2007-2008
FRANCIS BACON
By DOROTA KOZINSKA | FEATURES | VIE
DES ARTS |
VOLUME 52 | NUMBER 213 | SUPPLEMENT | WINTER 2008–2009
This vast retrospective of
the work of one of Britain’s greatest contemporary artists, Francis
Bacon (1909 – 1992)
is a major celebration heralding the centenary of his birth, and a
comprehensive and exhaustive document of his prolific career.
Born in Dublin of English
parents, Bacon first worked as an interior designer. He started
painting around 1928, but destroyed most of his early work. He
revealed his talent as a major artist in 1945 with an instantly
unforgettable and shocking work titled Three Studies for Figures
at the Base of a Crucifixion.
This was the start of one of
the most controversial and disturbing careers in the history of
modern art. Bacon’s demoralizing philosophy that man is simply
another animal in a godless world, subject to the same natural urges
towards violence, lust and fear, was at times in contrast with his
paintings infused as much with unbearable emotional anguish, as with
love. They are often extremely beautiful despite their gut-wrenching
subject matter.
This, the first UK retrospective of Bacon’s work since 1985, is a
form of re-assessment of his oeuvre, afforded by new research that
has emerged since the revelation of his studio and its contents
following the artist’s death. One of the rooms in the exhibition, Archive,
offers a glance into the inner sanctum of the artist, revealing to
what extent he relied on photography, and how he manipulated
photographic imagery. The imagery itself, like Bacon’s paintings for
that matter is often brutal, on the theme of violence and conflict,
but also focused on works of art, including stills from old film.
Bacon’s preoccupation with the human body and its suffering, is the
central theme of all of his works. He developed a unique way of
depicting the physical and emotional torment racking the body, by
twisting and deforming it, reducing it to a fleshy mass emitting a
silent scream of pain. His flamboyant homosexuality and personal
transgressions only added to his mythical stature, and are an
intrinsic element of his work.
The Tate retrospective brings together many famous paintings and
triptychs including Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope
Innocent X (1953), In Memory of George Dyer (1971), and Two
Figures in the Grass (1954).
This, however, is but the tip of the iceberg. The exhibition is
chock full of recognizable paintings, but that is perhaps due to
Bacon’s unmistakeable style.
It is divided into ten sections, or rooms, starting with Animal,
showing works done in the 1940s and reflecting the artist’s original
theory of man as an animal in a world without redemption. The
bestial depiction of the human form is at times combined with
specific references to the horrors of the Second World War. It is in
this room that we are first introduced to one of the early
variations on the theme of the Velazquez painting, which became an
obsession with the painter, Head VI (1949). All it really is,
is a screaming face, featureless except for the gaping mouth.
Room 2, Zone, focuses on Bacon’s experiments with pictorial
space, and the interaction between subject and setting. In most of
his works, the figure is solitary, isolated, yet placed centrally,
almost on a stage, therefore exposed to public scrutiny in all its
vulnerability. This visual formula weaves throughout his career, and
is symbolic of the artist’s sense of being alone in his suffering.
Room 3 is under the heading Apprehension, and the sense of
dread permeating the works in this section is of a very unusual
kind. The Man in Blue reigns in this hall, a haunting,
looming figure behind an enormous desk, a sinister, shadowy presence
exuding a particularly personal menace. This series refers to the
continued illegality of homosexuality, and on a personal level, to
Bacon’s sometimes violent affair with Peter Lacy. This room also
holds the Chimpanzee (1955), a terrifying depiction of
confinement and cruelty.
Through Crucifixion, Crisis, and Portrait, to Epic, Memorial and Late,
each section is a world onto itself, a mini exhibition within the
framework of a large one.
Portraits is like a burst of colour in the otherwise sombre
palette that predominates in Bacon’s oeuvre. Gone is the cage-like
grid holding the figure, the space is infused with light, ochres and
greens. His lover and most frequent model, George Dyer, is seen in
many of the works, like Three Figures in a Room (1964), in
which he is represented with a mixture of pathos and affection
section is a world onto itself, a mini exhibition within the
framework of a large one.
But it is in the room titled Memorial that one finds perhaps
the most accomplished, and the most painful of Bacon’s works. The
room is entirely dedicated to Dyer, who was the artist’s closest
companion as of 1963, and who committed suicide in 1971, two days
before Bacon’s major exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Racked
by loss and pain, Bacon created a series of works in the memory of
Dyer, that speaks a subtly different visual language. The fines are
cleaner, the imagery less raw, the setting staged, as if the horror
of the event was too much to bear and had to be presented in a
theatrical, detached manner.
The figure, as always, is placed centre stage, exposed in all its
physical degradation and beauty, terribly human in its vulnerability
and helplessness.
Presented in triptychs – Bacon’s
way of fulfilling his longing for cinematic expression – it
shows Dyer slumped on a toilet seat, dying, a giant black shadow
spilling from the central image like a great pool of blood
Bacon
was legendary for his resigned defiance in the face of mortality,
but the death of his friend was devastating. "Death is the only
absolute certainty," he told a friend. "Artists know that they can’t
defeat it, but I think that most artists are very aware of their
annihilation – it
follows them around like their shadow."
For someone wrestling with such overwhelming forces, Bacon exhibited
an impressive discipline at work, pouring his torment onto the
canvas with an unconscious, or perhaps very deliberate, sense of it
being his only salvation.
In the last room of this magnificent exhibition, we come face to
face with the artist so to speak. A series of wonderful
self-portraits reveal the man behind the easel; a profound, deeply
thinking, complex personality. In Three Studies for a
Self-Portrait (1979-80), the face is a twisting, undulating
patchwork of colour against a dark background. The features are
typically contorted, but what draws the attention are the eyes that
see, and look back at us.
What strikes one when contemplating the expanse of Bacon’s prolific
production, is how very consistent he was in his style and subject
matter, and yet at the same time how endlessly, surprisingly fresh
each of his painting is to this day. Despite the scatological,
eviscerating nature of his work, the viewer is instantly immersed in
its story, often unaware of, oblivious to the fabulous calibre of
the art. The two go hand in hand in Bacon’s paintings, the horror
and the beauty, life and art, united by the indomitable creative
spirit that helped him survive and fed his talent.
EXHIBITION FRANCIS BACON TATE BRITAIN
Upper Galleries London, UK 11 September 2008 – 4 January 2009

Francis Bacon
London
By DEXTER DALWOOD | EXHIBITION
REVIEWS | THE
BURLINGTON MAGAZINE |
VOLUME 150 | NUMBER 1269 | DECEMBER 2008
AS FRANCIS BACON’s third
retrospective at Tate Britain (to 4th January) 1 has
been timed to coincide with the centenary of his birth in 2009, it
seems appropriate that it should attempt a recanonisation of the
painter’s achievements. Bacon, always a sacred cow and regarded as a
titan of painting since his death in 1992, has been awarded a
coveted status accorded to only a few artists in every generation.
Cy Twombly is perhaps the most recent to achieve this, and he has
done so by disengaging his work from its origins in Arte Povera and
washing himself of contemporary allegiances. In Bacon’s case, enough
time has passed since the last major exhibition in London (1985;
Tate Britain) to permit the viewing of his work in a very different
context. Back then, painting, which since the 1970s had been
marginalised in favour of new art forms, was the subject of a
renewed interest, specifically figurative painting. This interest
was identified closely with the Royal Academy’s 1981 exhibition A
New Spirit in Painting, which spawned a surge of market-friendly
Neo-Expressionism. This was followed in 1984 by the more parochial The
Hard-Won Image at the Tate Gallery, which embraced figuration in
a cadaver-pumping bid to bring painting back in from the cold. The
subsequent 1985 Bacon retrospective provided the much needed impetus
for a debate about the relevance of painting, and satisfied the
intellectual requirements of people who liked art but still did not
really approve of painting. Gerhard Richter went on to make this
role of the intellectual painter his own, and brought about a
renewal that Bacon’s work always rooted in much older concerns,
could never effect. Studying at St Martin’s School of Art in the
early 1980s and poring over well-thumbed, paint-splattered
monographs the early 1980s and poring over well-thumbed,
paint-splattered monographs on Bacon’s work (long before Gilles
Deleuzes’s The Logic of Sensation was translate into
English), it seemed to me that his concerns were those of an earlier
generation.
The current exhibition aims
both to reinforce Bacon’s reputation as Britain’s greatest modern
painter, but also to question how Bacon propagandised his own work
and, further, how it might now be reinterpreted. The juxtaposition
of works enables the viewer to test new lines of approach. However,
the new groupings that emerge from the interpretation-led
presentation at
the Tate do, however, result in some misleadingly themed rooms:
‘Crisis’, ‘Apprehension’ and ‘Zone’ for example, manage to be
simultaneously vague and over-prescriptive. It
is also perhaps misleading to lay such emphasis, as the centrepiece
of the show, on a display of documentary and source material. This
is the result of a long history of obsessive archiving of the
ephemera from Bacon’s Reece Mews studio and, although it includes
some interesting photographs, is diluted by some unremarkable works
on paper. Since the early 1990s this material has been the main
focus for Bacon scholars and should have enhanced the exhibition,
but here the effect is more anecdotal than one of powerful
elucidation. The one exception is that Bacon’s notebooks, containing
lists of potential paintings, revealingly highlight the degree of
premeditation and planning of the images, and in doing so support
the case for Bacon as a highly methodical, strategic painter.
One of the most
successful rooms is filled with the early 1950s dark inky-blue
portraits of businessmen in suits, spatially flattened in airless
niches – surely these have never looked better. But this room seems
restrained in comparison with the histrionically titled ‘Crisis’
room. Here Bacon veers off course with the slashed-on, painterly
Bomberg/Soutine mash-ups done in 1956–57 such as Figures in a
landscape (1956–57;Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery) and Figure
in a mountain landscape (1956; Kunsthaus, Zürich) but returning
to some sort of form with the Study for portrait of Van Gogh VI (1957;
Arts Council Collection).
These days it is becoming harder to stomach the critically
reiterated idea that the horrors of the early twentieth century,
apparently depicted in these paintings, underpin Bacon’s
pre-eminence as a painter of the human condition. One of the
successes of the current exhibition is to show that Bacon’s
paintings may have less to do with ‘real’ violence than with
imagined violence. Such violence is conjured up as an antithesis of
boredom, fantasised to enrich the artist’s daily life, in the manner
of Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel America
Psycho (1991). The Three studies for figures at the base of a
Crucifixion (c.1944; Tate), Bacon’s ‘year zero’ painting, here
tightly grouped in a small room with two other large-scale triptych
Crucifixions from 1962 and 1965, rebuff the pundits’ view that they
somehow represent the more grotesque atrocities of the Second World
War without actually illustrating them. Indeed, even Bacon’s own
claim that ‘paint should come across directly onto the nervous
system’ wears thin when pitched against such subject-matter.
Martin Harrison’s catalogue essay goes some way towards exploring
this dilemma, which is, in short, how to consider Bacon’s statements
about his own work in the context both of research into previously
unavailable material and of the simple experience of looking at the
paintings. For example, it is interesting to question how much
Bacon’s often repeated statement ‘I do not know what accident will
occur’ actually played in his work process.2 It
seems obvious now that the paintings made after the late 1950s are
very formulaic in their construction
– and this is not necessarily a bad thing. This interpretation
liberates the viewer from considering Bacon’s work only in a
traditional expressionist context, following the credo that every
brushstroke can be considered to have been torn from the artist’s
soul. It is appropriate that the 1956 film Lust for Life (the
biopic of Van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas) is mentioned in the catalogue
essay by David Alan Mellor as the inspiration
for the Study for portrait of Van Gogh series
that Bacon knocked out a few days after seeing the film.
To simply accept Bacon’s version of how images floated into his head
and then appeared on the canvas is to detract from his great skill
as a painter which is in the composition and execution of the works.
What makes him such an interesting artist for other painters has as
much to do with what he leaves out of his paintings as it does with
what he puts in, and his continual short-circuiting of traditional
figurative mannerisms. In order to rupture traditional readings
Bacon developed a series of devices, which can be seen, for example,
in the grouping entitled ‘Portrait’ in the current exhibition. The
paintings Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963; Fig.34), Three
figures in a room (1964; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and Study
of George Dyer in a mirror (1968; Museo Thysse Bornemisza,
Madrid) all adopt either the chevron shape or the curved ellipse –
which first emerged in the Pope paintings – as a device which
operates in the bottom half of the painting as an effective way of
breaking the foreground/middleground/background convention of
figurative painting. Two studies for a portrait of George
Dyer (1968; Fig.35) is a good example of the potential for
failure of this device. Bacon allows the ground to drop off the
bottom of the canvas and hence the space of the painting becomes
recessive and even conventional – just a portrait of a
sitter. Viewed in this light, it is as if the ejaculation of paint
over the figure’s legs functions solely to prevent the painting from
becoming nothing more than a portrait of a man in a room with a
distorted face. Bacon’s depiction of space only really works when
the spatial arena is a believable distortion so that he makes it his
own.
It is also tempting to align Bacon’s work with that of Graham
Sutherland, but the latter’s surrealistic and symbolic images have
not stood the test of time as well as has Bacon’s work. Is it the
Miró-esque landscape or
the insipid Englishness of Sutherland’s paintings which
deadens them, in the same way that Paul Nash’s dumping of mangled pieces
of modernity into English fields has dated? It is true to say
that Bacon was operating
in the same socio-political context as Sutherland and Nash, but by
setting everything he did within a hermetic personal arena
(haunted by the ghost of Duchamp’s Large glass and furnished with
tubular chrome and G-plan
furniture), Bacon was able to create a unique contemporary
modernism which has not dated in the same way.
What is not suppressed in the current exhibition, although hardly
emphasised in the catalogue, is the older ideal of cruelty that
presides over Bacon’s imagery: the dark end-of-the-pier humour of
Punch and Judy, the nasty after-taste of nineteenth-century British
Colonialism unveiled and exposed as ‘the bible, the bottle, and the
lash’. Bacon deliberately and very effectively steered his work away
from pictorial convention and flaunted controversy, for example, by
disingenuously palming off the motif of a hypodermic needle away
from pictorial convention and flaunted controversy, for example, by
disingenuously palming off the motif of a hypodermic needle sticking
into the veins of one of his subjects as a formalist device. Bacon’s
shock tactics were as calculated as those of Turner, who enjoyed the
drama of pulling back the curtain to his blacked-out studio to an
audience full of nervous expectation.
It is
also tempting to align Bacon’s work with that of Graham Sutherland,
but the latter’s surrealistic and symbolic images have not stood the
test of time as well as has Bacon’s work. Is it the Miró-esque
landscape or
the insipid Englishness of Sutherland’s paintings which
deadens them, in the same way that Paul Nash’s dumping of mangled pieces
of modernity into English fields has dated? It is true to say
that Bacon was operating
in the same socio-political context as Sutherland and Nash, but by
setting everything he did within a hermetic personal arena
(haunted by the ghost of Duchamp’s Large glass and furnished
with tubular chrome and G-plan
furniture), Bacon was able to create a unique contemporary
modernism which has not dated in the same way.
What
is not suppressed in the current exhibition, although hardly
emphasised in the catalogue, is the older ideal of cruelty that
presides over Bacon’s imagery: the
dark end-of-the-pier humour of Punch and Judy, the nasty after-taste
of nineteenth-century British Colonialism unveiled and exposed as
‘the bible, the bottle, and the lash’. Bacon deliberately and very
effectively steered his work
away from pictorial convention and flaunted controversy, for
example, by disingenuously palming off the motif of a hypodermic
needle away from pictorial convention and flaunted controversy, for
example, by disingenuously palming off the motif of a hypodermic
needle sticking into the veins of one of his subjects as a formalist
device. Bacon’s shock tactics were as calculated as those of Turner,
who enjoyed the drama of pulling back the curtain to his blacked-out
studio to an audience full of nervous expectation.
Of
course, by the time of the 1985 exhibition such tactics were no
longer so effective. Bacon’s later paintings of dwarf-like figures in
cricket pads, inspired by his lust for the cricketing legend
Ian Botham, or his triptych of Mick Jagger, seemed like an
ill-judged over-indulgence. In the Tate’s current show these works
are mostly omitted in favour of the post-1985 work. This includes Jet
of water (1988; Fig.36) an image without the presence of a
figure which promised a new departure and which, confusingly, was
painted in the same
year as the Second version of Triptych 1944 (1988;
Tate), which has the feeling of a disastrous come-back gig and is
wisely relegated
to the vestibule outside the exhibition. Incredibly, and in
perverse defiance of the spontaneous nature of the subject, the 1988 Jet
of water is in fact a fairly identical version
to a first Jet of water painted in 1979. A display of these
two works together might have instigated the kind of
revisionism that Bacon’s
work now needs.
R.B. Kitaj
reportedly took to his bed for a couple of days after seeing Bacon’s
1985 Tate exhibition, overwhelmed and unnerved by the achievement of
his contemporary. But the current exhibition avoids any homage to
the aggrandising exhibition layouts typical of David Sylvester’s
hangs, seen to particularly impressive effect in his posthumous
homage to Bacon, The Human Body, mounted at the Hayward
Gallery in in 1998. Although there are no great surprises in the
loans to the show, and despite misleading interpretative categories,
Bacon’s work is allowed to unravel. The catalogue essays are for the
most part illuminating but fail to capitalise on this opportunity to
challenge the hagiography. It will be interesting to see if this
tangible difference is maintained when the exhibition tours to the
Prado, and whether the themed rooms are retained at the subsequent
and final showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By the end of
this exhibition tour we might hope that some more of the myth
surrounding Francis Bacon will have been debunked, in favour of the
view that these are simply the most original inventive figurative
paintings of their time.
1 The
exhibition travels to the Museo National del Prado,
Madrid (3rd February to 19th April) and to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York (18th May to 16th August). Catalogue: Francis
Bacon. Edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, with
contributions by Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield,
Gary Tinterow and Victoria Walsh. 288 pp. ncl. 151 col. + 56 b. & w.
ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2008), £24.99. ISBN
978–1–85437–738–8. The exhibits are not numbered in the checklist;
the bibliography is selective.
2
‘Francis Bacon: Letters to Michel Leiris 1966-89’, in
exh. cat. Supplement to Francis Bacon, London (Gagosian
Gallery) 2006, p.23.

Landscape
near Malabata, Tangier, by Francis Bacon.
1963. Canvas, 198 by 147.5 cm.
Francis Bacon
Tate Britain, London.
11 September 2008–4 January 2009.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
3 February–19 April 2009
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
18 May–16 August 2009
JANET MCKENZIE
|
STUDIO INTERNATIONAL
|
TUESDAY
30 DECEMBER 2008
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) at Tate Britain heralds the artist’s
centenary in 2009. It is the first retrospective since 1985,
enabling a re-assessment of his work, although the exhibitions in
Edinburgh, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads (2005) and
Norwich, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (2006) at the Sainsbury Centre
have been significant. The present exhibition is informed by the
revelation, following Bacon’s death in 1992, of the contents of his
studio. His working methods were revealed, especially his reliance
on photographs.
In
interviews, Francis Bacon insisted that he never drew, and that his
compositions were intuitive. These claims were refuted by the
posthumous revelation of figure studies from the 1950s. Bacon
usually commenced painting a figure on to the blank canvas. In 1962
he claimed that the genesis of his paintings came whilst
daydreaming. In fact his methods were often more orthodox. The works
on paper and lists that came to light after his death indicate that
he collected a wide range of material to use as points of reference.
The present exhibition, which makes a powerful impact on the viewer,
comprises 65 paintings and 13 major triptychs. It is the most
comprehensive exhibition to date, which examines the artist’s
sources, processes and thoughts. It is accompanied by an excellent,
scholarly catalogue; edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens; with
essays by Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield, Gary
Tinterow and Victoria Walsh.1
Widely
regarded as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century,
Francis Bacon can also be seen as one of the most powerful and
searing commentators of the human condition in Britain since the
Second World War, expressing unflinching images of sexuality,
violence and isolation. The exhibition is profound, haunting and
iconic. Bacon’s philosophy as an atheist is explored: man in a
godless world is presented as simply another animal, subject to the
same natural urges of violence, lust and fear. In this Bacon
personified the age. The loss of faith in humanity in the late 1940s
was such that the human image in art became increasingly difficult
to portray. The existential despair expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre
in Nausea (1938), found a visual counterpart in the images of
despair and alienation of Francis Bacon, the expressionism of Oskar
Kokoschka and the apocalyptic visions of Arthur Boyd. For the most
part, abstraction in the visual arts dominated because, after the
horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, artists found images
of humanity impossible to create.
John
Berger, formerly a harsh critic of Bacon, recently wrote:
“He repeatedly painted the human body, in discomfort or agony or
want. Sometimes the pain involved looks as if it has been inflicted;
more often it seems to originate from within, from the guts of the
body itself, from the misfortune of being physical”.2 In spite of
the hellish drama expressed, Bacon’s work is inspiring in the very
dedication to the craft of painting, and the intellectual dialogue
created. This is a profound exhibition, at once challenging and
awesome. In spite of the bewilderment that can so often be
experienced in confrontation with his painting, there is an
unexpected affirmation in the choice of formal language and the
precision and care applied to the act of painting: the placement of
each head, each brush stroke, every subtle hue, the manner in which
the figure inhabits the space, the form within the picture plane. A
quiet authority is established by the artist amid the shrieking
pain, due in large part to the dialogue he has with art from the
past.
Bacon’s sources have been divided by various commentators
now, to include ‘high art’ sources and ‘low art’ sources. Bacon
chose only the most remarkable artists to aspire to: Michelangelo,
Rembrandt, Velasquez and Picasso. He also chose inspiration from the
modern world: men in suits, modern furniture, dangling light bulbs,
gay comic books. He depicted a low-life from gangster boyfriends,
heavy drinking and sexually dissipated Colony Room artists and
intellectuals, a collision of high and low culture, survival and
destruction. Chance played an important role in Bacon’s work –
spontaneity was of key importance in a Post-Surrealist context.
Although he retained the human figure in his work, he embraced the
Abstract Expressionists’ love of chance in art as in life. A
primordial energy is central to many works, the Bullfight paintings
in 1969 being perfect examples of how Bacon infused the image on
canvas with a reckless, fatal movement. Describing the collision of
illustration of facts and an expression of the very deepest
feelings, Bacon noted: “one wants a thing to be as factual as
possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply
unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of
the object that you set out to do. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”3 Bacon
had the highest ambition from a young age, claiming that his work
should either be in the National Gallery or the dustbin, with
nothing in between. His ambition as a painter was to define his
existential, atheistic stance in a post-photography world. Bacon was
a habitual destroyer of paintings; in 1962 he remarked that
over-working was a form of destruction, of clogging. Spontaneity was
a vital quality, which Bacon sought to capture.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, in 1909. He spent most of
his life in London, working as a self-taught painter from the 1930s.
The human figure was central to his work throughout his long and
productive career. He died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Time has
played an important part in the appraisal of Bacon’s work; his
unflinching approach to violence and the human condition is more
poignant than ever. In 1973 he attributed his preoccupation with
violence and war to the times in which he grew up, interwar Germany
and the rise of Sinn Fein in Ireland:
I grew up in an atmosphere of threat for a long time…And
then I was in Berlin at the beginning of the Nazi thing, my whole
life had been lived through a time of stress, and then World War
Two, anyone who lived through the European wars was affected by
them, they affected one’s whole psyche to that extent, to live
continuously under an atmosphere of tension and threat.4
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, in which the
most scholarly essays, explore the lasting significance of his work
for the present day. Images of the abyss, of loneliness and the
inescapable suffering of human existence dominate the exhibition.
Francis Bacon at
Tate Britain is broadly chronological. Room One, Animal,
examines Bacon’s early work from the 1940s where his attitude to
humanity is already evident. His bestial depiction of the human
figure combined personal feelings of anxiety with broader references
to the Second World War. He used reproductions from books,
catalogues and magazines. The male figure is used repeatedly in
Bacon’s long career; he often includes a scream or shout to reveal
the internal repressed and violent anxieties. The open mouth
represents the tension that exists between the individual and the
broader context of time and place.
Room Two, Zone, examines
Bacon’s work of the 1950s where he carried out complex experiments
with pictorial space. He described the processes, in 1952, as ‘an
attempt to lift the image outside of its natural environment’. This
work established his easily recognisable images with boxed figures
in cage-like structures. Hexagonal ground planes establish tense
psychological zones; the use of shuttering, the vertical lines of
paint merge the foreground and background. This is the period in
which Bacon came of age as a painter. Yet his personal circumstances
were extremely difficult: homeless, in debt and in a tempestuous
relationship with Peter Lacy. During this time he searched for and
found appropriate subject -matter with which to express his deepest
anxiety. In the 1950s Bacon used the painting by Velazquez’s Portrait
of Pope Innocent X, (c.1650),
as his starting point to explore the insecurities of the powerful.
For Bacon, the choice of the portrait of a Pope had nothing to do
with religion; as a non-believer he was concerned with the way man
behaves to each other. For Bacon the portrait by Velazquez was one
of the greatest portraits ever painted for it opened up feelings and
prompted the imagination, beyond any real individual or other art
work. The colour is magnificent, prompting Bacon to give his own
images a sense of tragic grandeur, a sense of authority in painterly
terms. The Pope as a unique figure in the world suited Bacon’s
ambition to create a powerful image in which power is stripped of
its essence.
Room Three, Apprehension,
explores the pervading anxiety in all of Bacon’s work. The Cold War
anxiety that limited movement and personal freedom was combined in
Bacon’s case with the illegality at the time of homosexuality. His
sometimes, violent relationship, with Peter Lacy, is captured in
the Man in Blue series,
which concentrates on a single anonymous figure in a dark suit.
Although inspired by the greatest artists from history, Bacon
powerful images are achieved by combining the authority of the
history of art, with contemporary life. The figure is portrayed in
isolation, sitting at a table or at a bar. Like many artists in the
twentieth century, including the Italian Futurists, who worked with
the figure, Bacon drew from the photographic work of Edweard
Muybridge’s, The Human Figure in
Motion, (1887) sequential photographs of animals and humans,
which Bacon described as ‘a dictionary’ of the body in motion.
Room Four at Tate Britain is devoted to one of Bacon’s most
famous and iconic series, of the Crucifixion. He
made works throughout his career at pivotal moments. As an atheist
Bacon saw the Crucifixion as a particularly poignant act of man’s
violence. Brutality and fear are developed in a particularly cruel
evocation of the famous religious scene. The ritual of sacrifice is
given a new dimension, the brutality emphasised with extreme
abandon. Meat carcasses are used by Bacon to diminish the human
notion of superiority in the wider scheme of life according to
Christianity. In an early interview Bacon describes how existing
images breed others. He chose the Crucifixion by Cimabue as a
starting point, but readily admits that without all the paintings
that have been done on the subject, his could not have produced his
own. Often under the influence of alcohol, and prone to drug abuse,
and frequently suffering acute exhaustion, Bacon would create
Crucifixion images of profound despair. He also juxtaposes fragments
of films, such as those of Eisenstein, and isolated stills allowing
accident to play a major part in the creative process. Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, (c.1944)
is a key work and one that paved the way for his use of the triptych
format, and numerous later themes and compositions. The bestial
depiction of the human figure was central to Bacon’s oeuvre.
Displacing the traditional saints in Crucifixion paintings, Bacon
later referred to them as Furies from Greek mythology.
In interview with David Sylvester in 1966, he was asked
about the use of meat carcasses in these and other works. He stated,
“Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses”.5 Being
human in Bacon’s world was utterly debased. Bacon took works from
the history of art that were created within a spiritual context and
slashed them to bits. In this he felt completely justified, for the
Vatican never openly condemned Nazism. This was Bacon’s vendetta for
the hypocrisy played out in the name of God. Where artists such as
Hieronymous Bosch created devastating images of humanity in works
such as his Judgement Day paintings, Bacon chose the traditionally
edifying form of portraiture, which entails a degree of trust
between painter and sitter, and destroyed it. His disturbing papal
images are like the burning of an effigy, leaving the viewer with a
sense of physical revulsion.
Room Five Crisis,
focuses on the period 1956-1961. Bacon travelled widely in Monaco,
France and Africa, mostly with Peter Lacy. He used new methods of
painting, choosing thicker paint, strong colour, often violently
applied. Using a self-portrait, The
Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888)
by Vincent Van Gogh, as his source and inspiration, Bacon painted
works that were criticised for their ‘reckless energy’. With
hindsight the energy and drama in these works was necessary in
introducing chance into the painting process itself.
Room Six is the Archive in
the Tate’s exhibition, based on the revelations made by scholars
after Bacon’s death. The source material found in Bacon’s studio
revealed his reliance on photography and other sources that had not
been fully examined during Bacon’s lifetime. There were photographs
of athletes, film stills and reproductions of works of art. Further,
his practice of commissioning photographs of his friends by John
Deakin was fully realised, and formed an important component of the
exhibition in Edinburgh, Francis
Bacon: Portraits and Heads, (2005). Bacon also took
many photographs himself, preferring to draw from photographs, for
they were already two-dimensional images. In his studio there were
also lists of potential subjects and preparatory drawings, which
Bacon had denied making, preferring to emphasise the spontaneous
nature of the act of painting directly onto canvas.
Room Seven Portrait,
is important given the findings in Bacon’s studio. In descriptions
in interviews, most famously those with David Sylvester, Bacon
describes his intention to reinvent portraiture. He drew upon the
works he admired of Velazquez and Van Gogh. His abiding concern was
how a painter should create portraits in an age dominated by
photography. He distorted the sitter’s appearance in order to
extract a greater, more complete likeness, informed by internal
issues of personality and mood. George Dyer his lover is depicted
with a mixture of affection and contempt. Three
Figures in Room, (1964) expresses a range of human
characteristics including absurdity, pathos, and isolation.
Room Eight Memorial, is
dedicated to George Dyer, Bacon’s closest companion and model from
the autumn of 1963. Two days before the opening of Bacon’s
exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Dyer committed
suicide. The void created by Dyer’s death, under such tragic
circumstances prompted Bacon to produce a number of works in his
memory. The large-scale triptych suited the grand nature of Bacon’s
statements, enabling him to isolate and juxtapose simultaneously.
The energy in these works is overwhelming. The depths of despair
experienced in the loss of his lover, are expressed with consummate
skill and heartfelt anguish. Bacon told Sylvester shortly after
Dyer’s death: “You don’t stop thinking about them; time doesn’t
heal” He referred to his repeated depiction of homosexual copulation
as a form of exorcism. Although he regretted its ‘sensational
nature’, he was compelled to paint, Triptych, May-June, 1973, “to
get it out of his system”. As well as repeated posthumous images of
Dyer, he also made numerous self-portraits.6
Room Nine, Epic,
examines the work Bacon produced in response to poetry and
literature, particularly the work of T.S Eliot. Bacon was emphatic
in wanting to make works that evoked the meaning and mood of the
written word. They were not illustrations.
For me realism is an attempt to capture the appearance with
the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me. As for
my latest triptych and a few other canvases painted after I read
Aeschylus. I tried to create images of the episodes created inside
me. I could not paint Agamemnon. Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that
would have been merely another kind of historical painting when all
is said and done. Therefore, I tried to create an image of the
effect that was produced inside me. Perhaps realism is always
subjective when it is most profoundly expressed.7
Bacon felt a great affinity for poetry, perhaps more so than
contemporary art. He appreciated a wide range of poetry ranging from
the work of Aeschylus, W.B Yeats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ezra Pound,
William Shakespeare and especially T.S. Eliot. From Aeschylus’ Oresteia Bacon
found an evocative image: “the reek of human blood smiles out at
me”.8 In turn Bacon admired T.S. Eliot’s recasting of
Greek tragedy, seeing in it an appropriate model for modern society.
Bacon appreciated Eliot’s preoccupation with, ‘mortality, the
pathetic futility and solitude of life’, and the manner in which he
located ‘those existential conditions within a specific set of
modern circumstances’.9
Bacon’s description of the tightrope between abstraction and
figuration can also be used for poetry. “You have to abbreviate into
intensity”, he remarked, also an apt description for Eliot’s poetry.
Bacon chose painting to assuage the futility of life as he saw it.
“I think that man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a
completely futile being, that he has to play out the game within
reason... You can be optimistic and totally without hope”. Later, he
said, “I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during
our existence”.10 By contrast, Eliot had a Christian
faith and belief in an afterlife.
The use of triptych, Bacon insisted was its resistance to
narrative: “it breaks the series up and prevents it having a story,
that’s why the three panels are always framed separately”. Yet the
sequence created by three canvases side by side could equally create
a story through the interrelatedness of the three images and
specific references within each. Specific intended meaning is always
speculative in Bacon’s work. The triptych emphasises Bacon’s
fascination with theatrical devices to observe the human condition.
Likewise Eliot’s Wasteland, ‘describes
specific scenes and events but does not tie them to a single story’.11
Room Ten Late, examines
the last decade of Bacon’s life. The confrontation with mortality
was an abiding theme in his work, having lost key figures in his
life already. In 1993 he stated: “Life and death go hand in hand
…Death is like the shadow of life. When you’re dead, you’re dead,
but while you’re alive, the idea of death pursues you”.12 The
very black paintings made in the 1970s which confronted the death of
George Dyer, gave way to more contemplative works, with a palpable
restraint and composure. In several paintings he draws on his
admiration for the work of the nineteenth-century French painter
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Numerous reproductions of Ingres’
work were found in his studio, which he combined with incongruous
images from sporting figures. Bacon also employed a controlled
element of chance by throwing paint at the canvas. The aftermath of
violence, blood gushing from a victim onto the pavement, for
example, Bacon found exhilarating. Blood
on Pavement, (c1988) is presented with the artist’s
extraordinary detachment. “Things are not shocking if they haven’t
been put into a memorable form. Otherwise, it’s just blood
splattered against a wall.”13 The
theme of detachment from violence and suffering is achieved
throughout Bacon’s oeuvre,
from an early Wound for a Crucifixion (c.1934) to the
Bullfight works in the 1960s to Oedipus
and the Sphinx after Ingres, (1983).
The last paintings are the antithesis of Bacon’s early frenzied
works, and have been criticised for being formulaic and lacking in
tension. They have a monumentality and order, yet returning to the
same themes that had occupied him for forty years. His last triptych
of 1991 returns to the issue of sexual struggle, which permeates
much of his life’s work. His most private feelings are laid bare,
and to which he referred in 1971/3, “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 trying to say anything”.14
1. Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, Francis
Bacon, Tate Publishing, London, 2008.
2. John Berger, Prophet in a pitiless world, The Guardian, 29
May 2004.
3. Gale and Stephens, On the Margin of the Impossible, op.cit.,
p.26.
4. Quoted by Stephens, Epic, op.cit., p.218.
5. Quoted by Matthew Gale, Crucifixion, ibid, p.137.
6. Chris Stephens, Epic, ibid, p.214.
7. Ibid, p.216.
8. Gale and Stephens, op.cit., p.26.
9. Ibid, p.26.
10. Ibid, p.26.
11. Epic, op.cit., p. 213.
12. Rachel Tant, Late, p.233.
13. Ibid, p.233.
14. Ibid, p.237.
Desperately seeking
Daddy
Lewis Jones is
fascinated and appalled by details of the demons that drove Francis
Bacon
The Daily
Telegraph Saturday,
December 20, 2008
Michael Peppiatt
knew Francis Bacon for nearly 30 years, and in 1997 published an
authoritative biography, Anatomy of an Enigma. The 14 essays
and interviews collected in Studies for a Portrait necessarily
cover much of the same ground, but offer fresh perspectives.
In Bacon’s Eyes,
for example, he publishes extracts from a discarded memoir he wrote
as a Cambridge undergraduate, when he drank with Bacon in the bars
and clubs of Soho. This is brave of him, as the passages selected
are embarrassingly self-conscious and derivative – his publisher
remarked that they would sound better in French. Still, they catch
something of the artist: “Gargoyle face jutting out on nightairs,
with a bone structure from a butcher’s. Under barlight, pinkchopped,
the smooth skin glistening over the powerful mandibles.”
Bacon was all of a
piece, and his talk – recorded here in interviews laid out in the
reverential French style – could be as brilliantly perverse as his
paintings. “I always think of friendship,” he said, “as where two
people can really tear each other to bits.” Such friendships are a
staple of his work.
In the essays,
Peppiatt writes perceptively about Bacon’s endlessly contradictory
nature, his generosity and cruelty, his violence and tenderness, his
dandyism and love of squalor, his spectacular dissipation and iron
self-discipline, and what he called his “exhilarated despair”. There
is a contradiction, too, in the biographer’s approach to his
subject. On the one hand, he accepts the artist’s assertion that his
paintings are inexplicable, signifying nothing, while on the other
he naturally does his best to explain their significance. He is
excellent on Bacon’s literary influences, particularly Aeschylus and
TS Eliot, and quotes some lines from The Family Reunion (where
the two meet) which perfectly describe the paintings:
In and out, in an
endless drift
Of shrieking forms
in a circular desert
Weaving with
contagion of putrescent
embraces
On dissolving bone.
His main source of
explanation, though, is the painter’s life, particularly his
tortured adolescence. Bacon’s sexual feelings were first aroused by
his father, a brutal military man turned unsuccessful horse trainer,
who may have had his asthmatic son horsewhipped by the stud farm
grooms – a possible inspiration for all the primal screams of the
paintings (“the moment of truth, where all pretence and deceit fall
away”). In 1927, when Francis was 16, Captain Bacon expelled him
from home when he discovered him trying on his mother’s underwear.
The boy was entrusted to a suitably manly uncle, who took him from
the wilds of County Kildare to Berlin and to his bed, then left him
to fend for himself on the streets.
Peppiatt argues
persuasively that Bacon spent the rest of his life in search of a
“cruel father”, a quest dramatised in his obsessive depiction of
demented authority figures, whether subfusc businessmen or empurpled
popes (“the ultimate Papa”).
He recreated his
Berlin experiences in London, amid the depravity of post-war Soho,
where he helped create the Colony Room, a seedy drinking club (still
standing, just) whose bilious green décor provides the background
for some of his paintings. In his novel England, Half English, Colin
MacInnes captures the atmosphere in the club, which he calls
Mabel’s: “To sit in Mabel’s, with the curtains drawn at 4pm on a
sunny afternoon, sipping expensive poison and gossiping one’s life
away, has the futile fascination of forbidden fruit: the heady
intoxication of a bogus Baudelairian evil.”
It was there that
Bacon met Peter Lacy, his perfect “cruel father”, a former Spitfire
pilot who drank three bottles of spirits a day and had an extensive
collection of rhino whips, with which he belaboured the painter and
his paintings. The couple spent time in Tangiers, where Bacon was
repeatedly found wandering the streets at night in an appalling
state. A concerned British consul alerted the chief of police, who
reported, “Pardon, mais il n’y a rien à faire. Monsieur Bacon aime
ça.”
Bacon painted his
voluptuous abattoir visions – screaming monkey men, snarling
cripples, twisted, hacked and smeared – with the exquisite skill
that Van Gogh brought to his sunflowers. A few are lavishly
reproduced in Studies for a Portrait. Most of his
masterpieces are to be found in full coffee-table format in
Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon in the 1950s, first published two
years ago as the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name at the
Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia.

In search of a
cruel father: Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon: A
Centenary Retrospective
Huliq News, Thursday, December 18 2008
The
first major New York exhibition in 20 years devoted to Francis Bacon
(British, 1909–1992)—one of the most important painters of the 20th
century—will be presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May
20 through August 16, 2009. Marking the 100th anniversary of the
artist’s birth,
Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective will bring together the most
significant works from each period of the artist’s extraordinary
career. Drawn from public and private collections around the world,
this landmark exhibition will consist of some 70 paintings,
complemented by never-before-seen works and archival material from
the Francis Bacon Estate, which will shed new light on the artist’s
career and working practices. The Metropolitan Museum is the sole
U.S. venue of the exhibition tour.
The
exhibition is made possible in part by The Daniel and Estrellita
Brodsky Foundation.
It was
organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate
Britain, London, in partnership with the Museo Nacional del Prado,
Madrid.
"Bacon
is more compelling than ever: Despite the passage of time, his
paintings remain fresh, urgent, and mysterious. Never before has
this work been more relevant to young artists," noted Gary Tinterow,
Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department
of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. "For these
reasons, we are very pleased to be able to present a retrospective
spanning his entire career to our viewing public."
Entirely self-taught, Francis Bacon emerged in 1945 as a major force
in postwar art. He rose to prominence over the subsequent 45 years,
securing his reputation as one of the seminal artists of his
generation. With a predilection for shocking imagery, Bacon’s oeuvre
was dominated by emotionally charged depictions of the human body
that are among the most powerful images in the history of art.
The
exhibition’s loosely chronological structure will trace critical
themes in Bacon’s work and explore his philosophy about mankind and
the modern condition with visually arresting examples. The earliest
group of works, from the 1940s and ’50s, focuses on the animalistic
qualities of man, including: paintings of heads with snarling mouths
(Head I, 1947–1948, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); images
of men as pathetic and alone (Study for a Portrait, 1953,
Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany); and the human figure portrayed as
base and bestial (Figures in a Landscape, 1956, Birmingham
Museums & Art Gallery, England). The exhibition also features
numerous versions of Bacon’s iconic studies (1949–1953) after Diego
Velazquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (1650). Mortality is
addressed directly in his last works (Triptych, 1991, The
Museum of Modern Art, New York).
In the
1960s, working in his classic style of much looser, colorful, and
expressive painting, Bacon showed the human body exposed and
violated as in, for example, Lying Figure, 1969 (Foundation
Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland). In the following decade he
increasingly used narrative, autobiography, and myth to mediate
ideas about violence and emotion, as in the 1971 painting In
Memory of George Dyer (Foundation Beyeler) and Triptych
Inspired by the Orestia of Aeschylus, 1981 (Astrup Fearnley
Collection, Oslo, Norway).
A
number of important works by Bacon will only be presented at the
Metropolitan Museum, including Study for Portrait I, 1953
(Denise and Andrew Saul); Painting, 1946 (The Museum of
Modern Art, New York); and Self Portrait, 1973 (private
collection, courtesy Richard Nagy, London).
Central
to an understanding of the artist’s working methods are the large
caches of archival materials that have only become available since
Bacon’s death, especially the contents of the artist’s famously
cluttered London studio. A rich selection of 75 items from the
artist’s studio, his estate, and other archives will be included in
the exhibition. The objects include pages the artist tore from books
and magazines, photographs, and sketches—all of which are source
materials for the finished paintings on view in the exhibition.
Francis
Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective is organized by Matthew Gale, Head
of Displays, Tate Modern, Chris Stephens, Head of Displays, Tate
Britain, and Gary Tinterow. The presentation of the exhibition at
the Metropolitan Museum is organized by Gary Tinterow and Anne L.
Strauss, Associate Curator, assisted by Ian Alteveer, Research
Associate, all in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and
Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The
exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with
essays by Martin Harrison, David Mellor, Simon Ofield, Rachel Tant,
Gary Tinterow, and Victoria Walsh. The catalogue is published by
Tate Publishing and will be available in the Museum’s book shops.
The Metropolitan Museum will offer an array of
education programs in conjunction with Francis Bacon, including a
symposium; gallery talks; documentary films on the artist; and (on
request) verbal imaging tours for people with visual impairments.
Soho’s bohemian Colony Room Club faces extinction
The Colony
Room Club, London’s fabled drinking den beloved of artists from
Francis Bacon
to Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, is set to close in
Soho.
By Neil Tweedie, The
Daily Telegraph, Monday,
15 December 2008
THE
denizens of the Colony Room Club should have been gathering last
night for a joyous, or at least well lubricated, occasion. London’s
fabled drinking den celebrated its diamond jubilee yesterday – 60
years of uninterrupted, heroic carousing.
If one
place still captures the seedy glamour of post-war Soho it is the
Colony, hidden up a dark flight of stairs on Soho’s Dean Street. The
peep shows may have been overtaken by trendy, overpriced bars, but
the one-room dive remains, a bohemian reproach to modern,
money-driven conformity. That, at least, is how its membership –
once a roll call of the great and the bad in British art and which
still includes the likes of Emin and Hirst (who once served naked
behind the bar) – like to see it.
Vodkas
all around, then. Except that this week could be the last in the
club’s history. The Colony is facing extinction at the hands of the
man into whose care it was entrusted.
Such is
the uncertainty over the club’s future that it was unclear last
night if any celebration would be permitted. Its fate has for months
now been the subject of mistrust and rancour. Will the Colony
survive? And should it be missed?
A brief
history: it was in December 1948 that Muriel Belcher, a combative,
foul-mouthed but enterprising lesbian, opened the Soho establishment
as an intended meeting place for writers, painters and amusing hard
drinkers. The room – it is a small place – was initially decorated
in 'colonial' bamboo and leopard skin, in deference to Muriel’s
Jamaican squeeze, Carmel.
Thus
began six decades of bad behaviour, involving some of the best names
in the business. Dylan Thomas threw up there, Tom Driberg
propositioned there and Jeffrey Bernard advanced towards literal
leglessness in its smoky confines, decorated in industrial green
from the Fifties onwards.
Painters in particular liked it, including Bacon (a lifelong regular
who as a young man was paid by Muriel to bring in interesting
types), Freud and the doomed John Milton. Bacon described it as: "A
place to go where one feels free and easy."
Under
the stewardship of Belcher and that of her protégé Ian Board
(equally foul-mouthed and possessed of an enormous nose swollen and
purpled by brandy), the Colony grew into and remained an
institution. Its eclectic membership was bonded by a supposed
capacity for dazzling wit and a definite capacity for enormous
amounts of alcohol. Customers at its little bar wallowed in the
agreeable air of seediness, their imbibing overlooked by sometimes
fine works of art donated by the insolvent artists in settlement of
bar bills.
Muriel,
who liked to call her members "cunty", was mistress of the put-down,
while Board punished the unwary with sudden, violent eruptions of
invective. All forms of human frailty were indulged in the Colony,
except one: dullness.
Following Board’s death in 1994, the club was taken over by Michael Wojas, who had worked under Board. Things continued as before, but
the club inevitably lost some of its lustre as its greatest
characters drank themselves one by one to death.
The
problems started a few years ago when the club’s finances began to
fall into disrepair. Accounts were not properly prepared and tax and
rent went unpaid. The club is housed on the first floor of a
Georgian house and its lease was secure, so long as the rent was
paid. With a membership of 200-plus paying annual fees of £150 and
expensive bar prices, the club should have been able to pay the
£12,500 rent easily. But earlier this year, Wojas, citing financial
pressures, announced he would not be renewing the lease and the club
would have to close. He auctioned off some of the better artworks,
which he claimed were his by virtue of Board’s will. The sale raised
£40,000.
His
announcement sparked a rebellion among members who claimed he had no
right to close a club which belonged not to him but to them. They
succeeded in freezing the proceeds of the auction and securing a
High Court ruling in favour of a formal meeting. Last week, a new
governing committee was elected amid acrimonious exchanges between
the pro and anti Wojas factions. The new body believes it can
renegotiate the lease, secure a listing for the club from English
Heritage and ensure its future. Wojas, though, still holds the keys
to the bar.
Speaking yesterday, Michael Beckett, chairman of the committee,
said: "It still is a great place; all the members love it.
"It’s
the last bit of old Soho. I always meet interesting people when I go
in there. Everyone speaks to each other – it’s not some dull pub.
It’s homely – it’s a front room rather than a bar."
There
will be those who argue that, like empires, clubs rise and fall.
That, over time, what was once fresh and genuine becomes hackneyed
and artificial, the hollow replaying of bygone glories.
Critics
of the Colony would argue that nowadays there are rather more art
students than great artists among its members; more aspiring
bohemians and hell-raisers than real ones. But its members love it
and that should be reason enough for its survival.
What
would the formidable Muriel says about it all? There would be a few
colourful phrases in there, for certain.

Muriel Belcher with Francis Bacon
No
buyers for Bacon at major Paris art auction
AFP 11 December 2008
PARIS (AFP)
— Francis Bacon’s Two Figures failed to find a buyer when it
went under the hammer at the first major auction of contemporary art
in Paris since the global financial crisis erupted.
The
1961 oil-and-sand painting by the late Irish-born English
painter — depicting two naked, contorted bodies — had been valued at
five million to seven million euros (6.68 million to 9.36 million
dollars) by Sotheby’s.
Featured at several Bacon exhibitions, most recently at the Palazzo
Reale in Milan earlier this year, it was regarded by art experts as
the top lot at the two-day auction that ended Thursday.
Overall, the auction — with an estimated 12 million to 17 million
euros worth of art — raked in only 6.2 million euros, Sotheby’s
said, reflecting a softening in the global art market.
Bacon -
the subject of an ongoing major retrospective at the Tate Britain in
London — set a Paris record in 2007 when Sotheby’s sold another of
his works for 13.7 million euros.
True-Crime Temptresses, Bacon’s
Rubbish Fill Holiday Art Books
Review by Martin Gayford,
Bloomberg, Thursday, December 11, 2008
Dec. 11 (Bloomberg) – Ripped
photographs and newspaper clippings spattered with paint: This
isn’t what you expect in one of the year’s most intriguing art
books.
Francis Bacon: Incunabula by Martin Harrison and Rebecca
Daniels (Thames & Hudson, 224 pages, $75, 39.95 pounds) is
devoted to sweepings from the floor of the world’s most
expensive contemporary artist at auction.
Bacon
often remarked that he drew his inspiration from an atmosphere
of chaos. After his death in 1992, his London studio and its
contents were moved to Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where they
were sifted and studied like the detritus of an Egyptian tomb.
This book presents some of the results.
Though these photos,
clips and book illustrations were the raw material of Bacon’s
art, you can’t help wondering how accidental those markings
really are. Perhaps some of these altered images count as
artworks themselves.
Фотография мертвого
Фрэнсиса Бэкона стала частью коллажа
Британская фотохудожница Катерина Шекспир Лэйн для создания своего
триптиха
«Дань уважения Фрэнсису Бэкону» использовала фотографию
мертвого художника.
СЕГОДНЯ, Ukraine, 9
December 2008

Фрагмент
работыКатерины Шекспир Лэйн
В центре триптиха
помещена перевернутая фотография тела английского
художника-экспрессиониста Фрэнсиса Бэкона, сделанная в испанском
морге через несколько часов после его смерти. Тело лежит на каталке,
помещенное в прозрачный пластиковый пакет. Это изображение обрамляют
различные фотографии внутренностей.
На двух оставшихся
частях триптиха помещен Сальвадор Дали, стоящий у распятия. При этом
изображение центральной части вызывает ассоциации с известной
картиной Дали «Христос святого Хуана де ля Круус».
Свой коллаж
Катерины Лэйн, лично знавшая Бэкона, объясняет отношением самого
художника к смерти. По ее утверждению, художник заявлял: «Все мы
потенциальные трупы. Когда я захожу к мяснику, мне всегда
удивительно представить на прилавке себя, а не животных».
По одному из
свидетельств, Фрэнсис Бэкон также говорил о желании, чтобы его тело
после смерти положили в пластиковый пакет и выбросили в придорожную
канаву.
Триптих будет
экспонироваться в одном из лондонских баров в Сохо.
Британский художник
Фрэнсис Бэкон умер в Мадриде в 1992 году от сердечного приступа.
The first dark image
of Bacon’s death
NICK MATHIASON &
VANESSA THORPE | CULTURE | THE OBSERVER | SUNDAY DECEMBER 7 2008

A detail from
Catherine Shakespeare Lane’s Francis Bacon Homage Triptych work.
It was a suitably
macabre request from one of Britain’s greatest and darkest
20th-century painters. 'When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and
throw me in the gutter,' Francis Bacon told the barman at the
infamous Soho drinking club, the Colony Room Club.
Sixteen years after
the colourful artist’s death, one of Bacon’s circle of friends has
gone a long way to try to make his wish come true. A photograph
taken in a Spanish morgue hours after his death and never seen
before in public reveals that the artist had been placed in a
transparent body bag. The shocking image now forms the centrepiece
of a new work of art created by Bacon’s friend, the photographer
Catherine Shakespeare Lane.
The photograph is
mounted on a background of offal and framed by two images of
Salvador Dalí standing by a crucifix. The bleakly humorous tribute
to Bacon and to the Spanish surrealist Dalí will go on display for
the first time this week at the famous London watering hole in
London’s Dean Street, which is under threat of closing down.
Lane believes her
triptych is an appropriate homage to her late friend. Bacon, she
points out, once famously said: '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.'
A lifetime honorary
member of the club, Lane hopes the hanging of the image will serve
as a fitting farewell to both the great painter and to a venue
which, since the Sixties, has been the haunt of many of the leading
creative names in the country, including Lucien Freud, Dylan Thomas,
the actors Peter O’Toole and John Hurt and the writer Jeffrey
Barnard.
'I’m very sad that
if the club closes at the end of the month,' said Lane. 'I sincerely
hope it does not die and can survive.'
A last minute High
Court order obtained by the so-called Shadow Committee of club
members preventing its closure before an annual general meeting
could yet save the day.
In recent years
controversial leading artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and
Sarah Lucas and Sam Taylor Wood have all been habitues of the club,
with the model Kate Moss even tending the bar one evening. The
singer Lisa Stansfield and the film distributor Hamish McAlpine are
also regulars and have both tried to save the club by paying off
some of its debts.
Lane defends the
treatment of Bacon’s dead body as in keeping with the way that the
artist saw the world. 'People always think of Francis as gloomy and
tortured because that is what they see in his work,' said Lane. 'But
he got all that out in his painting and when he was out with us it
was not like that. He was out to play.'

No bed for Francis Bacon
Discipline
and chaos, suffering and human meat, as
seen in the works of an
unusually articulate artist
ALAN JENKINS
|
THE TIMES LITERARY
SUPPLEMENT
|
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2008
When Francis Bacon said “The only really interesting thing is what
happens between two people in a room”, he did not mean what happens
between an artist and his model – or if so, only indirectly. Bacon’s
portraits of himself, his friends and (male) lovers are among the
most enthusiastically acclaimed of all his pictures, but they were
done almost without exception from photographs and memory, not from
life. From a handful of paintings, early and late, it is clear that
for Bacon some of the most interesting things happened before,
during or after copulation – “or buggery, however you want to put
it”, as he himself put it in the late 1960s, with an insouciance
that could have been dangerous at any time before then.
Yet, as John Russell pointed out nearly thirty years ago, “perhaps
the most persistent of Bacon’s preoccupations is the problem of what
a man is to do when he is alone in a room”, and with only a very few
exceptions, his pictures until the later 1960s more often than not
featured single figures: human males, animals, especially apes,
heads or heads-and-shoulders, isolated in indeterminate spaces,
framed or confined in a kind of geometric canopy or glass box, seen
through strips of (shower?) curtain, paint cascading down the
interiors or, in the few landscapes, deft strokes rendering wild
grasses with Oriental precision. True, it is not always clear from
its posture and mass whether the pictured form is human or ape; nor
if in fact there is more than one of them pictured. Bacon would
sometimes, to achieve the desired “thickness”, model his single
figure on a sequence of photographs from Eadweard Muybridge’s The
Human Body in Motion that showed two men wrestling – though at a
glance, they could be having sex. (“I very often think of people’s
bodies that I’ve known, the contours of those bodies that have
particularly affected me, but then they’re grafted on to Muybridge
bodies”, Bacon explained.) Then, once he had begun to show two or
more people, the coupling – as in those earlier exceptions – becomes
explicit.
And, in his later vision, coupling is murder. In panel after panel
of the large-scale triptychs which were Bacon’s preferred format
from the 1960s on, the human carcass – mangled, butchered and
bloodied, studded with entry- and exit-wounds, spilling muscle
tissue and entrails, or intact but warped into terrible knots of
tension, straining in climax or death agony – is pinioned on carpets
or sprawled on stained mattress-ticking, like a police photograph at
the scene of a sex crime. And indeed other panels actually show
spectators or recorders – one holds a cinecamera – of the main
event, be it coupling or crucifixion, which has left its protagonist
eviscerated.
Bacon disavowed any moral or philosophical intention behind these
images of human suffering and detachment, and still more
emphatically denied trying to make a historical point –
notwithstanding his brief flirtation with the idea of publishing a
pictorial “History of Europe in [his] lifetime” (he was born in
1909). One of the most articulate of painters, with a strong sense
both for drama and self-presentation, from the moment he became a
succès de scandale Bacon was a tireless subject of interviews (with
Russell and David Sylvester, preeminently): occasions he seized to
rehearse a repertoire of anecdotes and apophthegms, some haughty and
whimsical, some purposefully discomfiting in their frankness, but
almost all prompted by the contradictory urges to elevate his
calling to a higher mystery or deflate its pretensions with a rude
reminder of fleshly limitation.
In
this he was both disingenuous and provocative, refusing, for
example, to allow in his own crucifixions the significance granted
to the image by the entire Western tradition – it was an example of
human behaviour, no more and no less. Behaviour, furthermore, that
aroused in Bacon a sense of his own wounded or tortured nature: a
crucifixion, he said, was almost a self-portrait. Almost from the
beginning – in Painting, 1946, now too fragile to have made
the trip from MoMA to the current exhibition at Tate Britain – the
painter evinced a fascination with sides of meat, a motif that
recurs in his later crucifixions and couplings. When asked about its
preponderance in his imagination he was ready with a dual response.
“Every time I go into a butcher’s”, he said, “I’m surprised that
it’s not me hanging there”; yet the meat was simultaneously a purely
aesthetic stimulus, its colours “absolutely beautiful”. Questioned
about his more Grand Guignol scenes he would shrug, affect complete
ignorance of their import, personal or otherwise, and insist on his
overriding desire to make “beautiful paintings”.
From the very small number of canvases that survived Bacon’s
apprentice years it is far from obvious that this was his ambition
when he started (if it was, his idea of beauty was as convulsive as
any Surrealist’s). The big, bold canvases in the grand manner of his
gilded middle age, exposing lavish, ritualistic cruelties, are
indeed very beautiful, and only a handful of pictures on show here,
from the later 1950s, seem unsure in technique or faltering in
composition. In the room titled “Crucifixion” (the Tate’s hang is a
compromise between a chronological and a thematic arrangement), the
body, whatever else it is being subjected to, mostly retains
recognizable limbs and a torso. Not so in the first room, “Animal”,
where a distended eye, mouth, teeth and phallic appendages dominate:
to these organs of appetite and aggression, in some of Bacon’s early
works, the human and the nightmarishly non-human alike are reduced.
Assisted by Bacon himself, commentators have established an
impeccably modern pedigree for these seemingly sui generis images:
in Picasso’s “biomorphic” beach scenes, 1930s photojournalism and
the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Luis Buñuel. (Lessons in form and
handling were learnt from Graham Sutherland and the Australian Roy
de Maistre, too, though Bacon was less prompt to acknowledge them in
later years.) In her catalogue essay Victoria Walsh cites
Foundations of Modern Art by Amédée Ozenfant (1931) as having
perhaps fertilized the insatiably curious young painter’s
imagination in ways that would lie dormant for years: “The search
for intensity dominates the whole of modern painting. There can be
no intensity without simplification, and to some degree, no
intensity without distortion . . . of what is seen naturally”.
In
1931, Bacon was twenty-two, had made his way as, more or less, a
rent boy in Weimar Berlin, had learnt French living in Chantilly and
was working in London as an interior decorator and designer of
Bauhaus-derived furniture for clients who included the editor of
Vogue and the novelist Patrick White. But almost as soon as he began
to paint in earnest (in oil on canvas, from which he rarely deviated
for forty-odd years), the beauty was there as well, and was there
till the end, in paintings that proclaim him one of the great
colourists of the last century: from the startling orange ground
against which the first three Studies for Figures at the Base of
a Crucifixion (1944) writhe and shriek, to the sumptuous deep
reds of its grander, more imposing and artistically pointless second
version (1988). Orange flames out at us again from the Figure
Studies, 1945–6, while Figure Study II is the work in
which another of Bacon’s motifs – or obsessions – unequivocally
makes an entrance: the gaping mouth, open in a scream of terror, a
snarl of hatred or a howl of impotent rage. Indelibly fixed in
Bacon’s imaginary by Picture Post shots of Goebbels and Mussolini
haranguing the crowds, Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents and
the nurse’s silent scream in The Battleship Potemkin, in Figure
Study II, where it is appended to a crouched or kneeling
half-clothed form, the mouth powerfully subverts those reliable
signifiers of bourgeois respectability, umbrella, herringbone tweed
and potted plants.
In
the late 1940s (with a series of Heads) and the early 50s (Study
for Nude, 1951; Study of a Figure in a Landscape and Study
for Crouching Nude, both 1952) Bacon’s pictures posit an
extra-historical continuity between the human at its noblest, as in
Michelangelo’s drawings and sculpture, and the simian – almost to
the point of conflating them. Head VI (1949), though, returns
us, whatever Bacon thought or said, to the human in historical time,
combining the motifs of toothed, gaping mouth and wildly staring eye
with the vestments of a little brief authority: the highest
authority on earth, indeed, for many, though in Bacon the vestments
are imperial purple rather than rich pontifical red, as in his
master-image, the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez.
Bacon’s remarkable travesty inaugurated a new series of studies
“after” the great original, though his fixation was inspired, in
fact, by a reproduction. (Even when he visited Rome, Bacon avoided
seeing the Velázquez in the Doria Pamphilj, a diffidence in which
embarrassment perhaps played a part. Much later he dismissed most of
his repeated assaults on it as “silly”, and it is hard to disagree,
despite or because of the presence in the current Tate show of two
of his strongest and least familiar Popes, as well as Head
VI: one, once thought lost, from 1950, the other from 1965 –
this last looking as if he has been shot in the head at close range,
or as if the rage or terror that animated his predecessors had
finally exploded his face from within.)
That so many of Bacon’s motifs derived, in complex, vigilant ways
from photography and film is entirely consistent with his acute
awareness that these new art forms had rendered representation in
painting obsolete, and with his horror of mere “illustration”. This
was not to say that painting should not deal in “fact”: just that
fact comprehended more than what is “seen naturally”. “One wants a
thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply
suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than
simple illustration of the object”, as Bacon put it to David
Sylvester. He was also one of the most literary of painters, an
admirer of Ulysses, an avid reader of poetry and drama who saw that
the Oresteia and T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes were blood
relations, who liked to quote lines from both yet who repeatedly and
sometimes fiercely repudiated attempts to read “a story” into his
own work.
But he insisted too much. At one level, his habit of working in
triptychs, and at a deeper one the suggestiveness he often in fact
achieved, not just in triptychs but in single paintings, militates
against that very insistence. It is hard to look at such works as
the Crucifixions of 1962 and 65, Lying Figure (1969), Triptych,
Studies from the Human Body (1970) or Triptych March 1974 without
a sense of prelude, climax and aftermath – though not necessarily in
that order. Some such adumbrated narrative, an intimate human drama
about to be embarked on, concluded or aborted also haunts the
restrained and very beautiful portrait studies of a suited Man in
Blue, his face and hands bright-lit on a deep blue ground, that
are at once the most “readable” of all Bacon’s male figures, and the
most ambiguous.
What is common to all these images, early, late and middle, is the
overwhelming presence or threat (or promise) of violence. Bacon’s
obsession with the figure drove him repeatedly to disfigure it – to
all but dismantle the heads and bodies he painted on his canvases,
and destroy the canvases themselves, when he judged them to be
failures. Working from photographs, so the artist said, enabled him
to do the necessary violence to his subjects – the better to
“distort them into appearance”; and that could not happen if the
subject was actually present. (This showed an untypical délicatesse.
Bacon’s definition of friendship was two people “pulling each other
apart”, and in sex his pursuit of the roughest of rough trade
bordered on the suicidal.) But he also spoke repeatedly of his
desire to make paintings that would “return [the viewer] more
violently to life”, by which he meant, as I understand it, shock
that viewer out of habitual or self-protective ignorance and into
awareness of his own physical reality. “An attempt to bring the
figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and
poignantly” was how he described his own work. “There is an area of
the nervous system”, Bacon believed, “to which the texture of [oil]
paint communicates more violently than anything else.”
Paintings (some paintings anyway) could mysteriously “unlock the
valves of sensation” or of “intuition and perception about the human
situation”; could, by seemingly subliminal means, evoke a memory
trace of raw, unmediated existence. Somewhere behind this lay
Baudelaire and Proust, with their different ideas of involuntary
memory. But for Bacon (who also liked to cite Paul Valéry: “modern
man wants the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance”), to
unlock the valves of his own subconscious was to bring up onto the
canvas and “onto the [viewer’s] nervous system” an apprehension of
life or “being-aliveness” as violent, primordial struggle, redeemed
only by an instinctive grace, or a stroke of luck.
For Bacon, a chronic asthmatic, the struggle began early: it was the
struggle for breath itself. The second son of a bad-tempered
military man-turned-horse breeder and the heiress to a Sheffield
steel fortune, he was brought up in Ireland and England in a
succession of big houses where the omnipresence of dogs and horses
was a perpetual challenge to his well-documented will to live. Bacon
senior made no secret of his disappointment in his sickly, sensitive
son, whose party piece was to appear at family gatherings in full
drag. Michael Peppiatt is one among many writers on Bacon to make
the connection, in his absorbing biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy
of an enigma (1995, now revised, updated and reissued by
Constable in paperback), between the father’s screaming rages, the
child’s gasping for air and the importance of the gaping mouth in
the work of the mature artist. The killings and house-burnings of
the Irish uprising and Civil War (“Violence upon the roads; violence
of horses”, in Yeats’s words) formed the backdrop to Bacon’s
childhood, further enlivened by the attentions of the grooms who
were encouraged to take horsewhips to the young master to punish him
for the attentions he was over-fond of paying them.
Three of his four siblings died premature deaths, but Francis would
enjoy long life, vigorous appetites and legendary resilience,
physical and psychological. Ejected from the family at sixteen, he
soon discovered the resourcefulness and the hunger for risk that
would sustain him both as a homosexual adventurer and a painter,
along with his preferred modus vivendi: to lurch between opulence
and squalor, between a punishing creative routine and an equally
punitive, if delighted (and delightful), dissipation. In later life
the prices commanded by his paintings made him rich, but he had
established his careless mastery over money much earlier, in the
casinos of Berlin and Monte Carlo. The centrality to both gambling
and painting of chance, risk, instinct – in painting Bacon subsumed
these under what he called “accident”, the way one mark might
suggest another, or perhaps an entirely new image, without the
apparent intervention of the will or conscious direction – made them
more than analogous: they were two sides of the same life force, the
same compulsion to live at the maximum pitch of intensity, for the
same high stakes and correspondingly high rewards.
In
some sense all Bacon’s paintings represent another throw of the
dice, a record not of how he “saw the world” but of the only way he,
human meat and a carcass-in-waiting as he was, could yet feel
himself to be truly alive. Peppiatt, Sylvester and other witnesses
have made clear that this life-and-death struggle issued as often as
not in despair and self-disgust; but of course for the artist there
was no choice. The paradox – and it strikes with greater force in
the final two large rooms of the Tate exhibition, showing works from
the last fifteen years of Bacon’s very productive life – is that
intensity itself could become a habit; that so many of these later
works look as mannered and fussy, in their beautiful, wearyingly
nasty way, as anything from the Academic schools of the nineteenth
century, in theirs.
The great exceptions are the paintings shown here in a room titled
“Memorial”. Bacon’s companion, George Dyer, committed suicide in
their hotel room on the eve of the artist’s retrospective at the
Grand Palais in Paris in 1971; three extraordinary triptychs from
1971–3 recall Dyer’s living presence, and imagine his last hours,
with monumental and moving factuality. Bacon often remarked on the
“awfulness” of his personal life – another of his lovers, Peter
Lacey, had steadily drunk himself to death in the 1950s – and while
no one would wish he had known more unhappiness of this kind, we can
regret that he did not always achieve, or desire, the direct appeal
to human emotion these pictures make, while surrendering nothing of
painterly value: they have a stunning aura in which grandeur,
indignity and grief are all present, and inseparable.
As
with Eliot in poetry, Bacon’s art sinks deep roots into the whole
psycho-physical life and attempts a reinvention of tradition (“the
figurative thing”), rather than the Freud-sponsored violation of the
natural order to which Surrealism aspired. To that extent, the
confusion of the Times reviewer, faced with Bacon’s very first solo
show in 1934, was understandable: “The difficulty . . . is to know
how far his paintings and drawings . . . may be regarded as artistic
expression and how far as the mere unloading on canvas and paper of
what used to be called the subconscious mind”. (Cited in “Bacon and
his Critics”, by Gary Tinterow, in the Tate catalogue.) Mere! We
like to think we have come a long way since then, but Bacon and the
best of his commentators are part of the long way we have come. The
catalogue contains a useful chronology, but none of its seven
essayists adds substantially to what has already been written by
Russell, Lawrence Gowing, Michel Leiris and Gilles Deleuze. Michael
Peppiatt’s new book, Francis Bacon: Studies for a portrait,
contains interviews with and recollections of the artist from the
1960s almost until his death: that is, either the raw materials of
Peppiatt’s biography or bits of the biography distilled into essays
and articles. For completists only, it does include the full,
fascinating text of Bacon’s answers when he was interviewed for the
first time by his future biographer, in 1963, before celebrity began
to overtake some of his responses.
Much recent scholarly interest in Bacon has focused on the
“drawings” controversy: whether the many preparatory sketches and
studies found in the artist’s studio and elsewhere after his death –
studies which, while he was alive, he insisted he never produced –
could be genuine. (It seems pretty obvious that some are, and some
aren’t.) A room at the Tate (“Archive”) is devoted to some
genuine-looking sketches, over-painted photographs and “doctored”
images, while Francis Bacon: Incunabula by Martin Harrison
and Rebecca Daniels is a spellbinding pictorial record of the most
significant of Bacon’s visual sources. The entire fantastic compost
of rags, paints, brushes, magazines, torn-out pages and tattered
reproductions laid down over decades in Bacon’s South Kensington
mews has been reconstructed entire at the Dublin City Gallery, the
Hugh Lane. While the artist’s living space was almost monastic in
its austerity, his workroom was a materialization of the rich,
sedimented strangeness of his inner world. To him, both discipline
and chaos seem to have been indispensable.
FRANCIS BACON
(Tate Britain, until January 4, 2009)
Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, editors
FRANCIS BACON
288pp. Tate Publishing. £24.99.
978 1 85437 738 8
Michael Peppiatt
FRANCIS BACON
Studies for a portrait
272pp. Yale University Press. £18.99 (US $35).
978 0 300 14255 6
Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels
FRANCIS BACON
Incunabula
256pp. Thames and Hudson. £39.95 (US $75).
978 0 500 09343 3
Alan Jenkins is Deputy Editor of the TLS. Drunken Boats, his
translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre, was published
last year.
Bacon’s theatre of the absurd
On Francis Bacon at the Tate
Britain, London.
By David Yezzi, The New Criterion,
December 2008
High-priced
meat-under-glass has been a staple of British art for the better
part of a century, long before Damien Hirst’s fashionable sharks
and calves appeared on the scene. Witness the current career
retrospective of paintings by Francis Bacon (surely the
ultimate nom de charcuterie), timed in accordance with the
artist’s centenary in 2009. [1] Bacon’s take on the human
condition was simple: “We are meat,” he liked to say. His
paintings of sixty years, from Crucifixion (1933)
to Triptych (1991) in the Tate show, rarely stray off message,
recapitulating his dark matter in image after traumatic image.
(From the mid-1960s on, Bacon displayed most of his sanguinary
subjects behind glass, placed in gilded frames.) It is worth
noting that the exhibition originates at Tate Britain, not at
Tate Modern, as I initially assumed—a far better venue for
staking Bacon’s claim as the greatest British painter since
Turner (and, in the eyes of many, as one Tate press release has
it, Britain’s greatest painter period!). But Bacon’s ubiquity
and collectability, abetted by his famously theatrical subjects
and bravura technique, mainly confirm his star status, not his
mastery.
Certainly, anyone possessed of a glancing acquaintance with
modern art knows what a Bacon looks like: arrays of distended
viscera, steaming sides of beef, screaming Popes in
“space-frames,” crucifixions, menacing dogs, swirled faces,
contorted nudes decomposing on divans, Muybridge-esque figures
recast in blurs of paint. Brutal, bloody stuff. It’s also
attention-grabbing stuff, both pictorially and commercially.
Even those who couldn’t give a fig for art will have noticed
Bacon’s recent record-breaking outing in the
marketplace: Triptych (1976) sold in May at Sotheby’s for over
$86 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a
contemporary art work. Last month, Study for
Self-Portrait (1964), estimated at $40 million, sat on the block
at Christie’s without a bid, but one assumes this was due more
to our economy’s recent resemblance to a Bacon painting than to
any decline in Bacon’s blue-chip stock.
Only Bacon’s friend Lucian Freud, among
the London School painters, comes close to rivaling his
celebrity and mystique. Bacon worried that his biography would
over-weight viewers’ interpretations of his work, and not
without reason; his was a colorful life tinged with tragedy. One
needn’t scratch the surface very deeply before biographical
details emerge, particularly in the portraits and late
paintings. Bacon’s reputed drinking, gambling, and masochism (he
fled one severe beating clothed only in fishnet stockings)
fueled his image as a peintre maudit. His greatest subject was
ultimately Francis Bacon.
A darling
of the bohemian intelligentsia, Bacon spent his bad-boy early
years in London commuting “between the gutter and the Ritz” (as
he put it): dodging rents, committing petty crimes, and living
off of patrons and friends. He took pride in the fact that he
never received formal training as a painter. Born in Ireland to
English parents, he fled a violent homelife in which his
horse-trainer father oversaw regular whippings of his son by the
grooms. In 1927, Bacon traveled to Germany with Cecil
Harcourt-Smith, a family friend (with whom he wound up in bed).
He found Berlin in the Twenties much as Auden described it at
that time—“a bugger’s daydream.” It was seeing Picasso’s work in
Paris, where he traveled after Berlin, that set him on the road
to becoming a painter.
Bacon’s earliest painting in the Tate exhibition is his spindly,
Picasso-inflected Crucifixion (1933). Crucifixions became a
signature motif for the artist. Among his most well-known images
are Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion (1944), his first major triptych,
and Painting (1946), a splayed cow carcass and bloody-mouthed
figure arranged as an abattoir-altarpiece, which Alfred Barr
acquired for the Museum of Modern Art. Bacon followed these with
a series of Popes, beginning with Head VI (1949)
and culminating in the streaked and gilded bombast of Study
after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953).
The Popes were one of a number of motifs Bacon would come back
to later in his career with diminishing returns. (Bacon was
extremely self-critical and destroyed a great deal of work, but
by the time he came to repent the Popes presumably it was too
late to get his hands on them.)
Bacon often equivocated when asked
questions about his influences and the significance of his work,
but certain things were repeated often enough to be believed: 1)
that he was an Nietzschean atheist, 2) that Picasso had meant a
great deal to him, 3) that he intended no religious meaning with
his crosses and Popes, and 4) that his greatest guiding
principle as a painter was the Surrealist notion of chance.
According to Michael Peppiatt in his recently updated biography,
[2] what Bacon most wanted was to “excite” himself, to stir
emotion ruthlessly, to “remove veils” from experience, to
provide direct access to the valves of feeling. His means:
bloody mouths, bones, flesh, screaming heads. Peppiatt once
claimed, in the September 1984 issue of Connoisseur, that “even
his detractors would agree that there is nothing of the easy
chair about the work of Francis Bacon. Far from ease, it offers
extreme disquiet.” I can’t say that I’m convinced. A kind of
bathos dogs Bacon’s work, arising from the fact that his
disquiet is, so to speak, always in an “easy chair,” swathed in
gorgeous magenta and crimson and served up with a Sargent-like
facility of the brush.
Bacon’s seductive paint handling is the
first thing that viewers notice after the carnage. His methods
of applying paint were as idiosyncratic as they were versatile.
Hugh Davies and Sally Yard describe his
everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, in which his materials
ranged from
Brillo pads to cashmere sweaters, as
brushes are joined by rags, cotton wool, sponges, scrub brushes,
garbage-can lids, paint-tube caps, the artist’s hands, and
whatever else he can find in the studio for the application and
shaping of painterly passages… . Thick impasto coexists with
thinned washes of pigment and raw canvas, sand and dust are
occasionally used to give texture to the paint. A few works of
the 1980s are veiled in the haze produced by applying paint with
an aerosol spray.
Reviewing Bacon’s show at the Malborough-Gerson gallery in 1968,
Hilton Kramer found him “one of the most dazzling pictorial
technicians on the current scene.” Why, then, he asks, does the
work “strike me as being clever rather than profound—brilliant
rather than authentic?” Kramer ends with a recognition of
“exactly how safe an artist Mr. Bacon really is.”
Safe and also stagey. Bacon’s
characteristic space is theatrical, suggesting operating
theaters, thrust stages, wrestling rings, circus rings, bull
rings, throne rooms, closets, altars—all playing areas in
Bacon’s theater of the absurd. Beckett is a name that tends to
come up when considering Bacon’s vision, but it’s closer to
Genet (whose plays he recommended to friends). Think of the
bishop in Le Balcon, who is in fact a man in costume acting out
a ritualistic sexual fantasy in a brothel that the madame calls
a “house of illusions.” In the critic Martin Esslin’s
description, absurdist theater portrays “a world that functions
mysteriously outside our conscious control… . It no longer has
religious or historical purpose; it has ceased to make sense.”
This is Bacon’s world, in which the artist rejects both
narrative and didactic purpose and attempts to confront, in
Esslin’s phrase, “the spectator with the harsh facts of a cruel
world and his own isolation.”
This
sense of chance and of confrontation is a key element of Bacon’s
most touted images, such as Painting (1946), with its absurdist
illogic and raw imagery. Yet the “safety” that Kramer perceived
in the late Sixties already exists here in the picture’s pink
and mauve symmetrical background. Bacon’s paint handling is so
delicious, it’s like a mountain of crème Chantilly—far from
horrified by it, you want to eat it with a spoon. Bacon is
continually betrayed by his beginnings as an interior designer,
no where more so in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion. As Peppiatt notes of the background colour
of Studies, “It is worth recalling that cadmium orange, which
had become the fashionable colour in avant-garde interior design
in the 1930s, remained Bacon’s favourite colour.” Bacon’s
fashion colours and mod furniture come off as frivolously
elegant.
Frivolity
is, of course, the last thing most people associate with Bacon’s
work. As Bacon’s Soho crony and (unauthorized) biographer Daniel
Farson writes: “To appreciate Bacon’s work, it helps to see him
as a deeply moral artist.” This strikes me as exactly what Bacon
is not, so much so that I wonder if Farson could really believe
it himself. Elsewhere he says that Bacon repeatedly told him
that he believed in “nothing.” John Richardson, the biographer
of Picasso, repeats the error: “By holding a mirror up to our
degenerate times Bacon proves himself to be one of the most
moral artists of the day. Far from titillating us, he castigates
us.” But Bacon does no such thing. Firstly, he is not concerned
with our “times” in any historical sense, except in so far as he
personally embodies them. For Bacon, images from news
photographs and films—the screaming nurse on the Odessa steps
in Potemkin or a Nazi armband, for example—have little to say
about “our degenerate times” and volumes to say about Bacon’s
roiling inner life. When a television commentator suggested that
Bacon’s work was a condemnation of man’s inhumanity to man,
Bacon retorted: “That’s the last thing I think of.”
It is
not Bacon’s stark subject matter that disqualifies him as a
“moral artist”; it is his aestheticization of the horror
depicted. As the critic Yvor Winters explains, the moral artist
does not shy from exploring the extremes of human experience,
but he portrays evil as evil and makes us know it as evil. This
is not the case with Bacon, either in his professed world view
or in his practice:
In all the motor accidents I’ve seen,
people strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is
the strange beauty—the vision of it, before you think of trying
to do anything… .
There’s no one more unnatural than myself,
and, after all, I’ve worked on myself to be as unnatural as I
can. I can’t really talk about painting because I only work for
myself and just by chance it happens that for some reason I’ve
been lucky enough to be able to live by something that obsesses
me, but I haven’t got any morals to preach… . I just work as
closely to my nerves as I can.
One leaves the Bacon show at the Tate
feeling beaten up by images of the dying George Dyer (Bacon’s
tragic lover) vomiting into a sink, the gaping wounds, the
twisted flesh. Bacon sought to transmit emotion as immediately
as possible, which in a sense he did, but it’s not emotion he
transmits so much as sensation. Shock lends Bacon’s work its
edge, but it diminishes it as well. The paintings register like
a trauma on the spinal column, without ever reaching the more
complex centers of the brain. Later in Bacon’s career, when
shock gave way to chic, the game was lost. Second Version of
Triptych 1944, his reworking of Three Studies for Figures at the
Base of a Crucifixion, replaces the brushy energy of the earlier
work with a spray-painted softness that makes Bacon’s phallic
Furies look like tchotchkas in a Madison Avenue boutique.
His Innocent X of
1965 replaces the pontiff’s rictus with the taffy-pull features
of the later portraits. Bacon became convinced that he could
have done the Popes better than he had, but this is no proof.
Nor is the reworking of Painting from the 1960s (not included in
the Tate show), which dresses the macabre scene up with a sunny
yellow background and what look like paper garlands—a travesty
of Gauguin’s Yellow Christ (1889). Bacon detested illustration,
but in the end he failed to escape it, and the portraits moved
him even further in this direction.
The Peppiatt book contains a
revealing quotation: “When I was young, I needed extreme subject
matter for my paintings… . Then as I grew older I began to find
my subject matter in my own life. During the 1960s the Furies,
the dictators and screaming Popes, the anonymous figures trapped
in darkened rooms gave way to portraits of living identified
beings.” And here is the disconnect: Bacon reviled abstraction
because for him it was all design, empty aesthetics. Bacon
relied on his figures to ground his work in reality, to lend his
paintings the force and horror of the real world. But the
triptychs and portraits of the Sixties and later marinate in the
very aesthetic stew he had hoped to avoid. Bacon’s contortions
of angst become so pretty, so tasteful. The large squares of
pink and orange (orange is the new pink, or is it the other way
around?), the natty black suits, the distinctive chaises and
tables make the lot seem very “safe” indeed.
The selection of works for the exhibition is
judicious, suggesting more variety in the work than is really
there. After the monotony of the Bacon treatment—floating
central figures against disconnected flat colors—sets in, the
decline is steady: the final paintings are his least
interesting. As David Sylvester prophesied in 1955, “many of the
things that make [Bacon] exciting today may render him laughable
for future generations.” The colored arrows pointing to
newspapers and wounds and bodies on toilets; the globs of thrown
white paint; the increased staginess—all seem like precious,
empty gestures. The Tate retrospective carefully elucidates
Bacon’s photographic sources; it includes BBC footage
of Bacon in conversation with David Sylvester that highlights
his considerable charm, but the work itself seems no different
that it did at the MOMA retrospective
in 1990—except that it has grown a little more tired with the
passage of time.
Bacon’s paintings, ostensibly
transmitting high-pitched emotion, are cut off from emotion. He
never flinched from working on a grand scale, from putting his
feet up against the masters—Grünewald, Titian, Vélazquez—but in
the end his almost mechanical serialism and cool shocks bring
him closer to Warhol, whose films Bacon admired even as he
turned his nose up at the paintings. Rather than being the
greatest British painter since Turner, Bacon may better be seen
as the great precursor to the soullessness of Damien Hirst,
whose shark is currently on view at the Met. When Francis
Bacon arrives in New York next summer, viewers will have a
chance to consider the two artists under one roof.
Notes
1. Francis
Bacon opened at Tate Britain, London, on September 11, 2008 and
remains on view through January 4, 2009. The exhibition will travel
to the Museo National del Prado, Madrid (February 3–April 19, 2009)
and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (May 18–August 19,
2009). A catalogue edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, with
essays by Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield, Gary
Tinterow, and Victoria Walsh, has been printed by Tate Publishing
(288 pages, £24.99 paper).
2. Francis
Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma,
by Michael Peppiatt; Constable, 456 pages, £12.99 paper.
David Yezzi is the Executive Editor of The
New Criterion.
Leading 20th
Century Artists Present at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Sale in Paris
Art Daily, Tuesday,
December 2, 2008
PARIS. – Sotheby’s two-session
sale of contemporary art, to be held in Paris on December 10/11, has
an overall estimate of €12-17 million and features 142 important
works by leading 20th century artists. Several represent landmarks
in their artists’ careers or number among the handful of works by
the artist still in private hands.
The top lot at the evening sale is expected to be Francis Bacon’s Two
Figures (1961), featuring two sturdy, naked figures shown
contorted and convulsed, their faces wracked in pain (lot 11,
estimate €5,000,000-7,000,000). This sort of subject recurred in
Bacon’s work for many years, but this painting is particularly
important as it marks a watershed in his figurative approach. By
placing the Two Figures in an abstract setting, Bacon
underlines both their solitude and captive condition – they are
imprisoned, as it were, within a dull field of faded pink and dirty
grey, where space and time are frozen.
Sotheby’s Paris has now offered major works by Francis Bacon on
three occasions, including Seated Woman (a portrait of Muriel
Belcher), which holds the record price for contemporary art in
France at €13.7m.
Sotheby’s
Contemporary Art
Sale: PF8020 | Location: Paris
Auction Dates: Session 1: Wed, 10
Dec 08 7:00 PM
Lot 11 Francis Bacon
1909-1992 TWO
FIGURES
5,000,000—7,000,000 EUR: Unsold
.jpg)
Two
Figures 1961 Francis Bacon
MEASUREMENTS
198 x
142 cm; 77 7/8 x 55 7/8 in.
DESCRIPTION
huile et
sable sur toile
Exécuté
en 1961.
Cette
oeuvre sera incluse dans le Catalogue Raisonné de l’oeuvre de
Francis Bacon actuellement en préparation par Martin Harrison.
PROVENANCE
Marlborough Fine Art, Londres
McCrory Corporation, New York
McKee Gallery, New York
Edward R. Broida, Los Angeles
EXHIBITED
Londres,
Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1962, illustré no.87
Mannheim, Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon, 1962, illustré no.76
Turin, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, 1962, illustré,
no.81
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Francis Bacon, 1962, no.75
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon, 1963, illustré, no. 66
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum et exposition itinérante à
Chicago, Art Institute, Francis Bacon, 1963-1964, illustré pp. 29 et
53, no. 53
Orlando, Museum of Art, The Edward R. Broida Collection: A Selection
of Works, 1998, illustré p. 34
Milan, Palazzo Reale, Bacon, 2008, no. 30, illustré p. 122
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES
Stephen
Spender, Quandrum XI, décembre 1961, illustré p. 53
John Rothenstein, Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, édition Thames and
Hudson Londres, 1964, no. 184, illustré p. 137
CATALOGUE NOTE
oil and
sand on canvas. Executed in 1961.
« ...
De ma prison, je vois tout. Dans ma cabine en verre isolant, on
m’observe. Seuls mes pieds solubles s’échappent sur les soupiraux de
l’inconnu, chiens perdus des rois déchus. Je chante, je hurle, je
ricane, j’insulte, je sanglote. Alors explosion. Il tombe des
flocons de chair qui s’accumulent et se transforment en paysages, en
sphinx. De la terre, de mon corps, en fouillant, j’extrais les
vestiges de leurs secrets. Les fantômes n’ont pas d’âge ; sous leurs
travestis, ils sont humains. ... ».
Roland Penrose (in Francis Bacon, galerie Rive Droite, Paris, 1957)
« Bacon,
à Paris, devrait faire l’effet d’une bombe. ».
(Cimaise, Michel Ragon, janvier 1963, compte rendu de la
rétrospective Bacon à la Tate Gallery à Londres ouverte en mai 1962
dans laquelle Two Figures était exposée)
« Bacon,
à Paris, devrait faire l’effet d’une bombe. ».
En écrivant ces lignes, extraites de la revue d’art française Cimaise parue
au mois de janvier 1963, Michel Ragon rapporte l’actualité
artistique anglaise. Il évoque en particulier l’événement survenu au
mois de mai 1962, à la Tate Gallery à Londres. La respectable
institution a offert à Francis Bacon une grande rétrospective
composée de 90 œuvres de l’artiste, parmi lesquelles Two Figures était
incluse. Cette exposition majeure ensuite itinérante et présentée,
jusqu’en 1963, à Mannheim, Turin, Zurich et Amsterdam, marque aussi
la prééminence de l’artiste parmi les peintres anglais qui lui sont
contemporains.
Si Francis Bacon jouit en Grande-Bretagne, et cela depuis fort
longtemps, d’une cote considérable, son succès s’illustre aussi en
1960 à Londres à la Marlborough Gallery où il réalise sa première
exposition en collaboration avec cette galerie prestigieuse.
Cette-dernière constitue à l’époque l’un des plus grands et des plus
beaux locaux de Londres ou de Paris. Elle compte dans son programme
le plus grand sculpteur anglais vivant, Henri Moore, et ne se
limitant pas à l’art contemporain, elle organise aussi des
expositions des œuvres de Vincent Van Gogh, de Degas, de Monet ou de
Renoir.
Quand Two Figures est peint en 1961, Francis Bacon a 52 ans. Le
corps et le visage de l’homme sont pour lui des leitmotivs depuis
longtemps. Ils deviennent avec la représentation du mouvement des
thèmes incontournables dans l’œuvre de l’artiste, aussi bien qu’un
tableau intitulé Turning Figure apparaît en 1962. Il qualifie à
l’évidence un mouvement de torsion de la figure sur elle-même, tout
en conservant cette impression que le corps est comprimé
nerveusement. Les prémices de Turning Figure s’observent précisément
dans Two Figures qui est réalisé l’année précédente. Two Figures apparaît
dès lors comme une œuvre essentielle, infléchissant l’ensemble du
système figuratif que Francis Bacon mettra désormais en place. Ainsi
coupée des formes conventionnelles de la figuration, l’œuvre de
Francis Bacon témoigne de l’inutilité des anciens mythes et de
l’impossibilité de raconter tout récit à partir de son œuvre.
«Vous
avez compris que ce n’est pas pour les autres que je peins. C’est
pour moi. Je n’ai personne à séduire, à tromper, à orienter.».
(Entretien avec Pierre Descargues, Marseille 1976, in L’Art est
vivant, p. 311).
Pour atteindre ce moment crucial dans l’évolution de sa peinture,
Francis Bacon est captivé: « Michel-Ange et Muybridge se mêlent dans
mon esprit, ainsi je pourrais peut-être apprendre des positions de
Muybridge et apprendre de l’ampleur, de la grandeur des formes de
Michel-Ange. ...Comme la plupart de mes modèles sont des nus
masculins, je suis sûr que j’ai été influencé par Michel-Ange qui a
réalisé les nus masculins les plus voluptueux des arts plastiques.».
Les fragments harmonieux des sculptures grecques, les dessins
parfaits de Michel-Ange se confondent dans son souvenir des corps
aimés et des photographies d’Eadweard Muybridge, pour enfin se
concrétiser dans la pulsion du geste de peindre. Si les
photographies d’Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) oscillent entre la
science et l’art et sont célèbres pour leurs décompositions du
mouvement, les modèles qu’elles représentent rejoignent le
maniérisme caractéristique des sculptures de Michel-Ange
(1474-1564). Ce dernier inspire, notamment dans l’aspect «inachevé»
de ses Esclaves du musée de l’Académie à Florence, l’ouverture vers
l’infini, traduisant la lutte de l’esprit cherchant à se libérer de
la matière.
La figure se trouve dans l’alternance de sa présence et de son
absence. Sortie dans un vide, ou plutôt dans un plein, elle semble
sortir d’un miroir où les deux chairs se confondent. Two
Figures sculpte les modèles dans le tableau. En évoquant le double
mouvement de l’inscription et de l’effacement des corps dans
l’espace, une telle tension renvoie vers l’œuvre d’Alberto
Giacometti, avec qui Francis Bacon se nouera d’ailleurs d’amitié ;
dans les sculptures de ce-dernier le corps de l’homme est souvent
représenté, en rendant justement un peu plus indistincte la
frontière entre l’absence et la présence de la matière. Les
tourments du vide sont aussi évoqués dans Two Figures avec la
présence de l’ombre noire, habillant le personnage qui est situé au
premier plan de l’oeuvre. Le titre en anglais de celle-ci,
dénombrant deux modèles, devient dès lors très ambigü. La lecture de
deux personnage dans le tableau est assez difficile et renvoit
directement au rapport que Francis Bacon entretient avec la mort:
"La mort est comme l’ombre de la vie. Quand on est mort, on est
mort, mais tant qu’on est en vie, l’idée de la mort vous poursuit...
." (Francis Bacon, Entretiens avec Michel Archimbaud, 1991-1992,
1996 Gallimard, Folio Essais p.126).
" On ne sait jamais d’ailleurs ce qu’une image produit en vous.
Elles entrent dans le cerveau, et puis après on ne sait pas comment
c’est assimilé, digéré. Elles sont transformées, mais on ne sait pas
comment. " (Francis Bacon, Entretiens avec Michel Archimbaud, op.
cité, p.18). Comme l’artiste donne à le comprendre, l’image se
transforme souvent au cours du travail et la relation avec le sujet
s’établit dans le mouvement même de la peinture. Ce que Francis
Bacon cherche à créer sur la toile, c’est de donner au modèle la
place centrale, en le situant au milieu des énergies tournoyantes
créées par la tension intérieure des corps en mouvement. Dans Two
Figures l’artiste réussit avec virtuosité ce tour de force
esthétique et transmet ces énergies à travers l’ardeur des traces de
sa main qui maintient le pinceau.
Se libérer de la matière pour mieux concevoir la beauté d’un être,
c’est aussi le savoir disparaître dans l’ardeur d’une intolérable
combustion. Les corps les plus robustes de Two Figures se tordent
dans un mouvement apparemment brutal, convulsif, renforcé par
l’impersonnalité croissante du visage grimaçant devenu presque
illisible. Le modèle, pivotant dans un mouvement maniériste,
superposant les attitudes comme il le ferait dans une construction
cubiste, se contractant dans une position délibérément faussée,
désaxée, est soumis à une volonté paradoxale consistant à le
défigurer pour rendre sa figuration plus forte, directe et
saisissante.
En plaçant Two Figures dans un décor abstrait, la solitude des
modèles nus augmente, l’un d’entre eux n’ayant pour défense
apparente que ses dents sorties avec rage. La captivité des
personnages dans la couleur sourde du vieux rose et du blanc mêlé de
gris composant le fond du tableau fige en outre l’espace et le
temps. Temps voluptueux rendu visible, dont les personnages semblent
vouloir briser le cours. En surgissant dans une pièce réduite à
l’essentiel pour exister à la frange de l’abstrait, les modèles
donnent l’impression de vouloir franchir les lignes de démarcations
du tableau et en détruire la vitre. Quoique figés, ce que les
modèles rendent paradoxalement explicite, c’est encore la vitesse du
pinceau et des brosses. Vitesse d’ailleurs volontaire à la recherche
de l’accident. Dans cette démarche, Francis Bacon rappelle également
celle poursuivie par Cy Twombly dans une représentation purement
abstraite: introduire le déséquilibre, l’erreur, la rature, et
constituer un univers par le renversement des valeurs essentielles
traditionnelles.
La tension intérieure de Two Figures démontre avec maestria le style
puissant de Francis Bacon. L’artiste affirme aussi, en recherchant
obstinément la vérité devant le sujet, que l’avenir de l’homme est
dans l’homme: pensée peut-être la plus ouverte et la plus généreuse
que l’on appelle l’humanisme.
Fig.1-2. Francis Bacon, 1984.
Fig.3.
Michel-Ange Buonarroti, Male Nude, circa 1504.
Fig.4. Michel-Ange Buonarroti, Esclave, Académie Florence.
Fig.5. Michel-Ange Buonarroti, La Furie. Palais de Windsor
Fig.6. Turning Figure, 1962, huile sur toile, 198,2 x 144,7 cm.
Gilbert de Botton, Family trust.
Art: Bacon with trimmings
Charles Darwent
recommends spending Boxing Day with Kandinsky’s colours or on
Francis’s studio floor
The Independent on Sunday, 30 November 2008
Freud’s friend and nemesis, Francis Bacon, slyly affected never to
draw, although this was a lie. Bacon, incredibly, would have been
100 next October, which explains the sudden outbreak of Baconia in
art publishing. Among the best of the resultant books is Francis
Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (Yale £18.99) by the late artist’s
friend and chronicler, Michael Peppiatt, a collection of essays and
interviews that offer a uniquely intimate glimpse into the life of a
notoriously unintimate artist.
Martin Harrison can’t match Peppiatt in the Boswell stakes, but his
encyclopaedic knowledge of Bacon minutiae and connections to the
artist’s estate make him a pretty good runner-up. His earlier In
Camera explored Bacon’s debt to photography. Now, Francis Bacon:
Incunabula (Thames & Hudson £39.95) picks through the sweepings
on Bacon’s studio floor. Scraps torn from medical books,
reproductions of Velázquez portraits, Muybridge stills, over-worked
shots of massacres from newspapers – all were grist to Bacon’s
satanic mill. Harrison presents this trove without intervening text,
as though we were truffling through the detritus on the floor at 7
Reece Mews ourselves. It’s a good way of approaching Bacon; also of
whiling away a wet Christmas afternoon.
The Sunday
Times books of the year: Art
The Sunday Times, November 30, 2008
It
was, of course, an image inspired by the Bolshevik revolution — the
bloodied face of the nurse from Eisenstein’s film
The Battleship Potemkin (1925, and therefore too late for Bowlt
to mention) – on which Francis Bacon based the heads of his
screaming popes. He habitually painted from photographs, most torn
from magazines and books, wilfully folded, daubed with paint and
discarded feet-deep on the floor of his studio. Francis Bacon:
Incunabula by Martin Harrison (Thames & Hudson £39.95)
illustrates some 200 of these ephemeral images (everything from gay
porn and pictures of skin diseases to, yes, stills from Potemkin),
all furnished with brief explanatory notes. If you’re a Bacon
fanatic with an insatiable appetite for information about his
guarded working methods you’ll like this book. You’ll also be drawn
to Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (Yale
£18.99), an anthology of interviews and essays, several unpublished,
a few repetitive, all relevant. Peppiatt writes about Bacon with
refreshing and sometimes revealing candour.
Bacon appears in several places (in one, seemingly pulling his
trousers down) in Lucian Freud’s
impressive On Paper (Cape £50). With an introduction by
Sebastian Smee and an essay by Richard Calvocoressi, this is an
extravagantly illustrated, satisfyingly fat volume about Freud’s
drawings in every medium. It spans his entire career from juvenilia
signed in old German script to recent, densely worked etchings. Some
of it looks clumsy, but more is mesmerising in its clairvoyant
intensity. All of it suggests that Freud’s most considerable
achievements are the result of his abiding desire to reconcile
drawing and painting. The texts are helpful, too, though this isn’t
chiefly a book to be read.
Lucian
Freud’s early obsessions
Lucian Freud’s early works speak volumes about the shy artist’s
sensuality —
and the combination of intensity and detachment that
women find irresistible.
Waldemar Januszczak looks at the formative
relationships of a master in the making
Waldemar Januszczak,
The
Sunday Times, Sunday, November 30, 2008
It was
also around this time that Freud met Francis Bacon. They were
introduced by Graham Sutherland and met at Victoria station while
setting off for a Sutherland weekend. Bacon seems to have freed
Freud of any remaining guilt he may have harboured. “His work
impressed me, but his personality affected me.” Bacon, who talked
fondly of “the sensuality of treachery”, showed Freud “how to wing
it through life, how to court risk, tempt accident and scorn the
norm”. When Freud drew him one evening, Bacon pointedly unbuttoned
his trousers.
“I think you ought to use these,” he said,
sliding them down to reveal his hips. How strange that the only
signs of unmistakable eroticism in Freud’s drawings should be
supplied by a man.
Art: From canvas to cameras
By Michael Glover , The Independent, Friday,
28 November 2008
It’s been a good year for lovers of the energising, sado-masochistic
gloom of Francis Bacon. The catalogue of his Tate Britain show does
him proud (Tate Publishing £24.99), and two other books thicken the
tortured plot of his life. Incunabula (Thames & Hudson,
£39.95) shows us images of the photographs and visual documents
which fed into the wild frenzy of his painting. His friend and
official biographer Michael Peppiatt has assembled Studies for a
Portrait (Yale, £18.99), a marvellously absorbing book of essays
and interviews.

Colony Room closing time?
Studio International, Wednesday, 26
November 2008
A glorious hub for artists, dilettantes and drunks for the
past 60 years, the Colony Room in Soho now faces imminent closure.
Brawls and protests have inevitably ensued, parties have been
planned to pay for legal fees and some members have been banned for
fighting closure. Amid all of this, the magnificent art collection — which
hangs modestly and cramped over the green walls of the tiny club — is
the subject of much conversation and speculation as to where it will
go if or when the party ends.
Fondly regarded as a ‘‘home
for those who don’t
have a home’’,
the Colony Room has long been a meeting point for the most nomadic
of the art world, its vagabonds, poets, drunks — and
their muses, friends and hangers-on — in
search of ‘‘a
place to dissolve our inhibitions’’,
as Francis Bacon would say. Muriel Belcher founded the infamous club
60 years ago, and paid the young Francis Bacon a ‘salary’ of
free drinks to bring in his crowd.
And so Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud, Patrick Caulfield and others
became regulars at the emerald dive, donating a picture here and
there, and piece by little masterpiece built the collection that
decorates the bar today, with additions from Damien Hirst, Sebastian
Horsley, Sarah Lucas et al. Tracey Emin, the late Angus Fairhurst,
Jay Jopling and Sam Taylor-Wood have all served the club’s current
owner, Michael Wojas, behind the bar.
Past the grimy buzzer, tucked into 41 Dean Street, through a
door and at the top of some narrow stairs, the Colony Room has an
almost mystical feel, damp with spilled gin (not beer), the odd tear
and a general air of easy grimy debauchery: this is the downtime
that follows the high art and the revelry to distract from the
absurdity. But it’s
not a pretentious place, and for all the mythology and wonder, it’s
a cosy, grounded sort of place, all warm, vaguely stuffy, nicely
scruffy, with swear words scrawled next to paintings and paintings
scrawled in swear words. It is something akin to a gypsy caravan
that decided to park. And yet now the vagabonds are being evicted.
Where shall they go now? Damien Hirst’s
new B&B? That would be a little too bourgeois, surely, for Soho’s
surly rebels.
’Soho is dying!’ moans Sebastian Horsley, ‘‘I
have always said I will commit suicide when the Colony closes. Not
that one needs an incentive.’’ Clearly,
shutting down the Colony Room will have an affect on Soho similar to
the effect of Prohibition on New York in the Twenties. But where
Gatsby found a way to steer around the law then, so Soho’s
residents will presumably find some moonshine of sorts as well,
rather than an out and out Depression. One would hope so, anyway.
The rebellion continues, and legal action is being taken
over the art and over the club. A party to raise funds for
consequential expenditure will be thrown in December, and the
resistance goes on. But is it too late? ‘‘The
ship is sinking. Man the lifeboats. Women and children first. Fuck
the women and children. Is there time?’’ wonders
Horsley.
But whether they drown or not, in their sorrows or their
wine, one hopes that the punters (who are the real draw) will
colonise elsewhere if need be, even after Soho’s
pirates push them overboard.

Rare works of Bacon defy art auction gloom
ABC News Australia, Tuesday, 25
November 2008
Two
paintings of Francis Bacon, by an Australian artist believed to have
been his lover, were sold for well over their pre-auction price last
night.
The works by Roy de Maistre — Francis
Bacon’s
Studio and Portrait Of Francis Bacon — were
sold for $180,000 and $96,000 respectively at Sotheby’s
sale of modern Australian art in Melbourne.
The two
paintings, among a collection of six de Maistre works, had not been
seen by the public for nearly 50 years.
“I
think both works illustrate very well that even in the present
climate, works of exceptional provenance which carry conservative
estimates are strongly competed for by enthusiastic collectors,” Georgina
Pemberton, head of Sotheby’s
Australian paintings, told Reuters.
“All
of de Maistre’s
paintings sold tonight.”
The de
Maistre star lots, which depict one of Bacon’s many studios and a
portrait of the young artist with carefully drawn eyebrows and
bright red lips, had been estimated by Sotheby’s
at between $37,600-$50,000 and $5,000-$7,500.
Sotheby’s
paintings specialist David Hansen said they had been painted in the
1930s, when the two artists were “associating.”
“They
were certainly closely associated both personally and
professionally. Close, but exactly how close is not known,” Mr
Hansen said of the two artists.
De Maistre,
who died in 1968, was considered a leading exponent of early
modernism in Australia.
Bacon, who
died in 1992, is believed to have made de Maistre’s
acquaintance when he was about 20-years-old, possibly in France or
London.
Francis Bacon: Studies for a
Portrait
Michael
Peppiatt. Yale
Univ., $35
(208p) ISBN 978-0-300-14255-6
Publishers
Weekly, 11/24/2008
Peppiatt, having already written Bacon’s
biography (Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma), now submits
a collection of essays and interviews spanning his career of writing
on the artist. Some of the pieces, updated with material originally
omitted because Bacon (1909–1992) was still living, take on new
life.
They also echo each other, as when, in an essay for Art
International, Peppiatt writes that “comparatively few artists
were admitted into Bacon’s pantheon, and even they tended to be
pared down to one or other aspect of their oeuvre”—Degas was one, as
Bacon says in one interview: “Degas is complete in himself. I like
his pastels enormously.”
Each piece describes a different period in
Bacon’s life, a theme in the work, influences or significant
companions. As each topic is inscribed with the biographical
essentials, the motifs stand out in relief from the background
details. The book gains a certain rhythm as the portrait is made
simultaneously more simple and more complex. The effect, cast in Peppiatt’s intimate reportage, works well, and the book will enrich
the library of any Bacon enthusiast. 16 pages of colour and 35 b&w
illus. (Jan.)
Rare works
about Francis Bacon defy art auction gloom
Reuters, Monday November 24, 2008
MELBOURNE (Reuters Life!) — Two
rare artworks by Australian painter Roy de Maistre, which feature
artist Francis Bacon who was believed to be his lover, will be
auctioned by Sotheby’s
on Monday among a collection of Australian modern art.
Of the
six de Maistre paintings, the two works — Francis
Bacon’s Studio and Portrait of Francis Bacon — have
not been seen by the public for nearly 50 years.
"All
six of the de Maistre’s
works on offer were painted in London in the 1930s when the two
artists were associating," David Hansen, senior researcher and
paintings’ specialist
at Sotheby’s,
told Reuters.
Francis Bacon’s
Studio, with a pre-sale estimate of between A$60,000-A$80,000
($37,600-$50,000), depicts one of Bacon’s
many studios while Portrait of Francis Bacon, with a pre-sale
estimate of between A$8,000-A$12,000 ($5,000-$7,500), shows a young
Bacon, with carefully drawn eyebrows and bright red lips.
"The
young Bacon was well known amongst members of London’s
gay subculture for his cosmetic display," Hansen said.
"They
were certainly closely associated both personally and professionally
- close but exactly how close is not known," he said of the two
artists. "It was often said that de Maistre taught Bacon how to
paint, though both artists denied it."
Sotheby’s said the auction, which also includes works by Australian
artists John Perceval and Brett Whiteley, had generated substantial
interest with potential buyers from Britain and Australia.
The
works on offer have a collective pre-sale estimate of A$3.3
million-A$4.4 million ($2.1 million-$2.75 million).
De
Maistre, who died in 1968, was considered a leading exponent of
early Modernism in Australia. Bacon, who died in 1992, is believed
to have made de Maistre’s
acquaintance when he was about 20 years old, possibly in France or
London.
(Reporting by Pauline Askin, Editing by Miral
Fahmy)

Portrait of Francis Bacon Roy
de Maistre
Sotheby’s
Important
Australian Art
Sale: AU0724 | Location: Melbourne
Auction Dates: Session 1: Mon, 24
Nov 08 6:30 PM

Portrait of Francis Bacon Roy de Maistre 1935
LOT 7
ROY DE MAISTRE, AUSTRALIAN, 1894-1968
PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BACON
8,000—12,000 AUD
Lot Sold.
Hammer Price with Buyer’s
Premium: 96,000 AUD
MEASUREMENTS
66 by
43.6m
DESCRIPTION
Signed
lower right
Oil on
board
Painted
in 1935
PROVENANCE
Dimitri
Mitrinoviæ
Trustees of the New Atlantis Foundation
Glady MacDermot; thence by descent
Private collection, Switzerland
EXHIBITED
Roy de
Maistre: A restrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings
1917-1960, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, May-June 1960, cat. 40
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES
Neville
Wallis, 'In the Humanist Tradition', The Observer, 15 May
1960, p. 20 (illus.)
Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Century,
London, 1993, p. 28 and illus.
Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968,
Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 26
CATALOGUE NOTE
Soon
after moving to London in 1930, de Maistre began a relationship with
Francis Bacon. Possibly a lover but certainly a good friend and
benevolent father figure, de Maistre provided the technical advice
and support which enabled bacon to make the transition from interior
decorator to painter.
He was also a social and professional mentor; at de Maistre’s Eccleston Street studio salon Bacon met people like the artists
Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, the young writer Patrick White
and the expatriate Australian collector and art dealer Douglas
Cooper, as well as patrons such as R.A. Butler and Gladys MacDermot,
who commissioned Bacon to entirely redesign her Bloomsbury
apartment.
De Maistre painted his young friend’s portrait in 1930, and included
the work in the three-man exhibtion – de Maistre paintings, Bacon
pictures and rugs and pastels by Jean Shepeard – held in Bacon’s
studio in 1930. The present work is dated to some years later and
shows Bacon in his mid 20s, looking, as de Maistre put it, 'like a
somewhat dubious choirboy'.
It is indeed a strange, tense, enigmatic portrait of the young
artist. Posed in three quarter profile in a strongly lit, shallow
space in front of a blood-red curtain, Bacon’s oddly unexpressive,
even doll-like face is at once abstracted and alert, while his
clasped hands seem to convey both formality and anxiety. In addition
to the familiar cowlick quiff and the piercing blue eyes, the
painting also shows carefully-drawn eyebrows and bright red lips.
The young Bacon was well known amongst members of London’s gay
subculture for his cosmetic display. Michael Peppiat records that
'shortly after he had gained some recognition as an artist, he
walked into a London bar where a well known homosexual wit was
sitting. When their gazes met, the wit said loudly: "as for her,
when I knew her, she was more famous for the paint that she put on
her face than the paint she put on canvas" Later, Patrick White was
to recall Bacon’s ’beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too
much lipstick on it,’ while ’a young relative of de Maistre
remembers meeting Francis and wondering whether she should tell him
he must have sucked his paintbrush and got red paint all over his
mouth.’
Portrait of Francis Bacon is an affectionate and revealing image of
the celebrated British artist at the start of his career, and an
important memento of his constructive relationship with the older
and wiser Australian.
1. Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Century,
London, 1993, p. 28
2. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, London, 1996, p. 56
3. Patrick White, Flaws in the Glass: a self-portrait, Jonathan
Cape, London, 1983, p. 62
4. Peppiatt, op. cit., p. 56
We are most grateful to Heather Johnson, Andrew Brighton and
Elizabeth Gertsakis for their assistance in cataloguing this work.
Sotheby’s
Important
Australian Art
Sale: AU0724 | Location: Melbourne
Auction Dates: Session 1: Mon, 24
Nov 08 6:30 PM

Francis Bacon’s Studio Roy de
Maistre 1932
LOT 69
ROY DE MAISTRE, AUSTRALIAN, 1894-1968
FRANCIS BACON’S STUDIO
Estimate
60,000—80,000 AUD
Lot Sold Hammer
Price with Buyer’s Premium: 180,000 AUD
MEASUREMENTS
91 by
76cm
DESCRIPTION
Signed
lower right; dated 1932 on the reverse
Oil on
canvas
PROVENANCE
Dimitri
Mitrinoviæ
Trustees of the New Atlantis Foundation
Glady MacDermot; thence by descent
Private collection, Switzerland
EXHIBITED
(possibly) Roy de Maistre, Mayor Gallery, London, October-November
1934 (Mayor Gallery label on stretcher bar on reverse)
Roy de Maistre: A retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings
1917 - 1960, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, May - June 1960, cat.
21
Francis Bacon, Tate Gallery, London, 24 May-1 July 1962, cat.
93 (as Francis Bacon’s Studio, 1932, lent by Roy de Maistre).
Partial Tate Gallery exhibition label attached to reverse.
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES
John
Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson,
London, 1964, p. 10
Mary Eagle, Australian Modern Painting Between the Wars 1914-1939,
Bay Books, Sydney, 1989, p. 50 (illus.)
John Russell, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, pp.
16-17
Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times, Crown
Publishers, New York, 1993, p. 64
Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968,
Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pp. 24, 77, 234
CATALOGUE NOTE
When
Roy de Maistre and Francis Bacon met, the 21 year old Bacon had
begun to establish himself as a fashionable furniture designer,
producing severe glass and tubular-steel tables and chairs and
synthetic-cubist screens and woven floor rugs. This art deco
aesthetic chimed with de Maistre’s own taste for geometric flat
pattern, and he responded with strikingly moderne but
’topographically precise’ views of Bacon’s studio: Francis
Bacon’s Queensbury Mews Studio (1930, collection of the late Francis Elek) and Interior (1930, Manchester City Art Gallery).
They were the first of some ten pictures of Bacon’s work spaces that
de Maistre would produce during the early 1930s. In addition to
these two and to Still Life (1933, National Gallery of Australia)
and Mr Francis Bacon’s Studio, Royal Hospital Road (1934, private
collection), there are no fewer than six related paintings of one of
these rooms, a whitewashed attic prism with open door and pictures
leaning against the walls.
The precise location depicted is uncertain. John Rothenstein
maintains that these works, too, depict the studio at 71 Royal
Hospital Road, Chelsea , but Heather Johnson notes that ’sketches
for the work were thought to have been made circa 1932, in which
case the studio represented could have been one of the many Bacon
occupied after leaving his Queensbury Mews studio in 1931 and before
he moved into the Royal Hospital Road studio...Bacon had studios in
Fulham Road, Cromwell Place and Glebe Place during this time.’
For those with an interest in the early Bacon, the picture’s key
interest lies in the two curious, Picassoesque works ’carefully,
irreplaceably recorded by de Maistre’. ’Against bare boards and
angular white surfaces, canvases are stacked, two turned towards the
painter’s brush, one of a skeletal and feathered bird, another of
the quartered outline of a horse or dragon – the start of a movement
from geonometric abstraction towards a more organic image... these
are works of transition, those of an embryo trying to flesh itself.’
The picture also has a special importance for de Maistre scholars.
The original version was purchased by Gladys MacDermot, de Maistre’s
great supporter both in Australia and in England, and attracted the
particular interest of another of MacDermot’s protégés, Dmitri
Mitrinovic, political and aesthetic visionary and polemicist, and
founder of the journals New Britain and New Atlantis. While
MacDermot’s painting was destroyed during the London Blitz, Johnson
records that ’Mitrinovic commissioned a version...for himself, New
Atlantis... almost identical to the original work’ and that ’several
other versions and variations of the work were also produced: a
third, smaller work done for Mitrinovic and given to a follower,
Jack Murphy... a fourth work also done for Mitrinovic and presently
in a private collection associated with the New Atlantis
Foundation...(the present work) and a sixth work, White Figure, Art
Gallery of Western Australia. All the extant works are believed to
have been done circa 1933 developed from sketches de Maistre made in
Bacon’s studio in 1932.'
1. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, London, 1996, p. 51
2. John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, Thames &
Hudson, London, 1964, p. 10
3. Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968,
Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 77
4. John Russell, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, p. 16
5. Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times, Crown
Publishers, New York, 1993, p. 64
6. Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968,
Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 77
We are most grateful to Heather Johnson, Andrew Brighton and
Elizabeth Gertsakis for their assistance in cataloguing this work.
Francis
Bacon: gesto y agonía de la figura humana
CARLOS M. LUIS,
ARTES Y LETRAS Especial/El Nuevo Herald
El
Nuevo Herald, Miami, 23 de Noviembre del 2008
Como
parte de la celebración del centenario en el 2009 del nacimiento de
Francis Bacon, la Tate Gallery de Londres ha inaugurado una
retrospectiva de este pintor. Entre los meses de febrero y agosto la
muestra viajará a los museos del Prado y al Metropolitan de Nueva
York. Los 60 cuadros que serán expuestos permiten indagar sobre la
vida y la obra de uno de los grandes pintores de todas las épocas.
Pocos como Bacon - quizás ninguno - ha llevado tan lejos el
tratamiento de la figura humana en la forma que este pintor lo ha
hecho.
Habría
que remontarse a las representaciones que los artistas medievales
hacían de los condenados para acercarnos a las suyas. O podemos
acudir a Goya como un antecedente. Para situarnos en el siglo XX,
las mujeres de De Kooning, el ''Grito'' de Edward Munch, o ciertas
obras de Chaim Soutine, de Van Gogh o los autorretratos de Artaud
entre otros, pueden ubicarse a su lado. Pero nadie como Bacon
realizó una visión tan escatológica del ser humano, abriéndole al
mismo tiempo, un espacio para ser representado en la soledad y el
sufrimiento. En su caso no podemos acusarlo de que lo hizo tomando
la figura humana como un simple tema pictórico. Su vida de
alcohólico y de homosexual sadomasoquista lo situó dentro de una
realidad que él experimentó hasta la saciedad de los excesos, pues
para Bacon los extremos se tocaban para desgarrarse entre sí.
Estamos
prisioneros en nuestra piel dijo Wittgenstein en sus diarios. En el
caso de Bacon podemos decir que éste encerró a la humanidad dentro
de la piel de los cuerpos que él pintó. Ese permanente contacto suyo
con las fuerzas elementales que emanan de la anatomía humana y
animal lo convirtió de paso en un filósofo visual sin quererlo.
Podemos a partir de sus cuadros especular toda una teoría acerca de
la condición humana, partiendo de una ''lógica de la sensación''
como lo hiciera Gilles Deleuze en su libro sobre el pintor. En el
mismo el pensador francés exploró las resonancias que pueden existir
entre la filosofía y las artes visuales. Tomando ese concepto como
punto de vista, Deleuze discute tres aspectos fundamentales de la
pintura de Bacon: la figura, los espacios de color que la rodean y
las estructuras que los separan. Esos tres aspectos aparecen
claramente configurados en Bacon como parte de su dinámica pictórica.
Veamos los tres por separado.
La
figura: la atracción que posee el cuerpo humano para Bacon le brinda
la ocasión para interpretarlo, de acuerdo con su visión de la
existencia, como un acto límite. Es por eso que sus cuerpos van
sufriendo toda suerte de distorsiones hasta llegar a ser
irreconocibles. Bacon entonces actúa sobre los mismos como
representando una especie de ritual frenético, cuyo sadismo hace
palidecer a las coreografías sexuales del Marqués. Bacon se sintió
influido por los experimentos fotográficos de Eadweard Muybridge,
quien a finales del siglo XIX, realizara una serie de fotos de
personas y animales sorprendidos en diversas posturas. Posiblemente
pudo también sentirse atraído por los dibujos anatómicos del
renacentista Andreas Vesalius. Por otra parte Velázquez le sirvió de
modelo para interpretar sus retratos. La versión que el maestro
español hiciera del papa Inocencio X fue objeto de una de las obras
más emblemáticas de Bacon.
El color: contrario al tratamiento
del color propio de los expresionistas, Bacon utilizó el suyo en
forma plana, realzando su brillantez. El contraste que esto provoca
con sus figuras retorcidas es notable. El color se extiende por el
espacio de sus cuadros, creando zonas de intensas gamas, sin
componer un contrapunto – como
lo hacen muchos expresionistas – con
el dramatismo de las figuras. De ese modo el color queda, sobre todo
en los cuadros de su última época, como una especie de trasfondo
donde podemos observar, si eliminamos las figuras de los mismos, una
distribución constructivista del espacio.
La
estructura: Bacon compone sus cuadros partiendo de un sentido
espacial muy preciso. De esa forma coloca sus figuras dentro de
compartimentos, semejantes muchos de ellos a grandes cajas de
cristal. Esa manera suya de encerrar a sus personajes nos recuerda
el juicio de Eichmann en Jerusalén, donde el famoso nazi permaneció
dentro de un cubículo durante todo el proceso. También nos puede
traer a la memoria la secuencia del filme Silence of the Lambs,
seguramente inspirada en Bacon, cuando Hannibal Lecter tuvo que ser
enjaulado en una gran cárcel de cristal en medio de un salón. Ambas
escenas muestran una teatralidad que su pintura nos comunica a
través de la gestualidad de muchas de sus mejores obras. Por otra
parte y a la manera de los pintores medievales, Bacon gustaba de
pintar trípticos como grandes retablos que reproducen variaciones
sobre un tema determinado. Uno de éstos, basado en la crucifixión,
llevó hasta el paroxismo de lo grotesco la representación de ese
acontecimiento central de la cultura cristiana.
Baudelaire afirmó que el Romanticismo no consistía tanto en la
verdad exacta como en la manera de sentir esa verdad. Bacon, que en
el fondo pertenece a la tradición romántica, está interesado en
capturar una verdad que le sirva para expresar un sentimiento ''agónico''.
Cada uno de sus modelos que tuvieron en un momento dado existencia
propia fueron sometidos a una interpretación delirante de la verdad
que encarnaban. Fue de esa forma que Bacon logró crear imágenes que
quedarán grabadas indeleblemente en la historia del arte. •
Francis Bacon:
Space and Surface, symposium organised by Brian Hatton
Symposium 22/11/08
- 10.00 Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B
3ES
To complement the
Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain, this symposium considers
spatial and architectural aspects in Bacon’s art. Bacon composed his
pictures by risking spontaneous acts and chance effects of painting
within carefully designed and projected spatial frameworks, often
deploying traces of his early work in furniture and interior
decoration.
This double aspect
of Bacon’s work has interested not only painters but also architects
and filmmakers. Presentations will be made by: Andrew Brighton,
James Cahill, Nigel Coates, Mark Cousins, Martin Hammer, Brian
Hatton and John Maybury. The symposium will conclude with a
roundtable discussion.
All welcome
No advance booking required
Please note: The AA Bar (1st Floor) will be open between 11.00 and
6.00 providing regular bar services.

Speakers at the
symposium included: Andrew Brighton, James Cahill, Nigel Coates,
Martin Hammer, John
Maybury, Bob Maxwell & Brian Hatton.

Joel Cadbury seeks
a Colony
It is the drinking
den whose patrons have included such artists as Francis Bacon and
Tracey Emin,
but the Colony Room in Soho may be about to have a
surprising new owner.
Richard Eden The
Daily Telegraph 15
November 2008
Mandrake can
disclose that Joel Cadbury, whose chocolate-producing ancestors were
abstemious Quakers, is lining up a bid for the louche private
members’ club. "Joel has been approached about taking it over and is
seriously considering it," says a friend of the 36-year-old son of
Peter "the Cad" Cadbury.
Joel, who is
married to Divia Lalvani, the daughter of an Indian electronics
tycoon, is a non-executive director the Groucho Club, the haunt of
media and theatre professionals, which is next door to the Colony
Room.
Last year, Cadbury
sold his Soho health and fitness club, The Third Space, to a
management buyout team backed by private equity for £22 million. The
deal came just over a year after he sold the Groucho to the same
private-equity group, Graphite Capital, for £20 million.
The Colony Room was
established 60 years ago to provide a refuge for members when the
pubs closed. Earlier this year, Michael Wojas, the club secretary
and chief barman, said he would close it when he retires in March
because of the impact of the smoking ban, an expiring lease and a
general downturn.
Art boom over as
auctions fail to bring home Bacon
Ben Hoyle, Arts
Reporter, The Times, November
14, 2008
When a Francis
Bacon triptych became the most expensive contemporary artwork sold
at auction earlier this year it fuelled hopes that the art market
might be credit-crunch proof.
Six months later
the failure of another important Bacon work to attract a single bid
at auction in New York has underlined what the leading auction
houses have long feared and recently suspected: the art boom is over
and it will not be back any time soon.
A sobering
fortnight of big sales in New York ends this afternoon with little
prospect of transactions totalling $1 billion (£676 million).
That might seem
like an obscene sum of money to lavish on art in the midst of an
economic crisis but it is well short of the auction houses’ own
combined minimum estimate for the sales of $1.7 billion.
The fortnight
included four star-studded evening sales of Impressionist and Modern
and Contemporary and PostWar art, which traditionally set the tone
for the art market over the next six months.
This year, despite
the presence of John McEnroe, the tennis player, Salma Hayek and
Steve Martin, the actors, Valentino, the fashion designer and
various billionaire art collectors in the auction rooms, the four
sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s pulled in only $608.5 million,
against a low estimate of $1.007 billion.
About a third of
the works on offer failed to sell at all, including pieces by
Picasso, Rothko, Manet, Monet, Modigliani, Matisse, Van Gogh,
Cezanne, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Hirst, while many of those that
did went for substantially less than the asking price.
Some records were
set, brightening the gloom for the auction houses. Suprematist
Composition by Kazimir Malevich, the Russian abstract pioneer, sold
for $60 million and there were record prices for works by Munch and
Degas among others.
Attention, however,
was inevitably focused on the failures, notably the Bacon.
In May it was
revealed that Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea
Football Club, was the mystery buyer of an $86.2 million Bacon
triptych. Days earlier he paid $33.6 million for Benefits Supervisor
Sleeping by Bacon’s old friend Lucian Freud.
This double splurge
was seized on as evidence that the art market would weather the
economic downturn thanks to stupendously wealthy collectors from
Russia, China, India and the Middle East.
But those buyers
were notably absent on Wednesday night when a 1964 self-portrait by
Bacon, estimated by Christie’s at $40 million, failed to sell.
There were gasps in
the hall when it was withdrawn from the sale.
The differing
fortunes of the two Bacons reflect the seismic shifts in the global
financial markets in the past two months, a connection summed up by
the presence in Wednesday’s sale of 16 works, belonging to the
family of Richard S. Fuld Jr, a former chief executive of Lehman
Brothers, that Christie’s had guaranteed at $20 millon. The price
estimates for these sales were set before the markets went into
meltdown in September and European buyers were handicapped by the
strengthening of the dollar.
As a result
dealers, sellers, collectors and auctioneers emerged from the New
York sales looking for the bottom of the market whereas not long ago
they were trying to spot the peak. Ian Peck, chief executive of Art
Capital Group, a merchant bank specialising in art world affairs,
said: “It’s like the aftermath of a rugby match with everybody
limping off the field. It’s a different universe compared to where
we were six months ago.”
Marc Porter,
president of Christie’s North and South America, said after the
Wednesday evening sale: “The market is adjusting down.”
The New York sales
followed a pattern set in significant recent auctions in London and
Hong Kong.
The auction houses
are the most obvious victims of the downturn. Christie’s and
Sotheby’s both spent tens of millions buying lots whose prices they
had guaranteed but which failed to sell. Sotheby’s share price has
collapsed from more than $40 a year ago to just over $8 yesterday.
Robert Read, group
fine art underwriter for Hiscox, the insurer, said that the auctions
could have been much worse. “It’s no longer a champagne market,” he
said. “Its more of a modest chablis, but it is still drinkable,
still functioning.”
Upper East Side:
Linger (Quietly) for a While
KAREN
ROSENBERG THE NEW YORK TIMES THURSDAY NOVEMBER 13, 2003
Chelsea has been
the undisputed center of the art market for the last decade, and the
young and the new are concentrated below 14th Street. The Upper East
Side will always have Museum Mile, but what do the galleries in this
staid enclave have to offer?
Simply put, the
Upper East Side is a quieter, more idiosyncratic art neighbourhood.
Particularly in the cloistered townhouse galleries off Madison
Avenue, you have the sense of walking into someone’s living room.
Chelsea can make you feel rushed, herded from one concrete-floored
box to the next; uptown the atmosphere is much more conducive to
lingering. You will often be the only visitor in the gallery, even
on a Saturday.
At the
ever-expanding Gagosian, as at Acquavella, the artist-muse
relationship inspires an exhibition worthy of the Museum of Modern
Art. Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Alberto
Giacometti and Francis Bacon inaugurates the gallery’s new
fourth-floor exhibition space. The show was organized by Véronique
Wiesinger, the director of the Giacometti Foundation in Paris, and
Martin Harrison, who is overseeing Bacon’s catalogue raisonné.
The woman singled
out in the title is the model Isabel Rawsthorne, whose chiseled
cheekbones inspired several paintings by Bacon and sculptures by
Giacometti. Other captivating figures in the exhibition include
Lucien Freud, in Bacon’s portraits, and Giacometti’s wife and
mistress (in separate, and markedly different, paintings).

Works by
Francis Bacon, left, and Giacometti at the Gagosian Gallery show Isabel
and Other Intimate Strangers.
Francis Bacon
portrait pulled from sale after failing to attract bids
A Francis Bacon
self-portrait was withdrawn half way through a Christie’s auction
in
New York after bidding failed to take off.
By Tom Leonard in
New York, The Daily Telegraph, Thursday, 13 November 2008
Study for Self
Portrait, painted in 1964, was billed as the highlight of the
contemporary art sale with an estimate of $40 million (£27 million).
However, when
bidding dried up at $27.4 million, the sale was abruptly halted,
prompting gasps of surprise in the auction room.
A Bacon triptych
fetched $86 million – a record for the painter – at an auction in
New York in May.
But the self
portrait was among almost a third of works in the 75-lot sale that
failed to find buyers. The auction brought in $113.6 million – half
the pre-sale low estimate.
In keeping with
other recent sales, the lots that did sell went for less than their
estimate.
At Christie’s, a
collection of 16 drawings sold by Kathy and Richard Fuld, the
controversial former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, brought in
$13.5 million after being expected to fetch $20 million.
However, Christie’s
had promised the Fulds had an undisclosed sum regardless of the
outcome of the sale. Mrs Fuld is a keen collector and the couple
have kept most of their works.
The Christie’s sale
came a day after a similarly underwhelming New York auction at
Sotheby’s.
Prices at both
sales were set earlier in the year before the financial crisis and
are now considered far too high.

Study for Self Portrait 1964 Francis Bacon
Art market in shock
as Christies calls halt to Francis Bacon sale
Anne Barrowclough,
The Times, Thursday, November 13, 2008
A Francis Bacon
self-portrait failed to sell at auction in New York last night, in a
significant sign that the global financial tsunami is beginning to
sweep over the international art market.
Bacon’s 1964 Study
for Self Portrait — billed as a highlight of Christie’s
contemporary art auction — was estimated to take in around $US40
million (£26.2 million). A Bacon triptych went under the hammer in
New York last May for $86.2 million (£56.4 million), a record for
the British painter and it was expected that the self portrait would
fetch a similarly high price.
But when bidding
reached $27.4 million (£179.3 million) the auction house
dramatically halted the proceedings, to a chorus of gasps from a
stunned audience.
Seventy-five
contemporary works were on sale on Wednesday. Among the most
important lots was a Jean-Michel Basquiat painter of a boxer, owned
by Metallica co-founder and drummer Lars Ulrich, which fetched just
over $13.5 million but short of the record $14.6 million for a
Basquiat.
A chill had already
entered the art market last month, when a rare portrait of Francis
Bacon by Lucien Freud sold for £1.6 million less than expected, and
the autumn season of art sales, which began on November 3, was being
closely watched.
However in the
fortnight since the autumn season began, there has been a big drop
off of sales of impressionist, modern and contemporary works of art.
The number of
unsold works has often exceeded 30 or 40 per cent of lots since
November 3, and barring a few notable exceptions the sales prices
are lower than the estimates for the majority of pieces.
Art sales were
still high in the spring sale season earlier this year, with records
set at Sotheby’s and Christies’ for works by Monet, whose Le Pont
du chemin de fer a Argenteuil went for a record $41.4 million
(£27.1 million) and Munch, whose Girls on a Bridge sold for
$30.8 million (£20.2 million), a record for the artist.
The record sales
were seen as a sign that the art market was protected from the
deepening economic gloom.
At the time David
Norman, chairman of Sotheby’s impressionist and modern department,
said the sales had displayed the "underpinnings of a really strong
market that we believe is going to continue as long as we keep the
estimates appealing to the consignors and choose the right
property."
He added: "There is
still so much liquidity and so many buyers from everywhere."
Such optimism has
evaporated recently, and last night’s sale will cast a further pall
over the international market. Some experts say the fall in sales is
due to the disappearance of hedge fund managers and Russian
oligarchs from auction rooms.
But some of Francis
Bacon’s work still seem popular — at least within a certain market.
His paintings of popes — of which there are just 40 in the world —
are seen as a trophy by some collectors, according to Sarah
Thornton, the author of Seven Days in the Art World.
"These paintings
are of a very powerful man in purgatory, in like a free-fall into
Hell," she told National Public Radio (NPR) in the US on Tuesday.
"The popes look terrified. I think, oh my God, that must be what
it’s like to be a hedge fund manager right now."

Francis Bacon’s self portrait failed to sell at a Christie’s auction
last night
No buyer for a
Bacon as New York art sale ends
By Christopher
Michaud, Reuters, Thursday 13 November 2008
NEW YORK, Nov 13
(Reuters) - The fall New York art sales limped to a close on
Wednesday, leaving a market bruised and bloodied but still standing.
Christie’s post-war
and contemporary auction took in $113.6 million, half a low pre-sale
estimate of $227 million, with 68 percent of the lots on offer
finding buyers.
The spotty sale was
consistent with Impressionist, modern and contemporary art auctions
at Christie’s and rival over the past two weeks.
The result was
"about as expected going in," said Amy Cappellazzo, international
co-head of contemporary and post-war art at Christie’s, given the
turmoil gripping world financial markets for the past two months.
Despite high points
including a nearly $15 million Richter, a $13.5 million Basquiat and
new records for Joseph Cornell and Yayoi Kusama, the evening’s star
lot failed to sell.
Francis Bacon’s Study
for Self-Portrait had been estimated to go for $40 million or
more, but no bid approached even $30 million. Bacons have seen huge
price spikes in recent seasons, including a record $86 million.
"The market is
continuing, but clearly at a different price level," Christie’s
president Marc Porter said.
"There’s no panic
in the market, but there is an adjustment," he told Reuters,
contrasting that to the volatility gripping other markets such as
oil or real estate.
"While it had
declined, you’ve seen it find a stable level, with a lot of
support."
Baird Ryan,
managing director of the art-related financial services firm Art
Capital Group, agreed with auction officials’ contention that the
two weeks of sales, while falling about one-third shy of estimates
set before the financial crisis, showed there continues to be demand
for fine art.
'A CORRECTION'
But Ryan noted that
other markets had seen a fall-off of about 20 to 40 percent, "and
that’s what you’re seeing here. There is a correction going on." He
said auction houses will have to edit sales to offer "a selected
group of works with cautious estimates."
Still it was
impressive that "in such a period of remarkable financial stress you
can sell over $100 million worth of art in an evening," Ryan added.
"People are focused, and active."
Art expert and
author Sarah Thornton, who chronicled several years spent
infiltrating the art world for the book Seven Days in the Art
World, said the sales "could have gone much worse."
"Given the state of
the financial world, it’s remarkable to see a group of people
spending money the way they are," she said. "There are obviously
some people who still have a lot of money to spend." (Editing by
Mohammad Zargham)
Mixed Results for
Contemporary Art Sale at Christie’s
By Carol Vogel, The
New York Times, November
12, 2008
In a
bumpy sale of contemporary art at Christie’s on Wednesday, some
paintings, drawings and sculptures were eagerly sought, but
there were also big disappointments as the art market struggled
to adjust to today’s financial climate.
What was
expected to be the star — a 1964 self-portrait by Francis Baon
that was estimated at $40 million — went unsold without so much
as a bid. But other works brought prices that surprised even
Christie’s executives.
“In the
beginning we thought we were witnessing a gravity-defying
auction,” Edward Dolman, Christie’s chief executive, said after
the sale. “But it was disappointing not to sell the Bacon. There
were some good prices, but it’s inconsistent.”
The evening,
dominated by American buyers, brought $113.6 million, well below
its low estimate of $227 million. Of the 75 works on the block,
nearly one-third failed to sell.
Some works
that were considered overpriced sold — but for what buyers
wanted to pay, not what the house had envisioned.
After the
sale, dealers and collectors milled about trying to make sense
of the results. “The auction house may not have done well,” said
Allan Schwartzman, an art adviser, “but some collectors did.”
It all began with
Freud and Bacon...
She’s made a
bestselling career examining the mores of suburbia, but as
Shena
Mackay admits, her literary life started in the fleshpots of Soho
Rachel Cooke, The
Observer, Sunday November 9 2008
Mackay was born in
1944. Her father did a series of jobs, from miner to ship’s purser,
and was often away; his marriage to Mackay’s mother was mostly
unhappy. She wanted to be a writer early on, a poet preferably. 'It
was through reading, and loving words. I could read when I was
three.'
Shortly before she
left school — the family was living in Blackheath by this time and
Mackay was attending Kidbrooke comprehensive, which she hated — she
won a Daily Mirror poetry competition, judged by the likes of
Kathleen Raine. The prize was £25. 'It was a huge amount of money,
but because I was leaving school [she left with two O-levels], I had
to buy these boring clothes for my job as an office junior; it had
to be squandered on pleated skirts and cardigans.'
The job didn’t work
out but, soon after, she got another one, working in an antique shop
in Chancery Lane. This turned out to be life-changing, in its way.
The shop was owned by the parents of David Sylvester, the art
critic, with whom she later had an affair (he was the father of her
daughter, Cecily Brown, the artist). The Sylvesters’ son-in-law,
playwright Frank Marcus, who is probably best known for The
Killing of Sister George, worked there with her. It was Marcus
who encouraged her to keep at the novel she had begun writing. 'He
found me an agent. He had it typed out for me.'
David Sylvester,
meanwhile, introduced her to every painter you care to think of,
from Frank Auerbach to Jasper Johns. She would visit the Colony Room
Club in Soho with him, for nights out with Francis Bacon and Lucian
Freud. 'Yes, I did meet them, but I was a young girl and they were
middle-aged.' But she realised how famous they were? 'Oh, yeah. I
mean, I met Giacometti. I certainly realised who he was. Sometimes,
the impression is given that I used to hang out in the Colony Room.
But I didn’t really. They were David’s friends, not mine.
'Francis could be
scary. He could either be lovely or spiteful — though he was never
spiteful to me. He liked me, so that was all right. It was a great
time and I loved it, but at a certain point, that kind of life
becomes quite sad. I realised it was much more glamorous actually to
have a real life.'
Art world’s
after-hours haunt, the Colony Room, may be saved from closure
Jack Malvern,
The Times, November
8, 2008
The impending
closure of the Colony Room, the Soho drinking den patronised by
louche figures from the art world including Francis Bacon and Tracey
Emin, may be averted after an intervention by English Heritage.
The advisory body
is rushing through an inspection to determine whether the club,
which has witnessed 60 years of booze-soaked misbehaviour by some of
Britain’s most creative drunks, merits listed status.
The club is under
threat after Michael Wojas, its secretary and chief barman, said
that he would close it when he retires in March. He claims that the
lease is up, but members who wish to preserve the club are concerned
that he may have surrendered the lease without consulting them.
If English Heritage
is impressed, it will recommend to the Government that the club be
listed as culturally important. The final decision rests with
Barbara Follett, the Culture Minister.
Artists who are
campaigning to keep the Colony Room open believe that listed status
will help them to come to an arrangement with the landlord because
it would be harder to redevelop the premises.
The club, a
single-room venue founded to provide a refuge for members when the
pubs closed, has also received the support of Boris Johnson, the
Mayor of London, who wrote an open letter this week to Simon
Thurley, the head of English Heritage. “I hope that you would agree
that it is important for London to preserve venues and collections
that bring inspiration and artistic pleasure to local, national and
international visitors,” he wrote.
English Heritage
told The Times that the building must have architectural and
historical merit on a national scale. “We are aware that there are
development pressures on the building,” a spokeswoman said. “The
application has been pushed towards the top of the pile to be
considered. We are aware of the enthusiasm about the cultural
relevance of the building, and the people who are associated with
it.”
She said that an
inspection would take place within a fortnight.
Rosemarie MacQueen,
head of planning for Westminster City Council, said that if listed
status were granted it would be an important consideration if the
landlord attempted to change the building. “The Colony Room is
basically a room with a staircase,” she said. “The real interest is
20th-century culture. If it is listed, that is the thing you’re
trying to protect. Any application for change of use would have to
take that into consideration.”
The club has been a
regular haunt for artists and musicians including Lucian Freud,
Peter O’Toole, John Hurt, Sir Peter Blake, George Melly and Damien
Hirst.
Mr Wojas did not
respond to inquiries yesterday.
Boris Johnson moves
to save the Colony
The FIRST POST,
Wednesday November 5, 2008
London mayor Boris
Johnson is attempting to save one of the city’s seediest
cultural landmarks, the Colony Room Club in Soho, which is currently
under threat of closure. In a letter to the chairman of English
Heritage, Simon Thurley, Johnson pledges his
unequivocal support for the preservation of the drinking dive, once
the haunt of the painter Francis Bacon and in more
recent times Damien Hirst and his YBA (Young
British Artists) cronies, and calls for it to be listed.
"I write to you in
support of the campaign to prevent the iconic Colony Room Club from
possible closure," writes Boris. "The Colony is a unique and
important place for the capital both in terms of cultural and
architectural significance. It represents an important part of part
of London’s post-war cultural heritage... I hope that you would
agree that it is important for London to preserve venues and
collections that bring inspiration and artistic pleasure to local,
national and international visitors."
So why does it need
saving? As reported here, the club’s secretary and head barman, Michael
Wojas, announced he was closing the club in March. It later
transpired that Wojas had neglected to pay the rent on the premises
for several months and recently, to the astonishment of everyone
trying to save the place, he surrendered the lease to the landlord,
an act which effectively signed the 60-year-old club’s death
warrant.
In reaction to
this, the
members who want the club to survive — the Save The Colony Room
Campaign — are attempting to oust Wojas and the committee that
supports him at an annual general meeting today, a move they see as
regrettable but essential if they are to have any chance of saving
their beloved club from extinction.
"It’s a desperate
situation," says a member of the campaign team. "Michael Wojas will
probably win the vote at the AGM because he has been ringing old
members who know nothing about what he’s been up to.
"What’s
unbelievable is that he maintains he’s representing the interests of
the members. By closing the club? By handing over the lease? By not
paying the rent and flogging off the art works? I don’t think so."
Ah, the art works.
In September, Wojas put up for sale many of the Colony’s artworks,
raising some £40,000. This was allegedly to be his "pension pot".
But the Save the Colony Room Campaign said that many of these were
gifts to the club and so not Wojas’s to sell, a claim supported by
many of the donors. As a result of intense legal activity, the
campaign managed to have the proceeds from the auction, held by the
London firm Lyon and Turnbull, placed in an escrow account until
true title of ownership had been established.
Christie’s
The Modern Age: The
Collection of Alice Lawrence
5 - 6 November 2008
New York, Rockefeller Plaza
Lot 44/Sale 2255
Lucien Freud (b. 1922) Head of a Man
Head of a
Man 1966 Lucien Freud
Lot
Description
Lucian Freud (b.
1922)
Head of a Man
signed and dated 'Lucian F 1966' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
18¼ x 15 3/8 in. (46.4 x 39.1 cm.)
Painted in 1966
Estimate
$1,800,000 -
$2,500,000
Price Realized
$1,800,000 -
$2,500,000
Pre-Lot Text
The Collection of
Alice Lawrence
Provenance
Marlborough
Gallery, London.
Mr. H. J. Renton, London
His sale; Sotheby’s, London, 30 June 1988, lot 643.
Acquired at the above sale by the late owner.
Exhibited
London, Marlborough
Gallery, Lucian Freud: Recent Work, 1968, no. 12 (titled George
Dyer II).
Lot Notes
Painted in 1966, Head
of a Man is one of only two oil portraits by Lucian Freud of
George Dyer, the lover and companion of his friend and fellow artist
Francis Bacon. The picture dates from a period when Freud and Bacon
were seeing each other on an almost daily basis. Their friendship,
which had been struck up during the 1940s following their
introduction to each other by Graham Sutherland, was important to
both men on a personal and an artistic level. Freud and Dyer
featured in a great number of Bacon’s paintings. However, Bacon and
Dyer each appeared only in two of Freud’s oils (his 1952 portrait of
Bacon, formerly in the collection of the Tate, was stolen when on
exhibition in London), making Head of a Man an extremely rare
insight into their friendship.
Dyer has become one of the most legendary of Bacon’s friends and
companions; their relationship even inspired the 1998 film Love
Is the Devil, starring Daniel Craig and Derek Jacobi. Bacon,
himself an incorrigible spinner of exaggerated tales, claimed he had
caught Dyer, a petty criminal, in the act when he attempted to break
into the artist’s home, and that this marked the beginning of their
relationship. However, a more prosaic and more indicative
explanation of their first meeting was included in Michael Peppiatt’s biography of Bacon, who explained that in 1964:
I was drinking with John Deakin, who had just done some photographs
for me, and lots of others. George was down the far end of the bar
and he came over and said, You all seem to be having a good time.
Can I buy you a drink?' And that’s how I met him. I might never have
noticed him otherwise (Bacon, quoted in M. Peppiatt, Francis
Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 1999, p. 211).
Dyer had been brought up in a family that had a history of petty
crime, and it was in this vocation that he attempted to make his
way. He was caught often enough that he spent time first in borstals
as a young offender and then in prison. There was a physical
presence to the man that implied strength and violence, and this,
along with his crooked nose, has been captured in Freud’s Head of
a Man, where the sheer bulk of head and shoulders are
emphasised. This serves to highlight the sensitivity of the eyes and
facial expression which, according to memoirs, were often in stark
contrast to the gangster image that he tried to project, mimicking
the style of figures such as the Kray twins in his sharp suits and
thin ties.
From the point of Dyer’s first acquaintance with Bacon, he was
seldom out of his company, and came to figure in many of his
paintings too. Now Dyer, no longer actively embroiled in the
criminal fraternity that had formerly provided his milieu, was in
the company of a celebrated artist and bon vivant, a situation that
meant that he and his friends seldom lacked for alcohol or company.
Bacon’s own recollections about Dyer provide some insight into the
paradoxes and complexities of the man who tragically took his own
life on the eve of the painter’s 1971 retrospective in Paris:
His stealing at least gave him a raison d’être, even though
he wasn’t very successful at it and was always in and out of prison.
But it gave him something to think about. When George was inside,
he’d spend all his time planning what he would do when he came out.
And so on. I thought I was helping him when I took him out of that
life. I knew the next time he was caught he’d get a heavy sentence.
And I thought, well, life’s too short to spend half of it in prison.
But I was wrong, of course. He’d have been in and out of prison, but
at least he’d have been alive. He became totally impossible with
drink. The rest of the time, when he was sober, he could be terribly
engaging and gentle. He used to love being with children and
animals. I think he was a nicer person than me. He was more
compassionate. He was much too nice to be a crook. That was the
trouble. He only went in for stealing because he had been born into
it (Bacon, quoted in David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis
Bacon, London, 2000, p. 135).
The strange tension between Dyer’s criminality and his gentle,
tender side is in evidence in Head of a Man.
In Head of a Man, even the brushwork owed its existence in
part to the artistic relationship between Bacon and Freud. When they
had first met, and indeed into the 1950s, Freud had painted in a
meticulous style, usually seated at his easel, using extremely fine
sable-hair brushes. It was with some justification that Herbert Read
had referred to him as the "Ingres of Existentialism." However, in
the early 1950s, in part through a feeling of the constraints of
that style and influenced by Bacon’s own handling of paint, Freud
began to use larger brushes, standing behind his easel, allowing him
more movement, more gesture, and therefore resulting in pictures
that were more painterly, as is the case in Head of a Man.
"His work impressed me but his personality affected me," Freud has
explained of his relationship to Bacon.
It was through that and through talking to him a lot. He talked a
great deal about the paint itself carrying the form, and imbuing the
paint with a sort of life. He talked about packing a lot of things
into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me and I
realized it was a million miles from anything I could ever do
(Freud, quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, p.
321).
Within a short time, Freud had developed the virtuoso painterly
style for which he is so famed, and which is clear in the almost
organic way that he has built up the sense of flesh in Dyer’s
features in Head of a Man. There is a pulsing impression of
life, of vitality in the oils in this picture, that demonstrates his
insistence that, "I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not
like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them. I didn’t
want to get just a likeness like a mimic, but to portray them, like
an actor. As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want
it to work for me just as flesh does" (Freud, quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian
Freud, London, 1982, pp. 190-91). It is for this reason that
Freud continues to focus, in his portraiture, on those people who
form a part of his family or his circle, people whom he knows and
who can relax in front of him, while being scrutinized by him, for
long enough for the painting to be complete.
This sense of life, captured in oils, perhaps reveals some artistic
cousinship between Freud and the seventeenth-century Dutch painter
Frans Hals. Discussing Hals, Freud celebrated that vivid sense of
life that he managed to capture in his laughing cavaliers,
banqueters and revelers:
They still shock people very much. I remember Francis had a friend
called George (Dyer) who had never looked at any painting in his
life. He’d been a sort of lookout man, a very bad one, and he saw a
book of Hals, he looked at it and his face absolutely lit up. He
said what a marvelous idea making people look like that. He thought
they were modern. That’s right really. I mean they are all talking,
eating, grinning — I think of Shakespeare a bit - done from a kind
of detached (and not all that detached) wit and observation" (Freud,
quoted in Feaver, op.cit., 2007, p. 322).
In Head of a Man, while Dyer may not be talking, eating or
grinning, Freud has nonetheless captured a similarly vivid sense of
his subject’s life and character.
Top 100 Treasures
Roberta Maneker,
Art & Antiques, November 2008
If beauty is in the
eye of the beholder, then where does value lie? Ask the child who
tucks away a seashell as a souvenir of summer; or the flea market
hunter-gatherer who pays a pittance for antique pottery others are
ignoring; or the mutual fund manager who knows a stock’s worth can
change by the hour; or the Russian billionaire who has just plunked
down more than $80 million for a must-have trio of Francis Bacon’s
exquisite, anguished-expressionist canvases. Value is in the eyes,
hearts and minds of those who recognize and create it. While often
measured in dollars or rubles or euro or yen, in the art market, at
least, it’s this ineffable sense of the kind of appreciation certain
objects deserve that helps transform price-tagged objects into
inestimable, ever-more-desirable treasures.
2: Bringing Home
the Bacon
The Francis Bacon market is exploding. In 2007 alone, Bacon works at
auction brought more than $250 million. In May his monumental Triptych,
1976, painted in muted, if not lugubrious tones, became the most
expensive work of contemporary art sold publicly, bringing $86.3
million. It might, however, be a bargain per square inch: Each panel
measures approximately a staggering 6 by 5 feet. Sotheby’s announced
a European private buyer, but other sources named London-based
Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. —
R.M.
FRANCIS BACON
Les sublimes
tortures de Bacon
Les Échos, France,
Lundi 3 Novembre 2008
Rendez-vous à
Londres pour découvrir les aspects méconnus d’un peintre de génie et
de tourments.
A la Tate Britain,
jusqu’au 4 janvier.
tél. :
00.44.207.887.88.88.
Faire sienne
l’histoire de l’art pour être capable de créer une nouvelle
peinture... Tout comme Picasso, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) puisa dans
le répertoire classique de la peinture. Mais, contrairement à son
aîné espagnol, l’Irlandais de Londres s’intéressait plutôt aux
reproductions des oeuvres, comme s’il redoutait la puissance du
contact avec la toile. Jusqu’au 4 janvier, la Tate Britain le montre
sous un jour inédit. Une rétrospective magistrale qui met en exergue
des toiles moins connues et les dernières recherches issues de
l’étude de son lieu de travail.
Une des grandes
obsessions de Bacon est une reproduction qu’il possédait en
plusieurs exemplaires du pape Innocent X, peint par Vélasquez en
1650, aujourd’hui conservé à la galerie Doria Pamphilij de Rome.
Selon l’ami du peintre et historien Michael Peppiatt, Bacon a peint
pas moins de 45 Papes entre 1949 et 1971. Mais il n’a jamais
cherché à voir la toile de Vélasquez, même lors de son passage à
Rome.
Dévoreur de
photographies
En homme du XXe
siècle, il était un dévoreur de photographies. Les images jonchaient
le sol de son atelier de Londres. C’est cette matière première
assemblée par une sensibilité tourmentée, agrémentée d’un sens des
couleurs hors du commun - il avait exercé dans sa jeunesse le métier
de décorateur -, qui donne corps à l’oeuvre de Francis Bacon.
A la Tate Britain,
l’espace a été divisé en thématiques pour ouvrir les yeux du
spectateur sur des points clefs de son langage. La première abordée,
celle de l’animal, est un leitmotiv dans sa création. Montrer
l’aspect le plus sauvage de l’être humain, c’est produire des corps
torturés et tordus, des visages déformés par des cris infinis. En
1944, il crée Trois études pour personnages de la crucifixion reconnues
comme son premier chef-d’oeuvre. Sur un fond orange, un être
surréaliste en gris dont émerge un cou tendu et une énorme bouche.
Le catalogue de l’exposition explique que cette imagerie de l’homme
bestial est puisée dans un fonds de photos qui est disposé dans le
studio de l’artiste et qui mélange des reproductions de Vélasquez,
Grünewald, Rodin et aussi des photos de leaders nazis comme Joseph
Goebbels en train de discourir.
Une des
caractéristiques fortes de la peinture de Bacon consiste aussi à
circonscrire un champ de vision au sein de la toile. C’est au sujet
de cette « zone » qu’est consacrée une partie de l’exposition. Etude
de chien de 1952 est une toile dépouillée au centre de laquelle
figure l’animal. Il est dans un cercle délimité par une ligne verte,
lui-même situé dans un polygone bordé de orange. Bacon explique
qu’il a puisé l’idée de zone dans son expérience de décorateur et
qu’elle permet d’extraire le sujet de son environnement naturel.
Etudes et soirs
d’ivresse
Crucifixion : voilà
un thème prisé par le peintre masochiste. De la viande, du sang, de
la douleur... une véritable boucherie, comme dans les « Trois études
pour une crucifixion » de 1962. L’ensemble est saturé de teintes
fortes mises au service du drame. Le sol est orange, les murs rouges
en contraste avec des formes géométriques noires. Les études faites
autour de cette peinture, réalisée un soir de désespoir et d’ivresse,
montrent l’influence des Demoiselles d’Avignon, de Picasso,
du crucifix de Cimabue à l’église Santa Croce de Florence, mais
aussi d’une photo de Mussolini pendu par les pieds, prise après sa
mort.
Une salle entière
de la Tate Britain explique comment le peintre fait usage des
images. L’étude du mouvement en photographie par Muybridge à la fin
du XIXe siècle se retrouve dans sa peinture, tout comme un portrait
photo d’Isabel Rawsthorne debout dans une rue de Soho dont le visage
va être consciencieusement déformé et replacé au sein d’une sorte
d’arène cerclée de bleu roi. En 1981, Bacon écrivait à l’écrivain
français Michel Leiris : « Nous sommes forcés d’inventer des méthodes par lesquelles la réalité peut prendre le dessus sur notre
système nerveux d’une manière nouvelle qui permette néanmoins de ne
pas perdre la vision objective du modèle. »
JUDITH
BENHAMOU-HUET
Own a Francis
Bacon? We’ll Pay You $$!
Sotheby’s, lender
of last resort.
Alexandra Peers,
New York Magazine, November 2, 2008
One art-world business is booming: collectors looking to
borrow against works they own, especially before the fall sales
threaten to lower values. “We’ve been contacted by lots of people
who are feeling some sort of margin call,” says Sotheby’s CEO, Bill
Ruprecht. Other lenders have virtually stopped lending against art
recently, but Ruprecht says Sotheby’s is still “very comfortable”
doing so. (At 2007’s end, the auction house had $176.4 million
loaned out; by the middle of this year, it was $212 million.)
Tobias Meyer,
who runs the contemporary-art department, says he’s also seeing more
“consignment advances”—sellers agreeing to put their art on the
block and getting some money up front. But he’s also finding owners
disappointed by their holdings’ worth. “Just because we sold a
great, rare $80 million Francis Bacon, everyone with a Bacon thinks
theirs is worth $40 million,” he says. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Francis Bacon, Tate
Britain, London
JOHN McAULIFFE |
EXHIBITIONS | REVIEWS | THE MANCHESTER REVIEW | NOVEMBER 2008
Francis Bacon is
presented, in his third Tate Britain retrospective, as a
straightforwardly thematic painter: the exhibition’s ten
chronologically-arranged rooms consistently refer the viewer to the
Cold War, World War 2, the illegality of homosexuality, the decline
of organised religion. Although Bacon regularly objected to any
narrative readings of individual paintings, he becomes here the
story of the twentieth century. It is a stultifying narrative and
it represses the strangeness of the paintings, replacing them with a
story which could be applied to many of his contemporaries.
The most shocking
painting in the exhibition, and one which confounds its narrative,
is his wild, luridly expressionist study of Van Gogh, who appears as
a conventional figure in a landscape in a painting based on Van
Gogh’s ‘The Painter on the Road to Tarascon’ (a painting destroyed
in the bombing of Dresden). Its meshing of colours, its absence of
a contrasted overlaid commentary or of cut-up, delineated spaces
make it seem more like the work of a contemporary like Sydney Nolan.
It is also the show’s one variation on Bacon’s basic, aggressive and
confrontational style.
Elsewhere the
exhibition covers familiar ground: the brilliant glaring orange
spaces in which his triptychs play out, the way he consistently
isolates his ‘sitters’ on a chair or stool or toilet bowl. Lenin
wrote that ‘the future of aesthetics will be ethics’, but Bacon
refuses this dictum, taking the abstract aesthetic patterns of arcs
and circles from Kandinsky and Matisse and plastering them with
fleshy wounds: the symmetries remain but Bacon’s flashy colours make
it hard to look away from his often grotesque subjects. Sometimes
Bacon rubs our noses in his aestheticism, but there is sentiment and
even pathos in some of the paintings of George Dyer. In one, he
cycles a bike, his face a mask as the wheel wobbles away from its
skeletal frame. But Bacon explodes this mildly comical scene by
sprouting from his head, in a whirl of pinks, a calm
all-seeing eye, granting his subject a vantage point for once.
Bacon’s interest in
TS Eliot’s early satires and in Aeschylus’s Furies is documented in
the notes to the paintings, but their regular focus on a single
orifice may have another, more contemporary literary source. The
early work’s insistence on the mouth as its central still and
clarifying image responds to WH Auden’s definition of his art as ‘a
way of happening, a mouth’. In the later work, the mouth is
displaced by meaty, bacony twists of flesh and by the bright red
arrows he aimed at his subjects. The most impressive of these
familiar paintings are the triptychs for, again, George Dyer whose
crude shadows and spilled flesh act as a powerful elegy for Bacon’s
partner.
The show has its
moments but does not add much, or detract from, Bacon’s reputation.
It is also disappointingly silent on Bacon’s artistic context and
future. It does include a room devoted to Eadweard Muybridge’s early
photographs, but Bacon’s kinetic manipulation and juxtaposition of
these sequential frames is a well-known story. Maybe Bacon’s
work is too narrow and limited, but there are signs here that he
could be usefully seen in the swim of the art of his time, in
relation to the abstract painters whose work he professed to loathe,
to David Hockney’s post-photographic work, or to the collage which
his Britart successors use to follow his example in shocking their
public.
AGONY AND PLEASURE:
FRANCIS
BACON’S RETROSPECTIVE AT TATE BRITAIN
(September 2008-January
2009)
By BEATRIZ
ACEVEDO | REVIEW | NOTEWORK | NOVEMBER 2008
Francis
Bacon has been regarded as one of the most important artists of
the Twentieth Century and even now his work does not cease to
produce questions, reactions and controversy. The retrospective
of his work at Tate Britain provides a unique opportunity to
grasp at the power of his oeuvre and to experience the
fascination that it exerts on the viewer. Bacon’s experiences
were shaped by the whole Twentieth Century: he was born on
October 28,1909 in Dublin, and he was brought up in the shadow
of the First World War, he also witnessed the horrors of the
Second World War. The experiences of these two wars, and the
subsequent changes in the world during the century, may explain
the most common reactions to his work: the violence, the horror,
and the brutal. For many, Bacon’s work conveys all these
adjectives; however, his work is more complex than a first sight
of his paintings may show.
For the
spectator, the sensation of being shocked, marvelled or
horrified is part of the fascination exerted by Bacon’s
paintings. As the artist stated, his intention was to make an
impact on ‘the nervous system more violently and more
poignantly’2,
and he used the human figure as the main weapon for his mission.
Although Bacon did not attend any formal education, his genius
developed by following some of the most important trends of the
earlier Twentieth Century: the work of Picasso and the
Surrealists. His own life is the big canvass of emotions,
experiences, pain and enjoyment, and although he would prefer
that we separate his paintings from his personal life, it is
undeniable that his work conveys the emotions of the modern man:
the anxiety and the pleasure, the question of life and the
presence of death, and the co-existing forces of Eros and
Thanatos.
The
exhibition is organised in ten rooms, covering certain
historical periods in his work. In doing so, the curators aimed
to show some echoes and dialogues amongst his paintings. Since
Bacon was a fierce critique of his own work and he is famous for
the amount of work that he destroyed when unpleased with it,
hence, very few paintings from the earlier period (stemming from
the 1930s) are exhibited here. Some of the survival paintings of
his earlier period are grouped in the first room, titled Animal.
Bacon’s concern with the bestial nature of human beings is
largely explored in this first group of paintings painted during
the 1940s: the scream, the pain and the convulsions of the
flesh. In particular, the series of ‘Heads’ announce the seeds
of further developments in Bacon’s work. For example, in Head I,
the emphasis is put on the corporeity of the ‘head’, while only
the open mouth with the carefully painted teeth suggests the
singularity of a deaf scream.
As noted by
Chris Stephens, one of the curators of the exhibition, in the Heads (Head
I and Head II) ‘these details add a disquieting
reminder of the figure’s humanity while the contrast of their
stillness with the dynamism of the mouth makes it seem as if the
figure is possessed, taken over by this animal force’ (Stephens,
2008: 94). However, it is not very clear if the figure is
screaming or gasping for air, and here Bacon in his
conversations with David Sylvester revealed his original
intentions: “I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror.”
The anxiety of the scream, the threshold between the sound and
the total deafness of this gesture, and the conveyance of
internal forces governing the flesh became common topics in
Bacon’s future works. For Deleuze, the scream in Bacon
establishes a relationship between the visibility of the scream
(the open mouth as a shadowy abyss) and invisible forces, which
are nothing other than the forces of the future (2003: 43).
In this
group of paintings some of the most important elements in
Bacon’s language start to appear. In particular, the Painting
1946, can be considered as the prototype for further
developments in Bacon’s work: here a dominant male figure
emerges, black tie and coat, yet, only his mouth in the gesture
of the scream is carefully revealed. His physical features are
crowned by an umbrella – the suggestion of a big bird with black
wings – and the Figure is flanked by a couple of fleshy
carcasses part bone, part dead meat in brilliant tones. The
Figure is sustained by a tubular structure, and it stands out in
a bright field of pink colour. It is said that Bacon based his
Figure on some pictures of Nazi leaders, and the thick neck
suggest the gestures of Mussolini. Nevertheless, Bacon wished to
distance himself from the specificity of the Nazi references to
something more universal in which the sense of threat and
brutality had been distilled (Stephens, 2008: 92).
The image of
authoritarian figures and leaders inspired many of Bacon’s
paintings. In this room we can appreciate an early
interpretation of Velázquez’s painting of the Pope Innocent X,
titled Head VI (1949). As noted by Peppiatt: ‘in
paraphrasing the Velázquez portrait, Bacon strikes not only at
the highest personification of spiritual power, but also at the
grandeur of the Western tradition of art’ (1996: 64). His
poignant reinterpretation of Velázquez’s Pope can be also
understood in relation to the influence of the surrealist spirit
in transforming pieces of art, such as Duchamp’s moustache on
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa thereby situating Bacon’s
screaming Pope. Other explanations can be drawn from his
difficult relationship with his father (Pope or Papa-Dad) or his
disdain for the catholic religion.
The point
here is to appreciate how Bacon’s painting of the Pope explores
the depths of authority and leadership. Whereas in Velázquez’s
painting the Pope appeared both regal, serene and cruel, Bacon’s
explored the isolation conferred by his authority. By confining
the Figure within the limits of a chair, and surrounded by a
shuttered wall, a curtain, or a white parallelepiped, the Pope
is isolated and somehow incarcerated. The Pope’s fists cling
recklessly to the chair and this produces a sensation of both
frailty and contained anger, while his screaming mouth
oscillates between the agony and the fury. As developed by
Deleuze: “Innocent X screams, but he screams behind the curtain,
not only as someone who can no longer be seen, but as someone
who cannot see, who has nothing left to see, whose only
remaining function is to render visible these invisible forces
that are making him scream, these powers of the future.”
(Deleuze, 2003: 42)
In the view
of his contemporaries, Bacon’s use of religious symbolism and
the exploration of the human figure contradicted the artistic
tendency toward abstractionism and conceptual art. While artists
around the world were engaged in the exploration of abstract art
– in particular the Abstract Expressionism and the playful
potentialities of the Pop Art – Bacon followed a different
route. He broke with figuration, but at the same time, he used
the figure to accomplish his aim. His work “it is not
impressionism, not expressionism, not symbolism, not cubism, not
abstraction (…) Never (except perhaps in the case of
Michelangelo) has anyone broken with figuration by elevating the
Figure to such prominence.” (Deleuze, 2003: xiv)
During the
1950s and 1960s, Bacon had completed the basic elements in his
work: (1) the Figure, not as narration or illustration, but as a
Figure in motion, or transformation; (2) the place in which the
Figure is located, normally a chair, a ring or inside a
geometrical figure of ice; (3) and the field of colour (Deleuze,
2003). These pictorial elements aim to stretch the Figure toward
more sensational (in terms of heightened sensations) effects
while avoiding the ‘representation’ or the ‘description’ of an
scene or an event. As Bacon remarked: “A picture should be a
re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an
object: but there is no tension in the figure unless there is
the struggle with the object.”3 The
second room in the exhibition is called Zone and a number of
examples concerning the creation of fields, places and figures
as ‘matters of fact’ (using Deleuze’s words) are presented here.
By the 1950s
Bacon’s work developed in amidst his hectic life and sexual
explorations around London during the postwar years. The next
room in the exhibition refers to this feeling as Apprehension: a
number of paintings and studies for Figures, amongst them the
series of the “Man in Blue”. These men are dressed as
‘executives’ or ‘business men’ although they look anonymous and
innocuous. For example, in the Man in Blue IV the figure
seems to sink in the depths of darkness and obscurity. Like the
Popes, the businessmen are depicted as figures of authority, yet
vulnerable and solitary (Stephens, 2008: 122).
Bacon’s
obsession with religion and authority appears intermittently in
his paintings. The series of Crucifixions reveal the many ways
in which the artist approached this classic theme. He was not
attempting to re-create a religious message, nor was he
interested in challenging it. For Bacon, the crucifixion can be
understood as an act of violence; and it is related to his
concern about the bestiality of human beings. He developed his
crucifixions by focusing on the fleshy characteristics of the
subject. As he asserted, “Well, of course, we are meat, 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’4.
For many, the reference to the Crucifixion can be understood
within the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Notwithstanding, the first painting of the Crucifixion came from
the earlier period of the painter and it was this painting which
put Bacon in the map of artists in Britain.5.
Almost ten
years later, the same topic is depicted in the Triptych format,
also exhibited in this retrospective. Here we find the famous: Three
Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)
which is one of the jewels owned by the Tate Gallery (normally
exhibited at Tate Modern on the Southbank). It consists of three
paintings connected by a bright field painted in orange. On the
central panel there is this ambiguous form, like an embryo, from
which only an opened mouth appears – savaging and devouring –
covered by a blanket (it looks more like a phallic figure –
maybe a penis dentata?) in an orange background limited by
angles. Because of the date of this painting, the second version
of the Crucifixion has been linked to the horrors of the
holocaust as an apocalyptic vision of the world although heavily
influenced by the political responsibility of the artist
illustrated by Picasso’s Guernica (exhibited in London in 1938).
Guernica showed how the formal language of modernism could frame
a response to contemporary events (Gale, 2008: 139). Bacon’s
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of Crucifixion goes beyond
the depiction of a single episode by denouncing the ongoing
nightmare.
Further
versions of the Crucifixion are produced in 1962 and 1965. In Three
Studies for A crucifixion (1962), and Crucifixion (1965),
the main elements of Bacon’s language reached their maturity:
the format of the triptych; the treatment, dissection and
isolation of the figure; and the large fields of colour. In
Deleuze’s brilliant analysis of Bacon’s work, these are the
three fundamental elements in his painting: “the material
structure, the round contour and the raised image. If we think
in sculptural terms, we would have to say: the armature; the
pedestal, which would be mobile; and the Figure, which would
move along the armature together with the pedestal.” (Deleuze,
2003: 4).
These
paintings became Bacon’s platform as a recognised artist and
then his life changed. From living on a sort of roller coaster,
hardly making means to meet ends (and yet indulging in drinks,
parties and gambling), he found himself with a disposable
income. Immersed in the chaotic relationship with his lover
Peter Lacy, he travelled around Europe and North Africa engaging
in compulsive gambling in cities such as Monte Carlo while
trying to paint under different lights either in Tangier or in
the South of France. Different experiments marked this period:
coupled figures, interpretations of Van Gogh’s paintings and
more expressive and colourful paintings are grouped in the
exhibition in the room titled Crisis. Although in this new
situation he was able to afford bigger premises, he kept the
smaller atelier at the Reece Mews (London) as his favourite
place for painting. An interesting feature of this exhibition is
the ‘archaeology’ of his studio in which many objects, pictures,
photographs and books may help to re-construct the creative
laboratory of the artist. Amongst the objects shown in the
‘Archive’ room were: magazines with photographs of Nazi leaders;
a medical document about mouth diseases; the studies of
Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion; books with
reproductions of his admired Velázquez; plentiful pictures from
newspapers, sport magazines; and photos of friends, lovers and
models.
Bacon relied
on reproductions and pictures as the first step for most of his
paintings. For instance, in the portraits of friends he
preferred to rely on the picture rather than painting directly
from the model. For him, photography has taken over the
illustrative and documentary role so that modern painting no
longer needs to fulfil this function. The challenge consists of
extracting the Figure from the figurative and to overcome the
descriptive or illustrative aspects of painting. He insisted on
the fact that his paintings were not describing violent acts,
neither were they trying to tell a story. Instead, what Bacon
aimed was to convey the emotion behind the act, the horror prior
to the scream, the convulsion of the body in anticipation of the
movement.
To this aim,
the combination of the three mentioned elements in Bacon’s
paintings make sense: the large fields as a spatializing
material structure; the Figure, the Figures and their fact; and
the place – that is the round area, the ring, or the contour
which is the common limit of the Figure and the field. Within
the round area, the Figure is sitting on a chair, lying on the
bed and sometimes it evens seems to be waiting for what is about
to happen. But what is happening, or is about to happen, or has
already happened is not a spectacle or a representation
(Deleuze, 2003: 9). By isolating the Figure, Bacon attempted to
condense the movement, the impulse and the emotion even before
their materialisation. As argued by Deleuze: “the Figure is the
sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately upon
the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form
is addressed to the head, and acts through the intermediary of
the brain, which is closer to the bone” (p. 10). This complex
mechanism may explain why Bacon’s painting impacts directly on
our ‘nervous system’ and thus the conflicting sensations of
agony and pleasure, anguish and convulsion, coexisting in the
experience of seeing his paintings.
In the last
rooms of the exhibition the dramatism of Bacon’s pictorial
language appears more clearly. In the room called Epic, the
format of the triptych reaches exquisite powers since the
figures express drama, tragedy, and in some cases, abandon and
pleasure. Furthermore, in the series of Portraits, Bacon aimed
to reinvent portraiture in the age of the camera; he sought ‘to
distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the
distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance’6.
The portraits of his friend, Isabelle Rawsthorne, convey the
vision of a strong woman with a huge personality and charisma.
As explained by Chris Stephens, the idea that an individual
might be used by Bacon as the vehicle for certain aspects of the
human condition seems especially evident in the paintings of
George Dyer. Dyer, who became Bacon’s lover in 1963, had strong
masculine features as his attire resembled that of a ‘gangster’
in East End London. In contrast, Bacon’s numerous portraits of
Dyer suggest a fragile and sometimes comical individual. In the Portrait
of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle (1966), the figure is
silhouetted in fair depiction of the model and although the
physical features of the face are distorted, the viewer can see
the absurdity of his situation: riding in circles, heading for
nowhere, chasing a shadow… unfortunately, this painting somehow
anticipates Dyer’s tragic end.
By that
time, Bacon had reached worldwide fame reinforced by the
Retrospective at the Grand Palais of Arts in Paris in 1971. Ten
years earlier, the exhibition of his work at Tate Gallery
elevated Bacon as one of the most important British artists and
this exhibition in Paris expanded his success. This was,
however, a year of contrasts: in April his mother died in South
Africa and another tragedy was looming over him. The evening
before the triumphal exhibition at the Grand Palais while Bacon
was busy with preparations – hanging paintings and sorting out
the details of the night in which the President of France would
open the ceremony – George Dyer committed suicide and his body
was found in the room that he and Bacon shared. Not
surprisingly, the events impacted Bacon deeply. As a way of
grieving, Bacon embarked on a number of triptychs collected in
the room Memorial. Amongst them, the Triptych in Memory of
George Dyer (1971) brings to mind the scene of Dyer’s death:
on the central panel a man opens a door, the key is just being
removed from the keyhole, it is late at night as evidenced by a
solitary light bulb at the top of the staircase; on the floor
the cryptic typos of a newspaper sink into the strong red blood
colour of the field. The rest of the canvas is painted in bright
colours of lilac and pink which relate to the fields in the
other two panels.
On the left
panel, the convulsive yet athletic figure of a man lingers
alongside a curve, a shadow pending on his existence. Bacon has
often said that in the domain of the Figures, the shadow has as
much presence as the body; but the shadow acquires this presence
only because it escapes from the body. The shadow is the body
that has escaped form through some localised point in the
contour (Deleuze, 2003: 12). On the right panel, it is the
figure of Dyer in a thick mirror, on the reflecting pair, the
drop of life spilling carefully on the canvas. The use of
mirrors represents another of the pictorial elements in Bacon’s
work. As observed by Deleuze: “Bacon’s mirrors can be anything
you like – except a reflecting surface. The mirror is an opaque
and sometimes black thickness. Bacon does not experience the
mirror in the same way as Lewis Carroll. The body enters the
mirror and lodges itself inside it, itself and its shadow. Hence
the fascination: nothing is behind the mirror, everything is
inside. The body seems to elongate, flatten, or stretch itself
out in the mirror, just as it contracted itself by going through
the hole (Deleuze, 2003: 13).”
In general,
the series of triptychs in the Memorial room are both haunting
and remarkable. The fields of colours, the void of obscurity,
the body in movement (in anticipation of death or pleasure), the
shadows and the living flesh produces a long-lasting effect in
the viewer. For instance, in Triptych May-June 1973 the
treatment of the figure reveals Bacon’s heightened artistic
powers. In this triptych, it is possible to imagine the last
moments in Dyer’s life: the agonic figure crawling to the
bathroom, clinging to the toilet, devoured by the dark void of
death. The Figure is moving, yet it is fixed in a point; there
is emotion, but there is also agony. The body is the focal
point, but as in all his work, brushing or scrubbing deforms the
features so the tones are subtle and alive. As argued by Deleuze,
Bacon’s Figures represent one of the most marvellous responses
in the history of painting to the question: ‘How can one make
invisible forces visible? (…) Bodies and heads in Bacon’
paintings can look as deformations but they are not tortures,
despite appearances. On the contrary, they are the most natural
postures of a body that has been reorganised by the simple force
being exerted upon it: the desire to sleep, to vomit, to
turnover, to remain seated as long as possible.” (Deleuze, 2003:
42-43)
After almost
eight decades of life, Bacon’s late paintings return to the
common themes: new interpretations of the crucifixion such as
the Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988), as well as a
number of self-portraits. A general refinement of composition
and expression is evident in the late paintings (Tant, 2008:
231). Getting to the end of the exhibition, I feel both isolated
and stimulated. In fact, this is my third view of Bacon’s work.
The first time was in March 2001 in the Netherlands when a small
collection of his work was presented at the Gemeentenmuseum in
The Hague where I made notes and drawings from this first
encounter that I still keep. Whereas in The Hague I was
fascinated with the colours and the effects of the skin, the
movement and the passion; in London, I have been impressed by
the complexity and depth of his work: the subtle qualities of
movement, the dramatic scenes, his experience of war and the
ambiguous sensations of pleasure and horror.
What is
really remarkable about this exhibition is the opportunity to
experience the power of Bacon’s imagery and the innovations of
his treatment of the Figure. This Retrospective is the
opportunity to go beyond appearances and prejudices, to embark
into a solitary journey of reflection and sensation: to scream
in silence, to agonise in joy, to vibrate in colours whilst
touching the void, to live at the brink of a disaster. Although
Bacon’s life and work referred to the last century, echoes of
his paintings are still relevant today.
As Kenneth
Clarke describes, he is ‘the interpreter of our contemporary
nightmare’7.
Bacon’s reminder of the ubiquitous disaster – evidenced in the
latest worldwide financial crisis – of the horrors of human
actions in a world without hope but driven by religious
fundamentalism are ever-present in the works exhibited in this
retrospective and demonstrate the perpetual power and relevance
of his paintings. Although this review is a futile attempt to
bring all the grandiosity of Bacon’s work together, it provides
an invitation to forget everything you read and experience, this
wonderful Retrospective
REFERENCES:
Deleuze,
Giles (2003) Francis Bacon. Original Title: Francis Bacon:
Logique de la Sensation. Translation by Daniel W. Smith.
Continuum: London
Gale,
Matthew and Stephens, Chris (Editors) (2008) Francis Bacon.
Catalogue Exhibition, Tate Publishing: London
Sylvester,
David (1993) Interviews with Francis Bacon. London, 1975.
Enlarged 1980, revised as “The Brutality of Fact: Interviews
with Francis Bacon” 1990, 4th Ed. As “Interviews with Francis
Bacon”, 1993 Thames and Hudson: London
Peppiatt,
Michael (1998) Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. The
Orion Publishing Group: London

Study after Velazquez,
1950
Bacon in close focus
Rebecca Daniels praises the curators’ discriminating selection of
works in Tate’s impressive Bacon exhibition.
REBECCA DANIELS | APOLLO | 1
NOVEMBER 2008
Despite claims that the Tate’s Francis Bacon exhibition is the
biggest retrospective of him ever staged, it is, in fact,
substantially smaller than the gallery’s 1985 show. However, the
decision to be more selective has resulted in a very high-quality
exhibition. It is really a celebration of Bacon’s larger paintings
and the few smaller works included, such as Study for Head of
George Dyer (1967; private collection), tend to be
over-shadowed. The focus on large-scale works is justified given the
crowds likely to flock to this show and the paintings have been
generously spaced, maximising the chances for an unimpaired view of
them.
This is particularly apparent in the opening room, which is hung
with only seven works, introducing the paintings that Bacon
completed after Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion (around 1944; Tate). The absence of that seminal
work from Room 1 (it is included in a later room devoted to the
Crucifixion) prevents the viewer from appreciating it as Bacon
subsequently intended: he made clear that it was the painting that
launched his career and anything he completed prior to it should be
destroyed. Also missing, undoubtedly due to its fragile condition,
is Painting 1946 (1946; Museum of Modern Art, New York), a work that
held a lifelong importance for Bacon. These exclusions from Room I
highlight the fact that this is the first exhibition held here since
Bacon died and, without the control he exercised over the previous
Tate show, the curators have had a new freedom in the presentation
and reassessment of his art.
There are two principal thematic detours from what is a loosely
chronological hang, and these provide the most dramatic and visually
powerful displays in the exhibition. The first features Bacon’s
recurring preoccupation with the theme of the Crucifixion, the
earliest version being the haunting Crucifixion (1933,
Murderme, London), which Herbert Read illustrated in Art Now (1933),
when Bacon was unknown. Bacon’s art is often characterised as
violent and brutal but, with a few exceptions, this does not hold up
under analysis. However, the Crucifixion triptychs are indeed
violent, as the exhibition’s curator Chris Stephens noted in a BBC
interview, and the decision by him and his co-curator, Matthew Gale,
to hang Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962; Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York) and Crucifixion (1965;
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Fig. 2) facing each other, as if in
gladiatorial combat, is inspired.
A source for the mutilated bodies that appear in both the 1962 and
the 1965 Crucifixion paintings is probably, as Martin Harrison has
observed in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, an
illustration in a book Bacon owned, The True Aspects of the Algerian
Revolution (1957). The prominence of carcasses in both triptychs was
prompted by a feature on abattoirs in Paris Match in November 1961
(which was found in Bacon’s studio). Furthermore, the controversial
inclusion of a swastika in the 1965 Crucifixion was influenced by
photographs of Hitler and his entourage. Therefore, the inspiration
for the motifs in these important triptychs is drawn, as in so much
of Bacon’s art, from magazines, newspapers and books. Yet, despite
the importance of this material, several reviewers have denounced
the exhibitions inclusion of a room devoted to archival material as
a distraction from the paintings. To me, the archive room enhances
the experience of Bacon’s work, as it adds to an understanding of
Bacon’s preparatory methods in the same way that Michelangelo’s
preliminary studies (incidentally a major source of inspiration to
Bacon) enhance an understanding of his finished frescoes.
The second thematic room, 'Memorial', is devoted to triptychs of
George Dyer, Bacon’s lover and muse. The three large triptychs were
all completed in the years following Dyer’s death in October 1971.
The first, Triptych - In memory of George Dyer (1971; Fondation
Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; Fig. 1) is unusual in Bacon’s oeuvre as it
appears to illustrate episodes in Dyer’s life, while Triptych,
May-June 1973 (1973; private collection, Switzerland) recalls events
of his lonely suicide by graphically showing him vomiting in a sink
in one panel and in another slumped on a toilet (where he was found
dead). Despite Bacon’s dislike of narrative interpretation, these
triptychs seem to encourage a biographical reading, an approach that
the curators have invited by collecting these works under the
heading 'Memorial'.
While it is tempting to analyse these works solely as a sentimental
and nostalgic pining for lost love — and there is undoubtedly an
element of that poignantly expressed in Bacon’s diary on 24 October
1972 ('George died a year today') — it must also be remembered that
shortly before his death Dyer had planted drugs in Bacon’s studio,
leading to Bacon’s arrest and trial only four months before Dyer’s
suicide. It is perhaps because such complex personal emotions
underlie these works that Bacon, unusually, has been unable to
frustrate a narrative reading of his works.
Bacon’s penchant for painting in themes is well represented and
there is a good selection of popes, businessmen, crouching figures
and animal paintings. The decision to hang the paintings at an
extremely low level (often just above the skirting boards) enables
the viewer to examine the variations in Bacon’s application of
paint. Nowhere is this more marked than in Head II (1949; Ulster
Museum, Belfast; Fig. 3), where the top half of the canvas has paint
so thick that it seems impenetrable (Bacon was trying to capture the
effect of rhinoceros skin) but the lower left is just raw canvas
(revealing also that Bacon painted on the unprimed side of the
canvas). Subtle nuances in technique and colour can be appreciated
with the low hang of the series works, particularly of the Popes,
where the marked differences in such compositional elements as the
'space frames', curtains or 'shuttering' and the depiction of the
throne are worthy of close attention.
The one problematic aspect of the hang is the decision to break up
the series paintings, particularly the crouching figures, which are
displayed over several different rooms and therefore offer no chance
to view them comparatively. Nevertheless, in the case of the
businessmen
—
which are all hung in one room
—
interspersing them
with animal paintings forces one to view them independently of each
other, and subtle differences appeared that I had not noticed
before. The exhibition also has a wonderful range of Bacon’s
important late works, particularly a room filled predominantly with
triptychs from the 1960s to 1980s, including Triptych (1976; private
collection), which was recently sold in London for the highest price
ever paid for a post-war work of art.
The quality and range of the works on display provide an opportunity
to show Bacon at his best to a new generation too young to have seen
the 1985 show. I left the exhibition feeling, as one should,
visually exhausted but exhilarated.
Rebecca Daniels is a researcher on Francis Bacon: The Catalogue
Raisonne.
Francis Bacon,
Urbanist, at Tate Britain
Ken Livingstone,
Joseph Rykwert and others discuss art and architecture.
Text by Ned Beauman
| Dazed Digital | 31 October 2008
Would Francis Bacon
prefer the London of today to the London he actually grew up in?
That was the question posed last week at the second of two
Architecture Foundation panels at Tate Britain, this time featuring
architects Nigel Coates and Denise Scott Brown, critics Joe Kerr and
Joseph Rykwert, and former mayor Ken Livingstone.
Londoners, argued Coates in his opening keynote, often feel a great
excitement about the fact that the city decays faster than it can be
rebuilt, and Bacon’s attraction to the “entropic aspects” of cities
comes through clearly in his paintings. So does his attraction to
cramped, crowded places – pubs, butcher shops, boxing matches and
back alleys – all of which anticipate the claustrophobic spaces he
put down on canvas. Also influential were the possibility of
impending doom that characterised much of the 1950s, and a certain
disillusionment about the concrete sterility of what was being
thrown up to repair the destruction of the Blitz.
In the clean, safe, prosperous modern London, of course, all that
darkness is mostly gone, but the sterility is still here, simply
transfigured from concrete into glass and steel. Kerr drew a
parallel between the way that, in the Thatcher era, the city became
predictable and therefore lost a certain complex, inscrutable
eroticism, and the way that, after the passage of the Wolfenden Act
that liberalised homosexuality, gay people were no longer driven
into the small, dark, weird spaces that many of them came to relish.
But is it dangerous to be nostalgic about a vanished London? Yes,
said Rykwert: every generation thinks that London isn’t as good as
it was.
Ken Livingstone, addressing this issue, described himself as an
‘urban chauvinist’, for whom cities are all that really matter. He
argued that the post-war Abercrombie plan to reduce the population
of London to five and a half million would have led to a horribly
dull capital, and that, although today’s London may have lost some
of its looseness, it is at least full of human diversity, which
Bacon would have appreciated; and the real challenge for cities like
Shanghai and Mumbai is to be open to population change, as well as
population growth. Livingstone admitted, however, that there is one
aspect of modern London that he’s glad he didn’t grow up with: “None
of us had our own flat or our own car, so thank god there was no
CCTV in alleys back then or we all would have been 25-year-old
virgins.”
Bacon har en
stillhet mitt i fasan
FRUSEN
OBJEKTIVITET Trots skräcken och plågan hos figurerna är Francis
Bacons penselskrift ömsint, delikat.
Carl-Johan Malmberg har sett
Tates tredje retrospektiv med den irländsk-brittiske målaren,
och
läst en bok som belyser det sakrala hos Bacon.
Francis
Bacon. Studies for a Portrait
SVD Sweden, 31
Oktober 2008
Det sägs ibland att
England bara haft två och en halv verkligt betydande målare: William
Blake, William Turner – och så Francis Bacon (1909–1992); han räknas
bara som en halv eftersom han var född på Irland.
Av 1900-talets engelska målare är Bacon hur som helst den enda som
under seklet nådde utanför England, och det trots – eller kanske
tack vare – att hans måleri redan vid debuten 1945 med triptyken Three
studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion, ett måleriskt
bombnedslag, gick stick i stäv med de rådande abstrakta
strömningarna.
Vid den tiden förstod bara några få Bacons betydelse, bland dem de
tongivande kritikerna Herbert Read och Kenneth Clark, liksom
ledningen för Tate Gallery. Där tog man något motvilligt emot den
skräckinjagande triptyken några år efter tillkomsten, som gåva av
konstnärens dåvarande älskare, en förmögen affärsman.
I höst är Bacon aktuell med sin tredje retrospektiv på Tate (de
tidigare var 1962 och 1985). Det är en storslagen utställning som
ger en enastående överblick över livsverket. Triptyken är givetvis
central, inte bara som startpunkten för konstnärskapet. Här finns
mycket av det som under de kommande decennierna skulle komma att
känneteckna Bacon, denne envist borrande mullvad: figurernas
monstrositet, det klaustrofobiska och samtidigt gränslösa rummet,
den kliniska ljussättningen, den relativt tunt pålagda, glanslösa
färgen, och en underligt frusen objektivitet, en stillhet mitt i
fasan – kanske det som Bacon själv, apropå Picasso, skulle kalla
”the brutality of fact”.
Bacon tillhör de konstnärer som kombinerar det radikalt främmande
med något man ändå tycker sig känna igen; Freud döpte denna egenskap
hos så mycket stor konst till das Unheimliche, det kusliga. En av
hemligheterna med Bacon är legeringen av det gengångaraktiga med det
aldrig tidigare skådade. Vi har varit här förr – och vi är här för
första gången.
Han sökte aldrig sin stil, han fann den tidigt, eller rättare sagt,
han trädde fram som målare först när han funnit den. När han gjorde
triptyken var han 35 år. I Tate-retrospektiven samsas den med ett
drygt sjuttiotal andra verk, flera av dem triptyker, men denna
första ter sig nu nästan intim. Bacons favoritstorlek kom senare att
bli betydligt större dukar som rymde människan i helformat, dukar om
2x1,5 meter, och utställningen visar hans besatthet av det formatet.
En viss monotoni står på spel; målningarna är vid första påseende
mycket lika varandra: en enstaka eller ett par figurer,
manieristiskt vridna, i ett rum med gåtfulla, liksom provisoriska,
kanske mer för kroppen än för ögat förnimbara avspjälkningar.
Det likartade förstärks av att samtliga målningar är glasade och de
flesta dessutom i tunga guldramar. Jag har alltid trott att detta
var galleriernas och samlarnas påhitt, det gör Bacons säregna,
spindelvävstunna måleriska textur svår att uppfatta med mindre än
att man trycker näsan mot glaset.
Men Michael Peppiatt, den främste kännaren av Bacons person och
konst sedan David Sylvester dog, skriver i sin nyutkomna essäsamling Francis
Bacon. Studies for a Portrait: ”Bacon ville att hans bilder
skulle bestå; och det var säkert det underliggande skälet till att
han lät glasa dem i allt deras överdåd och förse dem med massiva
guldramar, med den råa paradoxen och gåtfullheten intakt, precis som
de inneslutna mästerverken runt om i världens kyrkor och museer.”
Peppiatt skriver detta i The Sacred and the Profane, bokens
viktigaste essä och tveklöst bland det bästa som skrivits om honom.
Han visar hur Bacon i sin våldsamma uppfattning av det sakrala går
vid sidan av den kristna mytologi han hämtat så mycket visuell
inspiration från (alla dessa korsfästelser), och liksom lösgör
element, smärtan, det plågade skriket, offrandet av människokroppen,
ur berättelserna till ett slags slagkraftiga punktfenomen. Den
plågade, sargade kroppen blir vardagsmänniskans. Skriet, som finns
redan i triptyken från 1945, blir till existentiell urbild. Vi är
födda att dö och däremellan finns skriet.
Jag vet inte om någon har kopplat ihop Bacons återkommande skri –
inte minst de skrikande påvarna, hans mest kända bilder – med
Jesajas 40:e kapitel där det, i den engelska bibelöversättning som
Bacon läste, heter: ”The voice said, Cry… All flesh is grass.” Här
finns inte bara urskriket – Gud uppmanar Jesaja att skrika ut
kroppens dödlighet. Här finns också en möjlig urcell för Bacons
besatthet av kroppen, köttet.
I vår gamla bibelöversättning heter det ”Allt kött är hö.”
De orden är en god sammanfattning av Bacons måleri. Han förvandlar
det av våld, av lust, av båda tillsammans, eller bara av att finnas
till plågade mänskliga köttet till gräsliknande penselstråk. Hans
penselskrift är trots skräcken och skriken hos figurerna ömsint,
delikat. Det ser man vid närgranskning.
En vakt ber mig att inte gå så nära målningarna. Jag förklarar att
jag gärna skulle gå in i dem helt och hållet. Men inte i deras
händelser utan i deras stoff.
Carl-Johan Malmberg
Tapped Out?
By CAROL VOGEL |
THE NEW YORK TIMES | WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER
29, 2008
A $60 million
painting by Kazimir Malevich. A $40 million self-portrait by Francis
Bacon. It hardly seems the ideal moment to be selling such pricey
art. As Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury brace for their
big fall auctions in New York, starting with a sale of 71
Impressionist and Modern paintings, drawings and sculptures at
Sotheby’s on Monday night, anxiety is the dominant mood.
Only 10 days ago,
Sotheby’s reported a loss of $15 million in guarantees — the
undisclosed amount that the houses promise to sellers regardless of
the outcome of a sale — from recent auctions in Hong Kong and
London.
Millions of dollars
of art went unsold at those September and October sales, with many
works going for well below their estimates. Since then auction house
officials have been busy trying to get sellers to lower their
expectations. Much of the art up for auction this week and next was
secured early in the summer, when the world seemed a far different
place. Now, with the net worth of so many buyers plummeting, auction
houses have been trying to persuade sellers to lower their reserves,
that is, the undisclosed minimum price that a bidder must meet for
the art to be sold.
“Prices of all
assets have fallen — stocks, gold, oil, real estate — and it would
be unrealistic to expect works of art to be immune to the market’s
pressures,” said Marc Porter, president of Christie’s in America.
“We are actively encouraging consignors to set reasonable reserves.”
Minimizing risk is
the message of the moment. While Sotheby’s has said that it has
provided only half the number of guarantees it did a year ago, the
company still has outstanding guarantees of $285.5 million.
Unlike Sotheby’s,
Christie’s is not a public company, and is not obligated to release
figures, but officials there acknowledge having a similar level of
risk. As for buyers, the message is a little trickier. With them,
Mr. Porter said, Christie’s is making the argument that the objects
they desire “might not reappear on the market next season at an even
lower price.”
The big question is
who will be buying this expensive art. With hedge-fund traders,
Russian oligarchs and wealthy Middle Easterners having taken a hit
in the financial markets, the auction houses, whistling in the dark,
are hoping for a return of old money.
“Americans who fled
when prices began soaring will jump back into the market but at a
different price level,” said Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s head of
contemporary art. Among the standouts in the fall lineup at
Sotheby’s are paintings like Edvard Munch’s Vampire (1894),
priced to bring more than $35 million, and an Yves Klein wall relief
estimated at more than $25 million. Christie’s is offering a 1934
portrait of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter estimated at $18
million to $25 million and a Basquiat painting at $12 million and
$16 million. “I still hold the belief that the great works will find
buyers,” said Guy Bennett, of Christie’s. But at what price remains
to be seen.
No Guarantee for This One
EARLY last summer a
New York collector negotiated a hefty guarantee from Christie’s in
consigning his 1964 Study for Self-Portrait by Francis Bacon
for the fall auctions. In the months it took to hammer out details
of the contract, economic turmoil grew so worrisome that Christie’s
got cold feet and withdrew the guarantee.
The auction house
persuaded the seller to offer the Bacon anyway, and it is one of the
highlights of Christie’s Nov. 12 sale. Experts say that the
full-length portrait, in which the artist is shown sitting on a bed,
his body twisted from head to toe, should sell for around $40
million.
Christie’s is
obviously hoping to capitalize on the record prices paid for Bacon’s
works recently. A 1976 Bacon triptych went for $86.3 million in May
at Sotheby’s in New York, and a 1975 self-portrait brought $34.4
million at Christie’s in London in June. Those were among the
highest prices ever paid for the British artist, who is the subject
of a current exhibition at the Tate in London that travels to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in May.
Still, there is no
getting around the fact that “the market has changed,” said Brett
Gorvy, co-head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art
department.
Architecture and Design in the Bacon Era: Texture
Mark Cousins
The Architecture Foundation, Tate Britain Auditorium, Wednesday
1 October 2008
can’t remember now
whether it was in the catalogue of the current exhibition of Bacon
or whether on it was on one of those panels but at some point there
was a quotation from Bacon saying “I suppose in the end we’re just
meat” and I wanted to try and start off, as it were, some thoughts
about both texture and also materiality by considering some of the
problems, what we might call the aesthetic problems, of meat
especially in that difficult area that we call ugliness or which
other people call ugliness, I want to try and suggest this evening
this is not how it’s normally portrayed and if properly handled is
an extremely powerful and valuable artistic and architectural
instrument.
Let me invite you
first to engage in a thought experiment. You look at some ones face
as we scan some ones face we look, as it were, for signs of
expression, in some sense for the way in which the face is thought
to be able to represent emotions or states of mind or whatever. As
we do it invariably we have a fantasy that this expression does not
simply belong to the surface but it has a depth and we frequently
actually experience that as a depth but of course it has this
peculiarity because the depth is not remotely localised.
If we say he looked
sad we don’t say it looked about two centimetres deep in the sadness
of it. Now nowhere I think is it more remarkable than if you add in
to this picture of a face which you experience partly through the
dimension of the depth of its expression then imagine suddenly in
some process, the face suddenly manifests a wound and you suddenly
see that underneath the infinitesimally thin
layer of skin there’s blood and there’s flesh and there’s bone;
normally people have a kind of visceral turning away from this
experience. Now if you try to follow through this action of turning
away, we might wonder: what is it that we’re turning away from?...
The appearance of
the wound indicates suddenly the collapse – a collapse of what; I
mean, I’m going to say representation but I don’t mean it in a
representational way. It’s as if I can’t continue having a fantasy
about the depth of your sadness or the extent of your pleasure; I
can’t do it any longer because, as it were, it is disrupted by the
appearance of a wound. Essentially unless your medically
knowledgeable, what you’re seeing, and I think Bacon was correct to
use it in a general sense, is what he calls meat. Let’s kind of make
a formula in some sense as saying: what meat is at a kind of level
of experience, is almost the collapse of representation or of
signification…
This collapse of
representation is I think part of what we might call the experience
of ugliness, the turning away, at which point we might begin to
hypothesise that this is not what I think it is, it is what I think
people experience it as; an experience of the ugly in that sense is
this: it is without signification it is without being a part of the
a space of representation, it is stuff, it is meat… People’s
experience of the ugly
—
again I’m not saying that’s what it is
—
is a defence against this moment
—
a moment which is too raw and is too, almost, unnerving; we might
say that the popular experience of the ugly is: it’s that which is
there but at the same time, is perceived as it shouldn’t be there
—
or sometimes it’s the same but the other way round: it’s that which
is not there but should be.
In Leroux’s novel The
Phantom of the Opera there’s a wonderful moment when the scene
shifter describes to the girls of the corps de ballet that he has
seen the ghost in box five; he describes the ghost to the girls and
he says, in a way in which logic itself can’t tolerate, but clearly
we know exactly what he means, he says: and the ghost has no nose
and that no nose is a horrible thing to look at. It’s something that
isn’t there but should be… I want to suggest that one dimension of
the achievement of Bacon is in a sense to take this problem on board
directly and, in a way that it is very difficult to describe in his
achievement, but has the achievement of as it were, bringing back
meat into our understanding, bringing back meat into a kind of
poetics, that which is always, as it were, normally excluded; I was
at the exhibition on Sunday and it’s not just a question obviously
of meat, it is those strange puddles of existence which you see so
clearly in the three triptychs in homage to George Dyer — it is,
indeed, a sublime moment…
Now in a sense all
I’ve said is an attempt to say that what people describe as being
ugly we should consider it a defence and if you can undo this
defence, if, like Bacon, you can propel the spectator into the midst
of meat and find it not only human but essentially human, then, as
it were, you remove some of the defences which so often kind of
disable, I don’t mind putting it bluntly, disable public taste. It
is a struggle. Now if something like this is the case, that I’m more
than aware that I haven’t said directly anything about architecture
and texture, then one of the ways we might consider the issues this
evening is to think within the scope of Bacon’s adult career what
also happens within architecture to be able to do that: at the level
of a certain materiality and at the level of texture, that is to
say, to undermine the public defence against the ugly and actually
to propel it towards something new and powerful and human not in a
humanistic way but human almost in a somewhat unnerving way. Thank
you very much.

Art in the flesh
The Daily’s Whitney
Mallett gets a taste for meat as medium and muse
The McGill Daily |
Monday, Oct 27 | Volume 98, Issue 16
“Imagine you’re
hanging from a meat hook.” A dance teacher made this analogy to me
years ago, and I will never forget it. There is something eerily
beautiful about the suspension of raw meat. Of course, this beauty
is matched with the discomfort that comes from visualizing yourself
as a hanging carcass. Painter Francis Bacon would have probably
liked the idea. He once said, “Hams, pigs, tongues, sides of beef
seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I find it very
beautiful. And it’s all for sale – how unbelievably surrealistic!”
Bacon often painted
hanging meat. He was not the first artist to be seduced by the
texture, colour, and marbling of raw flesh. Rembrandt painted his
famous Carcass of Beef centuries before and, during Bacon’s
own lifetime, Chaim Soutine rendered a more modern, bloodier version
of Rembrandt’s suspended ox.
In the later part
of the 20th century, meat made a transition from the subject of art
works to the very fabric of them. In 1987, Canadian artist and
Concordia graduate Jana Sterbak first showed her dress constructed
of 50 pounds of salted flank steak in Montreal. Over the course of
the exhibit, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic transformed
from raw to cured state, in some ways imitating the human aging
process. Sterbak followed up her meaty success with another in
1996: Chair Apollinaire, a chair made from over 150 pounds of
steak, also cured. The piece is a pun on the French word for flesh: chair.
Fittingly, Sterbak
strongly emphasizes that her works are not about meat, but about
flesh. “And flesh is what we are!” she adds. A steak’s muscle, fat,
and tissue, when juxtaposed against human flesh, encourage us to
consider our own animality – something that usually escapes our
consciousness. When meat’s typical function is perverted, and it is
presented as flesh and not food, it becomes prime material for
self-reflection.
Chinese artist
Zhang Huan donned a meat suit in his piece My New York to
explore his complex relationship with his adopted city. The suit,
made of raw steaks, was shaped to give Huan a brawny body-builder
aesthetic, but its flayed surface contrasted strength with
vulnerability. During the performance piece, Huan released doves,
alluding to the Buddhist tradition amassing grace by freeing live
animals.
Huan’s piece was an
attempt to reconcile the culture he came from with a culture thrust
upon him. He explains that although a body-builder slowly builds up
muscle, he adopts the aesthetic overnight. Donning the meat suit
parallels his forced adoption of American culture. The connotations
of red meat as a conspicuous example of American society’s
disproportionate consumption cannot be ignored in the piece. Meat is
not just flesh used to explore mortality and self-reflection; for
Huan, it is undoubtedly also a symbol of a culture whose habits of
consumption differ drastically from the rest of the world.
In a 2005 interview
with Jonas Storsve, Sterbak explained: “The two most evident
connotations of flesh, but not necessarily of meat, are the sexual
and the mortal.” The relationship between carnage and carnality is
explored in some of the earliest recorded art using meat. Carol
Schneeman’s 1964 performance Meat Joy – shown first in Paris
and then again in New York City – was a Dionysian piece in which
eight partially nude figures danced and played in raw fish and
chicken, sausage, paint, and paper. It was meant to celebrate flesh
as a material.
The same year,
American performance artist Robert Delford Brown’s Meat Show also
used meat to invoke sexuality. In the Washington Meat Market, he
created brothel-like rooms out of tons of blood and raw meat strewn
with yards and yards of sheer fabric suggestive of lingerie.
Visitors walked through the decorated meat locker in white coats and
were then fed sausages. Brown, notorious for invoking shock and
scandal in his avant-garde art, located the viewers’ own consumption
of meat while meat surrounded them. The show only lasted three days.
Meat goes bad fast.
Meat art often has to be performed or captured on film because
otherwise it will rot. Its impermanence reminds us of our own
mortality – one day, we too, will rot. Sterbak cures steak to
prevent her work from putrefying, but the piece’s transformation
from fleshy and raw to its shrivelled, salted state recalls changes
that take place in our bodies over time. “Art, when successful,
comes close to resembling life; and life, as well as love, is
ephemeral, perishable, and fleeting,” she professes.
Pinar Yolacan also
uses meat to explore human decay. For Perishables, she
photographed elderly women wearing garments constructed from poultry
and tripe – each piece imitates the individual subject’s wrinkled
face. The state of the aging women and their perishing garb is
immortalized in the photographs. In an interview with The New
York Times in 2004, Yolacan commented on her choice of material:
“I’ve always been interested in the impermanence of things,” she
said.
While Sterbak and
Yolacan prevented their pieces from going rancid, Jan Fabre exploits
the rotting process in his installation piece, Temples of Meat.
The project involved wrapping columns at Ghent University in Belgium
with 200 pounds of decaying steak, bacon, and minced meat to make
them “come alive” by attracting flies. Meat is essentially lifeless,
but at once becomes a source of life, and a metaphor for life’s
transient nature.
Meat’s expiration
illustrates life’s impermanence, and its decomposition exemplifies
the cyclical nature of life and death. Whether it’s rotting or not,
meat can be disgusting. Meat evokes a visceral reaction: being
confronted by a material representation of death can instinctively
repel us. But most of us also depend on meat for survival. When it
is presented before us as art, this complex relationship is
explored.
Meat exposes us to
what is below the skin’s surface. We are often disconnected from our
own insides; for whatever reason, we are revolted when confronted
with a suggestion of the body turned inside-out. Viewers were
repulsed by Chilean artist Gabriela Rivera’s 2005 film Efímero:
she covered herself in raw meat strips to construct a metaphor for
the relationship people have with their mirror image. Meat is
intimately related to the body. It resembles our own flesh; it even
becomes a part of us when we ingest it. Disguised in meat, Rivera’s
flayed, Frankenstein-like figure provoked her audience members to
examine their own body images. However, many people were just
shocked and repulsed by the film.
McGill student Alex
Cowan is also interested in meat as provocation. He strewed rotting
scraps around public spaces in Montreal – what he thought would be a
foolproof plan to invoke some sort of reaction. But only a
congregation of seagulls and pigeons seemed to take notice. “Some
people looked disgusted; most people were entirely indifferent. Most
people tuned it right out of their consciousness,” he explains.
Indifference toward
this display of meat suggests society’s disconnect between ground-up
meat in a Styrofoam container and the concept of a dead animal.
Sterbak notes the linguistic dichotomy: “Consider that in many
languages the name of the animal changes when it arrives on your
plate. For example, cow becomes beef; pig becomes pork.” Meat is
defined by our consumption of it. “In the abstract, idealized world
that we live in most people don’t want to make the connection
between meat and a pig. Humans create their own world. We have
developed meat as a commodity because that’s what we think it ought
to be,” says Cowan.
The commodification
of meat has reached the point that it has become a symbol of
objectification. Ann Simonton wore a bologna dress to protest women
being treated as meat. The phrase “treated as meat” connotes a
complete lack of respect and devaluation.
Art can provoke us
to question the disconnection between the process and the product.
The transition from dead animal to food, however, can itself be an
art. Michelle Boubis, a butcher at Jean Talon Market, argues that
butchery is an art form “because it ennobles the animal, giving
value to what we eat.” Treating butchery as an art means treating
the animal like a living thing, and not merely as objectified,
consumer-defined, meat.
This type of
processing is rare today. While Boubis receives animals whole,
directly from the farm, most meat is packed in industrial factories.
The meat hanging from butchers’ windows that Bacon found so
beautiful is becoming less and less common. Instead, packaging
appeases our conceptualized ideal of meat. “Many people, myself
amongst them, have doubts about meat consumption, and, above all,
the way our society takes care of its livestock intended for mass
consumption…. This is why meat does not resemble itself in the
effort to divorce it from any appearance that may recall our own
flesh,” Sterbak stated in an interview with Storsve.
These concerns are
not new. In his 1924 silent film Kino-Glaz, Dzia Vertov
critically examines industrial meat processing. He playfully
presents the sequence of a cow’s slaughter in reverse, inspiring
both delight and horror in the viewer. Life springs from the
materiality of death lying on the slaughterhouse floor. A dead ox
appears to be sewn back up by mechanical knives, leaps to its feet,
and is driven backward to the pasture.
The relationship
between meat and art has manifested itself in different ways. A New
York Times article from 1909 titled “Meat Packers and Art”
describes meat as a currency to purchase treasured European art. The
article reports fears that the art would be exchanged for $2-million
“accumulated in meat packing.” Historic European works were said to
be dangled before the “covetous, meat-packing eyes” of American
millionaires, contrasting modern industrial society with established
artistic tradition. Both art and meat were marketed as commodities
then, just as they are now. The market was ascribing the two
equivalent values for exchange before artists were using meat to
draw metaphors in their art.
Whether hanging in
a butchers’ window or on display in art gallery, meat is for our
consumption. As food, or as art, meat is a product – whether it ends
up on our plate or not. It isn’t hard to engage critically with meat
when it’s presented subversively as art. But hopefully we can begin
to consume it as critically with our mouths as we do with our eyes.

Francis Bacon & Meat by Francis Giacobetti 1991
Bacon makes a meal
out of tragedy
The Daily
Telegraph Saturday,
25 October 2008
Steadily, since the
Thirties, the painter Francis Bacon had established himself as one
of the greatest figures of 20th century British art. And, as a
heavy-drinking Soho low-lifer with a string of violent boyfriends,
he thought he had seen it all. His first lover, Peter Lacy, an older
man, would often tear up the young artist’s paintings or beat him up
and leave him on the street half-conscious.
But in 1971, he was
to suffer a grievous blow. George Dyer, an East End petty criminal
Bacon had lived with since he caught him breaking into his home in
1964, committed suicide on the eve of a major retrospective in
Paris.
The artist was
devastated and started painting Triptych. An attempt to
exorcise Bacon’s pain and guilt, it is a portrait of Dyer before his
death and has been called one of his "supreme achievements", more
tragic and sensitive than any of his other works.
In 2008, Francis
Bacon’s Triptych 1976 became the most expensive work of
contemporary art, fetching $86.3m.

Francis Bacon
CHRISTIE’S
Post-War &
Contemporary Art Evening Sale
New York, Rockefeller Plaza 12 November 2008
Lot 27/Sale 2048
Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992) Study for Self-Portrait
Lot
Description
Francis
Bacon (1909-1992)
Study for Self-Portrait
titled and dated 'SELF PORTRAIT NO 1 1964' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
60 x 55 in. (152.4 x 140 cm.)
Painted in 1964.
Estimate
on request ($40
million to $60 million) Unsold
Provenance
Marlborough Fine Art, London
Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, Amsterdam, 1965
Waddington Galleries, London, 1976
Mark Goodson, New York
Richard Nagy Ltd., London
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Literature
L.
Ficacci, Francis Bacon: 1909-1992, New York, 2003, p.
95 (illustrated in color).
Exhibited
London,
Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings,
July-August 1965, no. 3 (illustrated).
Hamburg, Kunsthalle; Stockholm, Moderna Museet and Dublin,
Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon: Gemälde 1945-1964,
January 1965-1966, n.p., no. 61 (illustrated).
Manchester, City Art Gallery, Francis Bacon,
1966-1967.
London, The Tate Gallery, Recent British Painting: Peter
Stuyvesant Foundation Collection, November-December
1967, p. 48, no. 13 (illustrated in colour).
Adelaide, The Art Gallery of South Australia and Auckland
City Art Gallery, Recent British Painting: Peter
Stuyvesant Collection Foundation, 1970-1971, n.p., no.
11 (illustrated).
Tokyo, Le Musée National d'Art Occidental, English
Portraits, October-December 1975, no. 72 (illustrated in
colour; also illustrated on the cover).
Paris, Galerie de France, Peintres Anglais 1960-1980,
December 1980.
New York, Pace Wildenstein, The Mark Goodson Collection:
Modern Masters from the Collection of Mark Goodson,
1995.
New Haven, The Yale Center for British Art; The Minneapolis
Institute of Arts; The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Francis Bacon: A
Retrospective, January-October 1999, pp. 132-133, no. 41
(illustrated in colour).
Lot Notes
Francis
Bacon’s intense and probing self-portraits are among his
most important works, and are without a doubt part of the
canon of great self-portraits in the history of art. A
modern master of the human figure, Bacon naturally chose to
paint his own image; as he explained, "after all, as we are
human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves" (F.
Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact,
Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1987, p. 116). A
rare example of a full-length self-portrait, Study for
Self-Portrait of 1964 emblematically represents the
painter’s complex character painter, a tour-de-force of his
indelibly original style.
When Bacon executed Study for Self-Portrait, his
public recognition had recently and dramatically shifted -
metamorphosing from maverick to master in the worldwide
audience’s eyes. Just two years prior, he reached a new
zenith in his career, receiving accolades for his monumental
first retrospective at the Tate in London, followed by
another triumphant exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in
New York in 1963. A few years later, shows such as Nineteenth
and Twentieth Century Masters celebrated him as one of
the greatest British painters in history. The year he
painted the present work, both a catalogue raisonné and a
monograph by the esteemed historian John Russell critically
praised his career. Such accolades seem to have fuelled deep
introspection, as Bacon took stock of his relationship to
painting - as a friend recalled, "I sensed that for once
Francis was deeply content, possibly as satisfied with his
work as he had ever been - yet overwhelmed, too, and
possibly frightened" (D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life
of Francis Bacon, New York, 1993, p. 158). Devastating
news accompanied his success at the Tate: his lover Peter
Lacy, with whom he had a tortured affair, had died in
Tangiers. Nevertheless, Bacon continued experimenting and
pushing his painterly powers further than ever before in the
wake of this mixture of professional success and personal
tragedy.
Bacon depicts himself unsparingly, offering an intimate view
in the vulnerable position of sitting on a bed. Bacon grasps
his hands together tightly on his lap, making palpable the
tension simmering within. Swirling rhythms of paint move
from his head to the tip of his toe suggesting the storm of
his inner psyche. His startling facial convolutions – one of
his most important signatures – only amplify the painting’s
powerfully expressive effect. This paradox, that distorting
one’s physiognomy could yield deeper insight and truth, is
central to Bacon’s artistic enterprise. As he described in
an interview published the year he painted Study for
Self-Portrait, "I have deliberately tried to twist
myself, but I have not gone far enough. My paintings are, if
you like, a record of this distortion. Photography has
covered so much: 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. That is the peculiar difficulty of
figurative painting now. I attempt to re-create a particular
experience with greater poignancy in the desire to live
through it again with a different kind of intensity" (F.
Bacon, quoted in Cambridge Opinion, 1964). Despite
his customary deformations, Bacon’s subjects are always
surprisingly recognizable - as in his self-portrait, where
his distinctive forelock of dark hair emerges in the paint’s
twisting complexities. Bacon scrutinized himself not only in
the mirror, but also in photographs of himself. He worked
from memories of these sources, building up a complex matrix
of shifting perspectives.
Bacon cast himself as heir to two of the greatest painters
in the history of Western art, both famed for their
self-portrait series, Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Bacon admired
Rembrandt’s haunting self-portraits, in which the play of
light across his visage offers a poignant mediation on the
painter’s own mortality. Bacon claimed that, "I think the
self-portraits are the greatest thing Rembrandt ever did
because they were formally the most extraordinary paintings.
He altered painting in a way by the method by which he dealt
with himself, and perhaps he felt freer to deal with himself
in this totally liberal way" (F. Bacon quoted in D.
Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, London,
2000, p. 241). By extension, one can understand how Bacon
must have keenly felt free to experiment in rendering his
own image. His swirls of thick impasto recall not only the
heavily encrusted surface of Rembrandt’s portraits, but also
the canvases of Van Gogh. Like Van Gogh’s obsessive return
to his own image in his wide-ranging series of
self-portraits, Bacon used this format to come to terms with
himself throughout his career. Bacon made a number of copies
after self-portraits by Van Gogh in the late 1950s and early
1960s, including Self-portrait with Pipe in 1960.
Indeed, Bacon’s palette of high-keyed blue and green tones
echoes Van Gogh’s legendary coloration, just as Bacon’s
passages of juicy impasto share the acute expressiveness of
Van Gogh’s brushwork, where certain dabs of paint seem so
alive as to be almost sensate. Another great master on whose
legacy Bacon builds is of course Picasso. Indeed it was in
1927 at an exhibition of Picasso’s work at Pierre
Rosenberg’s gallery in Paris that first inspired Bacon to
become a painter. Picasso’s biomorphic contortions of
figures, especially in works from the late 1920s and early
1930s, particularly influenced Bacon. Yet Picasso never
submitted his own image to such radical pictorial
convolutions as Bacon, preferring instead to experiment upon
his models.
Bacon’s trenchant dedication to figural painting, and
especially to portraiture, went against the grain of the
avant-garde art world in the post-war era. Bacon continued
to be fascinated by the endless expressive possibilities in
depicting spatially isolated figures over the span of five
decades. By the time he painted the present work in 1964,
Pop art was at its apogee. Yet Bacon eschewed such
meditations on the world of popular culture and mass
reproduction in favour of his universe of intimate
portraits, a world behind closed doors, populated for the
most part with images of himself and his closest friends.
Likewise, he repudiated the ability of the dominant modern
form of painting, abstraction, to delve into the human
condition – which he saw as his artistic goal – stating that
"Man is haunted by the mystery of his existence and is
therefore much more obsessed with the remaking and recording
of his own image of his world than with the beautiful fun of
even the best abstract art. Pop art is made for kicks. Great
art gives kicks, too, but it also unlocks the valves of
intuition and perception about the human situation at a
deeper level" (F. Bacon, quoted in Cambridge Opinion,
1964).
Yet while Bacon’s squarely emphasizes the figure, he
nevertheless mastered the language of abstraction, from the
virtual colour field painting that comprises the spare
architectural setting for the figure, to the emphatic
gestural splashes and slashes of his paint. This stems, at
least in part, from the impact of a 1959 exhibition at the
Tate called New American Painting, which featured the work
of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko among
others. Yet his empathetic extemporaneous brushwork – only
heightened in contrast to the background’s smooth passages
of flat fields of paint, and raw exposed canvas that peeks
out intermittently - also reveals Bacon embracing of the
seductive thrills of chance. Famously, he had long greatly
loved gambling (even hosting an illegal gambling parlour in
his own home), particularly roulette. By the time he painted
the present work in 1964, he embraced in his paintings both
elements of chance and an almost violent abandon to the
action of painting. "I do," Bacon explained, "work very much
more by chance now than I did when I was young. For
instance, I throw an awful lot of paint onto things, and I
don’t know what is going to happen to it. I throw it with my
hand. I just squeeze it into my hand and throw it on. I
can’t by my will push it further. I can only hope that the
throwing of paint onto the already-made or half-made image
will either re-form the image or that I will be able to
manipulate this further into – anyway, for me – a greater
intensity" (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, Brutality
of Fact, p. 90). The spray of black paint behind his
head combines painterly abandon and aggression, made all the
more potent as it radiates from the head, suggesting either
psychic implosion or outright violence. In the present work
the dark, ambiguous geometric form that frames the painter’s
head. As Bacon often favored painting smaller-scale
self-portraits that featured his face isolated against a
dark background, this passage of the painting can be seen as
a mise-en-scène of one such work.
The present work was the sole self-portrait in Bacon’s 1965
solo exhibition in London at the Marlborough gallery, part
of a group of nine exceptionally strong works, including Crucifixion of
1965 (now in the collection of Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst
in Munich). The exhibition was timed to coincide with the
Giacometti retrospective at the Tate. Giacometti and Bacon
had struck up a friendship, and Giacometti even left an
opening reception for his own show to visit Bacon’s
exhibition. Bacon and Giacometti were firmly established as
two of the era’s most important artists, capturing the
despair of postwar existence by depicting isolated humanity.
Bacon above all admired Giacometti’s drawings, yet he was
also prompted to consider creating sculpture due to his
impact, an idea that, although soon abandoned, finds
resonance in the emphatically sculptural quality of his head
in the present self-portrait as well as other works.
Bacon titled this, and other finished works, "studies," to
emphasize the fact that although the works were complete in
themselves, they are part of an open-ended and ceaseless
meditation on his subjects, and existence itself. Study
for Self-portrait conveys in the most visceral way the
artist’s own subjectivity, and manages to be both sensual
and terrifying, lushly painted but also underscored by a
sense of violence. Above all, it truly succeeds in Bacon’s
avowed goal in portraiture: "The living quality is what you
have to get. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a
technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a
person" (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back,
p. 98).

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Exceptional
Work by Francis Bacon Leads Christie’s
New York Post-War &
Contemporary Art Sale
Art Daily, The
First Art Newspaper on the Net, Sunday, October 26, 2008
NEW YORK,
NY.– Christie’s is pleased to announce the sale of the
Francis Bacon’s Study for Self Portrait, 1964,
(estimate on request) in the New York Post-War and
Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 12 November 2008. A rare
example of a full length self-portrait, this work is truly a
consummate representation of the artist’s complex character,
as well as a tour-de-force of his indelibly original style
of painting.
According to Christie’s International Co-Head of Post-War
and Contemporary Art, Brett Gorvy, “This crucial work by
Francis Bacon is bound to attract international interest in
the November Evening Sale. Study for Self-Portrait,
is a rare and outstanding apogee in Bacon’s creative
output.”
Study for Self Portrait is triumph of Bacon’s
unapologetic metamorphosing of the human form. Grasping his
hands while sitting on a bed, the subject is twisted from
head to toe. The work affords the viewer a visceral
awareness of the subjectivity within the artist, managing to
achieve a sentiment that is both sensual and unsettling,
lushly painted but underscored with a sense of violence. Study
for Self-Portrait draws upon Rembrandt’s renowned
self-portraits in its introspective depiction of Bacon’s
inner struggle. Bacon depicts himself with a distorted
twisting face so as to illustrate the complex matrix of
perspectives that lie within, achieving a haunting effect
that not only presents his physical person, but in fact
reveals every pulsation existing within his being.
Bacon executed the present work in one of the most
significant years of his career and life, experiencing the
enormous satisfaction of critical acclamation in both a
catalogue raisonné and a monograph by John Russell, and the
unbearable anguish of the death of his lover, Peter Lacy.
However, it was in this wake of professional success and
personal tragedy that Bacon transitioned from a maverick to
a master, a triumph which is evident within Study for
Self-Portrait.
Today, Bacon’s self portraits are widely regarded as one of
his most important bodies of work, and unquestionably part
of the canon of great self-portraits in the history of art.
This assessment became apparent last spring based on the
tremendous demand for such works at Christie’s Post-War and
Contemporary Art Evening Sales when the intimate-scaled
works Three Studies for Self-Portrait, 1976 realized
$28,041,000/£14,380,000/€18,090,968 in New York, and Three
Studies for Self-Portrait, 1975 led the June sale in
London with £17,289,250/$34,457,475/€21,767,166.
 |
Detail
from Francis
Bacon’s Study for Self-Portrait, 1964
ISABEL AND OTHER
INTIMATE STRANGERS
Portraits by
Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon
Gagosian Gallery, November 4 - December 13, 200
980 Madison Avenue,
New York, NY 10075 USA
Tel 212.744.2313 Fax 212.710.3825 Tue-Sat 10-6

Francis Bacon by Jorge Lewinsk
Giacometti by Ernst Scheidegger
"To make
a head really lifelike is impossible, and the more you struggle to
make it lifelike the less like life it becomes."
– Alberto
Giacometti
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce Isabel and Other Intimate
Strangers: Portraits by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.
This exhibition brings together important loans and rarely seen
works from international museums and private collections, including
the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, The Metropolitan
Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Nasher Collection, the Detroit
Institute of Arts, and the Sainsbury Collection. It explores the
enduring fascination of Giacometti and Bacon with the existential
challenges and ineffable mysteries of the human figure and psyche,
explored throughout their careers in the portraits, or likenesses,
that they produced of close friends and family.
One such subject was the model and muse Isabel Rawsthorne, a
compelling figure of consuming vitality and recklessness. While
Rawsthorne generally made an instant and overwhelming physical
impression on people, over time her effect on Giacometti produced
profound conflictual responses in him. Beyond the clearly identified
bronze busts of her such as Tete d’Isabel I and II (1936
and 1937-38 respectively), his female standing figures, from Femme
qui marche (1932-36) to the diminutive pedestal sculptures and
the Amazonian Grandes Figures, are said to have been inspired
by his vision of her standing some distance away from him on a
street one night, distant and imperious.
Isabel’s
relationship with Francis Bacon was quite different, that of kindred
spirit and drinking companion rather than muse, yet her distinctive
presence is one that haunts his work, like Giacometti before him.
One of Bacon’s finest pictures, Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a
Street in Soho (1967), is based on a fleeting memory of her,
while in the high-keyed, viscerally rendered triptychs Three
Studies for a head of Isabel Rawsthorne (1965 and 1965), Bacon’s
perennial struggle with experience and its depiction plays itself
out in what he described as "shifting sequences where one picture
reflects on the other continuously."

Bacon’s 1954 David Sylvester
Walking flanked by Giocametti’s Striding Man and a Head
Giacometti’s most
enduring and remarkable relationship was with his younger brother
Diego, the subject of his first sculpture, Testa di Diego,
completed when he was just thirteen years old. Companion,
consultant, and studio assistant, Diego became his brother’s
favourite model and male archetype. Giacometti’s wife Annette, the
subject of hundreds of paintings and sculptures, and his
professional model and mistress Caroline would become similarly
pervasive referents, inspiring more subjective variations on the
feminine form, from the tiny yet shapely bronze Figurines (c.
1954-56) and seated sculptures (Femme Assise, 1956) to
paintings such as Annette (1952) and Caroline dans sa robe
rouge, 1965.
During the 1960s, Bacon, who had made very few named portraits in
the first half of his career, concentrated increasingly on himself
and a handful of close friends as his subjects - from his boyfriend,
George Dyer, to Lucien Freud, Muriel Belcher (who ran The Colony
Room, Bacon’s favourite drinking club), and Henrietta Moraes. Bacon
said that he thought of friendship as "two people pulling each other
to bits" and, in his unsettling portraits, he vivisected his friends
in no uncertain manner.
Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers will be accompanied by a
full colour publication with essays by Véronique Wiesinger, director
of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris who is also
responsible for the catalogue raisonné of Alberto Giacometti; and
Martin Harrison, director of the project for the catalogue raisonné
of the work of Francis Bacon. The Fondation Alberto and Annette
Giacometti has overseen the selection of Giacometti works for this
exhibition.
The exhibition inaugurates Gagosian’s fourth floor galleries at 980
Madison Avenue. It also coincides with the first major survey of
Alberto Giacometti’s work in Russia, opening at the Pushkin Museum
in Moscow on September 16, and Tate Britain’s historic exhibition
marking Francis Bacon’s centenary (September 8, 2008 – January 4,
2009)
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