foiled the plan.
Lloyd, charming and evasive throughout the Rothko trial,
became a fugitive from U.S. justice. Humiliated into resigning his
chairmanship in London, he lived his last years in the Bahamas with a new
young wife and family, until his death in 1998 at the age of 86. Starting in
1983, day-to-day management of the gallery fell to the two children from his
first marriage, Gilbert and Barbara, and a nephew, Pierre Levai. The Duke of
Beaufort remained, apparently unruffled by Lloyd’s various crimes. Most
Marlborough artists, including Bacon, remained, too, and the gallery,
scandalized but solvent, soldiered on.
Whatever his feelings about the Rothko trial, Bacon was
almost certainly less interested in it at the time than he was in a handsome
23-year-old pub manager from the East End, who confronted him rather
belligerently one day in 1974 in the Colony Room. More than once, the young
man explained, his older brother, who managed a pub called the Swan, had been
tipped off that Bacon was coming, and stocked champagne for the occasion. But
Bacon hadn’t showed, and now the brother was stuck with the stuff, because no
one in the East End drank it. “I said to him, ‘Why don’t you turn up when you
are supposed to turn up for this fucking champagne?’” John Edwards related
later to a British journalist. “He found that very amusing, and he took a
shine to me. He invited me to have lunch at Wheeler’s, but it’s a fish
restaurant and I don’t like fish, so he bought me some caviar.”
Edwards became Bacon’s closest pal, though apparently not a
lover-rather, a surrogate son. Unlike George Dyer, the petty criminal who was
with Bacon for eight years and committed suicide in 1971, and a previous
lover of Bacon’s named Peter Lacy, who played piano in bars, Edwards was
neither self-destructive nor a drunk. He had shrewd judgment, which Bacon
came to rely on, especially in weeding out some of the hangers-on in the
painter’s entourage. Bacon’s friends had no choice but to accept Edwards,
though some did so reluctantly. “He’s a nice guy,” says one close family
friend of Bacon’s. “Up to a point.”
With Marlborough’s guidance, Bacon became world-famous over
the next decade and, in 1989, the most expensive living artist when one of
his triptychs sold at Sotheby’s for over $6 million. Yet he kept Reece Mews
as his home and studio. People would see him at the South Kensington subway
station—but only after 9:30 A.M., when Bacon could travel at the reduced
senior-citizen rate. With friends, however, he was an easy touch, often
pulling a mass of crumpled bills from his pocket and handing them over.
Peppiatt recalls a late night when Bacon invited him to go gambling. “But I
have no money,” protested Peppiatt, who was a student at the time. Bacon
pulled cash from various cans around the studio and spotted him £50. At the
private gambling den, Bacon quickly lost his own stake, while Peppiatt, to
his own astonishment, won. When Bacon asked for a loan, Peppiatt, naturally,
obliged. Bacon proceeded to lose that money, too. The next day, over lunch,
Bacon insisted on repaying the money he’d “borrowed.”
As he grew closer to Bacon, Edwards adopted a more
extravagant lifestyle, installing himself with friends and family in a
Suffolk cottage called the Croft, which Bacon owned. According to Andrew
Sinclair, whose book Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times appeared
in 1993, the Edwards clan then acquired a nearby Georgian mansion with
converted stables, and Dale’s Farm, a house with outbuildings. For
transportation, they had a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley, one with the license
plate BOY 1.
“One banker, who went to dinner with the Edwards
brothers, found himself seated with eight men and two women at the table,”
Sinclair reported in The Sunday Times soon after Bacon’s
death. “Four of the men boasted of their prison sentences for burglary and
demanding money with menaces; but the food and the wine were excellent. The
rooms of the house were superbly decorated, but the banker was told that the
old furniture and the pictures were changed every three months. The constant
factor was the numerous paintings by Francis Bacon, which were even hung in
the lavatories.”
Bacon, who often mused on the finality of death and
remained an atheist all his life, appeared calm, almost cheerful, as he asked
his family doctor and longtime friend Paul Brass to be one of the three
executors of his will. “Don’t worry,” Bacon told him. “It’s such a simple
will, it’ll all be over in a few weeks. Everything will go to John.”
Seemingly unconcerned about possible conflicts of interest, Bacon appointed
as his other two executors Gilbert de Botton, a wealthy financier who had
once been a director of the Marlborough gallery and who still served as
Bacon’s financial adviser, and his own adored Valerie Beston. Death came
quickly, of a heart attack in April 1992 while he was on a trip to Madrid to
try to rekindle a romance with a much younger lover. On his easel back in
Reece Mews, Bacon left an unfinished self-portrait.
Though probate took some years to establish, Edwards was
given money by the executors, whenever he needed it, from his initial
inheritance of cash, real estate, and a handful of paintings, valued in sum
at $18 million. But the gallery held on to a dozen or so Bacon paintings—the
bulk of the estate—taken by Valerie Beston from the painter’s studio soon
after his death. “They kept telling him the market was flat; it was a bad
time to sell,” says one source. And when Edwards asked Marlborough for a
complete list of Bacon’s paintings sold over the years, and for how much, he
thought the gallery’s answers seemed insufficient.
Unfortunately, the estate’s executors could be of no help.
Gilbert de Botton resigned upon Bacon’s death, citing other obligations.
Edwards believed that Valerie Beston could hardly be counted on for impartial
counsel about Marlborough. And Dr. Paul Brass, though well-meaning, could get
nothing more out of Marlborough than Edwards had: Beston told him that she
was very busy, but was supplying Edwards with all the information he needed.
Beston thought that everything was proceeding properly, and that her
relations with Edwards were, as she reportedly put it, “very good.” But
Edwards’s frustration was growing, especially since Marlborough, as a
stipulation of Bacon’s will, was empowered to handle the paintings owned by
the estate. “John was overwhelmed by having to carry on the Francis Bacon
mantle, and wasn’t happy with how Marlborough was doing it, because they were
running the show completely,” a person close to the situation recalls. Early
on, this person says, Edwards had been contacted by an artist friend named
Brian Clarke, volunteering to help with the estate. Now Edwards took him up
on the offer, giving him power of attorney and asking him to scout around.
“That,” says another close observer, “is when the niggles began.”
When Marlborough at last opened its warehouse, about a
dozen full-size paintings, not all of them finished, lay within. Among them
was a stunning crucifixion triptych done a year before Bacon died, in magenta
and mauve. The Inland Revenue hired an expert from Christie’s to appraise the
works, and after much back-and-forth a settlement was worked out: the
government would take the triptych in lieu of transfer taxes for the whole
estate. But Edwards, wary of the process and fond of the triptych, said no.
Not long after, at an old framer’s shop that Bacon had
favored years ago, about 20 rolled-up canvases were found. These were mostly
finished paintings, including two “screaming popes” from Bacon’s golden days
in the 1950s, but some had been declared “abandoned” by the artist in his
catalogue raisonné. Nevertheless, they were said to be signed on the front
and back—an indication that Bacon approved them at the time. Now the estate
was worth considerably more, perhaps five times more. A new settlement was
agreed upon by the Inland Revenue and Bacon’s executors, but again, Edwards
refused to accept it.
Then, four years into the process of settling the estate,
the bombshell was revealed that Bacon had had a Swiss account, containing
millions of dollars. Moreover, Valerie Beston had been a co-signatory on it,
but apparently had failed to mention it to Edwards or anyone else involved
with the estate in all this time.
Why? One Bacon friend observes that Beston had started as a
secretary, as well as a nanny for Frank Lloyd’s children, and worked her way
up to be a director of the gallery with an elegant home on Harley Street in
London filled with art. Later, to the press, Brian Clarke exculpated Dr. Paul
Brass from any wrongdoing, but pointedly failed to mention Beston. Yet a
close associate of Beston’s recalls the day when Miss B showed her a check
for £1,000 from Bacon, intended as a gift. Beston had never cashed it. “I
didn’t want my relationship with Francis to be tainted by that,” she told the
associate.
“She wanted to protect Bacon,” says another source
close to the situation. “She lived to protect him.” Also, says another
source, “she was old, and . . . had definitely gotten confused.” So
conceivably Beston had somehow forgotten about the account. In any event,
says the participant, “after the Swiss account turned up, Valerie Beston was
exposed. So she had to leave.”
The estate moved to have Beston removed as an executor, and
in December 1998 an English judge complied. Dr. Brass was also removed, much
to his relief: the new money had meant new taxes to be paid to the Inland
Revenue, but Edwards, now a resident of Thailand, had been able to acquire
the whole Swiss account without having to pay any English taxes on it;
theoretically, Brass was warned, he, as an executor, might have been
obligated to pay them. Beston moved to France to tend a dying sister. Soon
after, her lawyers reported that she was no longer mentally competent to
answer queries about the account or anything else. (She is, in fact, not named
in the estate’s complaint.) Since no executors remained, Edwards was allowed
to name Brian Clarke to the post.
Also at the hearing, Marlborough was severed from the
estate. As a result, Clarke and Edwards were able to choose new dealers to
handle the Bacon paintings now owned by the estate: Gerard Faggionato in
London, and Tony Shafrazi in New York.
Those appointments sent up red flags on both sides of the
Atlantic. Faggionato was relatively unknown; Shafrazi was all too well known,
as the dealer who made his name by spray-painting the words “Kill Lies All”
on Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and
who later represented Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, among other hot
80s artists. Neither Faggionato nor Shafrazi was remotely in Marlborough’s
league, but both were old pals of Clarke and Edwards’s.
Both, as it happens, have exhibited the stained-glass art
of Brian Clarke.
By now the estate had a high-powered art-world lawyer in
John Eastman, 60, of New York. Eastman, who is the brother of Linda
McCartney, had represented many artists—one of his largest clients is the
estate of Willem de Kooning—and on at least one occasion he had gone up
against Marlborough, successfully representing the estate of the sculptor
Naum Gabo in the early 80s. When Clarke described how Bacon’s paintings had
been handled by Marlborough AG, Eastman perked up, remembering the role that
the Liechtenstein branch had played in the Rothko case.
At Clarke’s urging, Eastman undertook to determine if
Marlborough was hiding anything from the estate, and if Bacon had been
underpaid systematically over the years. But every time he requested
information from Marlborough, he felt the gallery failed to make a full
disclosure. By last spring he was fed up, one observer says, and so was the
estate.
The estate’s complaint, lodged in England, seems to make an
impressive case. Much of it portrays Bacon as a naïf about money, easily
duped by the gallery. At the start, the suit alleges, Marlborough let him
sign the 10-year contract without independent representation. It paid him a
pittance on the measurement scale when he should have earned much more. By
way of example, the estate lists more than 40 paintings and studies Bacon
created in 1965 and 1966, for which he was paid a total of £41,678 ($116,698)
when their “fair market value,” based on sales at the time, was £101,226
($283,432). Instead of granting Bacon full market value for his work, the
complaint declares, the gallery paid him less than 50 percent of that, and
appears never to have told Bacon what his paintings fetched when sold through
Marlborough AG.
Moreover, says the estate, the gallery was acting not just
as Bacon’s dealer but as his manager. As such, it had a “punctilio of honor,”
as the legal phrase has it, to get Bacon the highest possible price for his
paintings, and to give him the highest possible share of those sales. Yet in
many cases, the estate says, Bacon received as little as 26 percent of the
sale price of a painting. As one estate lawyer observes, the Rothko case
established a definition of prima facie fraud on the gallery’s part for
paying an artist 25 percent of a painting’s retail price.
The most shocking documents in the suit concern six
paintings bought from Bacon by Marlborough AG in the last years of his life.
Soon after Bacon’s death, his accountant received a receipt from Valerie
Beston showing that Marlborough had deposited £1.6 million ($2,832,000) for
the paintings into Bacon’s U.K. bank account in January 1992. But the
complaint produced another document from Marlborough AG purporting to show
that the Liechtenstein branch had paid Bacon £4.2 million ($7,434,000) for
those same paintings. Worse yet, the estate claims, the £1.6 million was
taken from Bacon’s own Swiss account. Not only was Bacon cheated out of half
of what he was owed, the complaint suggests, he was paid with his own money!
When Eastman examined the list of Bacon paintings sold over
the years, eventually surrendered by the gallery, 27 known paintings failed
to appear on it. Some of those are visible in photographs taken of Bacon in
his studio, yet Marlborough had no record of them. In an average year, John
Edwards recalled, Valerie Beston picked up between 10 and 25 paintings.
Marlborough’s list, however, showed only two or three paintings in some of
those years. Was it possible that Bacon, lost in his creative world, had
never been paid for those paintings at all?
Lawyers for the estate demanded the formal record book that
Valerie Beston had kept of Bacon purchases, but Marlborough U.K. failed to
produce it—then allegedly sent it out of jurisdiction to Marlborough AG. They
asked for photographs, books, and documents removed by Beston from Bacon’s
studio immediately after his death, but were given nothing. Instead, they
learned that seven boxes of documents pertaining to Bacon’s estate had been
spirited off to Marlborough AG. The attorneys went to the agency which had
taken photographs of all of Bacon’s paintings, and ordered a full set of
copies, only to learn that the copies and negatives were, according to the
lawsuit, “collected in person shortly thereafter by Gilbert Lloyd.”
As the charges were filed, they were reported both in the
London papers and on the front page of The New York Times, without
any point-by-point response from Marlborough, whose English lawyers forbade
Gilbert Lloyd or anyone else to make any comment other than that the charges
would be “robustly” contested.
Since then, Marlborough’s side of the story has come clearer,
pieced together from a number of sources.
It’s surprisingly credible.
In the first place, says a Marlborough source, Bacon was
represented by two different law firms at the time he signed his 10-year
agreement with Marlborough. One was Marlborough’s own solicitor, but the
other was hired to help him thwart a possible lawsuit from the Hanover
Gallery, which he’d left so abruptly. Marlborough became his dealer but not,
says one close observer, his manager: “All Marlborough did was allow Valerie
Beston to become Bacon’s secretary because Bacon was so disorganized.”
In any case, the amount paid per painting was fair based on
the painter’s market value at that time, say sources, as was the method of
paying by measurement. (Picasso, observes one art critic, was paid by a
comparable measurement scale by his Paris dealer for years.) When Bacon
terminated his agreement with Marlborough after five years, he set his own
escalating prices, understanding that the gallery would try to double them or
better, to cover its overhead and earn a profit. By 1990, according to a
Marlborough source, he was charging the gallery as much as $1.8 million per
artwork.
If Marlborough had handled Bacon’s work on a consignment
basis, it would have sent him regular financial statements—and paid him a
higher percentage when a painting was sold than it did by buying his
paintings outright. But Bacon, says someone close to the case, “knew very
well what his paintings fetched on the open market.” The estate’s claim that
Bacon received as little as 26 percent of his paintings’ retail price is
based, says a Marlborough source, on the sale of a 1983 painting
entitled Statue & Figures in a Street. This was a deal, though,
in which Bacon also received a painting in exchange, says a gallery insider.
Usually, says the same source, he received much more—enough so that over
time, says a close observer quoting Gilbert Lloyd, the gallery netted only
about one-third of its sales prices for Bacon paintings after all its
expenses for promoting him.
At first, says the source, the sums paid to Bacon seemed
paltry, because the estate knew only about Bacon’s U.K. account. Then the
estate learned that Bacon’s work had been sold through Liechtenstein.
Marlborough AG invited the estate’s lawyers to come inspect its books, but
the lawyers canceled two appointments to do so at the last minute. When a
full accounting was subsequently sent to the estate’s lawyers in New York, it
was initially returned unopened—because the lawyers realized it would show
payments made to Bacon’s Swiss account, which would obligate them to notify
the Inland Revenue. “The gallery actually said, ‘You might not want this
information,’” says one estate lawyer. Finally, they sent the accounting to
the estate’s English lawyers, who did open it—revealing the Swiss account.
In any event, say sources, Bacon was hardly naïve about
what Marlborough was making from his artwork, or how his finances were being
handled. “There are all kinds of public statements, whether in interviews in
the press or television, where Bacon complained about his taxes and talked
with a great deal of sophistication,” says one observer. “This guy was no
bucolic bumpkin.”
Art critic Brian Sewell agrees. “Francis was no fool. And
this idea that he was naïve and being taken for a ride is absolutely
idiotic.” Adds another old friend of Bacon’s, “You must never forget about
Francis that he earned his money early on by being a croupier at illegal
roulette parties. He was very good; and he had to be able to count.”
The shocking charge about the invoice of 1992 becomes an
embarrassment to the estate if the gallery’s side of this particular story is
true. “Bacon got himself a bit mixed up,” one source says. “He had all of the
money—the full £4.2 million— sent to his Swiss account. Then he realized he
needed to show some income in the U.K. for those paintings. So he asked for a
portion of it to be sent back.” To do that without implicating himself, he
had his Swiss banker send £1.6 million back to Marlborough, which then
forwarded the £1.6 million to Bacon’s U.K. account.
As for the missing paintings, says a Marlborough source,
they have all been identified. In most cases, Bacon gave them away himself—or
sold them, which he was allowed to do after his initial agreement was
terminated. (“It’s well known,” says biographer Michael Peppiatt, “that Bacon
gave paintings to various friends.”) Marlborough, which thus had no record of
them, and claims it had no obligation to bother about them, tracked them down
anyway. A list provided to the estate—and to Vanity Fair—appears to show
all those missing paintings, along with the full prices paid for them,
detailing payments made both to Bacon’s U.K. and Swiss accounts. (A lawyer
for the estate pronounces the information “not satisfactory.”)
The estate also believes that Marlborough paid Bacon little
or nothing for some 3,700 lithographs made of his work over the years. Yet if
a list shown to Vanity Fair is accurate, Bacon was indeed paid, on
a consistent and proper basis, for the lithographs.
Intimations of a cover-up, on this or any other aspect of
the gallery’s dealings with Bacon, says a Marlborough source, are simply
groundless. Any documents and photos Beston may have taken from the studio
were in the boxes that a lawyer sent to Liechtenstein by mistake, this source
explains. Half turned out to contain information pertaining to Bacon, and
were handed over to the estate. As for the telltale record book, only a copy
of it was sent to Liechtenstein, this source says; the original resides in
London. But a copy of it has been made available to the claimants. And
Gilbert Lloyd’s personal trip to snatch back photos of Bacon’s paintings,
says a source close to the gallery, never happened. (A spokesman for
Marlborough confirms this.) Lloyd did have a lawyer advise the photographer
who took the pictures that the pictures belonged to Marlborough, and warned
him that he’d be dragged into a messy lawsuit if he cooperated with the
estate.
Sources close to Marlborough acknowledge that the Rothko
case hangs heavily over the Bacon lawsuit, even 25 years later, and puts the
gallery on the defensive. But “the gallery has learned its lesson,” one
insider says, “I can tell you that.” And so it may have, to judge by two of
America’s best-known artists. “I’ve been very happy with them,” Red Grooms
says of Marlborough, which he had the nerve to join in 1974, in the heat of
the Rothko trial. “The accounting’s very good, very straight, they’re very
good at collecting money—which isn’t easy to do, actually—and I get paid. And
that’s been consistent.” Larry Rivers, a Marlborough artist for 30 years,
concurs. “They’ve always been honest with me,” he says. “Like any two people
who stay together a long time we’ve had our disagreements, but it was never
about anything where I felt I was being shortchanged. They were always
perfect with me.”
All of which leads one to wonder: in a game where every
character has his motives, what are Clarke’s and Edwards’s?
“They’re a bunch of cowboys,” says Brian Sewell. “The man
who inherited the estate knows nothing about pictures, knows nothing about
the market. The executor of the estate, Brian Clarke, is an absolutely lowly
artist who has a private war with Marlborough because he thinks he’s
marvelous and Marlborough wouldn’t take him on.” Their motives, say two other
close observers, are simple. “Money, money, money.”
Clarke in particular does seem to draw his share of
disparaging judgments. One prominent American dealer calls him a “ferret.”
“Had you ever heard of Brian Clarke or his art,” says one dealer, “before he
got the Bacon estate?”
One of Clarke’s supporters, English art critic Edward Lucie
Smith, suggests that at core Clarke, like Edwards, is driven by class
resentment. “Brian is a tough North Country boy,” says Smith, “and he’s not
going to let the Duke [of Beaufort] off the hook.”
Clarke is, in fact, the child of a miner and a cotton-mill
worker. “My childhood memories,” he told one British journalist, “are of
deprivation, of hardship, damp, mice and cockroaches.” But he scoffs at
Smith’s comment. “There’s a certain ill grace in suggesting that a [properly
structured] lawsuit is class-motivated,” he says. “It’s too silly for words.”
In the mid-70s, Clarke dove into the London art scene
through a chance meeting with Robert Fraser, the glamorous bad-boy dealer who
stood at the center of it all. Fraser was famous by then as the handsome,
Eton-educated founder of London’s most exciting gallery, the Robert Fraser
Gallery, though his fondness for drugs and his utter recklessness with money
doomed the venture from the start. In Groovy Bob, a recently
published oral biography of Fraser by Harriet Vyner, Clarke recalls favoring
clergyman’s clothing at the time. The day he met Fraser, he recalled, “I had
on a clerical collar and a leather jacket and tight jeans, and Robert tried
to pick me up in the toilets.”
The two became close enough for observers to feel that
Clarke was Fraser’s boyfriend, but Clarke denies this. “I would be proud to
say I was, but it wouldn’t be true.” In Groovy Bob, he says the
relationship was more complex than that. “That night Robert and I left with
two boys from the club,” Clarke recounts about an evening at a sleazy Soho
club called the Toucan, “and that established a pattern of behavior that was
to characterize a particular part of our friendship for the next decade.”
Through Fraser, Clarke met all the characters in the
Bacon-estate saga: Edwards, Shafrazi, and Faggionato. Also Paul McCartney,
who hired Clarke to design the sets for his 1993 “New World Tour,” and Linda
McCartney, who would introduce him to her brother, John Eastman.
In the process, Clarke became what he calls an
“architectural” artist, working in stained glass, and began to win large
commissions to design abstract creations for corporate clients which ranged
from a country club in Japan to an energy company in Kassel, Germany. Before
long he became rather wealthy, living in a spacious private house in
Kensington called Peel Cottage.
Clarke says he’s taken on his executor duties without fee.
“I don’t need any help from the estate,” he says, “and I don’t particularly
want it.” But an executor is entitled to charge for expenses, and Clarke is
said to travel frequently with Edwards, sparing no expense: for a gallery
show of Bacon’s work in Paris, according to a dealer, the two reportedly
stayed at the Ritz, with Edwards in a particularly impressive suite. “I know
a person who was in it who had never seen a suite this large at the Ritz,”
says one person in the Edwards-Clarke circle. “I do travel by first class,”
says Clarke. “I’ve done so since 1980. And yes, I’ve stayed in hotel suites
for 20 years, too—and expect to continue to do so.”
Nor is an executor forbidden by law to receive gifts—of
art, say—for his good work. One visitor to Clarke’s home observed a large
Bacon painting on the wall. “That belongs to John [Edwards],” Clarke
explained. Still, if Edwards sees fit—and perhaps if the legal action is
successful—Clarke could be rewarded with art on which, by law, he would owe
no taxes unless he sold it or died within seven years of receiving it.
Meanwhile, as one close observer notes, the owner of such a gift could borrow
money against it.
Clarke waves off the very suggestion, and says that in fact
the case has become a huge obstacle and headache. For starters, he says, “I
have an over-20-year relationship with both Shafrazi and Faggionato. I’ve
never found them to be anything other than impeccable. And because both were
known to Edwards through Fraser, I suggested he speak to them.”
This case, Clarke says emphatically, is not about money.
“John Edwards is wealthy enough not to have to worry about financial matters
for the rest of his life. So am I. This is about the truth. And it’s about
Francis Bacon’s legacy.”
So far, Clarke says, the gallery has “given accounts
created retrospectively. They have not answered our questions, they’ve
stonewalled us, they’ve moved documentation out of the jurisdiction of
English courts. We had to get the courts to order it back.
“When a will is discharged,” Clarke adds, “there are
always delays of one sort or another. But in a simple will, a delay of five
years is not acceptable. Especially when after that five-year period there
was not the slightest hint it would be resolved. We’ve worked very
diligently to avoid bringing this case to court. All we wanted was for
Marlborough to tell us the truth. If they want the truth as well, they have
nothing to fear.”
One way to assess Clarke and Edwards is by how they’ve
handled Bacon’s art to date. Several shows of the estate’s holdings—the
paintings at Reece Mews when Bacon died, and those found since his death—have
been held in Paris, London, and New York. The consensus seems to be that many
of the recent works are unfinished, and that most of the rest appear in an
early catalogue raisonné as “abandoned” paintings—listed that way by Bacon so
that if they surfaced they would not be sold or judged as part of his oeuvre.
One London dealer recalls taking on several “abandoned” Bacons in the 1960s,
and incurring the painter’s wrath. “I was on the wrong foot with Bacon after
that.” An art-world source who attended a Shafrazi show found the paintings
“pretty indifferent . . . I think Bacon had every idea that these paintings
should have been edited out.”
To one rival dealer, the recent shows suggest an intriguing
motive for the estate’s insistence on acquiring a complete list from
Marlborough of all of Bacon’s paintings. Clarke has acknowledged wanting to
create an updated catalogue raisonné. When that’s done, the matter of which
Bacon paintings are or are not “abandoned” can be revisited. The legal,
logical arbiter of that will be the estate. If “abandoned” paintings are
redefined as part of Bacon’s body of work, their value will rise. Clarke concedes
that that would probably make them easier to sell, “but the intellectual
value is so exciting that the last thing we want to do is part with any of
these pictures.”
Another realm of Bacon’s work in which the estate has made
decisions is that of the drawings—genuine or not—which have surfaced since
his death, challenging the painter’s oft-stated claim that he went straight
to the canvas.
The first lot surfaced courtesy of a South Kensington
neighbor of Bacon’s named Barry Joule, who became a friend and helper to the
painter after meeting him by chance in 1978. Often, Joule says, Bacon asked
him to destroy portraits that failed to meet his standards; Joule would
comply by cutting out the faces with a Stanley knife. It was Joule, too, who
introduced Bacon to a young Spanish banker in 1988 who became the painter’s
last lover. When the banker broke up with Bacon in 1990, the painter was
devastated, says Joule, and poured his sorrow into all his last paintings.
The hope of reviving that romance was what propelled Bacon to take his
ill-fated trip to Madrid in April 1992, even after a collapse and
hospitalization, three months before, for a faulty heart valve.
Joule says that when he drove Bacon to the airport that
last time, the painter asked him to deal with a cardboard box and a folder
that together contained hundreds of drawings, as well as magazine and
newspaper images drawn or painted over, and an early self-portrait on canvas.
Joule claims his instruction was somewhat cryptic—“You know what to do with
it”—but Joule interpreted it to mean he should safeguard the work.
In his art-filled London apartment, the 45-year-old
self-described Canadian ex-hippie, his long blond hair cut Sir Galahad style,
recalls the furor that greeted his unveiling of the drawings in 1996. “Here
was a man who said all his life he never drew—and the people who’d written
about him, and particularly [Bacon critic and interviewer] David Sylvester,
had followed that line, hook, line, and sinker.” They were embarrassed, Joule
feels, because they hadn’t pushed him hard enough in their questions about
whether he drew.
The estate responded first with silence, then with lawyers’
letters demanding the trove be returned. In a number of coffee-shop meetings,
Joule managed to persuade Clarke that he was, at least, a real friend of
Bacon’s. And his avowal that he would give nearly all the drawings to a
museum helped assuage Clarke’s suspicions. But a meeting at the Tate Gallery
to judge whether the drawings were real ended in keen frustration. Sylvester,
who had declared in a lecture upon first hearing of the drawings that they
were legitimate, now said that he could not “see Bacon’s hand in them.”
Another critic theorized that while much of the material must have come from
Bacon’s studio, someone else might have “overpainted” the magazine pictures.
Despite enthusiasm for them from more than one of his curators, Nicholas
Serota, the Tate’s director, was persuaded to reject the collection.
Bacon biographer Michael Peppiatt, who sat in on the
meeting, agrees with Sylvester about the Joule drawings. “They didn’t smell
right,” he says. “From everything I knew about Bacon over 30 years, he didn’t
need to practice like that, repetitively, before doing a picture. The whole
point of the picture was that as far as possible it should be spontaneous.
And the idea that he should have kept that huge amount of work, which he
didn’t want people to see, then preserved it and given it to Joule—it’s
unlikely.”
Yet within months of that meeting, the Tate announced its
acquisition of a collection of other Bacon drawings from two old friends of
the painter, Paul Danquah and Peter Pollock. The collection is essentially a
notebook containing 42 works on paper, yet the Tate bought it for £360,000
($637,200). Ironically, the collection came through Marlborough, supported by
Sylvester and, tacitly at least, by the estate, which appears to need
Sylvester as much as he needs it.
More curious still is the estate’s decision to give Bacon’s
studio to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin. In September 1997, John
Eastman asked Serota if he would be interested in acquiring the studio as a
gift to the Tate if it could be reconstructed as a permanent installation.
Serota expressed some interest, but warned that he couldn’t predict how the Tate’s
trustees would feel about dedicating a permanent space to it; the museum was
having trouble enough finding space for its Bacon paintings. Eastman
suggested that Serota view the studio by getting keys from Valerie Beston.
But when Serota called her, on more than one occasion, Beston said the keys
were with Edwards; she chose not to mention that the estate had begun to
disassociate itself from Marlborough, or that she and Edwards were no longer
working together.
Rather than approach Serota another time, Clarke and
Edwards gave the studio to the Hugh Lane, reasoning that Bacon had been born
in Ireland and spent his early years there. To Serota, who heard of the gift
only when a newspaper reporter called to ask for his reaction to it, the
estate’s behavior was baffling and unfortunate. The Tate clearly lost out on
a plum, but to many in the Bacon circle the estate lost, too, because the
Tate would have seemed the right place for the studio of a painter who had
done nearly all his best-known work in London.
Now that most of the items are logged in on the Hugh Lane
gallery’s computerized catalogue, a Bacon fan can amuse himself by typing in
the names of Bacon cronies to see how many references to each appear in the
studio’s contents. Photographer Peter Beard, a close friend since the
mid-1960s, has 254 references. (Bacon, says Michael Peppiatt, gave him a
triptych of Beard, just one of the many examples of paintings given by the
artist to friends and not sold through Marlborough.) John Edwards has 143,
and Lucian Freud 94. But, for Brian Clarke, there are only four references.
Along with the photographs and papers, the collection includes 58 slashed
canvases—each with a gaping hole where the face once was—and one unfinished
self-portrait, the painting found on Bacon’s easel after his death.
A short ride away is the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which
looks like a castle with elaborate formal gardens, where an outbuilding is
currently given over to the Barry Joule collection, warily subtitled “Works
on Paper Attributed to Francis Bacon.” Many of the items are news
photographs—boxers, Nazis, cricket players— painted over with hurried
brushstrokes. But enough of them do jibe so closely with the studio drawings
as to seem of a piece with them. If the estate declares them so, the Tate
will look foolish for buying its smaller collection of drawings instead of
taking the Joule material for free; so will the panjandrums of the Bacon
circle for judging them unpersuasive. But if it calls them fake, it needs
some proof, and so far, it appears to have none.
Handing Bacon’s estate is, as it turns out, fraught with
tough decisions—none harder than whether or not to push ahead with the
lawsuit against Marlborough. The gallery’s strong response will surely give
the estate’s lawyers pause. So must a recent verdict in another case against
the gallery, brought by the estate of German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, who
died in 1948. In the Schwitters case, Marlborough’s Liechtenstein branch was
accused of withholding information about its stewardship of roughly 700 works
by Schwitters from the legal guardian for the painter’s stroke-debilitated
son. The son, like Rothko and Bacon, had a Swiss bank account. But when the
guardian tried to access it, Marlborough moved it to Liechtenstein. The guardian,
in turn, terminated Marlborough’s contract with the estate and sued for the
return of the artworks. Eventually, Marlborough did surrender the art—but
countersued for breach of contract. A lower court in Norway found in the
estate’s favor, declaring Marlborough’s conduct “reprehensible.” But a higher
court reversed the ruling last March, chastising the gallery for not coughing
up information earlier to the estate, but finding that the gallery’s actions
did not breach its contract, and awarding it $1.2 million plus court costs.
So Marlborough is powerful, and in the Bacon case it may
also be right. If it is, however, that hardly makes it a paragon of virtue.
As in the Schwitters case, the gallery is accused of almost extraordinary
hubris, failing to communicate with Bacon’s rightful heir, much less giving
him a full accounting in a timely fashion. If so, the gallery has brought the
suit upon itself. (Marlborough’s lawyers say that the gallery cooperated with
the estate’s executors from when the first requests for information were made
in 1997, and that charges of hubris are completely unfounded.)
Then, too, even if Bacon was eagerly avoiding English
taxes, Marlborough has played the tax game on a grand scale for far too long.
“It’s a much bigger question than the Bacon affair,” says one longtime London
dealer. “It’s about people using foreign currency to buy art.” And using the
art, in turn, to launder their money. “If you take $10,000 into the U.S., you
have to declare it,” the dealer explains, “but if you consign a $2 million
painting through Liechtenstein, you don’t have to declare it.” The gallery
wins, not just by selling its paintings, but by moving art from country to
country for tax advantages. “Look at the annual gallery reports,” the dealer
says. “You will never see Marlborough appearing in the highest profit or
turnover columns,” despite the gallery’s prominence in the London art world.
“There’s a pattern,” says the dealer, “of disguising information.”
(“Absolutely false,” says one Marlborough lawyer. “It’s just that in London
people don’t want to pay the 17.5 percent [value-added tax]. So anyone who
wants a Bacon will go find it in New York or Switzerland.”)
Which side, in the case of The Estate of Francis
Bacon v. Marlborough Fine Art, is more egregious? One titled
English collector seems to sum up the growing consensus. “I don’t think for a
moment the Marlborough [directors] are saints—they’re rough and tough—but
there are very few artists’ families who don’t feel put out,” he snorts. And
in this case, John Edwards has little reason to be. “He’s a wanker,” says the
old lord. “He’s bloody lucky to get what he got.”
Get out
Looking
back at Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
Thames and Hudson, 272 pp, £29.95, June 2000,
ISBN 0 500 01994 0
Julian Bell | London Review of
Books | Vol. 22 No. 20 | 19 October, 2000
Somewhere in London, two heads would be nodding together:
one tall like the boulder topping a cairn, the other broadened like a
Hallowe’en pumpkin. Two lordly sensibilities, the heterosexual critic and the
homosexual artist, had converged to discuss painting and the human condition.
The thought that David Sylvester and Francis Bacon were caught up in this
dialogue seemed at once daunting and salutary to some of us then learning to
paint in the same town. Their Interviews – first published in 1975
– conveyed such unassailable aplomb. ‘All art has now become completely a
game by which man distracts himself.’ I had no real idea what version of
history had brought Bacon to that ‘now’. In fact, I probably understood his
responses to Sylvester no better than a dog follows human conversation. It
was simply the authoritative urgency that counted: distraction or not,
painting stood in some crucial relation to humanity, and somehow it must be
pursued.
The Interviews expanded through two further
editions, and seemed gradually to settle into place as part of the broad
landscape of British art institutions. Yet it’s still difficult, eight years
after his death, to find a level way of looking at the phenomenon of Francis
Bacon. By the time he died, one way of talking about him had seemingly been
exhausted. In his new book, Sylvester records the artist Brian Clarke’s
suggestion that Bacon’s ‘paintings … begin in words, not in
pictures. He was really a poet.’ If so, it’s fitting that his canvases
brought out the poet in so many others. Abidingly Eurocentric, he was vastly
gratified to have captured the imagination of literary Paris: Michel Leiris,
Philippe Sollers, Gilles Deleuze and Milan Kundera all produced high-flown
testimonies to the stature of his work as a comment on the human predicament.
Nearer home, the existential fervour surrounding the paintings was kept up by
Lawrence Gowing – ‘The imagination that does not recognise its own dilemma in
Bacon’s images simply does not know the score’ – and, indeed, by Sylvester
himself: he ruefully owns up to a ‘gnomic and incantatory’ text of 1957
containing phrases like ‘somebody seen in a fleeting moment in a world
without clocks’.
Now, when Bacon’s legacy is being ground down to prose, the
apocalyptics have come to seem a little quaint. A year after his death,
Daniel Farson wrote an affable, elbow-nudging Gilded Gutter Life of
Francis Bacon; Michael Peppiatt followed with the more measured speculations
of Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (1996); and last year the
Tate staged a small exhibition of his recently uncovered, painfully bathetic
sketches on paper. Sylvester, who worked on that and other, loftier recent
shows, has now worked over his file of Bacon material with the hope not only
of setting the record straight but of pushing the discussion
forward. Looking back at Francis Bacon devotes quite a few
paragraphs to the minutiae of dating and to disentangling rumours, but its
aims don’t rest there: it wants to save Bacon for poetry. It upholds the
right to speak of the ‘resounding solemnity’ of the art, as of ‘the
unaffected, easy-going grandeur’ of the artist.
The book has been organised in a kind of spiral, closing in
on Bacon’s memory. It starts with an extended critical account of the work,
asking one to recognise the brutal boldness of the ‘first great period’,
which lasts for nine years from his effective arrival on the London art scene
with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, painted in
1944 when he was 35; then the confused directions of an intermediary phase
lasting from 1953 to 1962. These are resolved by the mode of systematic
distortion he uses for portrait heads and figures through the 1960s. The
series of triptychs commemorating the death of Bacon’s lover George Dyer in
1971 is identified as a second plateau of high achievement – not that
Sylvester doesn’t find things to admire in the increasingly muted manner of
the painter’s old age.
Following this survey, Sylvester broods on the entire
achievement from various angles – for instance, how to pair up Bacon with
Giacometti, Sylvester’s other longstanding critical cause – before releasing
further snippets of taped conversation. Finally, an attempt at a concise,
straightforward, DNB-style record of the life provides, in its appended
notes, Sylvester’s most unbuttoned testimonial to his friend of forty years.
‘A good cook’, but when it came to wine, he would drink the lees in the
Lafite; ‘he overtipped dreadfully’; we also learn that Bacon, needing ready
cash in the 1950s, sold behind his dealer’s back – ‘most of these sales were
negotiated by myself, acting as Bacon’s agent for a commission of 20 per
cent.’ And about the painter’s ‘unstinting generosity … “I’ve only taken on
morality,” he said to me in 1987, “because I’ve had the money to do so.”
This’ – and Sylvester demonstrates the point – ‘was not true.’
In fact, his spiral seems to home in on a strikingly
unchanging subject of enquiry. From that late start onwards, Bacon is a
creature of habit. Standard format canvases every time; always with
instructions to the framers for glazing; as far as possible, the same studio,
the same friends with whom to drink champagne in the same Colony Room; the
same unwithering face with which to confront the same unending futility of
life and fascination of art. Perhaps this monotony – call it ‘certainty of
purpose’ – is what makes Bacon so compelling to Sylvester, a critic who
plumps instinctively for artists who display a rooted, emphatic conviction.
Sylvester’s criticism is distinguished partly by its own
‘unaffected, easy-going grandeur’ of delivery; partly by the way an almost
physical passion for metaphors of physicality is fine-tuned by an acute
sensitivity to nuance and context. His judgments can be sweeping – ‘the 20th
century likes its art to be jokey’ – but they never usher in the kind of
prophetic cultural agenda we have learned to expect from large-scale art
critics, because they are offered as contingent responses to a subtly shifting
art world. Works of art cannot be neatly detached from the individuals who
make them, nor yet from the locations in which they are displayed; products,
people and places interact in unpredictable ways. There are some eloquent
passages here about the way different hanging spaces have elicited fresh
qualities from Bacon’s paintings, reflecting Sylvester’s fascination with the
temporary interventions that curating can make in this flux. He prefers,
nonetheless, to find points of fixity around which to operate – hence his
tenacious hold on this highly consistent oeuvre.
His curating of it on paper is highly enjoyable, and sealed
with insider authority; it will be a primary document of Baconology. If
there’s a danger in knowing a body of work from the inside for so long,
however, it is that you lose track of outside correlatives. The Study
from the Human Body of 1949, for example, shines out to Sylvester as a
crucial canvas. The painting, Bacon’s earliest known nude, shows the back of
a man stepping into the darkness between what look like two shower curtains:
It is wonderfully tender and mysterious in its rendering of
the space between the legs and in its modelling of the underside of the right
thigh. Its use of grisaille is breathtaking. None of Bacon’s paintings puts
the question more teasingly as to whether he is primarily a painterly painter
or an image-maker. Does this work take us by the throat chiefly because of
its lyrical beauty or because of the elegiac poignancy of its sense of
farewell?
Looking on without the same commitments, what I see is a
figure outline which Bacon has mechanically summarised on the usual unprimed
canvas and has then blocked in with spasmodic strokes of a very stiff,
faintly crimson-tinted white, determined that the figure should somehow be
fleshly but desperately uncertain as to how its volume and structure could be
represented, or indeed whether they should be attempted. The brush doing this
bodged infill, nervously observing the outline of that right thigh and
buttock, has left a clean edge that half-prompts you to read the area as a
flat plane, thus stymying the effort to render its recession. The brushloads
of grey reaching to fill the fork below the groin are equally timorous. The
whole canvas is infected by an indecision as to whether the use of separated
vertical downstrokes – what Bacon called ‘shuttering’ – constitutes a
thoroughgoing methodology, or is simply a scrawny shorthand for shower
curtains. Poignancy and lyricism don’t get a look in; what takes me by the
throat is embarrassment.
I really don’t want Bacon to be this inept; but similar
fumbling occurs, often even more glaringly, in the majority of his surviving
early canvases, until in the early 1960s radical distortion offers a way of
bypassing his uncertainties. Bacon himself readily confessed to his
incompetences, as Sylvester acknowledges: but was he complacent about them?
Alone among those invited to present Artist’s Eye selections of the
National Gallery’s holdings, he insisted that his own work was unworthy to
sit beside the likes of Velázquez and Degas. He was ready to talk about those
masters and the endless stimulation that their painting offered to his own,
but he didn’t seem to equate attachment with co-achievement. At times, I
wonder if Sylvester does.
His own ‘teasing question’ about image-making and
painterliness touches on the issue: Bacon’s prowess as a poetic inventor –
starting with the matchlessly ferocious mutants of his 1944 debut – has long
prompted people to will old-masterly greatness on his paintwork. But maybe
this mislocates an artistic act which, in the context of postwar figuration,
was in fact rather ahead of its time. Unlike Giacometti or Freud, with their
arduous reinventions of the practice of drawing from life, Bacon painted his
repertory of screams and flurried buggerings with a peremptory wilfulness
that seems close to Pop Art: I want it now. (‘Presented directly to the
nervous system’; ‘the sensation of life without the boredom of its
conveyance’; ‘the grin without the Cheshire cat’; his self-descriptions are
unbeatable.) Sylvester notes how his reliance on photos left him disoriented
when confronted with living models in the 1950s – a disengagement from
traditional skills that would become institutionalised in the era of Warhol.
The mastery of fresh skills that recharges Bacon’s art from the early 1960s –
his use of contorted human forms as containers for squirming flesh paint,
themselves held down within designer-tidy interiors – could possibly have
been inspired by the way the young Kitaj composed on the canvas with ripped,
projected images; at any rate, his working ethos seems to come into clearer
focus from this time onwards. Simply give me a good strong layout, give me
the materials, and I’ll give you the way life really is; Bacon’s thumpingly
unsubtle descendants in this perspective (and for that matter in Sylvester’s
approbation) are Gilbert & George and Damien Hirst.
An alternative, more ancestral perspective on the nature of
Bacon’s skills might be to call him a northern painter. A painter, that is,
of a humanity born clothed; in this case, of a race that presents itself in
suits and ties. It’s not exactly that Bacon, as in his own disclaimer,
couldn’t draw. No one has had a more forceful structural knowledge of heads,
and of the tooth-ringed hollow that runs through them; hence the power of his
screams and his metamorphosed portraits. It’s simply that few figurative
artists have got through a career with such a radically unstructured notion
of what lies beneath the collar. Occasionally, he takes a butcher’s cleaver
to his quasi-acephalic nudes and discovers a backbone. But for the most part,
his instinct tells him that when you unbutton the tweed and serge encasing
the mid-century British male, there lies revealed a rippling, amorphous flood
of blubber.
Unaided by anatomy, Bacon thrashes about through much of
his career to find formulas to convey this judder of flesh. Short, circling
swoops of the brush, topped with little blurts from the paint-tube, prove the
most productive device: he gets very exquisite when he finesses them with
dusted and printed pigments in the later work. He whips paint into
fleshliness with this incessant urgency because the operation promises to
deliver a kind of transubstantiating miracle. It offers him direct access to
‘life’ – to the essence of things, as that gets defined by a God-disdaining
vitalist. This, in other words, is an art whose procedures are dictated by
belief. The texture of that belief is reflected in Bacon’s comments apropos a
Titian painting to a BBC interviewer (as recorded by Peppiatt): ‘We don’t
only live our life, as it were, in the material and physical sense; we live
it through our whole nervous system, which is, of course, also only a physical
thing, but it’s a whole kind of process of human images which have been
passed down – and yet nobody knows how to go on using them.’ That slippage
from a reassertion of materialist orthodoxy to a lament over broken tradition
is crucial to the tight circle of Bacon’s artistic rationale, which revolves
round a yawning void. The point has become too banal to detain Sylvester by
this stage, but sometimes the obvious has to be restated: the premise behind
Bacon’s anti-monuments is God’s failure to continue existing. This is the
occasion for his thoroughgoing ‘solemnity’. It’s not only the quality that
makes his triptychs and studies for crucifixions so memorable, vital and
horrid: it’s also what dates them. His declamatory anomie now seems to
document a certain mid-20th-century crisis mentality whose reference points
have since been dissolved, rather in the way that El Greco offers an
imaginatively exciting but spiritually distant insight into a peculiar brand
of Counter-Reformation piety.
Sylvester brings out what was lovable in his great friend.
This doesn’t diminish Bacon; but it was the more intimidating figure of
the Interviews who seemed to bear challenging messages for the art
of painting. Looking back, looking harder, they all seem to resolve into one
permanent announcement: end of game, grab your takings, get out.
THE
School of Bacon BACON ARCHIVE 1949-2000 Being
& Alien
Bacon News 1 Bacon
News 2 Bacon News 3 Bacon
News 4 BACON NEWS 5
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