LATE IN OCTOBER 1971, just a few days short of his 62nd birthday, the painter Francis Bacon was in Paris, where the president, Georges Pompidou, had decided to personally open a retrospective of his work at the Grand Palais. The presidential imprimatur, the prestigious venue and the scale of the exhibition amounted to an extraordinary accolade for Bacon. And, although he habitually made light of just about everything, he was enormously pleased. Not least, the event finally put him on a par with the artist who, more than any other, he saw as the figure he had to measure himself against: Pablo Picasso. Picasso had been similarly feted in the Grand Palais a few years earlier.

    

     Setting the scene: preparations for Francis Bacon; A Terrible Beauty at the Hugh Lane Gallery.

 

 

 

International Art Festival debuts in Tel Aviv

 

 

 

BY DAVID BRINN  |  THE JERUSALEM POST  |  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2009  

 

Any film festival that brings together homages to Francis Bacon and Merce Cunningham, hosts a descendant of Felix Mendelssohn and presents a master class by self-confessed art geek Ben Lewis deserves to be called eclectic – or EPOS, the first International Art Film Festival, which will take place October 29-31 at the Tel Aviv Cinemateque.

Festival directors Micky Laron and Gidi Avivi are presenting over 40 local and international documentary and feature films on music, dance, literature and poetry; art and theater. In addition, the festival will host special guests and present events, including an evening dedicated to Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham, the great choreographers who passed away this year, and commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth and the 100th anniversary of the British painter Bacon’s birth.

Controversial American art critic and filmmaker Lewis, who prides himself on having been booted out of the famed Sotheby’s auction house, will offer a master class entitled: Art Safari: The Tantrums, Tears and Traumas of making Art Documentaries, in which he will explain the inner workings of making cult documentary films on the subject of contemporary art, focusing on his own feature The Great Contemporary Art Bubble.

In collaboration with the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, on October 31 the festival will present an homage to Bacon’s 100th birthday, featuring a lecture by Tal Lanir, Fragment of a Crucifixion – The Art of Francis Bacon, and a screening of the film Francis Bacon, which follows a day in the life of the painter. The event will take place at the museum. 

Time will also be set aside at the festival on October 29 to focus on films made by students at films schools and art colleges around the country.

For a full schedule of films and events and to order tickets, go to EPOS online.

 

 

 

BY KATYA KAZAKINA  |  BLOOMBERG  |  TUESDAY, 20 OCTOBER, 2009 

The Paris-based Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain has added a new section, The Modern Project, which offers select dealers a sumptuous display booth and lower costs. The result is that for the first time FIAC has attracted major galleries and their high-end art.

The dealers are expected to offer a total of 25 museum- quality artworks with multimillion-dollar price tags during the fair, which runs Oct. 22-25 underneath the glass-domed Grand Palais and in the Louvre’s courtyard.

The priciest works will include Andy Warlol’s 1963 Green Disaster, created the same year as his Green Car Crash, which fetched $71.7 million at Christie’s New York in 2007; Bacon’s 1966 Portrait of George Dyer Talking, priced around $40 million; and a 1921 Fernand Leger Le Grand Dejeuner, priced between $20 million and $25 million (a larger version of the work is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Bacon’s Head III (1949) will be offered at about $20 million, and Pablo Picasso’s Maternity (1921) around $25 million.

“It will create fireworks,” said Paris-based dealer Daniel Malingue.

               Bacon’s 1966 Portrait of George Dyer Talking

Take ‘an astonishing look at Francis Bacon’ in Dublin

 Damien Hirst abandons shock of the new for

BY RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNTSON  |  FIRST NIGHT  |  THE TIMES  |  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 14 2009

The paintings are dreadful. Think Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole. So why are these works now hanging in the Wallace Collection? What are they doing in the home of such masters as Rembrandt or Poussin, Titian or Fragonard?

The answer is simple: they are by Damien Hirst. And his is a name that curators must welcome. The artist who can transform a pickled bovine into a cash cow has the commercial touch that any cash-strapped museum needs, not least the somewhat sedate Wallace Collection. Plus, the Hirst show comes complete with a fully paid-for gallery refurbishment (the artist covered the entire cost of the £250,000 exhibition) including a silk wall fabric commissioned from Marie Antoinette’s preferred manufacturers at a cost that would leave most of us dreaming of off-cuts.

Hirst undoubtedly has an entrepreneurial talent. Ever since he launched his landmark 1988 Freeze show he has been upping the ante, testing the parameters of expectation and taste.

Now he makes his latest departure. In the conceptual milieu which he has done so much to make fashionable, what now counts as radical is a return to tradition.

Hirst has been painting. And by that he doesn’t mean employing a team of assistants to produce the paint-by-numbers-type canvases familiar from recent shows. Hirst has been alone in his studio working with palette and brush.

The result is No Love Lost — a show of 25 pictures. Seen from a, istance they don’t look too bad. Their dark expanses are seductively presented iri traditional gilt frames. They fill the galleries with an eerie blue Insect-O-Cutor-style glow.

But take a step farther and a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst.

Here are all Hirst’s familiar obsessions: the skulls, the shark’s jaws, the ashtrays, the spots with the odd iguana or little O-level, “still life” lemon added to the mix. Hirst floats his images on the dark surface of the canvas, mapping out their spaces and relationships with a mesh of perspective lines.

These works are utterly derivative of Bacon (give or take a dash of Giacometti), but they completely lack his painterly skill. And their metaphors are as ham-fisted as the application of pigment.

Look to the end of the galleries and you will see Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time. Hirst appears to hope that his heavy handed memento mori will make him part of the line-up of art historical tradition. But the artist who has made his reputation with shock now produces works that are shockingly bad. And who knows, maybe this is his trick. Is his brand so strong that we can’t resist turning up to look — even at works on which we know no love will be lost?

 Exhibition runs until January 24

Back to the drawing board but ‘my kids are better than me’

BY BEN HOYLE  |  FIRST NIGHT  |  THE TIMES  |  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 14 2009

The critics are lining up to point out that as a painter Damien Hirst is no Rembrandt, Velazquez or Rubens, even though, from today, his new work is hanging alongside theirs. But the artist himself has pre-empted them: he is not even as good a painter as his children, he said.

Hirst, who has three sons aged 4 to 14, has theatrically turned his back on most production-line artworks, closed two of his studios and is on his last formaldehyde project — “three crucified cows in marble tanks”.

He has two galleries next to the Wallace Collection’s Great Gallery, which includes paintings by Rembrandt, Titian, Velazquez, Van Dyck, Rubens and Gainsborough.

“I’ve digested the history of art. I know all these guys but I’m approaching [painting] from a completely different angle. I love Rembrandt but I don’t have the same abilities.” Even if Hirst did, he doubts that he could make the same impact as they did from pure painting.

“There’s too much going on [today]. When they were painting there were paintings. There was no Hollywood, there was no plastic surgery, advertising, TV. We live in such a crazy world Hirst is abandoning formaldehyde projects to return to painting now I think a mere painting on that level doesn’t really work.”

He gave up painting as a teenager because Francis Bacon “had covered it all”. Now he has taken it up again and "it’s something that I’ve started to feel very comfortable with”.

Having children had steered him back to bush and canvas. “You see kids painting and they just pick it up.”

Is he better at painting than his children? “Definitely not, especially the little one. My mum once said to me, ‘I’ve learnt a hell of lot more from my children than I could possibly teach them’. All children are artists. It’s just that most of them stop.”

Stop it, Damien Hirst, you’re embarrassing yourself

BY BRIAN SEWELL  |  CULTURE  |  EXHIBITIONS  |  EVENING STANDARD  |  WEDNESDAY 14 OCTOBER 2009

Now, however, almost four centuries after his depiction, he has a wry reason for his laughter, for a guffaw must be the sane man’s immediate reaction to the puerile and maladroit paintings by Damien Hirst, newly installed in neighbouring rooms for the next three months or so.

Damien Hirst: Dead on Arrival

DAVID REMFRY  |  CONTRIBUTOR  |  IRISH AMERICA  |  AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009

Francis Bacon’s Poetics of the Grotesque

SCOTTS JACKSON  |  REVIEW  |  GHOST ISLAND  |  FRIDAY 21 AUGUST 2009

Francis Bacon at the Met

  Francis Bacon’s virtual reality

      ROBERT ZALLER | ART | BROAD STREET REVIEW | SATURDAY 15 AUGUST 2009

Francis Bacon, who died at the age of 82 in 1992, was the greatest British painter of the 20th Century, and by all odds the most notorious. His famous paintings of Baroque-era popes, distortedly rendering Diego Velazquez’s portrait of Innocent X as a succession of screaming funhouse faces, scandalized respectable opinion, while his treatment of gay life made him one of the first artists to unapologetically depict the gritty subculture of homosexual London. 

On a political level, Bacon’s postwar work seemed to decry violence, while on a personal one he appeared to embrace it. The result was an art that seemed both aesthetically disturbing and morally ambivalent. 

Bacon’s iconography is now familiar to us, and his bad-boy postures, after Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Greenaway, seem a bit old hat, not to say sentimental. We are really left, in the centenary exhibit of his work recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the art itself. There’s a cool, classical ironist behind the Romantic figure painter, and the tension between the two—the eye of a clinician observing a particularly messy operation—is what engages us now.

Yet there’s a deeper issue in Bacon’s work, the issue that besets modern art in general: how to represent the world in an age of photographic reproduction. 

Fine art’s dirty little secrets

Before photography, the artist looked directly at the world and depicted it through hand and eye. Afterwards, anyone with a camera could reproduce that same world with a click of the shutter. This easy appropriation included the world of art itself, as the digital camera flashes that have added a new level to the visual pollution of our galleries and museums attest. 

At the Met, guards were diligently shooing would-be picture takers away from the Bacons, but I think Bacon himself would have been highly amused. That painters had themselves often worked from photographs was one of fine art’s dirty little secrets, but Francis Bacon may have been the first to work only from photographs, film stills and other forms of reproduction. 

Even when painting his friends and lovers, he would never pose them, but have photographer friends such as John Deakin give him snapshots to work from. To have museum souvenir-hunters turn his paintings back into photographs might well have seemed a fitting completion of his work to him, or at any rate a reduction back to first principles.

A gambit taken to extremes

What were those principles? I don’t think Bacon was merely quirky in insisting on having a prefabricated image to work from (a Velazquez painting might serve too, but only itself in reproduction—Bacon claimed never to have seen the original). He was making a programmatic or, if you will, a philosophic statement— namely, that the modern world could be seen only in mediated form, never directly. 

This is a very classic modernist gambit, of course. But Bacon took it to the extreme. Photography had, as it were, usurped the natural world, and banished it to Kantian exile. The photograph was the primary datum of experience now, and art could only work off it, compete with it and, if successful, in some sense displace it. This displacement was the actual artistic gesture, the triumph of art itself.

This conviction, I think, was at the core of Bacon’s rejection of the dominant aesthetic of his generation, Abstract Expressionism. In photography, the image of a thing replaced the thing itself, but the Abstract Expressionists, by ignoring both, had retreated into what Bacon regarded as a sterile manipulation of form and color. 

Like tennis without a net

The Expressionists might say that, in rejecting the image, they freed themselves from the tyranny of representation in order to project emotions onto canvas directly. But to Bacon (not to mention Picasso and Matisse, among others), that was playing tennis without a net. The real issue was whether art could exist in what Walter Benjamin had called the age of mechanical reproduction, and any art that failed to engage the question— to grapple with the image, particularly the human image—was simply irrelevant.

The matter was not nearly so simple, of course. Picasso himself had broken up the conventional visual field with Cubism, and it was this gesture that made Abstract Expressionism possible, even if Picasso himself had chosen not to follow it. From this point of view, modern art was not about the image—temporality—but about space, reconfigured and reconceived. Photography had little to say about this issue, being in that sense an actually retrograde method for interrogating the world.

Bacon, too, despite his mock obeisance to the photograph, recognized this. The primary question in depicting the human image was, for him, not its color, outline or expression, but its placement in space. 

Baboons and the pope

I think the gaping or grimacing features that recur so regularly in his work attest to this spatial instability; they’re like the distortions caused by exposure to compressed air or a destructive wind. On a psychological level, one might say, Bacon’s gaping mouths are meant to reveal our animal kinship to other primates; thus, in the room that exhibits most of the papal images, figure studies of a chimpanzee and a baboon are included, as well as studies of dogs. 

But all the figures, human and animal, seem unlocated. The popes sit on their thrones, and there is no image more apparently grounded than a throne; but Bacon encloses them in the cage patterns characteristic of his early postwar work, thus making them appear suspended in a menacing void—menacing to them and to us. 

Or sometimes his figures are seen through drizzling screens of paint, like curtains that leave us uncertain whether the figures stand in front of or behind them (or are rather bombarded by them, like cosmic particles). Rain is spatially disorienting, especially when it appears without signpost or background; and Bacon’s existential rain—coming from no apparent source and proceeding to no apparent ground—is particularly riddling. 

The spoor of the human 

In his later work, these devices are replaced by large slabs of unbroken color, which, even when they suggest a pictorial referent (a bare room, for example), give us no real purchase. Bacon’s figures are as isolated, as ungrounded, as they can be, and the twists and gaps in the figures themselves leave them, too, at the margins of substantiality. It is as if Bacon (who adapts many of the devices of Expressionist space) wants to take the image as close to dubiety and unintelligibility as he can, while still leaving an inexpugnable trace, the spoor of the human.

This is a new kind of reality, but one that we can recognize about us everywhere today, and which Bacon was prescient in anticipating, particularly in his sensitivity to photographic processes—the chemical trace that leaves, mysteriously, a simulacrum of the object world. We live, increasingly, in this virtual reality, whose reach has been enormously extended by the computer and the world of video games and simulations that it has generated. Without noticing it, we have largely disappeared into this virtual reality, organized for us by unseen hands, which is now replacing the messy, unframed, chaotic natural world that, in our animal fear of it and our distrust of the instincts that once permitted us to navigate it, we are in the process of abandoning.

Paint itself as a victim

There is no reason why we ourselves should not some day be absorbed into this looking-glass, and that is the mirror Francis Bacon’s art holds up to us. Its ambiguity—and perhaps its violence, too—is born of the frisson we experience as we confront this brave new world, which fascinated Bacon himself as its prophet. 

One of the things we will lose in it, as he was well aware, is paint itself. A painter friend of mine, recently returned from Venice, remarked to me about how few paintings the Biennale contained, as opposed to videos and installations. What, look at a cloth canvas daubed with vegetable dyes and hung, immovably, on a wall? Titian is as far from us now as a cave dweller.

The one reality we can’t escape

Bacon, though, insisted upon paint, as he did upon the material core of humanity, distant and difficult though it had become to our perception (the difficulty was precisely his subject). Two paintings from the Met show may illustrate this for us. In one, his lover, George Dyer, is shown, nude and from the back, sitting on a toilet. He is surrounded by white space except for the piping that conducts Dyer’s waste away from him and toward us: a man, in effect, shitting in our faces. 

In another, Blood on a Pavement, a smear of blood is all that is left of the absent figure, and the background itself is rendered as three Rothko-like panels (another appropriation from the Expressionists, despite Bacon’s expressed disdain for Rothko). 

The Dyer portrait is, among other things, the ultimate send-up of the papal thrones; here, Bacon suggests, is where we all sit. We don’t see Dyer’s waste, but the image makes us inescapably conscious of it: shit is the one natural reality we can’t escape, however politely removed by modern plumbing, and however antiseptically white our bathroom walls and fixtures. 

Similarly, blood is also our trace: the one testimony to our existence when the murdered corpse has been removed from the scene of the crime. We live, and therefore shit; we die, and therefore bleed: however virtual our reality may become in between, these signatures reveal us.

                    Portrait of Michel Leiris (1976): Our kinship with animals

Filleted carcases, ghostly dogs, screaming popes, and wrestling men, all conjure up Francis Bacon: A Centenary which will close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday August 16. If you have not seen it yet, you should before it leaves. The Bacon retrospective is an amazing collection of his work and includes a curious display of photos and artifacts from his Chelsea studio. As you walk amongst his paintings, you become part of them — just as he wanted. Bacon requested that his paintings be presented behind glass so that his audience could be part of his twisted world.

Walking though the horror show, it’s hard to decide which works are more disturbing. The paintings that use shuttering, where the image fades in and out, or the works with minimal backgrounds. The simple ones take the cake. Although the canvases with shuttering were darker in appearance and more dramatic, the brighter and lusher colours of the minimal backgrounds put the terror into the everyday realm. Pain and suffering isn’t hiding in his cluttered studio in Chelsea, but out on the streets and in the landscape of the living.

Bacon painted a number of wrestling men, possibly to work out his “affliction” as he called it or homosexuality. Homosexuality was a no, no back in his day, punishable by law. The black-widow Bacon painted his lovers, two of whom committed suicide on his watch. Most of his lovers were thieves or transients, and he met one of them while being robbed in his home.

Leaving the Bacon show you’ll be exhilarated with his take on the grotesque figure. He twist and turns them inside and out with smears and kicks to the guts, pulling you inside and out and sometimes leaving you a little weary and sick.

Love is the Devil 

 JD BELTRAN  |  SFGATE  |  SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE  |  TUESDAY AUGUST 11 2009  

During the life of the painter Francis Bacon, journalists became fond of photographing his studio that was famous for its unique disarray. Piles of photographs, books and newspaper clippings were strewn, torn and spattered with paint, creating a veritable archaeological dig of source material for Bacon’s work.

Francis Bacon didn’t work from life. Rather, he used imagery to inform his paintings by surrounding himself with a living collage of reference material. The authors of Incunabula describe the deliberate means in which Bacon’s studio was recently disassembled and scrutinized to achieve a glimpse of the artist in process.

Bacon’s paintings are a subconscious, dreamlike view into floating interiors featuring twisted, flesh-like appendages sometimes resembling people or hanging slabs of meat in a slaughterhouse. The figures often appear pushed into strangely angled corners or trapped in undefined violence, yet the compositions are rendered with an air of serenity.

The evolution of Bacon’s paintings is revealed in random selections of source material. For example, the books that cluttered Bacon’s studio were deliberately shelved with the spines facing away from his sight. A book would be selected at random, pages torn, and imagery folded into the shape of a cone designed to stand beside Bacon’s easel without falling down. The abstraction created by the folds often translated into the final painted image – another degree of separation from the props that aided in creating the dreamlike quality of his canvases

In Incunabula, source materials sit on the pages side by side with the paintings that developed from them. On one page, a torn newspaper photo showing an opera singer in profile with outstretched arms is transformed into a sphinx, the head further transformed to resemble a second photograph of one of the artist’s friends. Thus, a portrait is created. A photograph with sharp diagonal folds becomes a self-portrait of the artist with similarly distorted features as in the photo. On another page, a clipping of hanging birds stripped of their feathers becomes a painting of a red cubist interior featuring a trompe l’oeil bird hanging in space. Here the authors take a biographical aside and explore Bacon’s interest in meat imagery: Was Francis Bacon fascinated with hanging carcasses, (which became the trademark image in his paintings), because his namesake, Sir Francis Bacon, died of pneumonia after stuffing dead birds with snow in an attempt to find a new way to preserve meat?

During his life, the painter Francis Bacon made no secret about the reason his studio was kept in what might at first glance appear to be only cluttered wreckage. The environment gave him the impulse to create order out of chaos. Paintings were the result. His studio could be regarded as his final work of art, a work that will remain a gloriously unfinished testament to an artist’s creative process

Francis Bacon: Incunabula, by Rebecca Daniels and Martin Harrison (Thames & Hudson, $75).

Sharon Anderson is a Los Angeles-based writer and painter, and a frequent contributor to Northside San Francisco. She also often appears in Art in America.

Sod off.  To escape the lingering odour given off by the career of Francis Bacon, you’d have to be hanging from a refrigerator hook in an abattoir. Not an unlikely place to meet the artist, actually. His paintings of anguish and horror make many avert their faces, not so much from offensive art as from an offensive smell. Goya’s blunt, black sketches of rotting corpses hanging from trees in the aftermath of the Napoleonic invasion strike the same note of crossing sensory boundaries. Bacon joins Jonathan Swift as obsessed with socially aberrant smells, in Swift’s case the smell of a lady farting, in Bacon’s the sweat of a man having sex with another man. But he is quite willing to throw in the rank odour of bloody meat and dog shit on the sidewalk (Bacon once spotted the latter and proclaimed, “Now there’s what life really is. ”)  The artist’s renegade sex life has been vividly portrayed in a film titled Love Is the Devil, which summarizes his rough-trade view on the subject of love. Such is the sainted renown of Bacon at home — he passes for the English Jean Genet but without a hagiographer on the order of Sartre - that every drunken careen through the low dives of Soho could be a station of the Cross.

Yet there are a host of critics who aren’t buying any of it. Before I attended the current large exhibit of over sixty Bacon canvases at the Met, I read New York squibs that labelled him a cartoonist, if not himself a cartoon, a shabby shocker, a Johnny One Note of screaming popes and butcher-shop variety meats.  In addition he was a blowhard who never met an interviewer he didn’t want to talk to, and a tireless careerist stage-managing his own fame.  Why did so many articles proclaim that Bacon was at once great but not credible? A painter famous for telling society to bugger off was being handed the same in return.

Yet even if every accusation were true, and there’s a viable argument for each, Bacon’s work jumps off the canvas and aims a dart into the soul as obviously (one should think) as Rembrandt’s or Turner’s.  If the greatest achievement of art is to communicate the consciousness of the artist, how can anyone deny Bacon’s power?  When you visit the Tate Britain in London, whose walls are lined with honourable accomplishment, the two painters capable of flaying the heart (in a good way) are Turner and Bacon.  They are supreme expression of a culture that managed to produce heroes no culture can contain.

I think ordinary viewers grasp this instinctively. Bacon, like Van Gogh, is critic-proof.  The Met’s gallery is all but silent (as an unscripted theatrical effect, an infant was screaming a siren wail on the day I visited), and people stare at images from a modern Hieronymus Bosch, cataloguing a hell of the interior as convincing to contemporary non-believers as Bosch’s was to post-medieval Christians.  An appalled shiver unites the crowds, which are thick and constant at this exhibit. In addition to the paintings themselves, the Met has devoted one dimmed side room to a display of flotsam and jetsam from Bacon’s famously chaotic studio (now transferred in toto to Dublin), where layer upon layer of compositing photos, news clips, magazine articles, and artistic shards formed a sedimentary deposit. Bacon left the studio in that condition, he said, because he was inspired by chaos, and he liked to await the arrival of happy accidents, a chance glance at a scrap or image underfoot that caused his mind to take flight.

Bacon never took a lesson and never painted from life.  He rose almost fully formed after an early start at interior decorating and street hustling, with a small grey Crucifixion in 1933 that resembles an x-ray of the Shroud of Turin, should it happen that the enshrouded figure was a splayed cow. Within months the picture appeared in a book on modern painting opposite a Picasso, the master whom Bacon adored above all others.  I imagine there was a certain shyness he felt before the living. A prowler of public toilets, gambling dens, sordid bars, and cruising spots wouldn’t exactly frolic in the normal, and when all is said and done, a model posing in a studio is decidedly normal.

Among all the detritus that satisfied his nesting instinct, I was struck by two images from Bacon’s studio. One was a page torn from the studies of bodies in motion taken by the nineteenth-century photographer, Eadward Muybridge.  These became famous as the first stop-action portrayals of men running, leaping, wrestling, and the like. Muybridge married science and art. His images supplied painters with thousands upon thousands of new poses, all in real-time motion, never dreamed of in anatomy classes. At the same time, they removed any hint of idealism, since not every gesture made by the human form is beautiful.

Bacon used Muybridge as a major inspiration; in this case, he saved a page showing two nude men wrestling, amounting to over a hundred postage-stamp sized shots in sequence. It’s not only that he transmuted them into men having sex (never explicitly portrayed – they could be men fighting or even merging like melting jelly or pooled liquid flesh). The startling part is how literal Bacon could be in lifting Muybridge’s poses while simultaneously making them so disturbing, as if his own desire-repellence was a transmuting force all its own, capable of damning-celebrating, looking-not looking, touching-cringing at the same time.

The other scrap that caught my eye was of one of Bacon’s young, usually thuggish, moody lovers, George Dyer. After Dyer’s suicide by overdose in 1971, a grief-stricken Bacon began to paint him even more obsessively than he had in life. According to the painter, the two met in 1964 when Dyer was attempting to burgle Bacon’s apartment, a likely story given that Dyer later planted some marijuana in the apartment, which he now shared with Bacon, and then called the police to come and seize it, arresting Bacon in the bargain.  Rough, handsome, and no doubt adept at various tinges of sado-masochism, Dyer happened to have a classic Roman nose in profile.  But in this particular photo he sits grinning in a chair facing us. It’s an ordinary snapshot.  What makes it striking is that Bacon has trampled and folded it many times, adding streaks of colour such as a red slash here and there. This deliberate manhandling – forget the psychological overtones – gave Bacon access to visual distortions that leapt on to the canvas as distortions of face, figure, character, and mood.

Similar mangling can be seen in much outsider art, the kind produced by schizophrenics who obsessively carry out hallucinatory visions. Bacon was certainly an outsider, and yet he calls from beyond sanity with screams that make more sense of life than one would imagine possible.  Psychosis is ultimately sterile when trying to dig deeper into life. It’s too repetitive, self-involved, and private, a maze luxuriant with growth but devoid of fruit. Bacon returns to the same themes with similar compulsiveness – the Met show includes six of his Screaming Popes, luridly purplish takes on a painting he thought the greatest ever done, Velasquez’s famous portrait of Pope Innocent X.  But when he stretches the Pope’s head into an elongated melon, pries his mouth open like a doctor looking for a festering wound (Bacon kept a Victorian volume on mouther. I must admit that seeing them in person doesn’t necessarily add as much as seeing Rembrandt or Titian in person. The pictures have gained some impact of scale, since all but a few are large and at times larger than life. Each is framed, per Bacon’s instructions, in heavy gold frames fronted with glass (he wanted the viewer’s reflection to become part of the painting – it doesn’t really work).  But Bacon’s existential surrealism hits with brute force no matter what the scale, and his habit of putting single figures on bright grounds of green and pink make it impossible not to focus on them. diseases close at hand), cages him in a rectangle of gold bars like a papal menagerie, and furrows the grey space all around into curtains of dripping sorrow, the final effect isn’t remotely psychotic. It’s despairingly religious, as seen by someone who called himself an optimist in a special sense: an optimist of nothing.

In an age of Google images, you can gaze at Bacon’s iconic paintings with the flick of a finger. I must admit that seeing them in person doesn’t necessarily add as much as seeing Rembrandt or Titian in person.  The pictures have gained some impact of scale, since all but a few are large and at times larger than life. Each is framed, per Bacon’s instructions, in heavy gold frames fronted with glass (he wanted the viewer’s reflection to become part of the painting – it doesn’t really work).  But Bacon’s existential surrealism hits with brute force no matter what the scale, and his habit of putting single figures on bright grounds of green and pink make it impossible not to focus on them.

Still, this is the first major Bacon show in New York in two decades, which makes it unmissable. A final point.  In the audio guide and a projection at the end of the show, there’s quite a bit of Bacon talking about himself in his upper-crust drone that’s peculiarly at odds with his tomcat-crawling-the-alley habits. He tends to carry on, almost like an Alec Guinness parody of Francis Bacon.  More to the point, he’s constantly evading the pain and honesty of his canvases. Despite some cogent remarks, Bacon was a celebrity poseur as flaccid as Andy Warhol but without the mesmerizing looks.  Bacon flouted a quotation he lifted from Aeschylus: “The reek of human blood smiles out at me.” He actually meant it, which is horrifying, but how can such an appetite ever be put into words.

RINA ARYA | REVIEW  |  IMPLICIT RELIGION  |  VOLUME 12  |  NUMBER 1  |  FRIDAY AUGUST 7 2009

Francis Bacon is arguably the most well-known British artist after J.M.W Turner, and his forthcoming centenary in 2009 has been well documented in both the art world and the mass media. !e BBC archive contains a comprehensive range of interviews and footage with the artist. To commemorate the centenary, the Tate has put together the third retrospective on Bacon (the previous ones were in 1962 and 1985 and were also held at the Tate), which has brought together some of his best works from different periods of his life. This extensive exhibition will then move to the Prado (Madrid) from 3 February–19 April 2009, and then on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York from 18 May–6 August 2009

On entry to the exhibition the viewer is faced with the Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988).1 This immediately sets us on guard. Three menacing beasts, one in each panel, either turn their back to the viewer (as in the left panel) or snarl and snap. !e notable absence of eyes in these figures means that the viewer cannot challenge the positions that we are being placed in because we cannot confront these figures, but are instead confronted by them as they grimace and growl at us. Fixed on podiums, and against a blood-red background, these creatures foretell doom. The monumentality of these figures, each featured on a panel measuring 198 x 147.5 cm and together spread across the entire wall, engulfs the viewer. Even before stepping into the room this painting is visible from the open niche and gives us a foretaste of the show. The conspicuous placement of this triptych is deliberate and gives an indication to the viewer who is perhaps not so familiar with Bacon’s work of the preoccupations of his subject matter and also the alarming effect that his paintings have on viewers.

As the title of this review suggests, I want to demonstrate the preoccupation that Bacon has with themes that are addressed in religion: the relationship between life and death, the role of evil in society, the position of the human being in a world that is bereft of God and of ultimate meaning or purpose. In a world without God, the human is drawn closer to the beast, and this is an ongoing theme in Bacon’s work (which is given a particular focus in Room 1: Animal).

Bacon employs religious symbols, namely the crucifixion (which is the subject of Room 4: Crucifixion) and the figure of the pope (of which there are innumerable examples in the exhibition, from Head VI, 1949, to the papal portraits such as Study after Velázquez, 1950, and Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, 1953). In statements about his work he claimed to be resolutely atheistic. Why then was he relentlessly drawn to these two popular iconographical reference points of the Christian tradition? I suggest that he did not use these symbols to support the Christian narrative or any other theological tradition, but that he used these symbols to explore questions about the meaning of life and existence. He explores the human nature of mortality and the plight of being thrown into a Godless world. The alienation of the individual and the realization of one’s fate are questions relating to what Tillich would describe as being of ultimate concern.

Rooms 1 to 4

The exhibition consists of ten rooms, which the viewer weaves his/her way through, and the paintings are largely arranged chronologically (Room 4: Crucifixion is an exception). Each room is given a name that corresponds to the subjects of the works. Room 1: Animal examines the significance of our animal instincts, which are usually latent, and demonstrates what happens when they come to the forefront of human expression. In these instances we experience the brutal, ravening capacities that exist beneath the veneer of civilization. For those unfamiliar with Bacon’s art, this room, rather in the manner of Second Version of Triptych 1944, presents a startling and immediate connection to the central issues of Bacon’s concerns: his expression of the proximity between the human and the animal, and the inevitable mortality that encapsulates the universal condition. !e sense of universality is conveyed by the absence of distinctive features in the works. In Figure in a Landscape (1945) and Figure Study I (1945–1946) the presence of a body is suggested, but the faces are hidden from view. More information is given in Figure Study II (1945–1946) and Painting (1946), where we witness the face that breaks out into a scream. More concentrated studies of the scream are conveyed in Head I (1947–1948) and Head II (1949). In the crossover from the human to the animal, and the generalized sense of despair articulated in these examples, Bacon is conveying the existential predicament of the human in post-war life.

Room 2: Zone focuses attention on another characteristic of Bacon’s work, the pictorial frame. In his works of the early 1950s Bacon was thinking about the presentation of form and he devised the three-dimensional space-frames that operate as powerful devices in his work. They serve to draw attention to the three-dimensional figure within the “pictures’ fictive space” (Gale 2008, 107). Study for a Crouching Nude (1952) and Study after Velázquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) conveys the effects of this device. In both these examples the striated vertical veil of brushstrokes breaks up the surface of the painting and draws the eye to the focal point of the scream. In the former example it draws attention to the taut musculature, of the body and in the latter example we are led to the point of disintegration, symbolized by the screaming mouth.

The literal darkness of the palette and metaphorical darkness of the sensibility pervades Room 3: Apprehension. The paintings in this room concentrate on a single anonymous male figure in a dark suit. These include Study for a Portrait (1953), Study for a Figure II (1953–1954) and Study for a Portrait (1953), Man in Blue V (1954) and Man in Blue (1954). Other paintings in the room focus on the animalistic tendencies in the human to mate—Two Figures in the Grass (1954) and cry—Chimpanzee (1955). The black backgrounds overwhelm and engulf the viewer, bringing with it a sense of doubt, despair and apprehension, which characterizes the atmosphere of the room. This apprehension is translated into real fear in Room 4: Crucifixion. If Room 3 can be described as encapsulating the anticipation and limbo-state of modern man, then the fears are actualized in Room 4. !e fear and aggression evidenced in the screams and cries of so many of the earlier figures are now taken a step further in the crucifixions, as we see the mechanisms of torture: from the figures who are tortured to the torturers themselves.

The crucifixions

In his interviews and written statements Bacon denied using the symbol of the crucifixion in a Christian way to support a particular faith. Among his many explanations he suggested that the crucifixion operated as an armature, which enabled him to explore human relationships and the behaviour of one human to another (Sylvester 1993, 44). The crucifixion revealed the cruelty and violence of human interaction. In three of the four crucifixion images that feature here, Crucifixion (1933), Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) and Crucifixion (1965), at least one figure looks as if it is being crucified. Comparisons are made between Christ on the Cross, which is well represented in the history of art, and the figure on a cross in a generic crucifixion. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion Bacon makes the connection, between the figure in the right hand panel and Cimabue’s Crucifixion 1272–1274, explicit. He states, of the representation of the Christ figure in Cimabue: “I always think of that as an image—as a worm crawling down the cross. I did try to make something of the feeling which I’ve sometimes had from that picture of this image just moving, undulating down the cross” (Sylvester 1993, 14). The interplay of brutality in Bacon’s crucifixions, as seen by the bloodshed of the figures on the cross, or the perpetrators of the act, such as in Second Version of Triptych 1944, and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) reinforces the sacrificial dimensions of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, and the concomitant religious feelings that this act symbolizes. The viewer is indirectly made aware of the ramifications of this act, even if they do not subscribe to the faith. The symbol of the crucifixion, which has been banalized and sanitized, now takes on a renewed sense of aesthetic and spiritual focus. The irony is that Bacon may be vehemently atheistic, but by continually referring to the crucifixion he is drawing attention to the very tradition he denies. His atheistic stance is dependent on the affirmation of theism in the first place. In the Godless world of Bacon’s generation, the propensity for violence and brutality is given a sharper focus and these sentiments are expressed in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944).

This painting is comprised of three strange figures separated into three panels with each figure on a podium and placed against a burnt orange background. It has already been referred to in Second Version of Triptych 1944, which as the title suggests was clearly influenced by this earlier triptych. Three Studies was painted in 1944 and exhibited for the first time at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945. This is now regarded as a seminal painting because it established Bacon into the art world. The art critic John Russell described this work as causing “a total consternation” (Russell 1993, 10–11). In contrast to the other exhibits in the 1945 show, Bacon’s contribution was regarded warily and offered a vision that many would have preferred to put behind them. Instead of deflecting or distracting the focus from post-war malaise, Bacon fixed the focus entirely on suffering, pain and despair, which these three figures articulate. These Tiresian figures are prophets of eternal doom. They cannot see and we are placed in this space to see what is in front of us. These figures, like the figures in the Second Version forty years later, are incomprehensible forms that defy easy classification. They have qualities that are unmistakably human and also animal/bird-like. In the earlier example, it becomes apparent that the reference to the crucifixion

in the title is not reflected in the image itself—the crucifixion is absent. Furthermore, contrary to one’s immediate reflection on the title, we are not looking at the, but at a, crucifixion (Russell 1993, 11). The use of the indefinite article alters the potential meaning of the work, and may provide explanations for his repeated use of the symbol. Bacon is discussing the crucifixion in a more generic sense. Given the political context of post-war Europe, it is plausible that this is a statement on the violence of wartime, but also more banally in day-to-day living. In his interviews with Sylvester Bacon spoke of the pervasive sense of violence that he felt he lived with (Sylvester 1993, 81–82). His background and early childhood were certainly tumultuous. His early memories were of upheaval due to the First World World. He also experienced the Blitz of the Second World War and the Irish Civil War (growing up as a Protestant in Catholic Ireland).

The presence of Second Version of Triptych 1944 on the way into Room 1 is a reminder of the monumental effects that the earlier “version,” Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, had on its viewers and singles this motif out as being amongst the most powerful in Bacon’s oeuvre. If the 1944 example established Bacon in the art world, then this second version undoubtedly consolidated his reputation. One possible attribution of the figures in the 1944 example is that of the Furies who seek eternal justice and hunt down wrongdoers. These Furies stalk us on our journey through the exhibition from room to room and appear in different guises.

The main themes reflected in the exhibition are Bacon’s preconception with the human form and the ontological questions about the status and place of the human being in the late twentieth century. In all his depictions, whether of anonymous and generic figures who epitomise the human condition, or in more specific studies of his friends in the portraits (the subject of Room 7), Bacon examines the mortality of the flesh and the proximity between life and death. These concerns are revisited in the final room, Room 10: Late. In these later works, which Bacon painted when he was in his seventies, he is seen facing up to his mortality. The disintegration or dissolution of figures’ heads and the palpability of the shadows (of death) in Triptych (1983) reveal the workings of death.

Religious musings

Interpretations of the religious content and sensibility of Bacon’s work are often thwarted in Bacon scholarship. Many defer to the endless statements that he made about his virulent atheistic stance. They interpret his use of the religious images as formal devices, which allowed him to explore aspects of human nature, but they do not concede a religious explanation of behaviour. I argue that his attitude to religion was problematic, but we can speak of the implicit religion in his work. His images do not support a theological tradition and hence cannot be described as explicit, but they do engage in theological debates and speak of existence in a Godless world. God is featured as a palpably absent presence: the grimace of a biomorphic form, a shadow that overspills a body, the numerous dark, black abyssal backgrounds. Bacon dealt with the primary themes about the meaning and purpose of existence by examining the mortality of the flesh and the intricacies of human behaviour. In the absence of any of the religious structures of the afterlife, his figures are left contemplating the void. The reflecting surfaces of the glass, coupled with the spatial inclusion of the triptych devices pulls the viewer in. We see our reflections in the glass and are variously positioned in a cage, at the base of a crucifixion and in a background where we find no familiarity and hence no solace. The Godless world is not a myth that is narrated to us but something that we are confronted with in the very fabric of the work.

I walked around the rooms sometimes following the rooms in sequence and at other times backtracking. The gravitas of the first image preyed on my mind and became weighted down by other similar images of distortion and degeneration. Bacon is inescapably imparting a message about the human condition that is pessimistic insofar as it makes us engage with our mortality and transient position in the world but it is also uplifting because it is energizing and has an urgency and immediacy that makes us rethink our place in the world. I walked away feeling that I had experienced a narrative of the evolution of the human which turns back in on itself thus revealing the animal in the human. Somehow this did not feel stultifying but progressive and paradoxical. !rough his sophisticated pictorial technique Bacon takes the viewer back to the natural body, which is undone of all its cultural fetters, and we experience it in all its spasmodic ways.

Critical appraisal

The arrangement of the paintings enabled the amateur to make sense of the broad themes of Bacon’s oeuvre, and, for the more accomplished viewer, to trace the development of Bacon’s style and technique. Whilst the division into named rooms is interesting, it might have been valuable to make more thematic comparisons. Bacon was a painter who emphasised the importance of process and the influence that chance exerted in his work. However, this was not adequately conveyed in the selection of images. The curators deliberately chose his masterpieces but it might have been an interesting contrast to see lesser works, whether in development or technique, in order to make the adjustment. The array of works was at times simply too much to take in, and certainly so for one visit, but when I considered the volume of work against the purpose of the show—a retrospective and a commemoration of his centenary—then I began to revise my opinion. The earliest wall text states that philosophical notions run through the exhibition like a spine, but there was a dearth of philosophical commentary to bolster the images, or rather the wall texts did not provide adequate information. !is could be construed positively, to make the case that the power of Bacon’s paintings is such that they can speak for themselves and do not require texts to impart meaning.

Another apparent mismatch between intention and delivery was the presence of Room 6: Archive. In 1998, John Edwards (Bacon’s former lover) gave the contents of Bacon’s studio and living space at 7 Reece Mews (in South Kensington) to the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. An incredible amount of source material, preparatory sketches, photographs etc was unearthed in the reconstruction and transplantation from the first to the second site. Room 6 chronicled the posthumous investigation of Bacon’s studio. This body of sources was revelatory because it gave us important information about Bacon’s working processes and modus operandi. In his statements and articulations of the brush on canvas it would appear that Bacon utilized the role of chance in his work, the accidental mark. The virtuosity of his brushwork in the examples of images from Room 1 to 5 certainly indicated this. The archival material presented here revealed the mismatch between Bacon’s statements and his actual practice, as it was revealed from photographic and other sources that he did preparatory paintings. The evidence here to a greater or lesser extent undermines his professions of spontaneity, the role he awarded to chance and intuition.

Whilst I understand the significance of this archive material both in authenticating Bacon’s method of working and also as contributing to Bacon scholarship, I feel that it was poorly placed here. It was deeply idiosyncratic and strange to go from Room 5: Crisis, to the orderliness of the archive. It interrupted the flow of being absorbed in the depth of his visions to having suddenly to retract from those recesses to a stark room filled with a proliferation of images and sanitized glass cases containing source material. !e wealth of material was tremendous and had been classified with astonishing precision. But it would have been well placed in an adjunct room, or at the beginning or end of the journey. !e experience of the subsequent rooms represented a deviation from Rooms 1 to 5 and invoked a more critical perspective on Bacon’s intentions. Bacon left an indelible mark on my imagination when I first discovered his work in 1998 and this exhibition bears testimony to this great artist. In spite of the familiarity of individual pieces of his work, which fetch millions at auction houses, and the growing trend of contemporary artists to explore distortion and the grotesque, Bacon’s art still has the power to wound and strike the nervous sensibilities of the viewer. In his engagement with the pain and suffering of the mortal condition, his portrayal of the evil in humankind, of the reality of the death of God and the subsequent redundancy of the symbol of the Pope in the contemporary age, Bacon can be said to be working out problems that are resolutely religious. He was a militant atheist who was haunted by the presence that the absent-God exerted in the world.

Note

1. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988 is featured as the tail end of Room 10: Late. However, we actually see the painting before we enter Room 1.

References

Gale, M. 2008. “Zone.” In Francis Bacon, edited by M. Gale and C. Stephens, xx-xx. London: Tate Publishing.

Russell, J. 1993. Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson.

Sylvester, D. 1993. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson.

NEW YORK (CBS) ― Brace yourself for artist Francis Bacon. Passionate about painting, the Dublin-born Bacon, who never went to art school, is considered one of the most influential European painters of the 20th century.

In this exhibition, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Bacon’s birth, the artist’s twisted, tortured human figures, and dramatic interpretations of screeching religious icons, demand your attention.

Surrounded by 65 dark, and dramatic works, at the met, you might think bacon was a tormented soul. But Curator Gary Tinterow tells CBS2’s Dana Tyler, "Actually he was a very cheerful person. He talked about not believing in God, being a confirmed atheist. But he said there is no meaning to life, there is only meaning one gives it through daily work, through what we achieve on a daily basis. There’s no predetermination he would say, but he would say I’m an optimist, an optimist about nothing. In other words, there’s not grand scheme but he took pleasure in his daily life."

World War II is the subject in Three Studies For Figures at the base of the Crucifixion from 1944. For Curator Gary Tinterow, it’s the most remarkable painting in the exhibition. He said, "This is a work that Bacon showed in London in April 1944. The month when Mussolini was hung. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, and FDR died in the United States. So it was a earth changing, shattering, momentous moment. And he releases this painting that he had been working on for about a year showing these strange, nightmarish creatures that look like an amoeba. We recognize that we want to anthropomorphize them and we want to see human aspects right in the mouth and the eye. But they’re horrific."

Tyler says, "Of course my eye is drawn here?" Tinterow responds, "Yeah, and the mouth is so fascinating with Bacon. Bacon said many times that I’m fascinated by mouth. He had books on diseases of the mouth and radiology."

Bacon was fascinated by Nazi imagery. A 1946 work, called Painting, shows Adolph Hitler’s reception room in his chancellory in Berlin.

Tinterow: "The architecture of power and that’s the statement that he wanted to make with his pictures. He wanted to explore our fascination with power. Our complicity and holding people up who in fact are just empty hallow men. And the colors are meant to be shocking and vibrant and harsh and to go against conventions of good taste. He wanted to, he said, unlock the valves of feeling, in other words he wanted to grab you by your guts."

Bacon’s personal life plays out on canvas, in his 1971 triptych In Memory of George Dyer. Tinterow explains, "This is one of the most moving pictures in the exhibition because it was painted after his companion, long time lover, and his muse George Dyer, who is seen there on the right, committed suicide in their Paris hotel room the night before his big opening of a retrospective at the grand palace. Bacon went on to the opening and pretended nothing had happened but it was tremendously devastating for him."

An artist who never lost his edge, Francis Bacon died in Madrid in 1992. He was 82 years old. Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, on display until August 16th.

BACON, HALF-BAKED

BEN DAVIS  |  REVIEW  |  ARTNET MAGAZINE  |  TUESDAY 28 JULY 2009

The large Francis Bacon show currently drawing multitudes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art really speaks for itself. You don’t need any theory to love it. The hits are all there — the wailing Popes, the naked wrestlers, the melted portraits of the British artist’s colleagues and lovers. All of these are crowd-pleasers, exuding an atmosphere of fertile angst that is immediately accessible. (The first thing you see as you enter, in fact, is Bacon’s triptych of serpentine, phallic monsters, inspiration for the chest-bursting creature of Alien fame, a curatorial decision that hammers home the populist appeal of Bacon.)

As I passed through the galleries one Tuesday morning with the crowds, however, I recalled that despite the horror-movie vibe of it all, there is a particular reference that gives Bacon’s work a sheen of intellectual mystique for me: Gilles Deleuze’s small book, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, first published in 1981. The much-cited postmodern philosopher, part of the canon in any college theory class, was a Bacon fan. That fact by itself has always made Bacon’s work seem somehow important in a way it might not otherwise have.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I know because the Met show quotes Deleuze in its wall text about one of the iconic Pope paintings: “Bacon’s scream is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth.” Every single writer in the Met catalogue feels bound to reference Deleuze’s book (though Martin Harrison does acknowledge that Deleuze is wrong to ascribe to Bacon a fundamentally anti-narrative agenda; more on this in a sec.) Even Bacon’s biographer, Michael Peppiatt, whose Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma was recently republished to coincide with this show, tells us that Deleuze’s treatise “put discussion of Bacon’s painting on a new plane of pure, often playful and always inventive intellectual conjecture” — though he doesn’t say that much more about it (Bacon and Deleuze apparently did meet, once, in the early ‘80s; as Peppiatt puts it, “no friendship evolved”.

A few years ago, University of Minnesota Press sent me a copy of a new edition of The Logic of Sensation when it was reissued in a new translation. After seeing the show at the Met, I decided to pick it up and see if its insights still held today.

I’ll spare a build up and say that I don’t think The Logic of Sensation does hold up to scrutiny (though any book that contains a sentence as crazy as “The head-meat is a becoming-animal of man” can’t be all bad either). Before I get into the details of why, however, I will note that Deleuze’s sibylline manner, which I think connotes a sense of timeless intellectual mystery for his admirers, today strikes me as a dated, period style. Overcomplex and bombastic, it’s a bit like the philosophical equivalent of prog rock. The Logic of Sensation was published the same year Rush released Tom Sawyer — coincidence? (Deleuze himself would probably prefer a comparison to Talking Heads; he quotes Crosseyed and Painless somewhere in this book.)

What, in essence, is Deleuze’s argument about Francis Bacon? The Logic of Sensation amounts to 17 tangentially connected essays, each one a different formal/philosophical analysis of one aspect of Bacon’s practice. Deleuze considers, to pick a few random examples, the fact that Bacon tends to isolate figures in a round area at the center of the frame; the recurrence of animal imagery in his paintings; his recourse to the triptych format; and his use of colors. He postulates a common “logic” that underlies all these various choices. In essence, Deleuze sees in Bacon’s liquescent brand of Expressionism an illustration of his own philosophical thesis that what is most real about bodies is their virtuality, their irreducibility to any one fixed form or identity. Thus, for Deleuze, the isolation of Bacon’s figures at the center of the frame is a way of cutting them out of any narrative relation that would ascribe to them a fixed meaning; the animal imagery reflects the blurring of the self and other; the triptych is a way of showing different aspects of a single form without reducing it to a common essence; and Bacon’s use of colour is a way of escaping the hypostatizing effect of linear representation, instead rendering spaces and bodies as flows of mercurial energy (“Each dominant colour and each broken tone indicates the immediate exercise of a force on the corresponding zone of the body or head; it immediately renders force visible.”

And what’s wrong with all of this? Nothing — unless you actually take it seriously. I’ll proceed through four counts, from the most inconsequential to the most compromised aspect of Deleuze’s adoption of Bacon.

First of all, Deleuze’s adventure into art is thrilling — but when he actually tries to talk about art history, he plays so fast and loose with references that it is distorting. One of Deleuze’s least helpful contributions to understanding Bacon, for instance, is his pronouncement that “Bacon first of all seems to be an Egyptian.” This is fine as a superficial bit of colour — there’s nothing outrageous about the observation that Bacon’s squashed spaces might resemble the absolute space of Egyptian art a little. But this is not a flourish for Deleuze; he repeats it multiple times, and actually seems to think that Bacon’s Egyptian-ness is a matter of world-historical import. When he asks the reader what accounts for the difference between Bacon’s painting and Egyptian art, Deleuze actually replies by stating the following: “What is at stake here is no longer just Bacon, but undoubtedly the entire history of Western painting” (Gotta love how art theorists who reject all historical “meta-narratives” can let a statement like that slide). But then it turns out what is important about “Egyptian art" for Deleuze is just one thing — bas-relief, an art form which (so he says) collapses the opposition between visual and haptic space, a quality that Deleuze also values in Bacon’s painting. Never mind that bas-relief is not really particular to Egypt, or that there is really a lot more to Egyptian art than bas-relief. . . I suppose if I defined an apple as any sweet round fruit, then an orange would also be an apple.

Second, while the power of The Logic of Sensation is due largely to what translator Daniel W. Smith calls Deleuze’s “extraordinarily specific and detailed analyses of individual paintings,” in fact the account has a yawning blind spot when it comes to the actual work of Francis Bacon. If you had to describe the characteristic tone of Bacon’s imagery, you’d probably think of claustrophobia, of dread, of a sense of visceral repulsion. And yet, Gilles Deleuze’s entire argument is based on bracketing this aspect of the work out as insignificant. From Deleuze’s own introduction to his book: “Bacon, to be sure, often traffics in the violence of a depicted scene: spectacles of horror, Crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters. But these are overtly facile detours. . . What directly interests him is a violence that is involved only with colour and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation).” Later, he tells us that “Bacon’s deformations are rarely constrained or forced, they are not tortures, despite appearances,” and still later, he asserts that Bacon “is not a painter who ‘believes’ in death. His is indeed a figurative misérabilisme, but one that serves an increasingly powerful Figure of life.”

But no, wrong — Bacon’s paintings are inescapably about crucifixions, monsters, torture, death, albeit of a surreal variety. That is part of their “logic." A work like Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (1961), on view at the Met, is pregnant with all sorts of meanings — but it does invoke the image of a disabled child, and owes some of its impact to the fact that this referent is explicit (we can be certain, because it is citing a frame from an Eadweard Muybridge serial photo). Deleuze, admittedly, is interested in championing the concept of the “diagram,” a manner of representing bodies that, he tells us, doesn’t try to replicate an original referent, but instead strives toward “a creation of original relations that are substituted for the form.” Apparently, such an operation renders subject matter indifferent; or, better said, it seems that technique is the only real subject matter for Deleuze. In effect, what Deleuze is doing is saying that Bacon is not “really” interested in what he is clearly most interested in, then rhapsodizing over how well his own edited version of the work fits his own thesis

Now, of course, one can argue that some secret life-affirming force is at work underneath Bacon’s imagery of horror and loneliness — but in that case, you still have to account for how the explicit and buried contents interact. If Bacon’s painting is fundamentally about unleashing powerful flows of desire, why do these primarily manifest themselves through horrific imagery? It is not as if sometimes he paints blood and ghouls, and sometimes he paints rainbows and frolicking puppies; he’s not indifferent to content. Similarly, it is no good to state that what is most fundamental about Bacon is a bracketing out of all narrative suggestion, when this is clearly not the case — at the Met, a work like Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI (1957), a depiction of the shadowy Dutchman slouching across a yellow field weighed down by painting instruments, as if in a funk, proves that Bacon is interested in plugging his paintings into recognizable figures and stories, however fragmentary. (As a matter of fact, you can even say he had a taste for stories — Peppiatt notes that the van Gogh series was inspired by the Kirk Douglas film Lust for Life!)

Deleuze fans will say that the philosopher is not interested in “interpreting” paintings, but in generating new ideas about them. However, if such a method is not going to operate just as a license to make shit up, it must be based on a reading of the actual material at hand. In his famous readings of philosophers, Deleuze prided himself on a method of overreading, using their own words to create something new and “monstrous” by pushing their internal logic to its limit — “the author had to say, in effect, everything I made him say.” This is not the method he follows in the much more openly “monstrous” case of Bacon’s art. Here he is simply superimposing his own affirmative philosophy onto his object.

Both of these problems with Deleuze’s reading of Bacon — his haphazard use of history, his tone-deafness when it comes to the paintings themselves — are symptoms of a more fundamental issue of approach. For, despite his attentiveness to specific artworks, it is not really art that interests Deleuze. He is only interested in art as it relates to a specific problem in philosophy, which is the representation of being. Thus, the history of art and the quirks of Bacon’s particular oeuvre both get reduced to responses to the dilemmas of representation — the space of “classical” painting, for Deleuze, is reducible to a manner of establishing an “objective” space which separates out the subject from the object, while he defines the achievement of Bacon as having to do with the way his work undoes this separation, collapsing visual space and returning the subject to its vital co-dependence with its environment.

There is some truth to this reading (though I will take David Harvey’s account of the Renaissance production of “objective” perspectival space as a function of a nascent mercantile capitalism’s needs for objective cartography and scientific knowledge over Deleuze’s placeless, causeless account any day). The real problem lies in the way that The Logic of Sensation reads artworks as nothing more than responses to intellectual problems, turning philosophical pertinence into a device for evaluating artistic quality. Despite the protestations of both his translator and Tom Conley, who writes an afterward for the most recent edition of the book, The Logic of Sensation does in fact amount to a philosophical aesthetics. It is full of casual generalizations about the ontology of art that are used as evaluative tools. Take the following: “[T]here is a special relation between painting and hysteria. . . Painting directly attempts to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation.” Deleuze then goes on to judge the success of various styles of painting against this definition of painting’s essence.

The paradoxical result, given this thinker’s reputation as a champion of difference, is that various artworks are conceived of as offering right or wrong answers, thereby strictly limiting the modes of appreciating art: “There are two ways in which the [modern] painting can fail,” Deleuze pronounces confidently, “once visually” — that would be abstraction of the Mondrian/Kandinsky variety, deemed to be too wrapped up in a quest for ideal Forms — “and once manually.” The latter case is that of Pollock-style abstraction, which Deleuze finds not merely distasteful, but demonstrably false. “By liberating a space that is (wrongly) claimed to be purely optical, the abstract expressionists in fact did nothing other than to make visible an exclusively manual space.” Marcel Duchamp, likewise, comes under fire for being too random, and therefore still implicitly posing a difference between human agency and impersonal chance. In the end, it seems Deleuze’s theory is only flexible enough to accommodate Cézanne, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Bacon.

Which brings me to my final point, which is about the self-undermining nature of Deleuzian “logic” in general. Even philosophical rivals like Alain Badiou will admit that Deleuze constructed a system that is formidably suggestive. However, it must be admitted that any attempt to actually do anything with his thought has mainly added up to nothing, or worse. The most successful attempt to put Deleuze’s insights into political form, for instance, is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s tome Empire, a work that essentially amounts to proposing not having a plan as a strategy for the anti-globalization movement (This is not a surprise, really — Deleuze’s frequent role-model was French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose reflections on the "élan vital" famously became reactionary when taken up as a political philosophy; the Bergsonian tendency to leave politics to "the irrational, to chance" is a subject of critique in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks).

Who was Gilles Deleuze? He was a French leftist philosopher who wrote all his major works in the ’60s and ’70s, most of them in the wake of the uprising of May 1968. As such, his work partakes of the sense of radical intellectual experimentation of that period, but also of the New Left’s disillusionment with material and historical explanations for reality (somewhat understandable, given the Stalinized nature of the French Communist Party’s politics, and the major role it played in French intellectual life). The philosophy Deleuze offers, in his book on Francis Bacon and elsewhere, gets much of its appeal because it still resounds with liberatory rhetoric. We live in a world that brutally instrumentalizes bodies, tries to sell people unrealistic Platonic ideals of what they can be — so Deleuze’s anti-Platonist philosophy that bodies cannot be confined to any one definition, that they are indisociably part of a constantly surging flux of self-differentiating energy, has a potent social content. (It’s always worth remembering that Deleuze, like his colleague Michel Foucault, had a famous — if equivocal — association with the gay liberation movement.)

Nevertheless, the problem with Deleuze’s attempt to write difference into ontology is that in reality what is “different” is determined in relation to actual, historical events, not in some abstract, free-flowing psychic space. Without anchoring concepts in relation to a real context, there is no way to stop one’s prescriptions from becoming ahistorical formulae, no matter how many times you state that they can’t be. In some contradictory way, I think that it is precisely this formalistic character which explains the continued appeal of Deleuze in art circles today: He allows his followers to insist that they are committed to liberating desire from all pre-established structures, while in fact confining themselves to a pretty narrow, predictable structure (Badiou rightly declares Deleuze’s oeuvre to be conceptually “monotonous” underneath its superficial complexity). In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and collaborator Felix Guattari tell us that philosophy is not about establishing fixed axioms and rules, but about creating new concepts, new trajectories of thought. It should therefore be deeply embarrassing that 99 percent of all writing on Deleuze is simply slavish blow-by-blow recapitulation, and that the Met show pays homage to him as a kind of aphorism-spouting sage.

In the final analysis, Francis Bacon’s oeuvre itself provides a tremendous example of the necessity of a historical approach. Read Jerry Saltz’s recent biographical sketch of Bacon’s career [see Sacred Monster, May 27, 2009]. Whereas in The Logic of Sensation, it often seems that Bacon’s career trajectory is nothing but a circling ever closer to Deleuze’s own position, Saltz shows how Bacon’s style, at one point an expression of a potent and unique worldview, eventually became a gimmick, a defense mechanism. The very same formal tics that had been an expression of an original thought became a way of resisting confronting further original thought. “What’s especially poignant about Bacon is that he knew he’d built his own prison. As early as 1963, he referred to ‘my rigidness.’ He talked about the ‘drawback’ of his style and how he used painterly tics as a ‘device.’ ”

In Three Studies for a Crucifixion by Francis Bacon, no one and everyone is on the cross. Each panel, as the title suggests, may show the same room. Its oval and red walls hint at decorative luxury. Its vomit-yellow carpeting terminates in the dark yellow wainscoting of period England. Repeated across three panels, the room could easily mark an estate.

It could also mark a museum. Museums used to affect these lavish tastes, before Modernism’s white cubes, and still may today in much of England. Those black rectangles in place of doors and windows could be the paintings. The towering side of meat at right could be sculpture. The grisly, contorted nude on a couch at center could have come right off the wall. Two men in the middle ground at left, cautiously edging their way toward the center panel, could be trapped in the museum at night. 

That pretty much describes, too, the experience of a Bacon retrospective. It also describes the experience of art for Bacon. He had no sympathy for Modernism, but he felt cut off from the past. He could not or would not train academically, in a country that clung to academic standards, but he could not help judging himself accordingly. He paints revulsion—against fine art, against the flesh, and against himself. As in Three Studies for a Crucifixion, even the dead are dying.

        
                 Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.  Francis Bacon

A Histrionic Horror Show

                  Crucifixion (1933) Francis Bacon 

                                                                                              Head VI, 1949 Francis Bacon (British, 1909–1992)

Bringing Bacon home  

W. H. CHONG  |  ART  |  CULTURE MULCHER  |  MONDAY JULY 6 2009