Francis Bacon News     

A World first for gallery

Lorna Marsh   16 September 2006 06:00

Norfolk's flagship art gallery has clinched an exclusive international first with an exhibition of Francis Bacon paintings which includes some never before seen in public.

               Unpacking a Pope

   One of the paintings being unpacked at the Sainsbury Centre

 

Norfolk's flagship art gallery has clinched an exclusive international first with an exhibition of Francis Bacon paintings which includes some never before seen in public.

It is only the second show that the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA), based at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, has put on since its £10m relaunch in May.

Fifty works by the acclaimed artist from private and public collections all over the globe form the first exhibition of its kind in the world and the only one in Europe before going to America.

And yesterday SCVA staff unpacked the first of the works for the Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, which is guest curated by London-based Michael Peppiatt, Bacon's biographer and friend of 30 years.

Mr Peppiatt said: “I have become increasingly convinced that Francis Bacon reached the height of his creative prowess during the 1950s.

“From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s, through the early popes and portraits of Van Gogh, to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation, never again would the Baconian world be so rich and inventive.”

And the show does not just comprise artworks but photos and letters that provide a fascinating glimpse inside the mind of a complex artist.

Mr Peppiatt said: “Photographs of Francis Bacon as a very young man show an immaculately dressed youth with neatly parted hair and a fresh round face consumed by the intensity of his wide-apart eyes. It is the gaze of a child surprised and fascinated by the mystery of the world.

“By the time Cecil Beaton photographs Bacon in the late 1950s, wariness has crept into the eyes. The young man has lost his innocence, but not his wonder.”

Some paintings also tell the story of the friendship formed between Bacon and Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, founders of the SCVA.

The couple helped Bacon financially and commissioned work from him, including each others' portraits which are among the 13 paintings owned by the SCVA that form the backbone of the exhibition.

Among the works sourced from other collections are five never put on public display giving visitors a rare opportunity to view them.

Sara Cooper, the exhibitions curator at the Norwich end, said it was satisfying to know that the centre had kept the momentum going since securing another world exclusive of Polynesian art for its relaunch.

She added: “It is very exciting to be unwrapping these major works of art, it is like Christmas with butterflies in your stomach as you open them.”

Oddity valued No requirement is too quirky to satisfy, if you know the right person to ask, finds Sian Griffiths  The Sunday Times  10th September 2006

Need a London flat with a living room vast enough to play football in? Or a loft so cavernous that you can host rehearsals for an eight-piece jazz band? Fancy practising your rock-climbing in a home with triple-height ceilings? Maybe the home of a famous painter such as the late Francis Bacon appeals? If you want a quirky property in the capital, you have to know who to call. Step forward Simon Harris, a former songwriter turned estate agent who specialises in “finding houses for people who want something unusual. We just don’t do normal”. The London property market’s answer to Ghostbusters is Cityscope, an agency founded by Harris 12 years ago. Among the buildings currently on its books are Francis Bacon’s former home in South Kensington; an old sausage factory in Rotherhithe; a house inside the railings of a London park; and any number of modernist visions in white concrete and glass. As we bowl along in Harris’s 4x4, viewing some of the London homes on his books, he enthuses about 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, which is coming to market for the first time since Francis Bacon’s death in 1992. The unusual thing about Bacon’s house is its history, he explains. “He lived there for 30 years and painted a lot in the studio there.” The painter’s decision to bequeath it — part of his £11m estate — to one of his oldest friends, a handsome Cockney barman called John Edwards, made headlines at the time. The studio was moved lock, stock and barrel to a Dublin museum and the house has been remodelled, but touches of the interior as it was in Bacon’s lifetime remain, such as the stained-glass windows of Bacon at work done by his friend, Linda McCartney. When the house goes on sale this month for £2.25m, Harris expects it to be snapped up. Harris admits that because a lot of his properties are so individual, their target market is small. “Sometimes they are not the easiest to sell.” But when was being different ever easy? Cityscope, 020 7830 9776, www.cityscope.co.uk

 Love is the Devil 

   Gay Times   September 2006

A chance encounter between 19-year-old Michael Peppiatt and the painter Francis Bacon started a friendship that lasted over three decades. After being asked to curate a new exhibition of his paintings from the 50s, Peppiatt, now 64, remembers his old friend and tells GT why that decade was of such importance to the artist.  Words by Joe Heaney

Most of us have dreamed of finding ourselves thrust into the middle of an exciting world of glamorous celebrities and invitations to all the best parties, but that's exactly what happened to Michael Peppiatt at the tender age of 19, when his student life collided dramatically with Francis Bacon, who was at the time a fast-rising star in the art world, already with his first Tate retrospective behind him, and a regular at Soho's more charismatic drinking holes.

"It was 1963. I was a student and writing for a student magazine called Cambridge Opinion. I decided to do a piece on modern art in Britain and someone said to me, 'Oh, you should meet Francis Bacon'.  I'd never heard of him but I got to know John Deakin, the photographer,  who was a close friend of Bacon's.  I came up from Cambridge and hung around the French House pub in Dean Street. It's still there, although I think it's been tarted up beyond recognition now. By sheer luck, I met John Deakin. I asked him, 'Is there any chance I could meet Francis Bacon?'  He was very camp and he said [adopts a fruity accent]. 'I don't know, my dear, now that she's become sooo famous, whether she'd bother to meet a student!'  Suddenly, a man at the bar turned around and said, 'What's the old fool saying? I adore students! Now - what are you having to drink?' So we were off!

"I was entranced. I'd never met anyone like him. He swept me off for lunch and we had a marvellous time - I drank far too much white wine, ate oysters, grilled sole and all kinds of other marvellous things. In a way, I just got so attracted to him as a person I forgot the original purpose why I was there."

Although Peppiatt couldn't have known it at the time, Bacon went on to have a formative impact on the writer-curator's life. "I was a little bit in search of a father, having not got on very well with my own, and Bacon was around 30 years older than me. I just felt that he was an extraordinarily magnetic person, and we had such a great time. 

"He took me to all sorts of clubs and bars, and that was much more interesting than reading up for my English exam at Cambridge, so I kept coming up to London. I met lots of people like Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach and all the others who were in his circle."

Over the next two decades the pair stayed in touch, even when Peppiatt moved to Paris in 1966 to take up a new job at the magazine Réalité.

"I found him a place to work in Paris. He used to call me when he came over and I would call him when I came to London. I'm sure it meant much more to me than it meant for him, but it was close relationship fro about 28 years. We travelled together sometimes."

Becoming such firm friends gave Peppiatt first-hand experience of Bacon as a person - perhaps the most misreported aspect of the artist. Ask him if Bacon looked after his friends, and Peppiatt is quick to respond. "Oh yes! Certainly. That's why I was annoyed with that film Love is the Devil because although Derek Jacobi is a wonderful actor, and looked uncannily like Bacon, the film didn't capture his geniality and his love of fun.  He was very funny  and had a penetrating sense of humour - an electric kind of presence. The best way I can describe it is that he could go into a dull restaurant, and suddenly  there'd be a current of life. He'd joke with the waiter and give him an enormous tip and order a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine. I mean, he just sent the temperature up.

"He was also very attentive to his friends. If there was an emergency he was the first to offer help. For instance, I had a girl friend who fell down and broke her back. He was immediately there on the phone, saying, 'If you need any money for the hospital, let me know and I'll wire it over straight away'.

"He was somebody who received and gave a lot of friendship. He had a large capacity for it - a bit like his capacity for drink and life in general. He was a very, very vital person because he slept very little, you know, I mean, even though he had all that drink inside him, he just had a few hours sleep and then he'd be back in the studio working again."

However, being Bacon's friend wasn't always plain sailing. "Of course there was the other side.  If he turned, he could be pretty terrifying. It happened to me once or twice.  I remember he was very scathing of other painters, and I think one time I maintained some rather pathetic defence of Hockney that really got to him.  He really laid into me: 'Well, with your lack of taste you would like those nothing paintings!' - you know, quite violent and nasty.

"He was very vital but he could also be very destructive. You had to be fairly resilient to stay the course.  I was fascinated with him, so he became a very central part of my life."

During their friendship, Bacon occasionally confided some of the most intimate details of his sexuality to Peppiatt, including his feelings towards his late father, Eddy Bacon, a retired Hussars Captain and thoroughbred racehorse trainer who had been notorious for his highly-strung, argumentative nature.

"He said he had that he had this curious thing where he disliked his father but was sexually attracted to him, and his mother was just an airhead - just thinking about her own fun - but I suspect it was more complex than that, and he didn't go into it."

Despite appearing apparently at ease with his sexuality and making no attempt either to curb his flamboyant behaviour or erase its erotic influence on his art, Peppiatt remembers that, privately, Bacon wasn't so comfortable.

"He used to say things like; it's a defect. It's like being born with a limp'. But on the other hand he assumed it fully. He was a very direct person and he liked other people to be direct with him and between themselves. He didn't have to get them drunk and find out who they were. There were a lot of people who got left by the wayside in his life."

Following Bacon's death in 1992, Michael Peppiatt's interest in his late friend and artwork inspired him to complete the biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), into which he poured a great deal of his own personal memories (it was published in 1996). Peppiatt quotes his favourite period of Bacon's life as being the 1950s, and this decade forms the basis of the exhibition he has curated at The Sainsbury Centre, Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 50s. It includes around 50 paintings, most of which have not been exhibited publically before and are borrowed from private collections as far afield as Taiwan and Seattle in the US.

"I've always been fascinated by the 50s because it seems to me Bacon was at his most fierce. He was very footlose. he seemed to explore a wide variety of themes, from landscapes to animals - he even did some painting of children.  He hadn't become fixed in one vision. All those great series come in the 50s - the Pope, the Van Gogh series, the William Blake series, some of crucifixions, all those animal paintings. It was a very inventive decade." 

But it wasn't Bacon's artwork that marks, for Peppiatt, the 50s as a significant period.

"He was in a very tortured relationship with Peter Lacy, and that overshadowed the whole decade.

"They met in 1950 but Lacy was already dead by the time I'd met Bacon in 1962. Famously, Bacon got a telegramme announcing his death during the opening of his first Tate retrospective in 1962. But he was still very present in Bacon's psyche when I met him, and I think he considered it a disastrous love affair that could have never have worked. 

"He was obsessed by Lacy.  He said to me once; 'It's like that song, "I can't live with him and I can't live without him" '. They had a very tumultuous relationship where Lacy would beat him up,  tear up his paintings, leave him on the street half conscious.  It was very violent, and somehow Bacon was able to deal with that and, actually, was excited by it and enjoyed it.  He enjoyed being badly treated."

Ask Peppiatt whether this found its way into Bacon's paintings and he nods in agreement. "If  look at them, they're full of sturm und drang, full of violent, passionate emotion, particularly the Van Gogh series.  He was pushed to his absolute limits by this affair.

"He was extremely tough, Bacon, even though he could look effeminate and acquiescent. He could take a lot of punishment. At the doctors, they could take out stitches without anaesthetic. He had a high threshold for pain.  But he said Lacy was tougher than he was, and I think that was part of the admiration. He felt that Lacy had lost that kind of toughness later, perhaps through drink, perhaps with the Arab boys - something went soft in him.  But to begin with I think there was this admiration for Lacy's toughness, and the fact he could easily keep up with Bacon's drinking and carrying on. In the end it got to him, though. I think that's what he died of - extreme alcoholism."

Unfortunately, by the early 1990s Bacon himself had passed away, but not before he'd been become crowned as the "greatest living artist" - and been through yet another difficult and violent relationship with east End petty criminal George Dyer, followed by a rather more successful one with Jon Edwards, to whom he later bequeathed his £11m fortune.

"I think he knew he was exceptional," says Peppiatt, "but he was also full of self-doubt. he had his eye on Picasso as basically the only other artist who mattered to him in the 20th century. So later, when they talked about Bacon as the 'greatest living painter', I remember him saying to me as a cynical aside; "Well, there's not much competition, is there!' "

Francis Bacon: Paintings From The 50s is at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (01603 593 100) from Sept 26th-Dec 10th

Francis Bacon ; Paintings at the Sainsbury Centre

1st September 2006

Francis Bacon in the 1950s

by Michael Peppiatt

From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation some ten years later, British artist Francis Bacon during one crucial decade created many of the most central and memorable images of his entire career. The artist enters the decade of the 1950s in search of himself and his true subject; he finishes ten years later having completed some of his great masterpieces and having acquired technical mastery over one of the most disturbing and revealing visions of the twentieth century. This book brings both Bacon the man and Bacon the painter vividly to life, focusing for the first time on this key period in his development. Michael Peppiatt, the leading authority on Bacon and a close friend of the artist for thirty years, offers a groundbreaking study that reveals essential keys to understanding Bacon's mysterious and subversive art. The book presents a wide range of paintings (many of them rarely seen before) representing all of Bacon's major themes during the 1950s, analyzes the significant developments in his art, and assesses the particular importance of key works.

    Culture  The Sunday Times 

      20 August, 2006

A handful of Francis Bacon paintings never seen in public before go on show soon. These works from the 1950s were tracked down by Michael Peppiatt, the curator of an exhibition opening at the Sainsbury Centre, in Norwich, in late September. There will be 50 early Bacons in total.

Also on display will be some intriguing letters the artist wrote to his friends Robert and Lisa Sainsbury. Quite a few are the begging kind, such as one dated December 5, 1955: “Dear Bob, I’m in rather bad money difficulties and wonder if you could lend me £400 till the start of April.”

At the time, £400 was the equivalent of at least £10,000 today. No wonder a flush Bacon fled to Tangier a few weeks later, where the boys and the booze were abundant. It turned out to be the most creative period of his career.

Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s

26th Sep 2006 - 10th Dec 2006

A rare and exciting insight into the early career of the artist Francis Bacon.

Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII) Francis Bacon Read more »

Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh I Francis Bacon Read more »

Two Figures in a Room Francis Bacon Read more »

Francis Bacon (1909 -1992) created many of the most central and memorable images of his entire career during the 1950s. From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s through the early Popes and portraits of Van Gogh to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation of some ten years later. For a painter whose imagination so rarely strayed beyond the walls of dark claustrophobic interiors, there were even glimpses of landscape, recollections of Africa and the South of France. It was a period which saw Bacon still searching for himself and eager to explore a variety of impressions and take all kinds of risks.

Throughout his life, Bacon carefully controlled the way his work was selected, presented and even interpreted. He ensured that all museum exhibitions devoted to his work took the form of classic retrospectives, with the emphasis placed on his most recent paintings and especially on the late triptychs. As a result, the latter part of Bacon’s oeuvre has been far more widely exhibited than the earlier half of his career.

This exhibition will take the thirteen Francis Bacon paintings in the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection as the nucleus for a show which will include loans from public and private collections across the world, a number of which have rarely been seen in public before. The exhibition will explore the major themes that interested Bacon between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, affording an unprecedented insight into the artist’s imaginative powers as well as his constantly evolving sources and techniques.

The exhibition is curated by Michael Peppiatt on behalf of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. A fully illustrated catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition.

 Norma

 

 

C

Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s January 27 - April 15, 2007 Baker/Rowland Exhibition Galleries Francis Bacon in the 1950s is the first exhibition to look in detail at this extraordinarily fertile decade in Bacon's life and affords the viewer unprecedented insight into the artist's imaginative powers as well as his constantly evolving sources and techniques. Although the most fruitful years in Bacon's career, they were also the most tumultuous and tortured in the artist's unsettled existence; Bacon was regularly without a fixed address, borrowing rooms and changing studios with bewildering frequency.  By the 1950s, Bacon had acquired sufficient technical prowess to forcefully express his vision, but he was still not fully in command of his disturbing images, which appear to rise from a dark well of the unconscious. Yet the rawness and sense of urgency exhibited in these pictures transcend any pictorial problems that Bacon eventually did come to resolve with experience and technical ability.  From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s through the early Popes and portraits of van Gogh to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation of some ten years later, Bacon created many of the most central and memorable images of his entire career during this time. Also making an appearance were dogs, owls, and elephants; sphinxes, children, and naked women; heads of William Blake, self-portraits, and portraits of friends. For this painter whose imagination so rarely strayed beyond the walls of a dark, claustrophobic interior, there were even glimpses of the African and French landscape

 

 

 

Norman’s Coach and his Horses

Newindpress on Sunday    Yusuf Arakkal

Friday September 1st 2006

 

‘‘When I opened this place in 1943 the world war was still on, we had a cross section of people coming here. Great artists, theatre personalities writers and even prime ministers frequented this place,’’ Norman began.

Jeffrey Bernard, Dylan Thomas, David Archer, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Peter O’Toole, Euan Uglow… the list is endless. I was very interested to know about Bacon. Apparently he loved alcohol and was known for his sexual preferences. I enquired about Norman’s relationship with Bacon. ‘‘You know he used to stand there and watch people coming and going… there,’’ said Norman, pointing to the corner where Greek Street ends. ‘‘I remember Bacon once said to Jeffrey Bernard, ‘now that your looks have gone boy, I do not know what you would do to make a living’’. Jeffrey Bernard was a regular at the pub ‘three hundred and sixty days in a year’ and was famous for his chaotic life and journalistic career. Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, a sell-out play by Keith Waterhouse, was entirely based on him and set at the Coach and Horses, with Peter O’Toole playing the lead.

‘‘Dom Moraes used to come here regularly,’’ Norman added as an afterthought.

So many memories, so many personalities. Promising to come back soon I said my goodbyes, knowing I may no longer get to meet Norman at The Coach. And as I walked out on to the pavement, memories crowded my mind of that chance encounter with the great artist – Francis Bacon.

 

 

 

 

 Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real

     Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen   September 16, 2006 – January 7, 2007

 

                          

 

Dramatic depictions of human forms - writhing painfully, dissolving, wrestling or engulfing one another, seated or in motion - are ubiquitous in the work of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), the most eminent 20th century British painter. Like no other artist of his generation, Bacon scenarized the ordeal of the vulnerable, defenselessly exposed body. His individuals are usually alone, isolated from their surroundings, trapped in empty, windowless rooms or behind the bars of cages. Bacon’s figures act on stage-like platforms, doubled over in torment, sliding into formlessness. By wiping, scratching, and erasures, Bacon converted the picture surface into a field of perpetually irritating activity - and in the process, created images of great forcefulness, sensibility, and beauty. At the center of this retrospectively conceived exhibition will be Bacon’s disturbing yet captivating studies of the human figure. The presentation will consists of approximately 60 works, among them both of Bacons owned by the Kunstsammlung since 1964 and 1986 respectively: Lying Figure No. 3 of 1959, and Man in Blue V of 1954. The accent will be on the painterly expression of a still prevalent sense of the loss of stable identity, and on a self that is vulnerable to “invisible forces” and threatened by deprivation of any secure place in the world.

Everything anecdotal or narrative has been excluded in favour of a concentration on the physical presence of human flesh. Bacon scenarizes bodies which appear mutable, vulnerable, or decrepit, while simultaneously asserting themselves with an aggressive, even boastful vitality. In aesthetically heightened form (for Bacon‘s images are always suggestively beautiful), such contradictoriness is conveyed in the form of the disquieting experience of the grandeur and finitude of human existence. Bacon said: “Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence ...” (Francis Bacon to Hugh Marlais Davies, 1973).

 

                                                  

 

Bacon sought to rend the veil of false perceptions and ideas that continually superimposes itself on the factual. He shows us forms and human traits whose artistic appearance is as fascinating as their physical deformations are alarming. His beings – which occasionally regress to the zoomorphic level – remain for the most part isolated, moving tentatively on stage-like platforms, in empty, windowless rooms or in structures resembling cages. Bacon discovered stimuli for his agitated image world in the works of artists such as Michelangelo, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Degas and van Gogh, although he was inspired by reproductions rather than by originals. Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic sequences of human and animal locomotion, books containing medical illustrations, newspaper photographs showing current events: all provided him with impetus.

Like a kind of “mill,” Bacon reworked this flood of reproduced visual material. Only after being transformed and profoundly defamiliarized were individual subjects incorporated into his paintings. Manifesting itself in Bacon’s oeuvre is an aesthetic image world that is inextricably entangled with the existential abysmal.

The 60 exhibited works – produced between 1945 and 1991, among them 10 triptychs, and photographic material from the artist‘s studio – provide insight into an unsettling yet captivating image world. Francis Bacon envisioned the human individual as a subject deprived of any stable (masculine) identity. Here we find a self that is exposed to “invisible forces,” one rendered incapable of locating itself securely in the world. To a large extent, this accounts for the continuing actuality of Bacon‘s creative achievement.

 Catalogue

Alongside colour illustrations of all exhibited works, this 224 page volume includes texts by Armin Zweite, Peter Bürger, Martin Harrison, Daria Kolacka, Frank Laukötter and Maria Müller. Published by Hirmer Verlag, Munich. The price in the museum shop is 28.00 Euros.

The Department of Education and Communication presents materials and
photographs from the artist’s studio.

 

                              

 

 

 

Long live mortality The Daily Telegraph    11th July 2006   A brilliantly conceived exhibition places works by Britart bad boy Damien Hirst next to paintings by Francis Bacon, revealing their shared obsession with flesh, decay and death.  By Sarah Crompton                                                               One of the most exciting developments in art in Britain in recent years is the way commercial galleries have started to mount shows to rival those planned by public institutions. And, although the current exhibition of Damien Hirst and Francis Bacon at the Gagosian Gallery in North London is comparatively small, its brilliance of conception - displaying these two artists alongside each other - and execution - full of air and thoughtfulness - puts many museum shows to shame. The links between the two men are obvious. Just before his death in 1992, Bacon saw and admired Hirst's A Thousand Years (1990), the chilling glass tank displaying an entire life cycle as flies hatch, feed and rush to their deaths on an electronic fly-catcher. Seeing it again, its bleak cruelty still stuns. For his part Hirst was, and is, clearly in awe of his great predecessor, a man whose obsession with flesh, decay and mortality was as intense as his own. The best piece on display at the Gagosian is directly inspired by that obsession. The Tranquility of Solitude (For George Dyer) (2006) takes the form of a triptych of vitrines. In one, a flayed sheep's carcass, its tongue horrifically jutting from its mouth in throes of agony, pokes out of a lavatory bowl, a bloodied syringe in one bony leg, the detritus of drug-taking scattered on the floor; in the centre, a crucified carcass hangs over a basin, scalpels standing in a pot beneath; in the third, the carcass is wrenched so that it sits astride the lavatory, bending over a basin as if to vomit, vodka and pills strewn beneath it. A carefully removed watch lies on the sink. The work puts paid, once and for all, to the idea that Hirst's preserved animals are some kind of gimmick. You may not like the piece, but anyone with eyes would have to acknowledge the seriousness of its intent, its savage depiction of abject loneliness (note the ironic title) and its oddly tender humanism. The inspiration for this work hangs in the next room. Triptych May-June 1973 is one of many paintings made by Bacon as a tribute to George Dyer, his lover for seven years, who committed suicide in 1971, in their hotel room. Bacon was full of guilt about his death, believing that if he had not been so bound up in the retrospective of his work that was about to open, he would have been able to save him. This emotion seeps into each panel of this giant canvas, in which Dyer's fleshy pink figure, pinned between two sharp parallels, bends - as in the Hirst - over a basin and a lavatory. In the central section he looms from a doorway, a dim lightbulb lighting his drama of despair, the shadow he casts on the floor looking like an image of the devil.                                           As always, the sheer power and control of Bacon's brushwork take the breath away. As you stand among the triptychs that dominate this show - and that the artist himself regarded as being among his best work - it is the beauty of the painting as much as the ferocity of the vision that is overwhelming. In Triptych 1976, the panels are dominated by two huge ovoid heads, their features missing, their bodies vanishing into limbless sketches, their spinal chords and jutting bones exposed. In the central panel, a vulture tears at the flesh. But what a vulture, swooping into the frame on freely-rendered wings; and what flesh, revealed in tones of purple and red. A splash of yellow on the bag carried by the figure in the left frame completes the composition. In these paintings, and the three-panelled portraits on display in an adjoining room, Bacon makes his images speak to one another, the shapes balancing and sliding into one another, a narrative unfolding across his closely controlled canvas.                                                                            In Four Studies for a Self Portrait, unusually for him, he puts the faces on top of one another, as if creating a totem pole. The top face dissolves into the one below, as if the features have melted; swirls of green define the dissolution. He is using the devices of film to make a movie in paint. What's striking about Bacon is both how modern and how distinguished he seems. He fits perfectly comfortably alongside Hirst, but the glory of his technique allows him to take his place alongside Rembrandt, Velázquez and Picasso as well. His is an art of constant challenge, richer the longer you look at it. In such company, Hirst's limitations are revealed. If Tranquility of Solitude reveals him at his best, then Like Flies Brushed Off the Wall We Fall (2006) - butterflies and flies trapped in high-gloss orange paint and arranged in an aesthetically pleasing shape - displays him at his most limited and superficial. His work has become art on an industrial scale, produced to meet the demands of the market rather than of his own thought. He is repeating himself, occasionally to great effect, but within the same groove nonetheless. You might argue that Bacon was doing the same, in great sequences of reworked images of screaming Popes and writhing bodies. But he could repeat an image while altering its execution. The hand that held the brush was as subtle as the mind behind it. Hirst has a subtle mind, but his execution is mechanical. It is both ironic and admirable that a gallery so closely associated with the commercial propagation of conceptual art should mount a show that clearly offers both a celebration and a critique of its own star artist.   'Francis Bacon: Triptychs' and 'Damien Hirst: A Thousand Years and Triptychs' are at Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London WC1 (020 7841 9960), until Aug 4.

 

 

Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst

Until August 4

Fri July 7 2006

An enthralment with mortality, a predilection for imprisoning flesh within transparent cubes, a slow descent into self-parody – yes, there are parallels between the careers of Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst. This show finds another link or, rather, Hirst opportunistically creates one.

Focusing on five triptychs from the 1970s, much of the gallery is given over to Bacon, who was notably variable by this point – sometimes throwing far too many elements into the mix. Through the raw painterly mist of Triptych 1976, for instance, you can discern an attacking bird, a blood-filled toilet and a headless harpy perched on a rail; they menace a figure whose elongated face appears to be part of a canvas within the image that has a fleshy and bloodied body mutating around it. It’s hysterical. By contrast In Memory of George Dyer (1971), whose subject clings to the toilet, casts a demonic shadow and pukes in the sink, is a true tenement symphony – pained, brutally spare and twice as powerful. The roomful of Bacon’s anguished popes and portraits, mostly from a decade earlier, is far more consistent; the popes, in particular, feel like some of the darkest and greatest paintings of the last century.

The less said about Hirst the better. He plays up his well-known love of Bacon in a series of triptychs; an execrable three-vitrine tribute features flayed sheep hunched in formaldehyde-filled bathrooms, stabbed with hypodermics and  mouths contorted in screams. Also on show, the still-extraordinary A Thousand Years (consisting of a cow's head, flies, sugar cubes and humming blue insect-o-cutor) illustrates how far he has fallen since 1990, when it was originally made.

Martin Herbert, Fri Jul 7

 

 

 

 

Seen and Heard International 

Art Review   July 4th 2006

 

‘Francis Bacon: Triptychs’ and ‘Damien Hirst: 

“A Thousand Years” and Triptychs’ Gagosian Gallery  (AR)

"Artworks have an immanent character of being an act and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary and sudden. To this extent they are truly after-images of the primordial shudder… Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image… In one of the most remarkable passages of his Aesthetics, Hegel defined the task of art as the appropriation of the alien." 

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press, 1997

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: Triptychs

Whilst I have seen the Bacon Retrospective at the Tate (1985), Francis Bacon: The Human Body, Hayward, (1998), Francis Bacon, Millenium Galleries, Sheffield (2001), and Francis Bacon: The Sacred and the Profane, Paris (2004), the Gagosian Gallery’s Francis Bacon: Triptychs exhibition has at last really revealed Bacon to me in a new light. Light is the key here: the natural light coming from overhead fanlights illuminating the paintings and making the paint appear more serene and translucent and evanescent than ever before.

The Gagosian, tucked away in Kings Cross, is an alluring and seductive gallery where the paintings can really begin to breathe and appear to be in their own space and show their true colours: the paintings can almost be heard as well – crackling under the heat of the light. As the light changes so do the mood and the sensations of the paint (which is the image in itself). The natural lighting helps the shape-shift, the mood and the movement of the paintings. Not only were all the paintings superbly lit but also sublimely spatially set out, with all the paintings having space to breathe. This must be one of the most elegant, spare yet sympathetic exhibition spaces in London.

It has become a tired cliché to associate Bacon’s imagery with ‘horror’, ‘terror’, and ‘violence’; – as ‘the ugly’, ‘the grotesque’ and ‘distorted’: yet none of these sensational media-motifs apply to the moods and the sensations of seeing ‘Bacon in the light’ (rather than ‘Bacon in the flesh’).

His calm and collective imagery displayed under the illuminating setting of this elegant gallery reveals a serene and spiritual, meditative and radiant – even humorous Bacon: several visitors laughed out loud whilst imitating the out-stretched arms of a laughing Pope (Portrait of a Pope with Two Owls, 1957-58).

 

                                                                                                                     

 

Like Martin Heidegger, Bacon never asked himself: “What is spirit?” and being a non-believer, Bacon preferred to use the terms ‘pulsation’, ‘energy’ or ‘emanation’ rather than the 'soul' or the 'spirit' of the sitting subject. But by painting out of the subconscious plane, the 'spirit' for Bacon: "seems to come straight out of what we call the unconscious with the foam of the unconscious locked around it - which is its freshness." (Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987).

In Triptych May June 1973, (1973) and In Memory of George Dyer (1972) we see the spirit of Dyer in the form of smeared white paint and a thrown whiplash of paint that has the sensation of a shimmering shudder – like a fleeting ‘ectoplasmic’ flash emanating from the body of Dyer. If one wondered what the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ ever looked like here Bacon has got close to it through non-illustrational (non-narrative) paint.

 

 

 

The triptych portraits also reveal the spiritual side of Bacon and have similar meditative moods to Alexej von Jawlensky’s Abstract Heads and Meditations. It would have been far more apt to juxtapose Bacon with Jawlensky than Hirst. In Triptych 1976 (1976) Bacon uses egg-like yellow and white discs similar to the way Jawlensky uses them as punctuating points of the spirit where the colour and size of the egg-disc gives off a certain mood-sensation of the psyche / spirit. They appear again in Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1976) and Three Studies for a Portrait of Peter Beard (1975).

 

  

 

The left-hand panel of Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (1967) is one of Bacon’s finest self-portraits, and has a subdued, sullen mood with the paint applied in a dry dragged way across the cheek with the skin of the canvas becoming the flesh. The grainy drag of the dry paint causes a classic goose-bump, shuddering sensation.

 

                                                                                  

                                                                           

This sensation is also felt in the central panel of Three Studies of Isabella Rawsthorne (1966), where Bacon again uses arbitrary white stabs and smears of paint impressed with a rag (torn from corduroy trousers) to suggest the spirit of the subject or ‘all the pulsations of the person’ – as Bacon would say about what he’s trying to trap.

In the room with the single paintings three were hung on walls all on their own, thus enhancing their power all the more: having one painting on each wall is so spatially aware and chic. One of these paintings is the rarely seen Crouching Nude (1961) which reminded me of the supermarket alien woman in John Carpenter’s film ‘They Live’. Here Bacon is reminiscent of Degas’ pastels of woman-as- animal, with the crouching nude looking very cat-like, grinning contemplatively – hands and feet reduced to mere stumps.

 

        

 

Bacon’s use of the triptych format was initially and  essentially a strategy to avoid what he termed as the ‘boredom of story-telling’ where an isolated image all on its own can avoid setting up ‘the banality of a narrative’. (This was also the case with the gallery’s decision not to have labels by each painting, since these detract from the image with inane information). The triptych in Bacon is often misinterpreted as his early interest in cinema where he saw things as serialised sequences – yet Bacon’s triptychs are not serial images but severed images, each one alienated from the other.

Damien Hirst: A Thousand Years and Triptychs

Larry Gagosian’s high-risk strategy of juxtaposing Hirst with Bacon has backfired and become a cruel and humiliating joke at Mr Hirst’s expense; I would personally like to express my sincere commiserations to Hirst for any hurt caused. Mr Gagosian has unwittingly exposed the tawdry banality of Mr Hirst’s ‘things’.

 This dual exhibition revealed that Hirst is simply not Bacon’s successor because Bacon’s enduring ‘art’ is the absolute antithesis of Hirst’s ephemeral ‘things’. One is a genius – the other is not. Whereas Bacon deals with living ‘beings’, Hirst deals with dead ‘things’. Whilst Hirst uses real ‘things’ (sheep, butterflies and a severed bull’s head in a pool of blood) they all look so uncannily unreal and lack realism because Hirst has not been able to ‘reinvent realism’ as Bacon does. Hirst likes to leave ‘things the way they are’ – hence his hyper-conservatism with the wish to ‘preserve’ things.

By juxtaposing Hirst with Bacon we can immediately see the superiority of Bacon’s ‘art’ and the way it has been able to survive the wrath of critics and time alike – whilst Hirst’s ‘things’ already look so tired and dated – Hirst is just a temporary media - manufactured phenomenon. Whilst with Bacon one has a sensation of the shudder and a nervous tension – there is absolutely no tension or sensation or shudder in Hirst’s dreary ‘things’.

Hirst’s infantile desire to shock merely displays his petty-bourgeois mentality whilst Bacon – being an aristocrat of the abject sublime – has no need to shock. Go along to make up your own minds.

Alex Russell

‘Francis Bacon: Triptychs’ and ‘Damien Hirst: “A Thousand Years” and Triptychs’, Gagosian Gallery, 6-24 Britannia Street, London WC1, tel +44 020 7841 9960; ‘Pablo Picasso: La Minotauromachie’, Gagosian Gallery, London W1, tel +44 020 7493 3020; all to August 4^th 2006.

 It's Bacon, with the hat-trick!

   by Charles Darwent

   Independent on Sunday  July 9th 2006

I guess it's only apt that exhibitions of triptychs should be like London buses: you wait years for one then three come along at once. Two of them - of works by Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst - are at Gagosian's Britannia Street galleries, the third - of Oscar Kokoschka's Prometheus Triptych - a short bus ride away at the Courtauld Institute in the Strand.

Like triptych panels, these shows need to be seen side-by-side. The first surprise is that there are enough works about to warrant them - not Renaissance altarpieces but triptychs made since the War, in an artistic day when God is listed as missing. Triptychs are irretrievably Christian, based on the Trinity' yet only Hirst of the artists involved is rumoured to be religious. Bacon was a happy atheist with a horror of nuns and Kokoschka a loon with beliefs so odd as to verge on the insane. So what is it with triptychs?

There are, as you'd expect, three answers to this, one for each artist. Bacon's triptychs, paintings of daunting genius, were made over a 30-year period as works on the wall and fall into three rough categories: history paintings, portraits and nudes, each represented in the Gagosian show. Kokoschka's Prometheus Triptych was painted in 1950 for the ceiling of a fellow Austrian emigr, while Hirst's The Tranquility of Solitude (For George Dyer) is his customary confection of sheep in vitrines, apparently inspired by Bacon's Triptych May-June 1973 in the room next door.

So far, so dissimilar, although all these works play with our expectations of what triptychs are and what they're for. Bacon, a joyous liar, claimed that his interest in them was only formal: "I suppose I could go and do five or six [panels] together, but I find the triptych a more balanced unit," he said. This is to imply he had no interest in their religious associations, but a short walk around Gagosian suggests he was being disingenuous.

Triptych-Studies from the Human Body (1970) is painted in liturgical colours, although the liturgy they celebrate is certainly not Christian. Likewise, the door-games Bacon plays in the triptych's side panels echo those of the early Northern Renaissance - they're not that different from Memling's, say. The difference is that Bacon's doors aren't the ecclesiastical details of a Last Judgement but the mirrored doors of a fitted wardrobe. What they reflect are the bleak faces of men - I'd guess George Dyer to the right, Peter Beard to the left - the doors revealing a central panel which, in the triptych tradition, is also the most important. This depicts the skinned figure of a man or of men everted, the blur of a dick, the black dot of an anus' the godless truth of man made flesh, of men made one flesh. Where traditional triptychs have hope at their centre, Bacon's has an empty tabernacle.

All of which raises a number of questions. The Gagosian show is among the best Bacon exhibitions I have seen, the 20 works in it intelligently borrowed and sharply focussed. They are wonderful in themselves, but they have also been used to tell a story about Bacon you may well not have heard. It is a museum class show: so why don't we get shows like this in museums?

The second question is how Gagosian, so clever as this, can be showing Bacon's masterpieces alongside Hirst? Hirst's self-styled triptych - skinned sheep with Baconian hypodermics in their legs and light bulbs over their heads - is self-aggrandising crap. An accompanying leaflet suggests that Bacon, in admiring a Hirst shortly before he died, "was handing the baton on to a new generation". It's the kind of thing to send you running into Britannia Street screaming.

The third mystery is Oskar Kokoschka, a man who was viewed in his day (1886-1980) as a star of Viennese modernism. How can this be? The Prometheus Triptych is appalling.

It conflates Biblical scenes with mythological ones, two dimensions with three, Tiepolo with New Expressionism' and it does it all badly. Its awfulness makes you rub your eyes in wonder, and for that alone I'd see it.

Bacon was an atheist with a fear of nuns' Kokoschka a loon with beliefs verging on the insane.

c.darwent@independent.co.uk

Gagosian Gallery, WC1, to 4 August (020 78419960)' CourtauldInstitute, WC2, to 17 September (020 7848 2 526)

Hirst and Bacon

Bloomberg  3rd July 2006  

No Sales, Please

The next day was the opening at the Gagosian Gallery of an exhibition juxtaposing Damien Hirst and Francis Bacon. The show features top-quality Bacons - some are in fact on loan from museums - along with a homage to Bacon by Damien Hirst.

"Nothing in the show is for sale,'' an employee of the gallery tells me proudly. It is clear to me that the exhibition was mounted to underscore the importance of Larry Gagosian on the international circuit. It is also, I think, Gagosian's shot across the bows of Jay Jopling, Hirst's British dealer. Gagosian represents Hirst in the U.S. and would, I suspect, love to muscle in on his London market.

The Hirst works, particularly The Tranquility of Solitude (for George Dyer) are directly drawn from an earlier Bacon work, In Memory of George Dyer and contain skinned cadavers of animals stuck in toilets with hypodermic needles embedded in flayed flesh. They were painful to look at though not redemptive in the way the Bacon canvases are.

Disappointing Hirst

The crowds in the gallery peered at the flies that had escaped from another work, A Thousand Years, and were circling and settling on the Bacons in the other rooms. Robin Vousden, a Gagosian employee, tells me that "Damien is no different from Grunewald, Bosch and Cranach'' and that "Bacon is his obsession.'' I am not convinced. The more complicated Hirst becomes the less interested I am. His earliest works like the iconic shark still have the power to intrigue, these new works seems too staged.

Far stronger are the three portraits of popes by Bacon in the far room. Here Bacon displays his signature strokes of thick black lines that demarcate space, sheltering and protecting the subject yet still ephemeral and mysterious. It's well worth a trip to the gallery near King's Cross to see the Bacons.

It's also worth considering whether it is appropriate for museums to lend works to commercial spaces as the marketplace continues to take on greater weight. The balance of power is shifting between the buying power of the commercial gallery and the political power of the public institution.