Francis
Bacon News
A World
first for gallery
Lorna Marsh,
EDP 24 Norfolk, 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
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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
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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 you 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
Norwich,
UK - Francis Bacon (1909-1992) created many of the most central and
memorable images of his entire career during the 1950s. This major
exhibition will explore the key 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. This will be the first exhibition to focus on this
specific period in Bacon’s development.
Francis Bacon: Paintings
from the 1950s is guest curated by Michael Peppiatt for the Sainsbury Centre
for Visual Arts. Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s runs from
Tuesday 26 September to Sunday 10 December.
“I have become
increasingly convinced that Francis Bacon reached the height of his creative
prowess during the 1950s and created some of the most central and memorable
images of his entire career”- Michael Peppiatt.
“I think the best
works of modern artists often give the impression that they were done when
the artist was in a state of not knowing – that the artist had a kind of
rightness of instinct and that the only interest was operating, and that
somehow he was working beyond reason” – Francis Bacon.
The thirteen Francis
Bacon paintings that form the nucleus of the show were collected by the
artist’s friends, Robert and Lisa Sainsbury. They form part of the
Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, which was given to the University of
East Anglia in 1970s, and they are now permanently on display at the
Sainsbury Centre. The exhibition, comprising around 50 paintings,
includes loans from public and private collections across the world. A
large number of the paintings, many of which have never been seen in public
before, are from private lenders.
The
1950s was a period in which Francis Bacon was still searching for himself,
eager to explore a variety of impressions and to take all kinds of risks.
It was a period of experimentation and development before he became fixed on
a single grand vision. A wide range of subjects can be seen, from
soberly suited men howling out their fear, to sphinxes, animals and
children, and portraits including those of Sir Robert and Lisa
Sainsbury.
“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”
– Michael Peppiatt.
The exhibition at the
Sainsbury Centre also includes a documentary section with photographs,
letters and documents, chronicling the fascinating, peripatetic life Francis
Bacon led during the decade.
Visit the Sainsbury
Centre for Visual Arts at :
www.scva.org.uk/
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.
Also included is the most
comprehensive account of the artist's life in the 1950s ever written and a
series of fascinating and revealing conversations between Peppiatt and Bacon in
1964, 1987, and 1989. It is published in association with the Sainsbury Centre
for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.


20
Illustrations, 70 colour images, 224 pages
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 0-300-12192-X
Price:
£29.99 Publication
Date: 30th September 2006
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.
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
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).
Francis Bacon Nude: preview for The Violence of the Real,
Duesseldorf 15/9/06
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.
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Long
live mortality
The
Daily Telegraph 11th
July 2006
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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 4th
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.
The human
zoo
Ugly, obscene and
terrifying - the grotesque figures in Francis Bacon's paintings
disturbingly evoke the claustrophobia and voyeurism of Big Brother,
writes Gordon Burn
The Guardian,
Saturday July 1, 2006

Portrait of Pope, 1957-58 Francis Bacon
"His subject
matter is still man in the horror of his isolation - naked and
obscene on a studio couch, or grinning baboon-like from behind a
desk ... But after the initial shock, one begins to feel on almost
friendly terms with the creatures in his zoo. It may be an ugly,
obscene and terrifying world, but it is also a deeply human
one."
It is hard to
read the American poet John Ashbery's review of Francis Bacon's 1963
Tate retrospective today without thinking of the menagerie being fed
and watered in the forensically over-illuminated, bread-and-circuses
Big Brother house. Conversely, it is impossible to watch Lea, the
sex-hungry, cartoonishly enhanced single mum from the Midlands;
Pete, who has Tourette's syndrome and is forever rabbit-punching
himself in the throat, involuntarily ejaculating the word "wanker";
or Nikki, the prating Essex diva - and not be reminded of the
grotesques in a typical Bacon painting, their faces bloated with
laughter or twisted into a scream.
The correspondences
from time to time have been eerie. "Devil woman" Grace
flinging a glass of water in the face of "golden girl"
Susie as she was evicted was an almost literal transcription of
Bacon's 1965 painting After Muybridge - Woman emptying bowl of water
and paralytic child on all fours: the ribbon of glittering water in
each carries the same sting of surprise. Lea in extremis - teeth
bared, nostrils flared, war-paint smeared - bears a strong
resemblance to one of Bacon's (and Lucian Freud's) favourite models,
Henrietta Moraes. (From different backgrounds and eras, the two
women have more in common than just physical appearance. Moraes once
came across the photographer John Deakin selling the
gynaecologically explicit pictures he had taken of her as an aide
memoir for Francis Bacon to sailors in a Soho pub. Lurid pictures
taken of Lea Walker before she went into the Big Brother house were
recently published in the Sunday Sport.)
The
simultaneously claustrophobic and voyeuristically transparent spaces
of the Channel 4 house are suggestive of the modern, vaguely
threatening, cell-like rooms in which Bacon habitually isolates his
figures, "putting them before us", as a critic once noted,
"as the lepidopterist puts a new specimen on a pin".
The Diary Room,
where Big Brother contestants are encouraged to drop their
game-faces and give vent to whatever extremes of rage, elation or
vindictiveness the producers can coax from them, shares the mean
dimensions of the cages or boxes - David Sylvester referred to them
as the "spaceframes" - which hold the screaming popes and
cardinals that Bacon famously painted during the 1950s. The only
furniture in the Diary Room this time round is a ludicrously ornate,
button-backed gold leather chair, which (resist it or not) invites
comparison with the thrones in which the snarling, primate-popes of
Bacon (Study after Velazquez, 1950 and Portrait of Pope, 1957-58, in
the current show) are trapped.
The drawing of
parallels between the participants in a reality TV show and the
subjects in the paintings of an artist who has been credited with
"reinventing the human head" and who, during his lifetime,
prompted major works by the French structuralist thinkers Roland
Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Leiris, among others, is less
facetious than it might at first appear.
Bacon's
overriding preoccupation was with what he liked to call "the
brutality of fact". "I would like my pictures to look as
if a human being had passed between them, like a snail," he
once said, "leaving a trail of the human presence and memory
trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime."
Throughout his
life, he liked to remember that Sigmund Freud kept in his possession
a set of particularly horrendous photographs from the Viennese
police archives; Bacon himself was welcomed as a visitor to the
Black Museum at Scotland Yard on more than one occasion. His
fascination with diseases of the mouth ("I like the glitter and
colour that comes from the mouth, and I've always hoped in a sense
to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset") and
with medical plates showing the body being positioned for x-ray are
part of the foundation myth. His ambition, he said, was "to
make the animal thing come through the human". And he did this
in any number of pictures of men seated in interiors wearing City
suits, as Sylvester once remarked.
It is still a
source of excitement to art students that Bacon was a keen collector
of photographic images that most people would turn away from,
showing the inevitable course of decay and death. That violence of
subject matter was fundamental to his own art.
He spent his
life tearing pictures out of newspapers and magazines - he was
particularly drawn to images of predatory wildlife and sportsmen,
especially boxers - and then discarding them on the studio floor
where, over the decades, they turned into a sort of involuntary
visual resource; a kind of painterly mulch. "Bacon values the
photograph as a source of significant falsehood, and he values it as
a source of exact information about incidents to which he has not
had direct access," his friend, the former New York Times art
critic John Russell, once wrote. "But above all, he values it
as a way of breaking back into reality; or, equally, of taking
reality by surprise."
This, of course,
was one of the earliest uses to which photography had been put: the
camera was seen as a way of creeping up on truth, catching the naked
shaking animal unawares and off-guard; it was seized on as a way of
making statements about the fugitive nature of human beings. Fox
Talbot's wife called the first cameras "mousetraps" -
little wooden boxes set down to capture flattened objects and
stilled lives.
According to
Russell in his 1971 book on the artist, Bacon had to wait until he
turned 60 to fulfil an ambition of several years' standing by
putting a camera into a painting and characterising it as vividly as
any of its human co-participants. Triptych - Studies from the Human
Body (1970) is one of a dozen triptychs in the unprecedentedly
blue-chip show just opened at the Gagosian Gallery in London.
(Before it went up, there was as much excitement about how much it
had cost to bring these paintings to London - they have been insured
for about £400m, it is rumoured - and the motives behind Larry
Gagosian mounting what is, on paper at least, a non-selling show, as
there was about the opportunity of seeing the most substantial body
of Bacon's work since the Hayward Gallery retrospective in 1998.)
The camera in
the 1970 triptych is an old-fashioned one standing on three timber
legs, with goggle-like lenses that approximate the uglified,
gouged-out faces so characteristic of the people in Bacon's
paintings. It has been suggested that the camera here has a symbolic
role: that it stands for the faculty, much prized by Bacon, of
impartial observation - it sees all, and comments on nothing. But it
seems to me possible that its inclusion was intended as a rejoinder
to John Berger, who, the previous year, had published an essay
linking the decline of the painted portrait with the rise of
photography, and in which he baldly stated that "it seems to me
unlikely that any important portraits will ever be painted
again".
"The talent
once involved in portrait painting can be used in some other way to
serve a more urgent, modern function," Berger wrote. "[In
all painted portraits] the sitter, somewhat like an arranged still
life, becomes subservient to the painter. Finally, it is not his
personality or his role which impress us but the artist's
vision." Bacon, as Berger would certainly have been aware,
preferred to work from photographs of friends or models rather than
have the person come to the studio to sit for him. "They
inhibit me," he once admitted. "If I like them, I don't
want to practise before them the injury that I do to them in my
work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I think
I can record the fact of them more clearly."
The Gagosian
show contains at least one authentically "important"
painting: Triptych May-June 1973 records in an austere, unflinching
way the death, alone in his hotel room, of Bacon's lover and
companion, George Dyer. This "document about pain", as it
has been described - the protagonist's pain, the artist's pain- is a
work whose details are local and personal; it is an expression of
felt, rather than operatic, grief.
However, just as
the Big Brother contestants' tearful, disfiguring reactions are
usually out of all proportion to what has caused them - Richard has
eaten all the cornflakes, Lea has been bitching about Nikki behind
her back - so the passages of existential angst in Bacon's painting
too often can seem excessive and embarrassingly worked up, at best
formulaic, at worst merely camp.
In many ways, he
was a victim as well as a beneficiary of his historical moment. He
had his first solo show at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1949,
the year that Cyril Connolly, in the last-ever issue of Horizon,
declared that "it is closing time in the gardens of the west
and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of
his solitude or the quality of his despair".
Throughout his
life, Bacon refused the interpretations of his work, which imputed
to it a "message" about the cold-war atmosphere of postwar
Europe, full of menace, guilt, disquiet, doubt, a sense of nearness
to death. He insisted that what stirred him was the private realm,
"the vulnerability of the human situation": "I'm just
trying to make images as accurately of my nervous system as I can. I
don't even know what half of them mean. I'm not 'saying' anything .
. . I've always been more interested in what is called 'behaviour'
and 'life' than in art." Nevertheless, the label of chief
interpreter of the morally and spiritually bankrupt, post-atrocity
universe is the one he was stuck with.
At the same
time, the flamboyant figure he cut in the drinking-clubs of Soho and
the gambling-rooms of the West End, his refusal to disguise or
apologise for his homosexuality, and a commitment to living,
according to the Picasso formula, like a poor man with a lot of
money, gave Bacon a personal glamour, and a media presence, that no
other British artist had ever had. Plus he talked a good painting.
The Conversations he recorded with David Sylvester
between 1962 and 1986 are one of the great documents of 20th-century
art.
Some years ago,
the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik credited Bacon with a tendency in
young international art to which he gave the name the "High
Morbid Manner" - "a detached, distanced, oddly smiling
presentation of violence ... the macabre fragment, the tortured
videos, the cryptic neon signs ... that new kind of ghostly, frozen,
remote look at death and suffering".
The Conversations are probably more greedily poured over by
art students today than Bacon's work, which, far from being
affectless or frozen, presently (post-Nauman, post-Hirst, post-Chapmans)
seems overcooked, shouty, despairing and fetishising of death in a
dated way.
· Francis
Bacon: Triptychs are at the Gagosian Gallery, London WC1R. Details:
020-7841 9960
|
Ham,
pigs, tongues, sides of beef seen in the butcher’s window, all that death, I
find it very beautiful. And it’s all for sale – how unbelievably
surrealistic!” Francis Bacon used to say that whenever he went into a
butcher’s shop he was surprised that he himself was not hanging there as a
carcass. In his 80s, he was intrigued by the carcasses of the young Damien
Hirst – A Thousand Years, for example: a claustrophobic glass box
where maggots hatch, turn into flies, feed on a bloody cow’s head and then
either meet a violent end in an Insect-o-cutor or survive to continue the life
cycle.
Now the greatest British
painter of the 20th century is hanging alongside the 41-year-old king of
BritArt conceptualism in one of the most visually stunning double shows of the
summer. The venue is London’s Gagosian Gallery and this exhibition announces
more clearly than any so far that, as art becomes more diverse, global and
surreally expensive, the role of the public museum is diminishing and
heavyweight commercial galleries are assuming a new significance. That has
been visible in London in the past few years, as the world’s two biggest
dealers, Larry Gagosian and Iwan Wirth, have each launched two massive new
spaces, sometimes taking on the city’s museums on their own turf – as
Wirth’s Kippenberger show, following hot on the heels of Tate Modern’s
recent retrospective, currently does.
In this context,
Gagosian’s Francis Bacon Triptychs is the sort of noblesse oblige
non-selling show one wholeheartedly applauds. Not only is it the first
exhibition ever dedicated to the triptychs, which Bacon always considered his
best works; it is also scholarly, popular, accessible, and elegantly and
dramatically redresses the mess Tate Modern has made of Bacon in its rehang.
Tate split up Bacon’s work, disastrously crammed some of it into a confusing
assemblage with Louise Bourgeois, and banished a masterpiece, Triptych –
August 1972, to the storeroom. Gagosian has rescued this great lamentation,
made after the suicide of Bacon’s lover George Dyer, and the picture holds
the large, bright central room in its main gallery. On one side is the
blurred, naked, vulnerable figure of Dyer, on the other Bacon; in the middle
the couple copulate furiously, their bodies melted into a single yet still
wrestling mass. In each panel, desire meets death, writhing flesh is framed by
a towering lush black rectangle: isolating, minimal, voluptuous, austere. This
is Bacon at his greatest, utterly unlike anyone else yet reminiscent all at
once of influences from Velazquez to Matisse – the solitary half-abstract
figures set in long panels recall “Bathers by a River”, which Bacon
specially liked – to Robert Motherwell’s abstract “Elegy” paintings.
How seductively Gagosian
shows off its half-dozen giant triptychs and a well-spaced crowd of screaming
caged popes and mangled, smudged portraits – the small three-panel heads,
seen in profile and as full-face mug shots, imitating police records, of
Henrietta Moraes, Isabelle Rawsthorne, Peter Beard. Here Bacon has the
monumental space to bring out what David Sylvester called his “commanding
grandeur and order and stillness” as well as the horror of twisting,
inside-out bodies. The triptych “In Memory of George Dyer”, particularly,
with its film noir set of blood-red staircase and single light bulb, and its
huddled figure trapped in distorted space at the door, compels as a hushed
work – as claustrophobic as the enclosed, enthroned popes but deathly silent
rather than screeching in pain. For all their subversion of the Renaissance
altarpiece format, their rage at God, their dramas of man’s evils rather
than Christ’s goodness, these triptychs of agonised lone figures overwhelmed
by emptiness here have the gravitas and tragic density of Old Masters in a
cathedral.
Except that Gagosian is a
21st- century, commercial cathedral, which brings its own agenda. Up the
road, it has just inaugurated its new Davies Street gallery with Pablo
Picasso: La Minotauromachie, triumphantly presenting the only complete set
in existence of all eight states of this famous etching depicting Picasso’s
charged figure of the Minotaur, half-man, half-beast. Meanwhile, medicine
cabinets, vitrines stuffed with animals live, rotting and dead, and a few
paintings line up in Damien Hirst: “A Thousand Years” and Triptychs.
Caveat emptor: this is a
blatant attempt to sell Hirst – top-priced Gagosian artist – as Bacon’s
successor, just as Bacon is perceived as Picasso’s heir. All three share
what Bacon called Picasso’s “brutality of fact”, humanity as meat and
flesh; Gagosian drools that “it is as if Bacon, a painter with no direct
heir in that medium, was handing the baton on to a new generation”.
Nonsense: Hirst looks one-dimensional, as parasitic as his carcass-gobbling
flies and already slightly dated when juxtaposed with Bacon. Fourteen years
after his death, on the other hand, Bacon still looks raw, shocking,
contemporary.
This is partly because,
for all the debt to Picasso, no great painter has been more shaped by the
camera that is today our constant companion. Bacon’s blur, immediacy,
transience, his abandonment of fixed viewpoint, his fragmentation and
dissolution reflecting the broken, relativist, traumatised 20th century: all
this derives from cinema and photography. Bacon knew that every modernist
painter of the human form had to confront the challenge of the camera: in Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, he depicts himself operating
photographic equipment as figures flail against a flat orange ground – he is
both voyeur and victim. His Pope pictures meld an image from Velazquez’s
stately portrait Innocent X with the face of the screaming nurse in
Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. “I see every image all the time
in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences,” Bacon said. The focus
here on the triptychs emphasises his images in series, and the cinematic
nature of all his work.
Triptych May-June
1973 reads as a film sequence in reverse. We look through one doorway in
the left panel, another in the centre and right; reading right to left, we see
George Dyer vomiting in the bathroom sink, staggering across the room, a huge
black shadow pouring out of his body towards us, and then dying on the toilet.
The curve of his arm and shoulder is echoed in the curve of the sink’s
drainpipe: “what I’ve always wanted to do is to make things that are very
formal yet coming to bits”, Bacon said. Britart’s conceptual carcasses (Hirst)
or toilets (Sarah Lucas) are trinkets by comparison with the hysterical
reality and primal terror of this canvas.
‘Francis Bacon:
Triptychs’ and ‘Damien Hirst: “A Thousand Years” and Triptychs’,
Gagosian Gallery, London WC1, tel +44 020 7841 9960; ‘Pablo
Picasso: La Minotauromachie’, Gagosian Gallery, London W1, tel +44 020
7493 3020; all to August 4
Hirst
transforms his mutton into Bacon
Rachel
Campbell-Johnston
Our
correspondent is stunned, appalled and exhilarated by Damien
Hirst’s homage to his great inspiration, Francis Bacon
The
Times June 28, 2006 |
|
 |
DAMIEN
HIRST: A THOUSAND YEARS & TRIPTYCHS
Gagosian Gallery, WC1
There is no
great secret to Francis Bacon’s success. He was, quite simply,
the most extraordinary, powerful and compelling painter that
Britain has seen in the postwar era. No wonder Damien Hirst was
obsessed. No wonder that, just as in his day Bacon was inspired
by Picasso — “Picasso is the reason why I paint”, he said
— Hirst in his turn is excited by Bacon. He is inspired by his
images, by his passions and philosophies. And perhaps this
explains why there is no great secret to Hirst’s success
either. At his most powerful, he translates Bacon into 3-D.
He
acknowledges his debt. In In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida — a 2004
Tate Britain show curated by Hirst and a couple of fellow
Brit-artists — he paid homage to his mentor by recreating one
of his images in a sculpture involving a carcass and tropical
fish.
Now, in a
new show at the Gagosian Gallery, the connections and echoes are
further emphasised. As the gallery presents a long-planned and
extremely impressive exhibition that takes five Bacon triptychs
as its focus, it stages at the same time in an adjoining gallery
a show of Hirst’s work, including a new piece, The
Tranquility of Solitude, created in direct response to one
of Bacon’s most famous images.
The Bacon
paintings are spectacular. Take this rare opportunity to see
some of the masterpieces from private collections alongside more
familiar ones on loan from the Tate. Flesh wrestles with fate in
lonely arenas of lilac and orange. Popes scream from their
cages. Faces are twisted into a mess of bruised hues. Bacon
aimed, as the poet Paul Valéry might have put it, “to give
the sensation without the boredom of conveyance”, to present,
as he said, the stark “brutality of fact”. These are
paintings that short-circuit the spectator’s normal mental
processes. They hit straight on the nervous system. They hijack
the soul.
I have to
confess that before seeing the show I had heard about Hirst’s
homage: his take on the great Bacon triptych commemorating the
suicide of his lover George Dyer, alone in a hotel bedroom,
throwing up in a basin, hunched over the lavatory while the
black shadows creep. Hirst’s response, I was told, was a
triptych of vitrines containing pickled sheep. One was perched
on a lavatory pan with a hypodermic syringe in its leg. And, to
be frank, it sounded utterly ludicrous — as if the artist,
bankrupt of ideas (though certainly not of cash — one of his
pieces made a sale-room record of £1.8 million last month), had
merely souped up an old formula to more sensationalist levels.
But I was
completely wrong. Hirst has succeeded again. The Tranquility
of Solitude has a harrowing power. Yes, there is an element
of ridiculousness — but this is the ridiculousness of the
human condition, the self-conscious awkwardness of life at its
most exposed. Stripped and achingly vulnerable, the flayed sheep
scream silent pain (like Bacon popes) across their flat tongues.
The violence is stark and brutal and blatant. The horror feels
claustrophobic. But an eerie beauty hangs in the stillness, in
this almost tender evocation of our sad, hermetic little lives.
I stared: fascinated, stunned, appalled — and exhilarated.
Hirst’s
work at its best — and, in this triptych, he is at his best
— strikes straight for the instincts. You can’t explain how
it’s done. Maybe you step closer to try to find out. But just
as Bacon’s images up close dissolve into a broken mess of
paintwork, so the formaldehyde in Hirst’s vitrines blears the
eyes. You step back again and see the full grandeur of the
vision: glazed and gilt-framed in Bacon’s case; in Hirst’s,
enclosed by a beautifully constructed box.
If only
Hirst would take a further lesson from Bacon. If only he would
destroy a bit more of his work. This small show contains a
selection of his earlier pieces. His A Thousand Years
from 1990, in which maggots hatch into flies, buzz about and
feed on a bloody cow’s head before being sizzled by an
Insect-O-Cutor to expire struggling weakly on the floor, still
has an unbearable strength.
The
spectator can still feel the visceral horror that Hirst himself
described when he had first completed it: when he stood back
appalled and wondered, “What have I done?” But you can
forget his medicine cabinets and fly-plastered canvases and bin
them along with his spot and spin paintings — merely
commercial spin-offs of his success. And perhaps it is this that
speaks most clearly of the differences between the two artists.
Where Bacon’s life, work and philosophy seemed almost one,
Hirst appears to capitulate to the tawdry demands of commerce
and celebrity.
Maybe that
shouldn’t matter, given the force of his images. But the
grandeur of his vision seems somehow flawed.
Damien
Hirst: A Thousand Years & Triptychs, Gagosian Gallery,
London WC1 (020-7841 9960), until August 4
|
|
 |
Bacon's
'Self-Portrait'
Sells for $6.2 Million at London Sale
Bloomberg
By
Linda Sandler 22nd June, 2006
June 22 (Bloomberg) - A
Francis Bacon triptych titled 'Three Studies for a Self-Portrait' went for 3.4
million pounds ($6.2 million) at a Christie's International auction in London
tonight.
The buyer was a telephone
bidder. The seller, an unnamed collector, bought the work in 1982 from Bacon.
The artist, best known for his screaming pope, died in 1992.
Christie's had valued the
1980 'Three Studies' at as much as 5.5 million pounds, on a bet that it would
set a record for the U.K.'s most-expensive contemporary artist. Bacon's 'Study
for a Pope I' fetched $10.1 million at Christie's New York in 2005.
The sale, which is still
going on, came on the fourth night of a London auction week that may raise as
much as 320.4 million pounds, doubling last year's total in the No. 2 art
market.
Dublin-born Bacon, who grew
up during World War I and worked as an interior designer in 1920s Berlin and
Paris, is one of a line of artists including Pablo Picasso who distorted their
images of human figures. He started painting in London in 1929, and destroyed
most of his work in 1943. The crucifixions and twisted bodies that made him
famous came after that.
Christie's catalogue links
Bacon's style to his sexuality. "Homosexuals are always more ruthless and
more precise about appearance,'' Bacon is cited as saying.
FRANCIS BACON :
TRIPTYCHS
Gagosian Gallery
Jun 20 - Aug 4, 2006
Opening reception: Tuesday, June 20th, 6 - 8pm
6-24 BRITANNIA STREET
LONDON WC1X 9JD
TEL 020 7841 9960
FAX 020 7841 9961
TUE-SAT 10-6
PRESS RELEASE
"Triptychs are the thing I like doing most, and I think this may be related
to the thought I've sometimes had of making a film. I like the juxtaposition of
the images separated on three different canvases. So far as my work has any
quality, I often feel perhaps it is the triptychs have the most quality."
(Francis Bacon, 1979)
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of triptychs by the late
Francis Bacon. This is the first exhibition of the artist's work in the U.K.
since the Hayward Gallery retrospective in 1998 and includes many important
loans from public institutions and private collections.
In the famous interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon states,"…I see every
image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences…. one
picture reflects on the other continuously and sometimes they're better in
series than they are separately because, unfortunately, I've never yet been able
to make the one image that sums up all the others. So one image against the
other seems to be able to say more." Thus Bacon's painting, with its
visceral, ever-intensifying exploration of the relation between figure and
field, proceeds through series: series of crucifixions, series of Popes, series
of portraits and self-portraits, series of simultaneity itself, as in the
triptychs. And within each work, whether single or triple, each painting, each
figure is itself a shifting sequence or series of sensations; each sensation
exists at different levels, in different orders, or in different domains,
brought together in the artist's attempt, as he himself describes it, 'to
capture the appearance together with the cluster of sensations that the
appearance arouses in me."
The triptych format first appeared in Bacon's pivotal work, Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). This small triptych contained
the seed for the first large triptych Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962),
which in turn set in motion a long process of large triptychs of almost
consistent dimension. Although Bacon was clearly aware of the historical
antecedents in religious art, he cites the panoramic cinema screen as the main
inspiration for his use of the triptych, thus totally recreating it as a topical
format. Gilles Deleuze writes, "The triptych has thoroughly separate
sections, truly distinct, which in advance negate any narrative that would
establish itself among them. Yet Bacon also links these sections with a kind of
brutal, unifying distribution that makes them interrelate free of any symbolic
undercurrent." (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981)
Over a period of thirty years, Bacon completed thirty-three large triptychs,
several of which he subsequently dismantled or destroyed. The large triptychs
can be classified into three broad categories, all of which are represented in
this exhibition: a sequenced event involving figures that is dramatic or erotic
(Studies from the Human Body, 1970); a trio of full-length seated figures
(Triptych, 1976); a trio of single nude figures (August, 1972).
Attendant panels show a bio morph or a still life; others depict figures in
diverse states of action or inertia. Concurrently, Bacon painted small triptych
self- portraits and portraits of friends, scaled to evoke the likeness of the
subject. In these triptychs, the portraits are arranged like mug shots, left
profile-centre-right profile, although all resemblance to photographic
verisimilitude stops there in the convulsive, dematerialised planes of Bacon's
painted faces.
In Bacon's art, modernity and tradition converge. His ectoplasmic figures strain
like savage forces of nature against the shallow, large fields of intense colour
and the cool armatures that bind them to the picture plane. In his gut-wrenching
serialisation of the human body and its sensations, he shows himself to be the
unflinching witness of the hysterical reality of the body and the primal fear of
those who inhabit it.
The publication accompanying the exhibition includes a set of previously
unpublished correspondence between the artist and philosopher Michel Leiris,
dating from 1966-82.
Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 and died in Madrid in 1992. Throughout
and beyond his lifetime, his work has been exhibited widely, including
retrospectives at the Tate Gallery (1962 and 1985); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
(1963, travelling); Grand Palais, Paris (1971); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York ( 1975); National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1983, travelling); Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (1989, travelling); Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris (1996, travelling).
For more information please contact the gallery. email
info@gagosian.com
A slice of Bacon

22 June 2006
A ONE-man play about Francis
Bacon, one of Britain's greatest and most controversial contemporary artists,
is being staged at the Eastgate Theatre in Peebles.
It will be performed by Pip Utton – who wrote the piece with Jeremy Towler
– next Thursday, June 29, at 7.30pm.
Margaret Thatcher once described Bacon as "that dreadful man who paints
horrible pictures".
"He would spend his mornings painting, his afternoons drinking champagne
and eating, and his nights roaming around in fishnet stockings looking for
rough trade," said Utton.
Tickets, £11/£9 from 01721 725777.
HIV'.
Self-portraits of the
artist as a mortal man
By Louise Jury, Arts
Correspondent
The Independent,
17 June 2006
A late Francis Bacon
self-portrait triptych from a period when the artist was becoming
increasingly anxious about his own mortality has gone on display in Britain
for the first time since it was painted a quarter of a century ago.
The work was bought
directly from the artist by a friend two years after it was painted and had
never been seen in public until the unnamed owner finally decided to sell.
After display in New
York and Hong Kong, it was finally unveiled in London yesterday prior to its
auction by Christie's next Thursday when it could even set a world record
price for a Bacon.
It is estimated at
between £3.5m and £5.5m while the world auction record was set at £5.8m
($10m) in New York last November. A European record of £5.1m was
established in London in February.
Pilar Ordovas,
Christie's director of post-war and contemporary art, said the work,
entitled Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (1980), was "very
exciting".
Although the experts
were aware of the triptych, it has never been loaned to an exhibition and
has not been seen for 26 years since it was painted.
It was also one of only
two works that the artist sold himself instead of through his gallery,
Marlborough.
As he hung onto it for
two years before selling, however, it suggests it meant something special to
the artist himself. "It was quite rare for Bacon to keep a picture for
two years. Normally there was a huge pressure - the gallery would want to
show them and sell them," said Ms Ordovas.
Both Bacon and Lucian
Freud, two of Britain's greatest artists, had produced self-portraits and
were famed for them, starting, in Bacon's case, with his first in 1956 when
he was 47.
But by 1980, when Bacon
was 71, he claimed that he had to paint himself as his friends and models
were all dying - or, as the artist himself expressed it, "dropping like
flies".
"He became more and
more obsessed with painting himself because he didn't have anyone else to
paint," said Ms Ordovas.
The three distorted
faces from different perspectives showed the influence of Cubism, she added.
The triptych is the
highlight of Christie's post-war and contemporary sale on Thursday.

Post War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
King's Street, London
June 22nd 2006

Sale Title
POST WAR (EVE)
Location
London, King Street
Sale
Date June
22, 2006
Sale
Number 7246
Lot Number 37
Creator
Francis Bacon
(1909-1992)
Lot
Title Three Studies
for a Self-Portrait
Estimate
3,500,000 - 5,500,000
British pounds
Sold 3,816,000
British pounds
Special
Notice VAT
rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.
Pre-lot
text PROPERTY
FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION
Lot
description
Francis
Bacon (1909-1992)
Three Studies for a Self-Portrait
signed, titled and dated 'Self-Portrait 1980 Francis Bacon' (on the reverse of
each canvas)
oil on canvas, triptych
each: 14 x 12in. (35.5 x 30.5cm.)
Painted in 1980
Provenance
Acquired directly
from the artist by the present owner in 1982.
Lot
Notes FRANCIS
BACON'S PORTRAITS AND SELF-PORTRAITS
'All the Pulsations of a
Person'
Michael Peppiatt
Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1980) belongs to a series which Bacon began
at the onset of old age. Here the brightness and bravura of the earlier
self-portraits give way to a soberly analytical, more naturalistic style. Gone
are the rainbow colours and the provocative, swaggering postures of the 1960s
and 1970s; and in their place, under the artist's implacable gaze, the subject
is pinned - 'like a patient etherised upon a table' - against a stark black
background to be X-rayed and analysed. Having recently turned seventy, Bacon was
acutely aware of his own mortality, and he undertook several new self-portraits
in a desire to catch his emotions as he watched himself grow old. In Three
Studies for Self-Portrait, the artist brought the scrutiny of a lifetime to
bear on himself: a gaze like a magnifying glass sweeps over his own features,
subtly spot-lighting and distorting them, but with such fluent skill that they
are never less than instantly recognizable. Bacon's aim in this triptych was to
reduce and simplify to the extreme. The impasto which Bacon had whipped up into
so many previous likenesses is replaced here by a calm, almost eerie
translucence, as though he had seen through the ruddiness of flesh to an
underlying substance as fine and ethereal as spun glass. The subject changes
nevertheless dramatically from panel to panel, underscoring the mystery and
complexity of all appearance, which changes from second to second. In his later
years, Bacon became convinced that he was within reach of the one perfect
portrait - the portrait that would sum up and surpass all his other portraits.
If there had been one ultimate image, it would have to have been heads of
himself, such as these Three Studies which, unusually, he kept and consulted
in his studio for a couple of years after painting them.
It is surprising how few other twentieth-century artists there are for whom
portraiture - especially self-portraiture - played the central role it played
for Bacon. Matisse certainly not, Picasso hardly so; and although Giacometti
recorded his immediate entourage - his brother, Diego, and his wife, Annette -
almost daily, he left relatively few self-portraits behind. The self-portrait,
with its natural bent towards introspection and self-questioning, has flourished
more in Nordic countries than in the South; so much so that one could hardly
conceive of Munch's tormented soul-searchings had the artist lived in Nice
rather than Norway. The only other great painter of the last century to have
given as important a place to self-portraits as Bacon is surely Max Beckmann,
whose whole career can be traced through the great, brooding images that he made
of himself. And Bacon's own fascination with self-portraits derived to a great
extent from his admiration for two other, unquestionably Nordic artists:
Rembrandt and Van Gogh.
Bacon had always been obsessed by the way people looked. He was fascinated by
the way an unhappy love affair, a trick of the light or a sudden surge of anger
could transform the features even of close friends whom he thought he knew
through and through. He himself linked this obsession with his sexuality.
'Whenever I really want to know what someone looks like,' he said to me once, 'I
always ask a queer - because homosexuals are always more ruthless and more
precise about appearance. After all, they spend their whole lives watching
themselves and others, then pulling the way they look to pieces.' Bacon himself
was no exception. There were few things he enjoyed more than sitting, preferably
opposite a large wall mirror, in a crowded bar or restaurant and watching
everyone 'carry on', as he put it. He loved following the ebb and flow of human
pretension and folly - his own very much included. Generally his gaze was
genial, but when something alerted his attention - a sudden row, the arrival of
someone he disliked, a drunk bursting into tears - it became as piercing and
pitiless as the eye of a hawk as it swoops.
What went on in the pale blue depths of Bacon's eyes in those split seconds of
absolute concentration? The stare seemed on the verge of a discovery, as if it
had cut through layers of grimace and disguise to a rare, harsh truth. Bacon was
convinced that a person's appearance and their underlying character were
indissolubly linked. 'I think the qualities of (people's) personality come
through in their appearance,' he remarked. 'Very often a person's appearance
belies their qualities, but generally speaking I think that you can, to a great
extent, analyse their character from their appearance. And so I am certainly not
trying to make a portrait of somebody's soul or psyche or whatever you like to
call it. You can only make a portrait of their appearance, but I think that
their appearance is deeply linked with their behaviour.' (1)
That capacity for piercing the façade and perceiving the confused, sometimes
abject, sometimes heroic, human truth behind was to make Bacon one of the
greatest - possibly even the greatest - portraitist of the Twentieth Century.
Through his portraits, Bacon recorded for posterity an entire gallery of
characters who, once seen, are never forgotten. A roll-call of his protagonists
reads like that of a modern Dickens or Balzac: a panorama of late
twentieth-century life filled with writers and artists, petty crooks, exuberant
ladies, Soho characters, French poets, international financiers, East Enders:
Peter Lacy, Muriel Belcher (both as her indomitable, everyday self and as a
Sphinx), Lucian Freud, George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne, Michel Leiris, Henrietta
Moraes, Gilbert de Botton, John Edwards. If one wanted a concentrated picture of
London life, high and low, caught between Soho and the Ritz, one would only have
to look at Bacon's portraits. They reveal unsuspected diversity and uncanny
accuracy. However much the sitter's appearance is pulled apart, pummelled and
deformed, he or she is instantly recognizable (unlike, say, many of Giacometti's
portraits or busts which, however beautiful and moving, are often difficult to
identify). 'One day people will see,' Bacon once said to me, 'how natural my
distortions are.' It was precisely this tension between deformation and
recognizability - the degree to which one could 'reinvent' appearance without
destroying its identity - which excited Bacon and drew him back so frequently to
portraiture.
Bacon, who talked so penetratingly about his own work, often came back to this
point, trying to define it: '... very often the involuntary marks are much more
deeply suggestive than others... the marks are made, and you survey the thing
like you would a sort of graph. And you see within this graph the possibilities
of all types of fact being planted... if you think of a portrait, you maybe at
one time have put the mouth somewhere, but you suddenly see through this graph
that the mouth could go right across the face. And in way you would love to be
able in a portrait to make a Sahara of the appearance - to make it so like, yet
seeming to have the distances of the Sahara.' (2) To Bacon's mind, the element
of chance was primordial to portraiture, as to all his images. 'When I was
trying in despair the other day to paint that head of a specific person,' he
recounts in an interview, 'I used a very big brush and a great deal of paint and
I put it on very, very freely, and I simply didn't know in the end what I was
doing, and suddenly this thing clicked and became exactly like this image I was
trying to record. But not out of any conscious will, nor was it anything to do
with illustrational painting. What has never been analyzed is why this
particular way of painting is more poignant than illustration. I suppose because
it has a life completely of its own. It lives on its own, and therefore
transfers the essence of the image more poignantly.' (3) And later, talking to
David Sylvester again more generally about portraits, he added: 'The living
quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a
technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person. It's why
portrait painting is so fascinating and so difficult.' (4)
Throughout the first half of his career, Bacon experimented with a variety of
formats, much as he experimented with different techniques and materials. Then,
around 1961 - being a man of very fixed habits, despite his bohemian lifestyle -
he settled on two formats, one large, one small-scale, to which he then adhered
unwaveringly. The small-format paintings, which are devoted to single heads, can
be read in conjunction with the larger canvases, since they stand in a kind of
counterpoint to them throughout the latter half of Bacon's working life. (5)
Bacon moved constantly and deliberately between the two, executing a series of
small heads whenever larger compositions were not uppermost in his mind, and
vice versa, clearly relishing the shift in tempo and focus. Although many of the
small-format paintings became triptychs, they often began as single heads which
then triggered off other companion pieces - which in turn resulted not only in
triptychs, but also occasionally in diptychs and even, in one case, a four-panel
picture, arranged vertically, with one head mounting above another. (6)
Bacon
began painting in series early on, prompted by his fascination with film and
photography; but it was only after the early 1960s that triptychs began to
occupy such a dominant place in his work. There were several reasons why Bacon
favoured this form, as he acknowledged in various interviews. But the most
obvious one was that three-pictures-in-one allowed him far greater latitude to
explore the possibilities of a particular 'appearance' while conjugating and
contrasting the formal discoveries and visual implications of each of the
partnered images. In portraiture, Bacon remained acutely conscious of the need
for constant invention, particularly in small-format canvases, where the scope
and focus were so precise and so unforgiving. One of Bacon's touchstones for
inventiveness in conveying a human likeness was Rembrandt, whose self-portraits
he held in special esteem. What fascinated him in the Dutchman's later
self-portraits (and above all in one portrait where Rembrandt's authorship is
disputed) was the way in which, when seen close to, the head dissolves into a
mass of totally abstract or unrepresentational marks. 'If you think of the great
Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence, for instance, and you analyze it,'
Bacon confides at one point, 'you will see there are hardly any sockets to the
eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational. I think that the mystery
of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. And you
can't will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident
always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do,
you're making just another form of illustration. But what can happen sometimes,
as it happened in this Rembrandt self-portrait, is that there is a coagulation
of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great
image.' (7)
Bacon himself came to self-portraiture relatively late, the earliest
recognizable self-portrait being the one he executed in 1958.(8) Looking at the
major themes that characterize the first half of his career, one might
reasonably conclude that Bacon had too many demons (dictators, Popes and other
father-figures) to lay to rest to be able to concentrate on his own image. But,
as middle age approached, Bacon's need for grand, dramatic themes diminished,
and he became increasingly aware that the richest subject matter was to hand in
his everyday life and his immediate entourage. It was at this moment, in the
early 1960s, that portraiture took centre stage in Bacon's work; and as he
produced one astonishingly living image after another of his close friends and
lovers, he began increasingly to submit his own features to the same restlessly
destructive and inventive scrutiny. Bacon never asked his friends or lovers to
'sit' for him in the conventional sense; but he regularly commissioned his
friend, the well-known photographer and Soho wit, John Deakin, to take
photographs of them which he then kept within reach while painting portraits of
them from memory.(9) Deakin, as well as a host of other photographers, had
frequently captured Bacon on camera, so that when he came to grapple with his
own image, Bacon could refer to a mass of photos of himself which he kept
scattered in the thick debris of books and images covering the studio floor.
Closely as he had watched the features and personalities of his friends, there
was no face or psyche that Bacon knew as well as his own. As a young man fully
conscious of his youthful allure, he had become adept at creating unusual and
striking makeup effects; and it is not altogether frivolous to suggest that
these early experiments in self-transformation greatly aided Bacon in his later
efforts to 'paint faces'. (10) He also constantly scrutinized himself in the
mirror, often carrying a compact mirror with him when he went out; and he was
deeply conscious that success, both in the social and the sexual domain,
depended on how one 'presented' oneself. Along with the deep familiarity he had
with own appearance, in all lights and all moods, Bacon also benefited from a
feeling of absolute freedom in manipulating his own features. If he professed a
sense of committing an 'injury' to the appearance of his friends when he painted
them, he had no such concerns for himself. Accordingly, no image in the whole
Baconian canon was as brutally whipped up, hollowed out and summarily
reassembled in unlikely conjunctions of eye and mouth, jowl and cheek, as his
own face. Here, too, despite the inherent constraints of the genre, was an
exuberant diversity: Bacon against green or blue or lilac grounds, oblique or
elliptical, fleshy or ethereal, wristwatch to the fore (his lifetime ticking by)
or already half-enshrouded by the blackness behind - as if, in old age, the
artist were gradually painting himself out of the picture.
In his last years, Bacon returned more and more frequently to his own image.
Sardonically, he would explain that since 'all his friends were dying like
flies' around him, he only had his own 'old pudding face' left to paint. By the
1980s, he was moving towards an ever greater economy of effect: while his forms
grew less distorted, tending towards a new naturalism, his colours became colder
and more translucent, thinned, it seemed, by the passage of time. Where the
backgrounds had been brilliant with contrasting colour, they now became
uniformly black: bright daylight replaced by the encroaching night. The late
self-portraits form a long elegy to the artist's acute sense of mortality as
well as to his desire to pare his images down, with all superfluity stripped
away. In one of the last interviews he gave, Bacon remarked that, with
experience and age, painting became rather more difficult than less, because:
'You're more conscious of the fact that nine-tenths of everything is
inessential. What is called "reality" becomes so much more acute. The
few things that matter become so much more concentrated and can be summed up
with so much less.' (11) Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1980) is a case in
point, since nowhere in Bacon's work is the desire to capture the very core of
appearance and identity more evident and more poignantly resolved than in these
late images of himself.
(1) David Sylvester: Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 234.
(2) David Sylvester: Interviews with Francis Bacon, revised ed., 1993, p. 56.
(3) Ibid., p. 17.
(4) Ibid., p. 174.
(5) The one exception, insofar as I am aware, is Triptych 1977, painted as a
gift for a friend in Paris. The three small panels represent a view of Bacon's
studio, another of his bed, and a self-portrait).
(6) Four Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1967.
(7) David Sylvester: Interviews with Francis Bacon, revised ed., 1993, p. 58.
(8) There are grounds for considering Portrait c1931-32, reproduced as
illustration no 5 in the Alley-Rothenstein catalogue, as a very early
self-portrait - despite Alley's opinion that it was not.
(9) Bacon had of course been 'sat to' for portraits, notably by Bob and Lisa
Sainsbury. Bacon's decision not to have any more sitters in his studio appears
to have come about after Cecil Beaton had rejected the portrait Bacon had done
of him. For Beaton's account of the incident, see Cecil Beaton: The Restless
Years, London, 1976, pp. 100-107.
(10) Bacon's dexterity with makeup is wonderfully described by Michael Wishart
in his autobiography, High Diver, London, 1977, p. 63.
(11) Michael Peppiatt: An Interview with Francis Bacon: Provoking Accident,
Promoting Chance, Art International, Paris, Autumn 1989.

Post War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
King's Street, London
June 22nd 2006
Composition (Figure)
1933 Francis Bacon
Sale Title
POST WAR (EVE)
Location
London, King Street
Sale
Date June 22, 2006
Sale
Number 7246
Lot
Number 40
Creator Francis
Bacon (1909-1992)
Lot
Title Composition
(Figure)
Estimate
350,000
- 550,000 British pounds
Sold 400,000 British pounds
Special
Notice
VAT rate
of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.
Lot
Description
Francis
Bacon (1909-1992)
Composition (Figure)
signed 'F. Bacon 33' (lower right)
gouache, pastel, pen and ink on paper
21 x 15½in. (53.5 x 40cm.)
Executed in 1933
Provenance
Miss
Diana Watson, London.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's London, 14 May 1952, lot 52.
Peter Cochrane, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
Literature
R. Alley
and J. Rothenstein, Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné, London 1964, no. 9
(illustrated, unpaged).
C. Domino, Francis Bacon: 'Taking Reality by Surprise', London 1996, p.
13 (illustrated in colour).
W. Schmied, Francis Bacon: Commitment and Conflict, Munich 1996, fig. 99
(illustrated, p. 91).
M. Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon; Photography, Film and the Practice of
Painting, London 2005, no. 14 (illustrated in colour, p. 16).
Exhibited
London,
Transition Gallery, Paintings by Francis Bacon, February 1934.
Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, British Art and the Modern Movement
1930-1940, October-November 1962, no. 108.
London, Hayward Gallery, The Thirties: British Art and Design before the War,
October 1979-January 1980, no. 6.47 (illustrated).
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Francis Bacon, June-October 1996, no. 89
(illustrated in colour, p. 90). This exhibition later travelled to Munich, Haus
der Kunst, November 1996-January 1997.
New York, Marlborough Gallery, On Paper: Selected Drawings of the 19th and
20th Century, January-February 2000, no. 7 (illustrated in colour).
Paris, Musée Picasso, Bacon Picasso, La vie des images, March-May 2005,
no. 115 (illustrated in colour, p. 125).
Lot
Notes
Composition
(Figure), executed in 1933, is an exceptionally rare early work by Francis
Bacon, dating from a period from which only a tiny number of other pictures have
survived. Already in 1933, the figure is filled with movement and panic, Bacon
managing to harness what he termed as the 'human cry', and what he defined as
'The whole coagulation of pain, despair...' (quoted in Daniel Farson, The
Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London 1994, p. 106). This is therefore
an existentialist image from before the age of existentialism, and provides an
exciting insight both into Bacon's early development and the consistency of his
interest in the agony of life.
When Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucufuxion was
unleashed upon the world in 1944, people all too easily assumed that the artist
had sprung, ready-formed, from nowhere. Yet that picture showed an interest in
the organic forms that had been earlier pioneered by Picasso and which had
influenced Bacon's paintings over a decade earlier. For Bacon, it was at an
exhibition of Picasso's works at Paul Rosenberg's gallery in Paris in the late
1920s that had formed his great epiphany - he would later tell his cousin Diana
Watson, one of his most important early supporters and the first owner of the
present picture, 'That's when I first thought about painting' (Bacon, quoted in
A. Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times, New York 1993,
p. 53). He abandoned the furniture design that had previously occupied him and
instead became a painter, learning the techniques through his friend and mentor
Roy de Maistre.
Bacon had been struck in particular by 'Picasso's brutality of fact' (Bacon,
quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon,
New York 1990, p. 182). He turned it to his own purposes, adding a rawness that
had not featured in Picasso's works. The gestural manner in which Bacon has
rendered Composition (Figure) emphasises the 'brutality', lending this
work a harsh edge that was lacking in Picasso's Dinard pictures. It is
interesting to note that the features of the figure are even reminiscent of
Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso's lover at the time his Dinard works were
painted. In Composition (Figure), there is no sense of illustration;
instead Bacon has tapped into a more direct manner of depiction that conveys
sensation as well as movement.
Composition (Figure) is one of a small number of works that were
exhibited in Bacon's first one-man show, which he held in 1934 following his
success in group exhibitions and the publication of his Crucufixion of
1933 in Herbert Read's book, Art Now. Only a handful of other works from
this exhibition have survived from his exhibition at the Transition Gallery (a
name the artist himself chose). This picture therefore bears intriguing witness
both to the early development and the early history of one of the most important
painters of the Post-War period.
| Bacon
painted Three Studies when he was growing
increasingly preoccupied with his mortality. He believed
that he was close to creating the portrait that would
surpass all his others |
|
 |
Francis
Bacon and a vision of perfection
By
Jack Malvern Friday
May 26 2006
A triptych of
self-portraits hidden from public view for 26 years is to be
auctioned
|
 |
|
FRANCIS
BACON’S attempt to paint the perfect portrait is revealed in
today’s Times in three previously unseen paintings.
The triptych
of self-portraits is considered the closest the artist came to
his belief that he was within reach of creating the ultimate
likeness. The portraits have come to light only now — 26 years
after they were painted and 14 years after Bacon’s death —
because he sold them directly to a friend rather than through
his gallery.
The buyer, who
has never put them on public display or published photographs of
them, is selling them at auction for an estimated £5.5 million.
The anonymous collector is believed to have paid about £100,000
for the triptych, entitled Three Studies, in 1982.
The triptych
is exceptional not least because it survived two years in
Bacon’s studio — something of a feat, as he was so
destructive that his gallery would take his paintings away as
soon as they knew they were finished. Valerie Beston, his
personal assistant, regularly came to his studio to remove works
while the paint was still drying.
Michael
Peppiatt, Bacon’s biographer, believes that the artist held
the triptych in the highest regard. “In his later years, Bacon
became convinced that he was within reach of the one perfect
portrait — the portrait that would sum up and surpass all his
other portraits,” he said. “If there had been one ultimate
image, it would have to have been heads of himself, such as
these Three Studies, which, unusually, he kept and
consulted in his studio for a couple of years after painting
them.”
Bacon, who
was 71 when he created the work, had become preoccupied with his
own mortality. He remarked that he was driven to do
self-portraits because his friends were “dying like flies”.
In particular, George Dyer, his long-term lover, had committed
suicide eight years earlier.
Pilar
Ordovas, head of evening sales for postwar and contemporary art
at Christie’s, said that Bacon almost never sold his work
outside his gallery. “There are only two occasions that we
know when this happened. The other one he sold to the same
person,” she added.
“He must
have had some special connection with these paintings — he
kept them much longer than usual. Works were usually sold
immediately because they were in such high demand. He was the
greatest living British artist.”
In his later
years Bacon constantly examined himself in the mirror. He also
had a collection of photographs of himself, taken by his friend
John Deakin, which he kept scattered in his chaotic studio.
His idea of
the perfect portrait was not a photorealistic painting, but a
picture that captured someone’s personality. “One day people
will see how natural my distortions are,” he said. “Very
often a person’s appearance belies their qualities, but
generally speaking I think that you can, to a great extent,
analyse their character from their appearance.”
The triptych
also shows his willingness to distort his features. Although
Bacon worried about committing an “injury” when he
manipulated his friends’ faces, he had no qualms about
rearranging his own “old pudding face”.
Three
Studies could break the $10 million (£5.8 million) record
for a Bacon, set by Study for a Pope (1961) in November.
The paintings will go on show at Christie’s in London, on June
16 before the postwar and contemporary art sale on June 22.
'I
had nobody else to paint'
By
Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Chief Art Critic
|
|
 |
“I
LOATHE my own face,” Francis Bacon famously
said. “But I’ve done several self-portraits
because I had nobody else to do.”
This
wilfully disingenuous explanation masks the
profound sensibility of a painter whose
self-portraits are as honest, unsparing and
psychologically acute as those of that great
master of introspection, Rembrandt. The triptych
which now comes up for sale at Christies is a
powerfully — almost painfully — intimate
piece of work. Bacon thought of a portrait as an
almost impossible task. And yet again and again
he gazed unflinchingly into the mirror. He
attacked and brutalised his image, slurring his
pulped features across the canvas in a smear of
bruised hues as he sought to escape mere
illustration and evoke instead what he famously
described as “the brutality of fact”.
His
portraits are images of mortality. And yet as
Bacon paints this work his vision has grown
softer, less violent, more meditative. His
images take on an almost evanescent quality.
Where his earlier works confront savage passions
with impetuous energy, this later triptych seems
less about ferocity and more about fragility.
Its mood is poignant. Life seems to leak from
inside his features like air from a slowly
deflating balloon. It seeps back into the black.
This
was clearly an important work to the most
important British postwar painter. He destroyed
any canvases he didn’t like — sometimes, it
is said, getting them back from collectors under
false pretences so that he could burn them.
|
|
|
|
Bacon portraits brought to
light
BBC News 26th
May 2006

Bacon kept the painting
for two years before selling it
A painting featuring three self-portraits by Francis Bacon has been uncovered
24 years after it was sold privately by the artist.
Three Studies,
painted in 1980 when Bacon was 71, is expected to fetch up to £5.5m when it
is auctioned at Christie's in London 22 June.
The triptych has never
been seen before by the public.
It was painted at a time
when Bacon became concerned for his own mortality as he entered old age.
Several of his friends had
also died in the past decade, which increased his fear - his partner George
Dyer committed suicide in 1970.
Private sale
A portrait of him by Bacon
fetched £4.9m at auction last year.
Dublin-born Bacon often
dealt with themes of death and decay in his work and is probably most famous
for his portraits.
Bacon kept hold of Three
Studies for two years before selling it himself rather than through his
gallery.
He once said: "I
don't know that I should talk about a triptych in my case."
"Of course, there are
three canvases, and you can link that to a long-standing tradition. The
primitives often used the triptych format, but as far as my work is concerned,
a triptych corresponds more to the idea of a succession of images on
film."
The triptych is being sold
as part of Christie's Post-war and Contemporary Art Sale.
Bacon's
'Self-Portrait' Is Priced at a Record $10.3 Million
By Linda Sandler
Bloomberg May 26, 2006
May 26 (Bloomberg) -
Francis Bacon's studies for a self- portrait, hidden in a private collection
for more than two decades, will go on sale for as much as 5.5 million pounds
($10.3 million) in London on June 22.
Christie's International
is betting that the 1980 triptych painting, Three Studies for a
Self-Portrait, will set a record for Dublin-born Bacon, who is the U.K.'s
most-expensive contemporary artist. The seller is an unnamed collector who
bought the work from Bacon in 1982, London-based Christie's said in a
statement. The artist died in 1992.
Auction houses are driving
valuations higher, after taking in $900 million at their New York sales this
month - the combined total for Sotheby's, Christie's International and
Phillips de Pury & Co. On May 9, an Andy Warhol painting of a soup can
went for 20 percent less than Christie's top estimate, indicating collectors
may be resisting the run-up.
The discounted soup can
was bought by the billionaire collector Eli Broad.
Christie's and Sotheby's
Holdings Inc. are preparing to put on view art for their London June sales,
which last year took in 160 million pounds. Christie's contemporary auction
this year may raise about 21 million pounds, the auction house said.
Bacon's Study for a Pope
I set a record of $10.1 million at Christie's New York in 2005, including
commission, according to sale tracker Artnet AG.
Francis Bacon embalmed
Richard
Calvocoressi
The
Times Literary Supplement, March 29, 2006
Margarita
Cappock
FRANCIS BACON’S STUDIO
239pp. Merrell. £35 (US $59.95).
1 85894 276 4
The
dismantling in
1998 of Francis Bacon’s London studio, wall by paint-spattered wall and
object by distressed object, and its painstaking reconstruction in the Dublin
City Gallery, ranks as one of the more extraordinary conservation projects of
modern times. What Bacon would have made of the prospect of thousands of
visitors every year gazing through internal windows in the Dublin museum at
the hermetically sealed dust and intimate chaos of 7 Reece Mews, South
Kensington, is not hard to guess. He was a ruthless editor of his own work,
destroying half-finished, and even finished, pictures, concealing as many of
his sources as he revealed, and suppressing books and catalogues about himself
that he did not approve of. It is said that on one occasion he even burned two
sackfuls of crumpled photographs and press cuttings from his studio floor, in
order to deprive a hopeful Tate Gallery of a potentially invaluable addition
to its archive. In fact, as Margarita Cappock admits in this useful and
beautifully illustrated book, colour photographs of Bacon’s studio taken in
1974 show it to have been even more congested than it was at his death: “. .
. for all the sources that have survived, a great many must have mouldered
away”.
It is nevertheless due to
Dublin that we know considerably more about Bacon’s voracious but eclectic
interests than before. The illustrated database compiled by Dr Cappock and her
team at the City Gallery catalogues no fewer than 7,500 objects found in
Bacon’s studio, including illustrated publications, photographs, press
cuttings, notes, drawings, artist’s materials – among them several pairs
of Marks and Spencer corduroy trousers used to apply paint – and slashed
canvases. This remarkable research tool has already, in the four years since
the studio opened, begun to change the face of Bacon scholarship. For
instance, we now know that Bacon, contrary to what he maintained, sometimes
made rough preliminary sketches, suggesting, as Cappock observes, that he
“was much more premeditated in his approach to painting than he cared to
admit”.
Dr Cappock herself adds to
our understanding of Bacon’s complex relationship to photography. Some 1,400
photographs were found in Bacon’s studio, a considerable number of them
portraits by the photographer John Deakin, including 129 alone of Bacon’s
lover George Dyer. (The series of Lucian Freud on a bed may have been taken by
Walker Evans, not Deakin.) Cappock argues that these photos, many of which
were commissioned by Bacon, functioned as more than mere aides-memoire. Bacon
stopped working from life in the early 1960s and relied increasingly on
memory, or so he implied, when painting portraits of his friends. Deakin’s
photos, writes Cappock, “were not just a means to reality; they often were
the reality”. She coins the memorable phrase “destruction as a form of
enquiry” to describe Bacon’s deliberate intervention in the surface of the
prints – cuts, tears, creases, folds and paint marks.
Bacon’s aggressive
manipulation of the photographic image for his own imaginative ends placed him
in the role of editor rather than that of passive consumer. Sometimes
disparate fragments would be joined by safety pins or paper clips; at other
times Bacon would mount particularly telling details on to card. He even, on
occasion, took photographs himself – most notably of his long-term companion
and heir John Edwards, which informed a handful of comparatively benign late
portraits. But it is in his painterly transformations of Deakin’s
photographs that Bacon’s true originality lies, reinventing the human figure
for an apparently post-humanist world. These records of his subjects’
appearance were recalled long after their deaths. Dyer’s features, for
instance, dominated Bacon’s painting for some years following his suicide in
1971. And Bacon would sometimes transpose gestures or expressions captured by
Deakin’s incisive lens from one subject to another.
Various photographs of
Bacon himself were found in the studio, including several by Deakin, which the
artist made use of for his own self-portraits. The automatic photo booth,
where Bacon, frequently drunk, could experiment with different poses and
indulge in the performative side of his character, was another catalyst. The
potential of the multiple photo-strip to suggest a view of human personality
as changeable and contingent would have appealed to Bacon’s sense of people
in a state of flux. From the early 1960s he produced several small triptychs
which show contrasting aspects of the same head.
Analysing the numerous
books, magazines, loose leaves, newspapers and press cuttings recovered from
the studio floor, Cappock identifies the principal themes that fascinated
Bacon. Warfare, crime and political leaders supplied images of violence and
power. Medicine, sport, wildlife and human locomotion – Bacon left four
copies of Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion – nourished his
visceral and erotic iconography of the body. Humans and animals in extreme
situations or moving at high speed provided the basis for many of his
anatomical distortions, while Bacon’s interest in detailed photographs of
injuries and skin disorders from medical textbooks influenced his palette as
well as his depiction of flesh. Cappock speculates that the increasingly
pathological view of human flesh in Bacon’s late work may also reflect the
artist’s own physical decline.
The French publication on
diseases of the mouth, which, Bacon told David Sylvester, was the origin of
his obsession with the open mouth, was not found in the studio; but a fragment
of a hand-coloured illustration of gum disease, almost certainly torn from it,
was. Two copies of another book whose influence Bacon openly acknowledged, K.
C. Clark’s Positioning in Radiography, were also found. But the most
curious discovery made by Cappock and her colleagues was a well-thumbed and
paint-smeared copy of a 1920 book on mediums, ectoplasms and other psychic
phenomena by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, which Bacon never mentioned to
anyone. As Martin Harrison in his recently published study of Bacon and
photography has demonstrated, faked spiritualist photographs made a decisive
impact on Bacon’s painting from an early stage.
That there is still more
to be learned about Bacon is evident from this book, comprehensive though it
tries to be. Faced with so much material, it has clearly not been possible for
Margarita Cappock in the time available to follow up every lead. However, it
would not have required much detective work to spot that the “Leaf from an
unidentified book with black-and-white stills from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship
Potemkin . . . Date unknown”, has been torn from Roger Manvell’s 1944
book Film. This seminal little paperback includes five pages of stills
from the famous Odessa Steps sequence that so haunted Bacon. Further research
needs to be done on Bacon’s relation to the silent cinema, with its
expressive facial close-ups. It is also tempting to look at Bacon against the
backdrop of European avant-garde portrait photography, which, after the mass
slaughter of the First World War, lost faith in the ideal of an integrated
human face – and perhaps, by extension, in the notion of human identity as
something immutable.
Colin Gleadell reports on
contemporary auctions
The
Daily Telegraph 16th
May 2006
Before the sales, there
was concern that competition between Sotheby's and Christie's had led each to
extend financial guarantees of more than £26 million to owners to persuade
them to sell. It was a risky policy that could have backfired.
Indeed, a poor Francis
Bacon, over-estimated at £4 million to £6 million, failed to sell at
Christie's.

Man Carrying a Child
1956 Francis Bacon
BALLET TAKES YOU UP CLOSE
TO MODERN DANCE IN A SMALL HOUSE
DANCE
SHERRY DAWN KNETTLE
VUE Weekly, Canada,
27 April, 2006.
Edmonton's independent
arts and entertainment weekly magazine

Choreographer Emily Molnar
had already heard painter Francis Bacon (a descendant of the Renaissance
philosopher) was largely misunderstood when she first saw his work at the Tate
Gallery in London years ago.
His work is known for its violent, disturbing nature, and with that in mind,
Molnar searched out other qualities in the work that would eventually end up
influencing her impressions of him as she prepared to choreograph a modern
work for seven male dancers as part of Alberta Ballet’s Up Close.
“I liked the way he captured the figure of the body, how he showed motion,
and the three-dimensionality of the work,” she says. She also noticed that
he painted the male figure rather than using the more traditional female
model.
Molnar recalled Bacon’s paintings and decided to incorporate some of her
impressions of them into the piece “Portrait of a Suspended Grace,” a
melding of ideas about the human body and its relationship to dance, music and
visual art.
The choreographer weighed how much of her own interpretations to offer the
dancers, and she decided to allow them to respond both to her ideas and their
own about the paintings and music.
Describing the collaboration as a conversation, Molnar found that the
classically trained dancers loved her choreographic process. “The music and
paintings actually became a point of departure,” she says. “I gave the
artists information, but then let them experience that with their own point of
view.
“But dance is an abstract art, so the choreography doesn’t necessarily
illustrate Bacon’s paintings or the words to the music,” she says,
referring to an aria she chose by the composer Pergolesi.
Fri, Apr 28 (8 pm)
Up Close
By Alberta Ballet
Timms Centre for the Arts
(87 AVEnue & 112 Street), $30

POST-WAR
AND CONTEMPORARY ART (EVENING SALE), Sale 1658
May 09, 2006, New York, Rockefeller Plaza

Man Carrying a Child
1956 Francis Bacon
Lot Number: 59
Creator: Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Lot Title:
Man Carrying a Child
Estimate: 8,000,000 -
12,000,000 U.S. dollars Unsold
On occasion, Christie's
has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale which may include
guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is
secured solely by consigned property. This is such a lot. This indicates both
in cases where Christie's holds the financial interest on its own, and in
cases where Christie's has financed all or a part of such interest through a
third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed
lot is sold successfully and may incur a loss if the sale is not successful.
Pre-lot Text: Property
from a Private American Collection
Lot Description:
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Man Carrying a Child
oil on canvas
77¾ x 55½ in. (197.5 x 141 cm.)
Painted in 1956.
Provenance:
Beaux Arts Gallery, London
Mrs. Brenda Bomford, Aldbourne
Marlborough Fine Arts Ltd., London
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Literature:
The Listener, LXV,
February 1961, p. 360
X, II, no. 1, March 1961, pp. 24-25
S. Spender, "Francis Bacon", Quadrum, XI, December 1961, p.
49 (illustrated).
Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1996, p. 250,
(illustrated).
D. Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, pp. 86-87,
no. 65 (illustrated).
Exhibited:
Bath, Victoria Art
Gallery, Three Masters of Modern British Painting: Sir Matthew Smith, Victor
Pasmore, and Francis Bacon, 1958, no. 46.
London, Hanover Gallery, Francis Bacon, June-July 1959, no. 9.
Nottingham University, Francis Bacon, February-March 1961, no. 17.
Mannheim Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon, July-August 1962, no. 44.
Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, September-October 1962,
p. 47 (illustrated).
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Francis Bacon, October-November 1962, no. 42.
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon, January-February 1963, no. 38.
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Painterly Visions, 1985.
Lot Notes:
Enshrouded in darkness and
framed by the strange gossamer threads of an invisible or transparent cage,
this full-length portrait of a man in a jellaba stepping out across a
hexagonal patch of warm sun-drenched landscape, is both a rare and unique work
deriving from the time that Bacon spent in Tangiers. It is one of only two
works in the artist's oeuvre to overtly refer to Morocco and to the important
time that Bacon spent there on frequent visits in the mid-1950s. The other
work is Bacon's 1963 painting Landscape near Malabata in which he
commemorated his former lover Peter Lacy by painting a dark and enigmatic
portrait of the Moroccan landscape in which Lacy had chosen to be buried.
Situated just outside Tangiers where Bacon used to visit Lacy, this richly
colored landscape, had also made a brief appearance in Bacon's 1957 painting Van
Gogh in a Landscape. This earlier painting was one of an important and
memorable series of 'Van Gogh' paintings depicting the lone figure of an
artist walking in a Mediterranean landscape which to some extent also seems to
have been born out of Bacon's experiences in Morocco. Rooted in the harsh
sunlight, brilliant color and rich textures of Tangiers and (rarely for this
time) depicting a lone figure striding across a landscape, Man Carrying a
Child is an alternate and more ominous working of a similar theme. Painted
immediately after his return from Morocco in the previous year to this series
it is a work that clearly informed Bacon's Van Gogh paintings and bears an
especially close resemblance to the1957 painting Study for Portrait of Van
Gogh II.
According to Ronald Alley, the rare subject of Man Carrying a Child - a
full-length walking figure - was inspired by one of the Moroccans that Bacon
had met in Tangiers. It was apparently a subject that Bacon had, along with
many others, first attempted to paint while staying in Tangiers but had
ultimately found himself unable to complete satisfactorily. Man Carrying a
Child was painted entirely in his Battersea studio when Bacon took up the
subject again on his return to London in the autumn of 1956.
The summer of 1956 that Bacon spent in Morocco was the first of several visits
to Tangiers that Bacon would make during the 1950s. Bacon was ostensibly
travelling there to visit his lover Peter Lacy. Lacy was Bacon's first great
love and his features haunt the figures of most of the artist's paintings from
these years. Indeed, even though the central figure in Man Carrying a Child
was clearly not based on Lacy but on a Moroccan man Bacon knew in Tangier,
aspects of Lacy's features also dominate the face of the man carrying the
child in this work too.
Older than Bacon and an ex-Spitfire pilot from the war, Peter Lacy had
seemingly sought some kind of an 'escape' in Morocco that was to end with him
seemingly becoming set on drinking himself to death. Lacy was by all accounts
an excellent pianist and by 1956 had managed tie himself down to eking out a
meagre existence in a Handful of Dust - like situation playing piano in a
small-time Tangier bar known as Dean's Bar. Heavily in debt to the bar's
owner, Lacy was obliged to 'tinkle the ivories' for the owner on a near
permanent basis in order to pay off an amount that never seemed to decrease.
Often playing eighteen hour stints, Lacy would play and drink himself into a
stupor, his alcoholic consumption often matching or exceeding any reduction in
his debt that he produced at the piano. Bacon's arrival in the summer of 1956
led to the first of many volatile episodes between the two men that would
recur with increasing violence with each of Bacon's subsequent visits to
Tangiers.
Tangiers at this time was the home of a vibrant bohemian homosexual scene. The
widespread tolerance of the Moroccan authorities towards drugs, prostitution
and sexual promiscuity had led to the town becoming a magnet for many artists
and writers. Included among the more permanent residents of the city were the
beat poets Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky, the resident
English writer Paul Bowles and the American Beat writer William Burroughs who
was completing his first infamous novel of heroin addiction, The Naked
Lunch in Tangiers. Set against this background of intoxication and of
Beats, boys and promiscuity, Bacon and Lacy's tempestuous relationship grew
dangerously explosive.
In the summer of 1956 Bacon had written back from Tangiers to his dealer Erica
Bronsen that his visit to Morocco had proved inspirational and that his work
was taking a new turn. Certainly, the light and rich colors that he found in
Morocco can be seen creeping into several of Bacon's works from late 1956 and
early 1957 not least the series of Van Gogh paintings from the following year.
But what is not certain is how well Bacon was able to work in Morocco itself.
Notoriously reliant on his London studio throughout his life, Bacon wrote to
Erica Bronsen that in Tangiers, he had already finished four paintings,
exclaiming that, "I think they are the best things I have done. I am
doing two series, one of the Pope with Owls quite different from the
others and a serial portrait of a person in a room. I am very excited about
it. I hope to come back with about 20 or 25 paintings early in October... I
feel full of work and believe I may do a few really good paintings now"
(Letter to Erica Brausen, 1956, cited in Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon:
Anatomy of an Enigma. London, 1996, p. 172).
In spite of all his talk about how well things were going in Tangiers, his
letters to Erica Bronsen also preceded other letters asking for more funds to
prolong his stay. Bacon is known to have begun several paintings in Tangiers
but only one - the aforementioned Pope with Owls - made it back to
London. In a fit of jealous rage one night, Peter Lacy was said to have
slashed and destroyed the rest of Bacon's Moroccan paintings, much to the
artist's amusement. Bacon too is known to have destroyed several of his own
works and to have left other unfinished canvases permanently abandoned in
Tangiers. Years later in discussion with David Sylvester Bacon admitted
"I did paint a certain amount there (Morocco) but not at all
successfully. I think perhaps the light was too strong" (cited in David
Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact , Interviews with Francis Bacon,
London 1990, p. 190).
With its richly patterned and textured ground and, for Bacon, its surprisingly
vivid colour, Man Carrying Child evidently owes something to kind of
orientalising influence that North Africa had provided for earlier modern
painters such as Paul Klee, August Macke and Henri Matisse. But though Bacon's
time in Tangiers evidently played some part in determining the colour and light
of some of his paintings over the next few years, it played another altogether
more important role. Despite all its apparent gaiety and decadence, Bacon's
experiences in Morocco and the painful split from Peter Lacy that his visits
there also signaled, reconfirmed in him his dark existential view of life and
his sense of the ultimate isolation of modern man.
The ambiguous setting of this work serves to further enhance an uncanny sense
of isolation and alienation. The scene is only illuminated by a strange
hexagonal patch of floor that seems to extend into the distance as if
reflecting the light from a skylight or a floor from a carnivalesque hall of
mirrors. A similar shape to those used in Bacon's earlier paintings of a Dog
in 1952 and of the Sphinx in 1953, this richly coloured and
patterned floor forms a strangely modern stage-like pedestal for the standing
figure above it. This sense of artifice and disturbing unreality is further
enforced by the wire-like threads of a cage seeming to frame or encase the
figure and his shadow, imprisoning his life as if this deceptively free and
nurturing man too were merely an insect pinned in a case. The cage, a familiar
motif from Bacon's portraits of screaming Popes made throughout this period,
is here used as if to capture and frame the St Christopher - like actions of a
man that Bacon had perhaps seen crossing the marketplace in Tangiers in just
such a fashion. Trapped and frozen in a state of motion like a fleeting snap
shot-like image from his memory or one of the Muybridge photographs that he so
often consulted, the painting shows a vivid, intimate and intensely human
aspect of life as but a fleeting shadow on an empty artificial stage.
Bacon work installed in new Hugh Lane
RTE Ireland
23 March 2006
One of
Francis Bacon's unfinished works became the first painting to be hung in the
new extension to Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, today.
The
gallery, which was first opened in 1903, has been closed for the past two
years, in order to complete an extension which has doubled the size of the
premises.
The first
painting to be hung in the new extension was 'Seated Figure on a Dappled
Carpet', which is one of six unfinished paintings by Francis Bacon that have
been acquired by the gallery.
The
paintings, which reveal more about the artist's unorthodox techniques, relate
to his famous studio which is also housed in the gallery.
Finishing
touches are currently being added to the extension but the exhibition will
open to the public on 5 May.
A portrait of Bacon

ABC
News By Emma Rodgers in Adelaide.
Saturday, March 11th 2006.
The aim of the play is to
create a portrait of the artist and his muse that is as startling as one of
Bacon's own portraits. What I've endeavoured to do in staging it, is to be
true to that idea with without attempting too much literal evocation of the
paintings...I've attempted to avoid it becoming a biographical
interpretation.
That's
what director Jim Sharman says about Three Furies and not only was it startling, it was nightmarish, bleak and
constantly on a knife edge of comedy and tragedy.
The
play, written by Stephen Sewell, explores the painter/model
relationship between Francis Bacon and George Dyer,
a petty East End criminal and Bacon's lover for several years.
The
production also features several cabaret-style songs, sung brilliantly by the
third fury, Tisiphone (Paul Capsis) who torments Bacon over his treatment of
George.
I was
somewhat sceptical of going into a production which attempts to not only
reflect on a "flamboyant artist's life", but to do it through song.
However
the use of music, with an accompanying double bass player, pianist and
percussionist on stage, mixed with tumultuous scenes between Francis and George
gave an emotional insight into Bacon's life and motivations.
Socratis Otto
who plays George, looked everything like the wannabe East End gangster in the
Kray-style suits, struggling to be more than a thief through his involvement
with Bacon.
The
production is fast and clever, full of witty one liners delivered by Simon
Burke as Bacon, ("champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham
friends!") and has you laughing, although sometimes you don't know why as
you're watching torturous scenes as George pleads with Francis to be allowed
to be seen with him at his Grand Palais retrospective.
The
set is at times glamorous and at other times reminiscent of a Bacon's
slaughterhouse-style paintings as a hideous animal carcass slides in and out
of view.
The
Adelaide Festival of Arts' final performance of Three Furies is tonight
and a Bacon triptych is also on display at the Art Gallery of SA.
A
taste of Bacon

By Tim
Lloyd Adelaide, Australia
06 March 2006
SIMON
Burke is reclining in a pile of cushions in the Persian Garden. It's in the
middle of the day and the Adelaide Festival's nightclub venue, strewn with
masses of Persian carpets and cushions and cute little ottomans, is empty. But
the palm trees are shady, the Torrens is rippling to a gently cooling breeze,
and the drunken, tortured genius of British artist Francis Bacon seems a long
way away.
Simon Burke, best known as a lively musical theatre star, is deeply ensconced
in one of the 20th century's most complex artistic characters, playing the
role of Francis Bacon.
"I knew absolutely
nothing about him, and I don't think I had even seen any paintings of
his," confesses Burke.
It was July, 2004, and
Burke was staying here for the 2004 Adelaide Cabaret Festival, when he first
read the script of Three Furies.
"It's kind of cool
that I was here then, and two years later I am here doing it," he says.
Burke tells the story of
being gently admonished by director Jim Sharman for having been in Adelaide
for 24 hours and not having seen Australia's key painting by Bacon, Triptych
(1970). The painting has been moved from the National Gallery of Australia to
the Art Gallery of South Australia for the Festival.
"I did something that
was typically Francis Bacon," says Burke. "I caught a cab from the
hotel and kept it waiting for 20 minutes while I went in and sat with the Triptych.
It did wonders for me. I had seen his work before in New York and London, but
now knowing him and feeling him made it extraordinary."
Amazingly for an actor who
has had such a long and distinguished career in the theatre, Burke has never
before performed in a play by leading Australian playwright Stephen Sewell, or
been directed by the almost legendary Sharman. Given its international
relevance, Three Furies could conceivably go on to tour the world, and thus
totally transform the career of the actor with it.
Indeed, the production,
which was a joint initiative with the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, has
already been seen in Sydney, Auckland, Perth and now Adelaide.
Burke says there has been
considerable interest in the production internationally.
"It's a phenomenal
piece of writing and there is quite extreme technical and emotional and
physical challenges to the role, but to me it's the most intellectually
stimulating thing that I have done as an actor," he says.
"It's very rare that
your mind gets used as an actor. We use our emotions and our instinct and our
technique, all of which are put to the test in this performance, but this adds
the mind. It's because a combination of the genius of Francis Bacon together
with Stephen Sewell and Jim Sharman is a pretty scary collection of people.
The play kind of uses Bacon as a symbol for all artists.
"I think Jim and
Stephen both identify themselves in the character I am playing - what does it
cost you personally as an artist and what do you have to destroy in order to
do it. It's a pretty heavy subject, and I myself identify with it as well,
although I try not to identify too much with it because it's dark."
Burke sees Bacon as
someone who single-handedly changed the way people looked at things. "I
think what Jim Sharman attempts to do with this production is to get that same
sensation people had when they saw Bacon's works in the 1940s and 50s. It's
something that cuts through and shows you reality in a quite different
way," he explains.
"I feel it almost
costs me to do this what it may have cost Bacon to paint or Jim to direct or
Stephen to write. It's not that you don't invest in everything as a performer
but this demands a lot of you. By the end of it, I'm spent. The only downside
to a role like this is that you stay in your room all day with the curtains
drawn. That's what I did in Perth.
"But I love Adelaide
so much and I am a great fan of Brett (Sheehy) and I think he has done such an
astounding job here that I will try to get out." Burke's parting quip is
"I'll be rolling around drunk somewhere". Bacon, the legendary
drinker, should forgive him that.
Three Furies,
reviewed next page, plays at the Playhouse until March 11.

A Symphony in Three
Movements
By JOHN FLEMING, Times
Performing Arts Critic
Published February 26, 2006
"Good evening, ladies
and gentlemen. As you see, we've entered the 21st century,'' Stefan Sanderling
said, gesturing to the wall behind him where a slide of information on
Mark-Anthony Turnage was projected.
Sanderling, music director
of the Florida Orchestra, was starting his preconcert talk in typically breezy
fashion. He had enlisted visual aids to make his case for Turnage,
anticipating that the British composer's angular, angry music would be a tough
sell to the audience.
About 100 people turned
out for the talk, sitting on folding chairs in a hall adjacent to the
sanctuary of Pasadena Community Church in St. Petersburg. The orchestra is
playing there while its usual venue in the city, Mahaffey Theater, undergoes
renovation.
The program was appealing:
Turnage's Three Screaming Popes, a jazzy walk on the wild side for an
orchestra that doesn't get to play much contemporary music; William Schuman's
tuneful slice of Americana, New England Triptych; and one of the
greatest symphonies ever written, Beethoven's mighty opus to a hero, Symphony
No. 3, the Eroica.
In Three Screaming
Popes, Turnage's 1989 homage to Francis Bacon's lurid, angst-ridden
paintings based on Velásquez's portraits of Pope Innocent X, the instrumental
forces were as big as a Mahler symphony, with extra brass and winds,
saxophones, electric keyboard and much percussion, even a police whistle. With
strains of Gershwin and Copland running through the mix, the orchestra sounded
like some kind of crazed dance band. A series of bloodcurdling "screams''
came at the end.
The crowd barely stirred
after this cacophony. At each performance of the Turnage, the response was
tepid, and in some cases, downright hostile. A man gave von Dassow a
thumbs-down signal at Pasadena. A couple in front of me at Morsani walked out.
New music had gotten
another indifferent - at best - reception, one of those perennial episodes in
the life of an orchestra, many of whose younger musicians are closer in
sensibility to the rowdy riffs of Turnage than the country dance rhythms of
Beethoven.
 |
 |
|
Market
news: confident buyers set the pace
The
Daily Telegraph
14/02/2006
Colin
Gleadell rounds up all the latest news from the
contemporary market
An
intoxicating mixture of cash-rich individuals, some
genuine masterpieces and a rash of headstrong bidding
ensured that contemporary art remained the most buoyant
sector of the art market last week when Sotheby's and
Christie's achieved record sales levels in London.
Of
the 124 lots offered in the main evening sales, 118 were
sold, 74 for prices well above saleroom expectations.
Sixteen artists' records were broken and £67.4 million
changed hands. The comparable figure last February was
£39.8 million.
Christie's
began with a selection of paintings from the estate of
the Marlborough Gallery's director, Valerie Beston, and
everything went through the roof. A glittering landscape
by Frank Auerbach fetched a record £433,600, four times
Christie's estimate, from New York gallery Acquavella.
A
Francis Bacon self-portrait sold for £5.16 million,
nearly three times the estimate. The prices were the
more exceptional because these were all small paintings.
The highest price for a small Bacon was previously £1.4
million.
 |
|
| Irving
Penn's portrait of Francis Bacon |
And
a ghostly Francis Bacon, Two Figures at a Window (1953),
took £2.3 million - three times the price it made in
1999. Auction records were broken for Rachel Whiteread,
Antony Gormley, and Keith Tyson.
The
sales ended where they had begun - with the remains of
the Valerie Beston estate at Christie's. But anyone
looking for a bargain was disappointed. A photograph of
Bacon by Irving Penn, torn and splattered with paint,
sold for £187,200 - 10 times its estimate - to a
private UK collector. A portrait of Bacon by Michael
Clark sold for 50 times its estimate at £50,400.
These
are puzzling times for saleroom experts. As Cheyenne
Westphal of Sotheby's said: "Our estimates are no
longer relevant. The new buyers are so confident, they
make their own values."
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Tuesday, February 14, 2006
No More
Francis Bacon
by Bill Bonner
We didn't think we could
stand seeing it again. Now we don't have to.
Christie's auction house
on Old Brompton Road, South Kensington, has had a portrait in the window for
the last few weeks – Francis Bacon's 1969 'Self Portrait.' Every time
we walked to the tube station we had to pass the hideous thing – with its
huge bent nose and its corrupted mug. It looked like the face of man who had
shot hit own grandmother or drowned his dog.
Who would want to own such
a painting? It was so depressing it would have made us want to blow our own
brains out.
Apparently, it had that
effect on several other people. A friend of the artist (a burglar whom he
caught in his apartment and to whom he became attached) committed suicide, and
Bacon himself tried to destroy most of his own paintings.
But such is the strength
of the boom in London's financial industry ...such is the bubble in
"assets," and such is the soft-headedness of "art" buyers
that the revolting thing was sold for more than twice the amount expected. It
went for 5.2 million pounds (about $9 million).
We pity the poor sap that
bought it. It is not an "asset" at all – but a wretched liability.
The buyer could hang it on his living room wall, but then he and his loved
ones would be forced to gaze on it day after day. Better yet, he could hide it
away, and then at least he'd be performing a public service. In either case,
he would have to hope that an even bigger fool would come along in a couple
years to take it off his hands.
Copyright
© 2006 Bill Bonner
bent nose and its corrupted mug. It looked like the face of man who had shot
hit own grandmother or drowned his dog
Happy as Larry
ArtForum London 10.02.06

| Left:
Christie's Laura Paulson, Brett Gorvy, and Amy Cappellazzo. Right:
The bidding begins on Francis Bacon's Self Portrait, 1969. |
Record-breaking
auction prices are the norm today, so the fact that Christie's Post-War and
Contemporary Art Evening Sale achieved the highest ever UK total for such an
event Wednesday evening is not really big news. The auction room was more
crowded than usual, with elderly and the self-important attendees complaining
like only the rich can about the lack of seats. The pre-sale babble was louder
and the ringtones were more diverse. Most importantly, it was just a little
harder to resist being seduced by the tantalizing hum of acquisition and
profit. The art market, as one insider noted, is "hot but solid with lots
of depth."
Christie's
UK doesn't use paddles so the bidding took the form of hand flicking, pen
wagging, bid-card waving, reserved nods, and insistent eye contact. I sat next
to a notoriously grumpy Swiss dealer, who grunted, sometimes even shouted his
bids, and not far from a female British consultant who did a lot of insistent
finger snapping. Amy Cappellazzo, International Co-Head of Post-War and
Contemporary Art, joked, "I've always suspected that people's bidding
strategies are connected to their sexual performance. Some bidders are not
afraid to let the auctioneer know what they want. They're shameless in their
desires and transparent about their needs." Presumably, other bidders
like to keep you guessing, so discrete that they're either alluring or plain
frustrating. Art consultant Sandy Heller saw it another way: "I need to
be shy with my clients' money. I want the auctioneer to think that every bid
is my last bid. The key thing to avoid is regret. You really don't want to
take the wrong girl home—particularly for the wrong price."
The crowd
was keen for the first four lots of British paintings, but the energy in the
room really shifted with Lot 5, a 1969 Francis Bacon self-portrait from the
collection of the artist's devoted spinster friend, Miss Valerie Beston.
Sitting in the fifth row in a pale-blue shirt and dark grey blazer was
expansionist dealer Larry Gagosian. Although not known first and foremost as a
Bacon man, Larry has exhibited him in the past and, given his evident interest
in the Lot, he must have inventory back at the gallery whose collective worth
would be bolstered by a high price. When the bidding started out slowly, he
wore a slight frown. His head swiveled with the bids, trying to keep track of
who was doing what, and he looked concerned. He may have made a bid at around
£2 million in his casual "why not" arm-swinging style, but I
couldn't be sure from where I was sitting. When the bidding hit £3 million,
his face started to relax, then at £3.5m, it cracked into a broad smile. At
£3.7m, he started to look like a big kid, and his eyes kept shifting up to
the currency converter to confirm the dollar value of what he was hearing.
With each increment, Larry's eyes expressed increasing wonder. When the
painting finally sold for a whopping £4,600,000 hammer (£5,160,000 including
the buyer's premium), the audience applauded and Larry had a good belly laugh.
And that
was the highlight of the sale.
—Sarah
Thornton
Christie's
Packs in U.S. Dealers, Sets 10 Records (Update3)
By
Linda Sandler Bloomberg 9th
February, 2006
Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -
Christie's International broke 10 records and set new highs for artists from
Frank Auerbach to Georg Baselitz last night in an overheated London auction
room where U.S. dealers Larry Gagosian and Andrew Fabricant were active
bidders.
U.K. painter Francis
Bacon's 1969 'Self-Portrait,' with a twisted face and rabbit-like nose, was
the biggest draw. It fetched 5.2 million pounds ($9 million), shooting above
its top estimate of 1.8 million pounds. At least five bidders in the room
fought for the painting, including Gagosian, Fabricant, Iwan Wirth and Ivor
Braka, before it went to a telephone bidder.
"You can't buy
anything these days,'' said Wirth, founder of the Hauser & Wirth gallery
of Zurich and London, after bidding unsuccessfully for at least three
pictures. "Prices are just too high.'' Bacon's self-portrait was
sold by the estate of Marlborough Gallery's Valerie Beston, a collector and
friend of the artist.
The sale, which came
midway through a week of London auctions, showed that trends seen last year in
New York are continuing, and wealthy collectors - if not dealers - are still
willing to pay record prices for contemporary art that's in vogue, even after
a near-quadrupling in values since 1995.
Christie's said its total
count of records was 10, including eight new highs for artists and two for
work in a particular medium.
Christie's most heavily
advertised Bacon barely beat its valuation of about 5 million pounds. The
stumpy-armed portrait of Pope Innocent X from 1959 - one of about 45 Bacon
studies of a painting by 17th-century Spaniard Velazquez - sold for 5.2
million pounds.
It wasn't one of Bacon's
famous screaming popes, and it drew few bids. The sale raised 37 million
pounds, Christie's highest total ever for a contemporary auction in the U.K.
capital.
Bacon's
'Self-Portrait' Goes for $9 Million at Christie's Sale
By
Linda Sandler Bloomberg 8th
February, 2006
Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) -
Francis Bacon's 1969 'Self-Portrait' stirred up the crowded main auction
room at Christie's International in London tonight, going for 5.2
million pounds ($9 million), well above its top sale estimate of 1.8
million pounds.
At least five
bidders in the room fought for the painting, including Larry Gagosian,
Iwan Wirth and Andrew Fabrikant, before it went to a telephone bidder.
Another Bacon barely
beat its estimate of about 5 million pounds. The stumpy-armed portrait
of Pope Innocent X (1959) - one of about 45 Bacon studies of a
painting by 17th-century Spaniard Velazquez - sold for 5.2 million
pounds. The auction house expected the night's sale to raise 19 million
pounds to 27 million pounds.
Christie's sold
another pope picture by Bacon in November in New York for $10.1 million,
including commission.
Sellers have been
looking to take advantage of rising prices for contemporary art. From
the outset tonight, many pictures went for two or three times their top
estimate, and seven records were set. The main auction room was jammed
with more than 500 people, as 45 Christie's staffers manned telephones.
At 8:30 p.m. London time the sale was still going on.
Three Bacons and
five Lucian Freuds are vying for buyers at London's contemporary evening
sales by Christie's and Sotheby's Holdings Inc. Bacon, who died in 1992,
is the top-priced contemporary artist of the London sales, and Freud is
No. 2. Sellers lured by high prices also are offering hard-to-get
pictures by young Germans Franz Ackermann, Dirk Skreber and Matthias
Weischer.
"Many records
will be set, but the market is a minefield for the uninitiated, where a
big-name artist could just as easily be bought in, or make over $1
million,'' said Kenny Schachter, who runs the Rove gallery in London
across the road from Gagosian.
Christie's, which is
owned by the French billionaire Francois Pinault, and publicly traded
Sotheby's are in the middle of an auction week that could raise as much
as 245 million pounds.
Last year,
Christie's took in 24.5 million pounds from its contemporary evening
sale, with almost 60 percent of the works selling above top estimates.
On top of the hammer
prices, Sotheby's and Christie's charge buyers a 20 percent commission
on the first 100,000 pounds and 12 percent on the rest of the value.
Estimates are pre-commission, and they calculate records after adding a
commission.
Tomorrow night,
Sotheby's will sell contemporary art valued at 17.2 million pounds to
24.4 million pounds. The top-priced lot is Freud's portrait of U.K.
photo editor Bruce Bernard, with a high estimate of 3 million pounds.
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To contact the reporter on this story:
Linda Sandler in London at lsandler@bloomberg.net.News
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News-Antique.com
9th February, 2006
London – The highest
ever total for a Post-War and Contemporary art sale in Europe was achieved at
Christie’s this evening when 58 works of art realised £37,038,000
($64,557,234 /£53,853,252).
The record sale was 94% sold by lot and 99% sold by value. 10 new world
auction records were set and 10 works of art sold for over $1 million (8 for
over £1 million). Buyer activity in the sale was 66% European, 30% American,
2% Asian and 2% Middle East.
“Christie’s, the global market leaders in sales of Post-War and
Contemporary art, continues to dictate the pace of this auction market
category,” said Fernando Mignoni, Director and Head of Christie’s Post-War
and Contemporary Art department in London. “Christie’s sale demonstrates
not only the current, unprecedented strength of this field but also how
international the market has become. Increasing numbers of new collectors for
both Post-War and Contemporary Art have resulted in prices growing
considerably year on year. As well as the new stars continuing to emerge among
the younger generation of artists, strong results were also achieved for
classic Post-War art; in particular the Warhol market is unparalleled and
rising. It was also the night of the London school with Lucian Freud and
Francis Bacon again leading the prices. This was a great night for the London
and European art market.”
The two top lots of the evening were both by Francis Bacon. The raw and
powerful Self-Portrait, 1969, more than trebled pre-sale expectation selling
for £5,160,000 ($8,993,880 /£7,502,640). The condition, the impeccable
provenance and the haunting appeal contributed to this superb result. An
example of Bacon’s celebrated ‘Pope’ series, Study from Portrait of Pope
Innocent X by Velazquez, 1959, realized £5,160,000 ($8,993,880/£7,502,640).
Driven by the arts
By Thor Kah Hoong
Malaysia Star, Malaysia -
6 February, 2006.
Rectifying an oversight last week:
Wishing readers a flea-free new year ... except for those who enjoy a good
scratch.
It’s a clichéd annual ritual to
observe how deserted the capital city is on a long week of leave. And it was.
For one week driving was not a simmering stew of resentment and rage while
bumpers inched forward in a mockery of movement.
For one week, I lazed and devoured
a dozen DVDs. Didn’t have much time (or mood) for reading. Just managed to
finish Daniel Farson’s memoir The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon
(Century), and re-read a few of The Paris Review interviews.
I found this bit from E.L.Doctorow
amusing and wise. It’s one answer to the question about what writing taps
into:
“I subscribe to what Henry James
tries to indicate when he gives the wonderful example of a young woman who has
led a sheltered life walking along beside an army barracks and hearing a
snatch of soldier’s conversation coming through the window. On the basis of
that, said James, if she’s a novelist she’s capable of going home and
writing a perfectly accurate novel about army life. I’ve always subscribed
to that idea. We’re supposed to be able to get into other skins. We’re
supposed to be able to render experiences not our own and warrant times and
places we haven’t seen ... Writing teachers invariably tell students. Write
about what you know. That’s, of course, what you have to do, but on the
other hand, how do you know what you know until you’ve written it? Writing
is knowing.”
Writing is knowing. I think this
thought, the knowledge/wisdom that is derived from the process of creation,
applies to all creative arts. I’m reminded of the artist Franc Kline who
noted: “Well, look, if I paint what you know, then that will simply bore
you, the repetition from me to you. If I paint what I know, it will be boring
to myself. Therefore, I paint what I don’t know.”
While talking about a coincidence
of thought, the following from the interview with William Faulkner struck me
as resonant, to some extent, of Francis Bacon (the 20th century Anglo-Irish
artist, not the 17th century philosopher/statesman):
“An artist is a creature driven
by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy
to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or
steal from anybody and every body to get the work done.
“The writer’s only
responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he’s a good
one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no
peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honour, pride, decency,
security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his
mother, he will not hesitate: the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is wroth any
number of old ladies.”
Compare Faulkner’s sentiment (a
bit hyperbolic) with Farson’s comment on Bacon:
“He betrayed many of his close
friends, especially if they were rival artists, and some did not forgive him.
He was totally amoral. He had little time for weakness in others and no
patience with human foibles or small vanities.”
One must resist an easy acceptance
of bad behaviour. I certainly don’t believe an artist, no matter how
brilliant, is licensed to be an a*****e. The calling doesn’t justify his
behaviour; just possibly explains it.
Yet we are, I am anyway, drawn to
such electric personalities, charged with an energy that the rest of us are
fearful of (yet fascinated by, in a ghoulish curiosity).
Expanding on a note earlier in this
column, Francis Bacon’s father did claim to have been descended from the 1st
Viscount St Albans, the man described by Alexander Pope as “the wisest,
brightest, meanest of mankind.”
The philosopher was also a pederast
who died in debt, a pedigree that his namesake was proud of.
Of course, one must never take the
pronouncements of artists as gospel, the whole truth. There is always an
element of a pose – in prose and in person. Nobody is as he claims to be –
not Doctorow with his seeming put-down of life and experience, not Faulkner
with his mum-bashing.
My own romantic bias is that the
artists speak true, whether consciously or not, in their works.
And in Bacon’s works, what you
have is power and prison together, an individual detained in a cage, a grungy
room, barely lit, suggestions of torture, screaming. In many cases, screaming
– like Munch’s stolen, still missing masterpiece. In Bacon’s paintings,
Munch’s inspiration was layered with the help of a manual on oral diseases,
mucous-wet, inflamed, pus-filled.
The subject is getting a bit yucky.
I think I’d better torture you next week with the rest of my thoughts on
Bacon (or Eggs as he was known to his friends).
Thor Kah Hoong is a lecturer, actor
and bookstore owner (Skoob Books, Old Town Petaling Jaya; 03-77702500).
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The
Daily Telegraph
31/01/2006
Arts:
Market New Colin
Gleadell
- Works
by School of London artists Francis Bacon, Lucian
Freud and Frank Auerbach worth £20 million are up
for pre-sale viewing at Sotheby's and Christie's in
London this weekend.
The
five works by Freud span nearly 60 years and are
estimated to fetch up to £8 million. A dozen small
paintings, drawings and etchings by Auerbach dating
from 1954 to 1994 could fetch over £1 million. Most
belonged to the late Valerie Beston, a director of
the Marlborough Gallery, whose previously unknown
collection is being sold by Christie's.
The
jewel of the collection is a small self-portrait by
Francis Bacon, estimated at £1.4 million to £1.8
million. But the highest-value painting in the sales
is the £5 million ascribed by Christie's to Bacon's
1959 painting, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent
X by Velázquez (below).
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| Study
from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez |
Christie's
has not disclosed the identity of the seller, but
the painting is known to belong to Madame Georges
Marci, an art dealer based in Switzerland and Monte
Carlo.
Christie's
is so confident of its value that it has guaranteed
Madame Marci an undisclosed sum whether the painting
sells or not.
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Hockney?
He's such rubbish, Bacon said
By
Dalya Alberge
The
Times January
30, 2006
Tapes
reveal the late artist's scorn for his rival's 'dreary' work
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PAINTINGS by
David Hockney have been damned from the grave by Francis Bacon
as “such rubbish”.
Bacon’s
criticisms can be heard in private recordings that have been
revealed to The Times before their publication this year. In a
conversation taped on a summer’s day in 1982, Bacon can be
heard unequivocably dismissing Hockney’s paintings.
Having just
visited the Tate, he complains about the gallery’s
incongruous juxtaposition of one of his own favourite works,
his huge and powerful Triptych — August 1972, with
Hockney’s well-known painting My Parents.
Bacon says
on the tape: “They are such rubbish, those Hockneys . . . I
mean that awful one of his mother and father — so
depressing, it really is, the dreary side of north England.”
He was
referring to Hockney’s 1977 painting, in which the
Bradford-born artist depicts his mother being attentive and
graceful, while his father reads. The Tate bought it in 1981,
a year after buying Bacon’s Triptych, in which two solitary
figures frame a couple engaged in a struggle that seems both
violent and sexual. It was Bacon’s haunting farewell to his
friend George Dyer, who had committed suicide.
Bacon
objected to the displaying of the works together, saying that
the Hockney “doesn’t mean anything to me — I don’t
know why I should have been put in the room with David Hockney
. . . I don’t care for him and he doesn’t care for me”.
The
comments are particularly controversial because Bacon and
Hockney are so widely revered and the criticisms have emerged
only after Bacon’s death. Bacon is admired for iconic
paintings that convey brutality and pain. His masterpieces
include his screaming popes in which Velázquez’s Portrait
of Pope Innocent X was converted into a nightmarish depiction
of hysterical terror.
Hockney’s
best-known paintings include A Bigger Splash (1967), which
shows a splash made by an unseen diver in a brilliant-blue
swimming pool.
Bacon’s
view of Hockney was preserved in 16 hours of interviews with
Barry Joule, a Canadian friend and neighbour in South
Kensington for 14 years. Mr Joule, 51, who will publish the
tape’s contents in a book, Francis Bacon — Verbatim, said
Bacon knew that they would one day be made public. “He
trusted me,” Mr Joule said. “The book will be Francis
absolutely verbatim — not a single word altered — his
views on a huge range of topics . . . art, people, you name
it.
“Francis
put a stranglehold copyright on me . . . for 12 years after
his death. That is up now and my book will set many a Francis
Bacon record straight.”
The two
men met in 1978, forming a friendship that would last until
the artist’s death in 1992. They would sit down together to
make the recordings, chatting until they ran out of tape.
The artist
gave his friend works that included 1,200 sketches, which Mr
Joule donated to the Tate in 2004. Estimated to be worth £20
million, it was one of the most generous donations in the
Tate’s history. He will donate all his tapes to the Tate
after the book’s publication.
Mr Joule
also has a large number of unpublished photographs of Bacon,
which he will feature in the book. One of them is the subject
of a legal action against the Réunion des Musées Nationaux
in Paris, headquarters of the French museums, over an alleged
breach of copyright. Mr Joule claims that the organisation
reproduced one of the pictures without his permission.
On being
told of the tapes, Hockney’s dealer, David Juda, said:
“Bacon is a great artist. I’m sure David would think Bacon
is a great artist . . . I cannot believe that deep down in his
latter years he [Bacon] didn’t respect Hockney.”
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Valerie at the gallery
She was prim, proper and fiercely private; the gallery administrator who
quietly controlled the creative chaos surrounding artists such as Francis
Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Henry Moore. But, as her estate goes
under the hammer at Christie's, Harriet Lane reveals the passions that lurked
beneath the calm exterior of Miss Valerie Beston
The Observer Magazine,
Sunday January 29, 2006
French leave: Miss Beston with Francis Bacon on
the steps of the Grand Palais, Paris, 1971.
It mattered very much, what
you called her. Mostly, this solid little figure wearing beige or navy blue,
her forearm bisected by a handbag strap, was known as Miss Beston. That's
how Francis Bacon referred to her in public, when edging away from a request
that did not interest him. 'I'd absolutely adore it,' he would say, on many,
many occasions, 'but I'm afraid Miss Beston says it's quite impossible at
the moment because she's simply snowed under with other projects for several
years to come.' Behind her back, he facetiously referred to 'Valerie at the
gallery', but very few people were able to use her Christian name to her
face; even favoured colleagues referred to her as 'VB'. Occasionally, after
serving months in the foothills of acquaintanceship, someone would suggest
that perhaps it was time to make their relationship less formal. This
suggestion almost always met with silence. 'I think,' Miss Beston would say
eventually, 'most people tend to call me Miss Beston.'
When Marlborough Fine Art began to represent Francis Bacon in 1958, Miss
Beston had been in place there for a dozen years, having joined as a typist
in her mid-twenties. Her talents were low-key, low-heeled, low-lit, but they
were much needed as the gallery took flight. She shone in a purely practical
capacity, a discreet administrative genius marshalling the paperwork (the
archives, bills and catalogues) of noisier creative ones. Frank Auerbach,
Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Ben Nicholson made her
gifts of their paintings and sketches, inscribed with gratitude, but Bacon
proved to be her life's work. 'Bacon coming into the gallery completely
transformed her professional life,' says Pilar Ordovas, an associate
director of Christie's post-war and contemporary art department. 'She came
from quite a conservative background, a single, professional woman, and she
controlled every aspect of this man's life, from the major to the very minor
- a man about whom there was nothing conventional at all.'
Until his death in 1992,
by which point she had become a director at Marlborough, she made herself
indispensable to Bacon. Alongside the routine business of setting up
exhibitions and arranging the collection of new work from his Kensington
studio, Miss Beston made heroic attempts to impose order on the bacchanalia
of Bacon's private life: settling his Harrods bills, booking haircuts,
collecting prescriptions, holding spare house keys, bankrolling his gambling
jags, ministering to his boyfriends, mopping up after binges and, on
Sundays, accompanying him to the cinema. And though he could be unkind to
her, as he was to anyone he was close to, he never seems to have
underestimated her. A friend remembers that a call from Miss Beston had the
power to sober up Bacon mid-binge.
For nearly 40 years, as
secretary, major-domo, cashier, nanny, companion and unblinking sweeper, she
dedicated her life to making sure his ran as smoothly as possible. Was she
in love with him? Probably, yes. 'Somehow Francis got to the centre of your
life,' says Michael Peppiatt, Bacon's biographer and friend for many years.
'Being with him was such an enlivening experience that you wanted to have
him at the centre of your life. I don't think he could have got through life
being as difficult as he was if he hadn't had a hugely positive and vital
effect on the people around him. You tended to get swept up in it.' But
Bacon, who was forever seducing and then losing patience with lovers,
friends and associates, never broke it off with her.
Miss Beston always held
the world at arm's length. Her discretion was legendary: her colleagues were
kept in the dark about her background, just as her family were told next to
nothing about her work. This apparently mild, colourless, correct person was
also, diligently, a cipher. 'She wasn't comfortable with anyone getting too
close and I suspect that Bacon liked that,' Peppiatt says. 'He went through
people a dozen a minute. Miss Beston stayed the course, and that's probably
because she was intuitive, and knew the point which she must not overstep.'
After her retirement in
1998, Miss Beston's last years were overshadowed by Alzheimer's and
speculation about Marlborough's treatment of Bacon, prompted by a lawsuit
threatened by his last companion and heir, John Edwards. Though the case was
dropped at the last minute in 2002, the suggestion that Marlborough Fine Art
had systematically ripped off Bacon throughout his career distressed her
tremendously. No one who knew her seems to believe that she could in any way
have conned Bacon and so, somehow, the scandal did not seriously mark her
reputation, though it took its toll on her health. Kate Austin, her
assistant at Marlborough, says the case, coming on top of Bacon's death, was
'a great source of distress to her. She'd known John, had been very kind to
John. It must have been a kick in the teeth. Very difficult.'
When Miss Beston died
last July, aged 83, she left behind a self-portrait Bacon gave her in 1969
('To V with all very best wishes Francis') which, with the rest of her
collection, goes up for sale in 10 days' time at Christie's. It's a
typically alarming work, full of lilacs and oranges and bruise-blues,
suggesting, in the concave whorl made by Bacon's apparently smacked-about
cheek, eyebrow and nose, the curve of something ancient and time-worn: a
shell, a stone, a crater. As far as is known, it was never up in her flat in
Harley Street. When it was cleared, a number of Auerbachs were hanging on
the walls, but no Bacons. Perhaps this was the one place where Miss Beston
felt able to draw the line.
Despite its familiarity,
Bacon's work still evokes panic and disquiet in the viewer. When the paint
was barely dry, it must have been entirely shocking; and indeed, 30 years
ago, at the Pompidou Centre, Michael Peppiatt saw a chic, worldly looking
woman flinch and shield her eyes as she passed one of his pictures. Peppiatt
suspects the artist - who was deeply satisfied when this was reported to him
- appreciated the comic counterpoint Miss Beston provided in the gallery.
'She talked about Francis's work as though there wasn't all this human
drama, Sturm und Drang, going on. You'd have a painting with a man having
God knows what done to him, blood all over the place, and Miss Beston would
say, "Oh, there's the lovely bluey-green he used before. Isn't it
pretty, the way he's put the paint on?" Miss Beston gave the work an
odd respectability, took it into a different dimension.'
Miss Beston may have
looked like the soul of propriety, one of Barbara Pym's excellent women, but
her background was less than conventional. She was born in 1922 in West
Bromwich, the fourth of five daughters; her father 'EWB' (Ernest Walter) was
a prosperous bookmaker, and her mother Daisy Mary, known as Dulcie, had been
on the stage. Both had been married to other people when they began their
affair and, though they passed themselves off as husband and wife, EWB and
Dulcie (an Irish Catholic) were never actually married. Their daughters were
not aware of this as children. But you might suppose that the atmosphere at
home must have been shaped by the constant fear of exposure.
There is a photograph of
the family, taken in the mid-Twenties, outside Fernwood Grange, the large
house in Birmingham where the girls spent the early part of their childhood.
The 'Bestons', aspirationally bookended by chauffeur and nursemaid, are
arranged in front of one of EWB's Rolls-Royces (family legend has it that he
owned 13, his lucky number; there were also 13 peacocks in the garden).
Dulcie, then in her late thirties, holds the baby, Betty, whose face is a
gloomy moon within a white-frilled bonnet; Joy and Shirley, the older two,
are tall, thin streaks in dark dresses with Peter Pan collars; Sylvia, the
third daughter, stands beaming on the running board next to her father, who
is a Toadish figure in three-piece, pork-pie hat and watch chain. There at
the front, knee socks tumbling down her shins, feet slightly turned in at
the toe, is sturdy little Val. It all looks very proper, very correct and
well-to-do: the ivy and gravel, the swagged curtains in the bay window, the
sheen on the hubcaps and on the leather shoes. And yet, undoubtedly, it's
the portrait of a scandal.
Shortly after this
photograph was taken, things became less grand. The family moved to Belgium
(some problem with tax) and the girls were put to board in a convent while
EWB and Dulcie took a flat in Antwerp. (In later years, Valerie's ease with
the language, and familiarity with its literature, would come in useful when
she met the Francophile Bacon.) After a few years, they moved back to
England, to a much smaller house. Ernest died when the younger girls were
still at school, his estate splitting between his two 'wives'. Inheriting a
quantity of furniture but no cash to speak of, Dulcie found herself on her
uppers. She bought short-lease properties in Surrey and later on the south
coast, around Folkestone and Hythe, so she and the girls could live in some
style, but the leases were forever running out, obliging them to move on.
Dulcie seems to have
concentrated her mothering efforts on her first two daughters. To Joy and
Shirley, she was generous and painstaking, scraping together enough money in
the mid-Thirties to send them to finishing school in Germany, and making
ballgowns which she dispatched after them 'so they could go to all the
parties'. Sylvia, Valerie and Betty experienced a different sort of mother:
strict, austere, rather hard. Perhaps, by the time it came to them, she had
run out of patience and ideas, as well as money.
The older two took the
conventional route and married early. Dulcie made it clear to the other
three that it was no good looking to her for help; they would have to
support themselves. Betty, the baby, became a nun. Sylvia and Valerie did
secretarial courses and, during the war, volunteered for the army, ending up
at Bletchley Park. According to family legend, Sylvia worked on the German
code, Val on the Japanese. Sylvia was the outgoing one. She was the one who
would say, 'Of course, there are things I can't tell you, I know state
secrets ...' Val was the brainy one. Also the quietest. Maybe she had
learned early on that it paid not to solicit Dulcie's attention. Either way,
the Bletchley Park uniform of discretion, efficiency and anonymity suited
her very well.
During the war, living
in another inappropriately large house in Redhill, Surrey, Dulcie was
obliged to take in boarders. One of these was Harry Fischer, a rare-book
dealer originally from Vienna. At Dulcie Beston's tea table, Fischer hatched
a plan with his friend Frank Lloyd to start a picture gallery in London
'when all this is over'. Family myth has Dulcie pushing Valerie towards the
pair at this point, asking them to give her a job as a typist.
In her early days at
Marlborough, Valerie used to bring her typing back home and rip up her
mistakes in privacy: she didn't want any witnesses in the office. The fact
that she probably had an inconclusive affair with Frank Lloyd around this
time may have caused her additional anxiety. But as the gallery grew into an
international giant, attracting and consolidating the careers of famous
artists, her administrative abilities stretched accordingly. Before long,
she was almost famous, respected within the gallery and by rivals for her
dedication, unflappability and that peculiar bond with Bacon. (An obituary
describes Anthony d'Offay hauling a new assistant into the Marlborough in
the early Seventies, pointing out Miss Beston and saying, 'That's what I
want you to be.') Yet she never stepped out of her anonymity. She had a
skill for self-effacement that a spook might envy. Michael Clark, an artist
who met her through Bacon, once saw her heading to work along Bond Street:
'I was so shocked, she just walked in front of the car and she looked so ...
so nondescript, so inconsequential.'
Though she once sold a
Henry Moore to James Cagney, she was never a natural salesperson: she did
not - could not - schmooze. Her technique throughout her career was to offer
the interested party a cup of tea and then usher them into the viewing room,
leaving them to it with, one suspects, a faint gasp of relief. But over the
years, this became a more complicated procedure, thanks to the control panel
which dimmed or brightened the lights in the viewing room. Miss Beston
seemed resigned to the fact that she couldn't make it work, just as she was
forever losing calls that came in on the extension.
Throughout her career
she balanced paperwork with small, carefully inconspicuous acts of kindness,
buying work at beginners' shows without drawing attention to herself - she
picked up several early Auerbachs this way - and sending round paints
without a note if someone was particularly skint. And, from early on, she
liked to summon her favourites to the gallery for a cup of tea in her office
(her 'altar to Francis', as Pilar Ordovas describes it) before allowing them
a real treat.
Michael Clark was called
to the Marlborough from time to time to see 'new Bacons, straight from Reece
Mews, with the paint still wet; [and] paintings by Frank Auerbach. On one
occasion, I went in and there was a small Cezanne, one of my favourites, a
small head, just propped up out of its frame against the wall. "Pick it
up," she said, "You've got to hold it." And the next time I
saw that picture was purely by chance, in the Met, on loan from a private
collection.'
When Miss Beston moved
into central London, taking a tiny flat at 50 Harley Street, she began to
drift away from her family, as if work drained all her reserves of energy
and emotion. Joy's daughter, Rosemary Morgan, says, 'My reading of it is she
chose her work to be her life; and her family - well, she didn't disown us,
but we were kept at arm's length. She looked after Bacon's every need, and
gave up her life to do that. He was needy, he needed her, and she was
there.'
Though always meticulous
in her business dealings, Valerie appeared or failed to appear at family
gatherings without notice. The big question, in the run-up to Christmas, was
always: will Val come? When she did, she was invariably generous, dishing
out cashmere twinsets to her sisters and sensational toys to her nephews and
nieces. But she was uneasy with children. She was not the sort of aunt who
would chase you around the flowerbeds, though she could draw funny faces on
request.
Rosemary remembers her
as serious, withdrawn. 'None of us knew that much about her. She wasn't a
chatterbox, she asked few questions, and the focus of the conversation was
always carefully steered away from herself.' She was capable of imaginative
kindnesses, as when Rosemary and her husband bought a flat in Notting Hill
in the late Seventies. 'We had no furniture and no money to go and buy any.
I don't know how she found out about it, but she had furniture in storage
and she gave it to us: two sofas, a dining table and chairs. Later, she
offered us some rugs from Fernwood, and when we went to collect them from
the gallery, she took us into a sideroom and she had these prints, nothing
very valuable, but she just said, "Take your pick, one of these."'
Valerie remained close
to sociable, animated Sylvia, who became a civil servant and married a wing
commander. But even Sylvia knew that much of Val's life in London was out of
bounds. There were, Sylvia told Rosemary later, questions that you could
never ask. No one in the family ever knew about the affair with Frank Lloyd,
for example, or the few other male friends, backroom gallery staff, who
faded away as Valerie moved into middle age. There was certainly no
suggestion of chances missed. Strictly speaking, Valerie's life was a full
one. It was just full of someone else's excitements.
Sylvia and her husband
seem to have understood her best. 'She was part of their life,' says
Rosemary. 'They didn't have children, they had Valerie.'
Throughout her working
life, Valerie never went on 'holidays': she travelled with Bacon, of course,
for work, but summers were spent at Sylvia's house in the Ardeche, to which
she made a financial contribution, and where she would arrive, appropriately
enough, with the latest le Carre (in London, the bookshelves held only art
books; in France, her bedroom extension was stashed with bestsellers). Here,
she could indulge in two enthusiasms which had no place in Harley Street:
walking the dogs and pottering about in the garden.
In London, no one knew
any of this. Even the location of her flat was top secret. Michael Peppiatt
gave her a lift home on a few occasions, but was left in some confusion as
to her address: 'She got out at a point where it would not be clear at
exactly which house she lived.' Michael Clark remembers the thrill of
intimacy when she wrote down her address in front of him: 'I felt quite
privileged.' He had a glimpse of her internal world just once, when he was
feeling out of sorts and was offered some advice which, he sensed, reflected
a private dream.
'She said, "Why
don't you just go to Paris, it would be so lovely, go and sit down by the
Seine, have a glass of champagne and look through the papers." There
was a fantastic simplicity to what she might do when she wasn't organising
the next major retrospective of Bacon: pop over to Paris, have a glass of
champagne by the river.'
But in general, if the
conversation strayed into sensitive territory, acquaintances would find
themselves marooned in an excruciating pause, while Miss Beston examined the
view out of her office window. Then, after a moment, conversation would
resume on a less dangerous footing, usually related to Bacon and his work.
It was as if by stumbling upon Francis, she had found the personality
capable of filling the silence.
· The Collection of the
late Miss Valerie Beston will be sold at Christie's on 8 and 10 February
(020 7930 6074)
Inspired by Francis
Bacon, Miles Davis and all that jazz...
KENNETH
WALTON News
Monday
30th January, 2006
MARK-Anthony Turnage is
the last person you'd associate with soppy, romantic gestures. He is, after
all, the ultimate rude boy of classical music whose late-1980s opera Greek,
complete with post-punk rock influences and enough offensive language to cause
severe apoplexy among the prim Kensington set, was nothing less than a direct
assault on the "stifling, snotty atmosphere" of traditional
opera-house culture.
His hatred of Thatcherism
manifested itself in probably the most aggressive of musical voices to emerge
at the time; a language singed with brassy abrasion and, as an extension of
that, his 1996 jazz collaboration Blood on the Floor laid bare, in
uncompromising musical terms, the destructive realities of a drug culture that
had led to the death of his own brother, Andrew.
Turnage, in response to a
commission from the prestigious Ensemble Modern, originally wrote the earlier
work as "a sour ten-minute opener", its title inspired by a Francis
Bacon painting. Bacon had already been the inspiration behind his grizzly 1989
orchestral work, Three Screaming Popes. "I felt drawn to the sensibility
of his paintings, their bleakness and colour," he says. But no sooner had
Blood on the Floor received its successful premiere in 1993, than Turnage was
under pressure from the Frankfurt-based Ensemble to expand it into a
full-length concert work. Enter saxophonist Robertson, jazz drummer Peter
Erskine and Scofield, whose input transformed the work into a nine-movement
suite fusing hard-core jazz with Turnage's gutsy orchestral style.
It also forged an artistic
collaboration that, to this day, fills the composer with awe. "Scofield
could work with anyone he wants," says Turnage. "After these gigs,
he's off to work with the great Vince Mendoza, for goodness sake!"
But the respect was
mutual. As a thank-you for working on the extended Blood on the Floor, Turnage
hit upon the idea of arranging one of Scofield's compositions for orchestra,
to be performed as a tailor-made encore at the 1996 premiere. Inadvertently,
he had planted the seed for a collaboration that would meet the requirements
of a subsequent commission from Frankfurt Radio, designed to pull together the
resources of its house symphony orchestra and big band. Scorched was the funky
and dramatic result.
As with Blood on the
Floor, it features jazz combo and orchestra, thus the notable presence
alongside Scofield in these Scottish performances of Partitucci, Erskine and
Robertson, who takes the saxophone lead in the earlier work. The outcome of
such a collaboration is not, as you might expect, some anaemic exercise in
fusing diverse musical genres. If anything, Scorched super-sensitises each of
the individual styles - Turnage's orchestral re-workings of Scofield are
unmistakably his, visceral, pungent and explosive; pure jazz surfaces when the
trio emerges alone, underpinned by Scofield's typically angular and sardonic
influence. Yet the overall impact is one of cohesion.
Such ambivalence sits
comfortably with Turnage. "I'm often pigeon-holed as someone who
straddles the division between jazz and classical styles," he says.
"Personally, I don't see the division. Look at my CD collection and
you'll find Scofield next to Shostakovich."
And as for the love songs,
Turnage may have mellowed in his personal life, but musically he's still a
loose canon.
• The BBC SSO performs
Blood on the Floor at the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, 4 February, 9pm. The SCO
performs Scorched at the same venue, 10 February, 8pm; and the Usher Hall,
Edinburgh, 9 February, 7:30pm. Scofield, Partitucci and Erskine will be
appearing in an exclusive jazz programme of their own at Perth Concert Hall on
7 February.
Cate
takes a backstage role to honour theatre stars
The
Arts, Matthew Westwood
The Australian,
January
17, 2006
A
HALO of television lights surrounded Cate Blanchett as she arrived in a Sydney
bar last night, a room already full of theatre luminaries.
Blanchett, wearing a black velvet dress with applique ribbons, was a guest
presenter at the Sydney Theatre Awards.
She presented awards for
best play for Stephen Sewell's Three Furies, best actor David Field and
best actress Caroline O'Connor.
Accepting the award for
her role as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow, O'Connor expressed her
surprise at the absurdity of putting her makeup on in the toilets and then
standing on stage next to Blanchett.
"I love theatre -
anything can happen," O'Connor said. "It's crazy."
Among the guests crowded
into the subterranean Statement bar at the State Theatre were actors Simon
Burke, John Stanton, Jacki Weaver and Julie Hamilton. Three Furies,
Sewell's vivid and confronting portrait of painter Francis Bacon, won three
awards including best main stage production.
Sotheby's
CONTEMPORARY
ART EVENING

Two Figures at a Window 1953
LOT
19

FRANCIS BACON 1909-1992
TWO FIGURES AT A WINDOW 1953

Estimate:
1,800,000 - 2,500,000 GBP
Lot Sold: Hammer
Price with Buyer's Premium:
2,584,000 GBP
SESSION
1 | 09 Feb 06 7:00 PM
.
LOCATION
London,
New Bond Street
DESCRIPTION
oil
on canvas
MEASUREMENTS
152.4 x 116.5 cm. 60 x 45 7/8 in.
PROVENANCE
Mayor Gallery, London
Obelisk Gallery, London
Mr.s Brenda Bomford, Aldbourne
Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
The Hon. Gareth Browne, Ireland
Private Collection, Italy
Dr. M. Meyer, Zurich
Private Collection, Osaka
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, Part I, May
18th, 1999, Lot 20
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
EXHIBITED
London, Beaux Arts Gallery, New
Paintings by Francis Bacon, 1953
Nottingham University Art Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1961, cat. no. 11
Mannheim, Kunsthalle (cat. no. 25); Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna
(cat. no. 21, illustrated); Zurich, Kunsthaus (cat. no. 23); Amsterdam,
Stedelijk Museum (cat. no. 21), Francis Bacon, 1962-1963
Malmo, Moderna Museet, Francis Bacon: Malinger 1945 - 1964, 1965,
cat. no. 16
Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, Francis Bacon, 1998,
cat. no. 7, p. 55, illustrated in color
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES
J. Reichardt, "Francis
Bacon", London Magazine, vol. II, no. 3, June 1962, pp. 40-41,
illustrated
Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London, 1964, cat. no. 76, illustrated
CATALOGUE NOTE
The sale at auction of Two
Figures at a Window, 1953, offers an exceptionally rare opportunity to
acquire a seminal painting by Francis Bacon from his most highly esteemed and
consequential early period. While the cardinal breakthrough of his career came
in 1944 with the exhibition of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a
Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery, London, it was not until the
intellectually and stylistically fecund period of 1952-1953 that his
idiosyncratic approach to composition and painterly ingenuity were harnessed,
honed and refined to this unprecedented degree of cogency. Painted in the same
year as the first major Pope series (fig. 1) – universally acclaimed as
Bacon’s most accomplished series and a momentous landmark of
twentieth-century art - Two Figures at a Window embodies the same
brilliance of painterly flair that makes paintings from this period the most
recherché of his entire oeuvre. Almost without exception, the canvases from
the late 1940s and early 1950s are housed in prestigious public and private
collections - among them the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection in Venice - from which they will never be released,
making this a truly remarkable auction moment.
One of his most original
investigations into pictorial representation to date, Two Figures at a
Window evinces a keen sense of experimentation and inquiry that is typical
of the period, the product of sustained periods of concentration as he
prepared for regular shows at Erica Brausen’s Hanover Gallery. Brausen
visited Bacon’s studio in 1946 at the suggestion of Graham Sutherland,
mounting his first significant solo show in 1949 and launching his
international career by successfully placing Painting 1946 - another
early masterpiece – in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New
York. His growing international recognition fuelled an intensely fertile
period of productivity and an acuteness of focus that the present work shares
with series with the 1953 Popes which were sent to New York for Bacon’s
first solo show outside Britain later that year. Although prolific, few works
survive from this period – fewer still in private hands – in part a
consequence of Bacon’s exacting self-criticism and practice of destroying
works that he deemed imperfect.
Continuing to explore the theme
first evolved in his 1949 exhibition of Heads, Bacon here interrogates the
human form and its relationship and interaction with an economically depicted
interior space. Bacon approached the interiors of his paintings not as
portraits of a specific room, but as a vehicle of enhancing the human form:
“I want to make the interior so much there that the form will speak more
eloquently. - (cited in John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1971, p.75) Unlike
the earlier series of tightly cropped Heads, here the figures are located at a
distance from the picture plane inhabiting a more expansive, abstract space
which presages the subsequent Men in Blue series of 1954 (fig. 2).
Reiterating the internal framing device of the Popes series, in Two
Figures at a Window negative space adopts a new, profound significance;
just as the tragic moment is preceded by a tranquil interlude in the
Shakespearean tragedies that so often inspired his painting, so in the present
work the open expanse of deep cerulean blue that engulfs the figures serves as
a hiatus that bestows a full visceral intensity on the human drama within.
This intensity of focus is enhanced
further by the marked formal rigour of the composition which employs with
devastating aplomb the device of the spaceframe and the motif of the curtains.
Serving both a formal and narrative function, Bacon had been interested in the
motif of curtains for some time: “I’ve always wanted to paint curtains. I
love rooms that are hung all round with just curtains hung in even folds” (Ibid
p. 35). At times diaphanous, veiling the entire figure, in Two Figures at a
Window the drapes form two vast vertical swathes that crop and frame the
figures, simultaneously shielding and unveiling them, exposing and concealing
their equivocal activity. As a formal device this is reminiscent of Study for
the Human Body of 1949 (fig. 3), which, in terms of composition and treatment
of the figure, is a direct precursor of this work. In Two Figures at a
Window the spaceframe - a formal device increasingly employed by
Giacometti, another artist in Brausen’s stable of talent – is superimposed
on top of the curtains, the cube-like space adumbrated by faintly drawn pale
grey lines, evoking a theatrical space redolent of a proscenium and bestowing
on the protagonists all the gravitas and pathos of Greek tragedy. The
suggestion of the shutter, whose repeated horizontal striation fills the right
flank of the composition, lends solidity and weight to the ostensibly
architectural yet ultimately abstract space.
Throughout his career Bacon
remained resolutely unmoved by the new and increasing forms of abstraction
that were emanating from America, steadfast in his belief that art devoid of
human content lacked resonance. Nonetheless, Two Figures at a Window belies
an understanding – if not appreciation – of the principal tenets of spare
abstraction and colour field painting that ostensibly, at least, were deemed
to be the anathema of figurative painting. More than any painting to date, Two
Figures at a Window shows Bacon experimenting with more reductive forms of
composition and harnessing the semantic power of colour witnessed in the vast
paintings of Barnett Newman. Although insistently figurative, Two Figures
at a Window derives a disproportionately large degree of its emotional
charge from the intense, inky blue canvas. The central vertical strip formed
by the partition of the curtains – a corollary to Newman’s ‘zips’ –
shows Bacon grappling directly with abstract modes of expression.
The treatment of the figures
themselves, on the other hand, shows Bacon at the apogee of his early
painterly maturity. The dominant flat blue background with its ethereal,
velvety application sets off the pinkish-white flesh tones of the figures. As
John Russell observes: - Bacon, when he wishes, is one of the great painters
of human flesh and can give it a kind of creamy resonance, a fulfilled soft
firmness, for which both Ingres and Courbet had also been searching”. (Ibid
p. 75) The spontaneity of the treatment of the flesh and the beautiful dryness
of the paint is reminiscent of Velasquez’s handling of flesh, while the
sombre tonal range and severely restricted palette belies Bacon’s
appreciation for the later paintings of Rembrandt. At the same time, however,
the treatment of the figure is vapourously photographic, an effect evocative
of the soft focus of the camera obscura image. Unlike traditional figurative
painters, Bacon preferred to paint in absentia, relying predominantly on the
combination of photographic material and memory to inform his image
production. The figural painting in Two Figures at a Window betrays the
primacy of one of Bacon’s preferred sources, a book of X-ray plates entitled
Positioning in Radiotherapy. The figure is treated as a semi-transparent,
spectral form, the figures’ atrophied forms condensing into something solid
but not quite fleshly. This technique simultaneously captures the blur and
flicker of transitional movement, like a blurred snap shot or film still
depicting figures dissolving in and out of focus. A torn fragment from the
artist’s studio (fig. 4) shows how Bacon used such photographic and filmic
source material to compose and structure his paintings, democratically fusing
photographic motifs with Old Master painterliness, translating the
fragmentary, everyday images into modern high tragedy.
Ever since his debut, when Studies
for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was received with consternation
by the public, Bacon was synonymous with violence and savage imagery. This
haunting image, while continuing the prevalent air of claustrophobia, anxiety
and unease nonetheless betrays a human tenderness rarely glimpsed in Bacon’s
oeuvre. Despite the astringency of the surrounding atmosphere, one does not
sense the neurotic angst that prevails in the Museum of Modern Art’s Study
for Portrait VIII (fig. 1). The power of Two Figures at a Window
resides in this poignant, fragile balance between the physical and emotional
contact which lies at the heart of human relationships and the existential
fear and impotent solitude, experienced in the writings of Nietzsche and
Sartre, which pervades the contemporaneous Popes series. At the time of
painting Bacon was involved in a passionate, if tempestuous relationship with
Peter Lacy, an engagement often sited as the inspiration and impetus for the
present work in autobiographical accounts of Bacon’s oeuvre which locate the
figures in one of the hotel rooms and borrowed apartments through which Bacon
passed during his relationship with Lacy. Yet the very indeterminacy of the
figures surely stems from the desire to eschew any such prescribed narrative;
unlike the pastels of Degas, for example, which Bacon admired immensely, the
very incompleteness of Bacon’s forms is what makes them so powerfully
suggestive. Bacon much admired Marcel Proust for his adroitness in analysing
human passion and behaviour; like the Proustian notion of the ‘memory
trigger’, Bacon’s indeterminate forms tap into a deeper recess of the
human psyche, precipitating myriad open-ended narratives of human experience.
Bacon’s paintings remain essentially ambiguous deriving potency from
unanswerable questions. Like the ancient oracles they are open to quite
contrary interpretations; that is their strength, the magic and power of their
enigma.

Post War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
King's Street, London February 8th 2006

Self Portrait 1969 Francis Bacon
Sale
Title:
POST WAR
& CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING
SALE pounds
Sale
Date: Feb 08, 2006
Location:
London, King's Street
Lot
Number: 5
Creator:
Francis Bacon
(1909-1992)
Lot
Title: Self-Portrait
Estimate:
1,400,000 -
1,800,000 British pounds
Sold: 5,160,000
British pounds
Salesroom
Notice:
Please
note this work has been request for the forthcoming Francis Bacon exhibition
Paintings from the 50s which will take place at the Sainsbury Centre for
Visual Arts, Norwich from October to December 2006 and will later travel to
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
Pre-lot
Text:
THE
COLLECTION OF THE LATE MISS VALERIE BESTON: ARTISTS FROM THE LONDON SCHOOL
Lot
Description:
Francis
Bacon (1909-1992)
Self-Portrait
signed, dedicated and dated 'Self-Portrait 1969 Francis Bacon To V with all
very best wishes Francis' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
13½ x 11¼in. (34.3 x 28.6cm.)
Painted in 1969T
Provenance:
A gift
from the artist to Miss Beston
Literature:
J.
Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1971, no. 89 (illustrated p. 182).
L. Trucchi, Francis Bacon, Milan 1975, pl. 136.
M. Leiris, Francis Bacon, full face and in profile, London 1983, no. 68
(illustrated in colour).
H. Davies and S. Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, no. 1 (illustrated
on the cover and on p. 6).
W. Schmied, Francis Bacon Commitment and Conflict, Munich and New York
1996, no. 31 (illustrated in colour, unpaged); fig. 117 (illustrated, p. 100).
F. Bores and M. Kundera, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits,
London 1997 (illustrated, p. 106).
Exhibited:
London,
Arts Council of Great Britain, The Human Clay, 1976, no. 9.
Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Francis Bacon, October-January
1972, no. 90 (illustrated, p. 131). This exhibition later travelled to Düsseldorf,
Kunsthalle, March-May 1972.
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Recent Paintings 1968-1974, March-June
1975, no. 4.
Madrid, Fundación Juan March, Francis Bacon, April-May 1978, no. 1. This
exhibition later travelled to Barcelona, Fundaciò Joan Miro, June-July 1978.
Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon. Paintings
1945-1982,
June-August 1983, no. 24 (illustrated, p. 52). This exhibition later travelled
to Kyoto, The National Museum of Modern Art, September-October 1983; Aichi,
Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery, November 1983.
Paris, Galerie Maeght Lelong, Francis Bacon. Peintures récentes,
January-February 1984, no. 2 (illustrated, p. 33).
London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, May-August 1985, no. 66 (illustrated in
colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie,
October 1985-January 1986; Berlin, Nationalgalerie, February-March 1986.
London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon a loan exhibition in
Celebration of his 80th Birthday, October-November 1989, no. 8 (illustrated in
colour, p. 23).
London, The Barbican Art Gallery, The pursuit of the real, May-July 1990.
London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Francis Bacon 1909-1992 Small Portrait
Studies, October-December 1993, no. 19 (illustrated in colour).
Saint-Paul, Foundation Maeght, Bacon- Freud Expression, July-October 1995, no.
18 (illustrated in colour, p. 71).
Lot Notes:
Inspired
by the example of his great art historical heroes, Velázquez, Rembrandt and
Van Gogh, Bacon believed that in the self-portrait an artist could take more
liberties and risks with the image - with its distortion from illustrative
reality and in its conveyance of feeling - than in any other medium. In the
same way that he worked from photographs rather than directly from sitters
because, photography's 'slight remove from fact' could, 'return' him 'onto the
fact more violently', Bacon found that the self-investigative peculiarities of
self-portraiture were highly suited to the fierce scrutiny of his art.
'The obsession' he once remarked, is 'how like can I make this thing in the
most irrational way? So that you're not only remaking the look of the image,
you're re-making all the areas of feeling which you yourself have
apprehensions of. You want to open up so many levels of feeling...It's wrong
to say it can't be done in pure illustration, in purely figurative terms,
because of course it has been done. It has been done in Velázquez...[and]...if
you take the great late self-portraits of Rembrandt, you will find that the
whole contour of the face changes time after time; it's a totally different
face although it has what is called a look of Rembrandt, and by this
difference it involves you in different areas of feeling...With Velázquez its
more controlled and, of course, I believe more miraculous. Because one wants
to do this thing of walking along a precipice, and in Velázquez it's a very,
very, extraordinary thing that he has been able to keep it so near to what we
call illustration and at the same time so deeply unlock the greatest and
deepest things that man can feel'. (Francis Bacon in a 1975 Interview with
David Sylvester, reproduced in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews
with Francis Bacon, London 1990, pp. 26-28).
Bacon's own attempts to 'walk upon this precipice' first came about in the
late 1960s. Barring a few rare attempts at self-portraiture in the 1950s,
Bacon began systematically to paint portraits of his own head only towards the
end of the 1960s. This 1969 painting is one of the first of his single-head
portraits from this time. Far from being rooted in any sense of vanity, these
paintings reflect how Bacon brought to the painting of his own self-image the
same objective curiosity about the human condition that Rembrandt brought to
his self-portraiture. 'I loathe my own face' Bacon told David Sylvester, 'but
I go on painting it only because I haven't got any other people to do. It is
true to say...One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was: 'Each day in the
mirror I watch death at work'. This is what one does oneself' (ibid
p.130-133).
While in the mid-1970s Bacon's slightly self-pitying lament that he had no-one
else to paint may have had a ring of truth to it, this was certainly not the
case in the late 1960s when he was painting many of his most celebrated
portraits of George Dyer, Isabel Rawsthorne, Michel Leiris and Lucian Freud.
Bacon's turning to investigate his own unique animal presence and self image
at this time perhaps reflects a degree of introspection and more certainly a
heightened existential awareness and increased psychological intensity in his
work. For, inevitably, with his fundamental belief in life as an accident, for
Bacon, self-portraiture was intrinsically connected to his keen awareness of
passing of time and the presence of death within everything in life including
his own. For him, as it was for Rembrandt, the device of the self-portrait was
a powerful means with which to speak about the fascinating but ultimately
meaningless existential nature of the human condition. And, excepting his
earlier series of expressionist self-identifications as a working artist in
the guise of Vincent Van Gogh, Bacon's self-portraits are predominantly
objective and dispassionate portrayals of himself as a seemingly ordinary and
unremarkable man.
Bacon was also undoubtedly conscious of the precedents among the Old Masters
when he began the process of exploring the contours and idiosyncratic features
of his face in the late '60s. Not only did he bring a fierce objectivity to
the depiction of his own striking and owl-like face, but he also carefully
laid the groundwork for these images with a remarkable degree of preparation.
According to the writer and art historian John Richardson, before embarking on
a self-portrait Bacon would let his stubble grow for three of four days and
then rehearse the angular and distortive brushstrokes using make-up on his
face in front of the mirror. ' Those strange revolving brushstrokes, that are
so familiar from his pictures, ' Richardson recalled, 'would be rehearsed with
Max Factor pancake make-up. He had a series of these Max Factor pots and he
would take one and do a sort of smear across his face, and these are the
smears that you see on so many of the faces of those early paintings.' (J.
Richardson quoted in Francis Bacon: taking Reality by Surprise, C. Domino,
London 1996).
In this raw and powerful self-portrait, Bacon's recognisable but seemingly
beaten-up or swollen features stare directly out of the painting with an
unconcerned air of nonchalance that borders on disdain. It is the portrait of
a man deeply aware of but ultimately indifferent to the peculiarities of his
own features. Seeming to trap something of the animated essence of life into
the semi-chaotic, half-chance driven application of his paint with its bizarre
splashes. smears and rubs of purple, orange and white Bacon articulates a
brutish and vital physicality. In doing so he expresses less the effects of
the passing of time upon his features as in the manner of Rembrandt's
self-portraits for example, but rather the energy and effect of inner emotion
on the material exterior of his face. Distortion, exaggeration, accident and
craft combine to create an undeniably animated material presence in the paint.
Through this magic, what Bacon referred to as 'the mystery of fact' when
talking of his favourite Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en Provence - the
magic of seeming to animate what is essentially inanimate dead material -
something of the essential nature of the human condition is also approximated.
'I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of
non-rational marks' Bacon asserted,' and you can't will this non-rationality
of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this
activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another
form of illustration' (ibid p. 59). In this self-portrait from 1969 Bacon
presents a disturbingly honest psychological portrait of himself as but
another human ape. What underlies and perhaps undermines the apparent
existential objectivity of this image is that the painting itself is the
product of this 'mystery of fact'. This seemingly animated image of the living
artist has apparently been brought into existence by a certain kind of magic
or alchemy involving a fusion of controlled chance and the artist's skill. In
doing this the painting seems to probe the mystery and apparent meaningless of
life, as Bacon himself did and to infuse it with a life and perhaps meaning of
its own. In this it is a visual echo of Bacon's philosophical view of life as
'meaningless but we give it meaning during our own existence. We create
certain attitudes which give it a meaning while we exist, though they in
themselves are meaningless, really' (ibid p.133).
As a token of some kind of meaning however, presumably friendship and
gratitude, this self-portrait was given by Bacon to Valerie Beston soon after
he completed it. On its reverse it bears the dedication, 'To V. with all very
best wishes Francis.'
Day in pictures BBC
News 8
February 2006

Francis
Bacon's painting entitled 'Study from Portrait of Pope
Innocent X
by Velazquez' is up for auction today in London.
Post War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale
King's Street, London February 8th 2006

Study
from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez Francis
Bacon
Sale
Title: POST WAR
& CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING
SALE pounds
Sale
Date: Feb 08, 2006
Location:
London, King's Street
Creator:
Francis Bacon
(1909-1992)
Lot
Number: 36
Lot
Title: Study from
Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez
Estimate:
5,000,000 - 7,000,00 British
pounds
Sold: 5,160,000
British pounds
Pre-lot
Text: Property
from a Distinguished Collection
Lot
Description:
Francis
Bacon (1909-1992)
Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez
titled 'Study from Portrait of Innocent X by Velasquez' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
60 1/8 x 47in. (152.5 x 119.5cm.)
Painted in 1959
Provenance:
Marlborough
Fine Art Ltd.,
London.
Lady Elizabeth Montagu, London.
Christopher Selmes, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1971.
Literature:
Studio,
CLX, London, July 1960, (illustrated, p. 29).
R. Alley and J. Rothenstein, Francis Bacon, London 1964, pp. 124-126,
no. 156 (illustrated, unpaged).
Exhibited:
London,
Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon: Paintings 1959-1960, March-April
1960, no. 10 (illustrated).
London, The Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, May-July 1962, no. 74
(illustrated). This exhibition later travelled to Mannheim, Kunsthalle,
July-August 1962, no. 62; Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna,
September-October 1962, no. 66; Zurich, Kunsthaus, October-November 1962, no.
61 and Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, January-February 1963, no. 54.
Milan, Palazzo Reale, L'Anima e il Volo Ritratto e Fisiognomica da Leonardo
a Bacon, October 1998-March 1999, no. 352.
Valencia, Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Lo Sagrado y lo Profano, December
2003-March 2004, no. 25 (illustrated in colour, p. 80).
Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musee Maillol, Francis Bacon: Le sacré et le
profane, April-August 2004.
Lot Notes:
Francis
Bacon believed that Velázquez' portrait of Pope Innocent X was the greatest
portrait in the world. It is a sign of his constant thirst for rebellion and
his iconoclastic desire to shatter the illusions of the world around him that
he repeatedly assaulted Velazquez' original, painting his own tormented
visions of the same subject: 'I was haunted by that work, by the reproductions
that I saw of it. It's such an extraordinary portrait that I wanted to do
something based on it... I was quite overcome by it and I felt compelled to do
what I did. I felt overwhelmed by that image' (F. Bacon quoted in interview
with M. Archimbaud, reproduced in Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art,
W. Seipel (ed.), et al., exh. cat., Vienna and Basel 2004, p. 377). Painted in
1959, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez marks a
triumphant return to that theme after a few years absence. In this painting,
Bacon has now synthesised a far more assured and painterly means of depiction
and applied it to one of his most iconic themes. This picture is a milestone
in the development of what would come to be recognised as his signature style:
Bacon has distorted and disturbed the features of the Pope, creating a direct
image that provokes an almost physical reaction in the viewer - it goes 'from
the eye to the stomach without going through the brain' (F. Bacon, quoted in
F. Giacobetti, 'Exclusive Interview with Francis Bacon: I painted to be
loved', The Art Newspaper, June 2003). It is a reflection of Bacon's
own high opinion of this painting that it is only the second of all the Pope
pictures whose title fully and directly refers to the Velázquez original, the
other being the one in the Des Moines Art Center.
Bacon felt personally impelled to depict the Popes. The Velázquez
portrait clearly struck a deep chord with him: 'I think it is one of the
greatest portraits that has ever been made, and I became obsessed with it. I
buy book after book with this illustration in it of the Velásquez Pope,
because it just haunts me, and it opens up all sorts of feelings and areas of
- I was going to say - imagination, even in me' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in D.
Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New
York 1990, p. 24). Bacon made a concerted effort to buy copy after copy of the
Velázquez, many of which were found in his studio, some juxtaposed with
pictures of death and Nazis, yet when he had the chance to view the original
in Rome, he chose not to do so. Instead, he deliberately limited his knowledge
of the work to the small reproductions that he so compulsively acquired. Bacon
felt himself almost unwillingly drawn to the picture, to the subject's quiet
authority and to the authority of Velázquez' masterly handling. Study from
Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is an attack on those
authorities, and others besides. It is an attack on religion, on Catholicism,
on power, on his father, on the Old Masters and even on Bacon's own
limitations.
Bacon's attack on the Velázquez appears more subtle here than in other
paintings of the same subject in that there is no scream. The Pope appears
tense and terrified, glancing sideways out into the world of the viewer as
though discerning a threat. He is not racked with the overt, tortured pain of
some of the earlier versions; instead, there is a quieter and all the more
poignant angst clearly visible in the subject's face. When Innocent X was
painted in Velázquez' time, The Pope was considered all-powerful and
infallible. The original portrait shows a face twisted with condescension,
with the 'wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command' reminiscent of Shelley's Ozymandias.
Bacon had been influenced not only by Velázquez' painting, but also by a
photograph of Pope Pius XII being carried in a procession on a raised
platform, a sedia gestatoria. This almost anachronistic image of the Pope
still being venerated, dressed and carried around even in the Twentieth
Century struck Bacon forcefully: 'It is true, of course, the Pope is unique.
He's put in a unique position by being the Pope, and therefore, like in
certain great tragedies, he's as though raised onto a dais on which the
grandeur of this image can be displayed to the world' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted
in D. Sylvester, op.cit., 1990, p. 26).
Bacon was fascinated by this strange paradoxical position, by this presence of
a man revered as so much more than a man. The Popes are wholly infused
with the sense of tragedy and, by extension, of hubris that he had pointed out
to Sylvester. In Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez,
he has removed the veneer of extra powers and mystique that surrounds the
pontiff, creating a direct assault on his papal authority. Yet in Study
from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, the figure appears weak
and vulnerable, under imminent attack. He is an imposter, under threat of
discovery, dressed in false garbs and painfully aware of the redundancy of his
powers and position in the modern world. At the same time, stripping the Pope
of his authority in this way allows Bacon all the more dramatically to capture
his haunting perception of the human condition, of our everyday vulnerability,
of the fragility of life. The fact that it is the anguished gaze of a Pope -
and not just of a man - that we see here heightens the sense of existential
revelation that makes his greatest paintings so powerful.
Bacon was being ingenuous when he stated that, 'In the Popes it doesn't come
from anything to do with religion; it comes from an obsession with the
photographs that I know of Velasquez's Pope Innocent X' (F. Bacon, 1962,
quoted in D. Sylvester, op.cit., 1990, p. 24). While it is true that he was
obsessed with the image, he was also deeply interested in the role of
religion, and more importantly of its absence in the modern age of
existentialism. The old assurances have been stripped away by a century of
insane wars, of mechanisation and crucially of scientific advances. It was
this central understanding of man's position in the scheme of things that made
a difference between the age in which Velázquez was painting and Bacon was.
For Bacon this difference, this destabilised cosmogony with its religious
centre torn out, had changed the entire nature and purpose of art in the same
way that it had changed man's own perception of his existence:
'I think that man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely
futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. I think that,
even when Velasquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, in a
peculiar way they were still, whatever their attitude to life, slightly
conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now, you
could say, has had completely cancelled out for him. Now, of course, man can
only attempt to beguile himself for a time by the way he behaves, by
prolonging possibly his life through the doctors' (F. Bacon, 1962, quoted in
D. Sylvester, op.cit., 1990, pp. 28-29).
Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is a painting of
precisely this process. We see the Pope denuded of his assurances, of
his certainty of divine powers and divine salvation. Stripped of the old
certainties of life, we perceive instead the ugly realities of existence. In
Bacon's Pope, we see a key player, or victim, transported from Artaud's
'theatre of cruelty'. It is for this reason that in some of Bacon's other
depictions of the Pope, they are shown screaming. They have been forced into
revelation, have been robbed of the comforting curtain of their beliefs, and
are left instead to face the ordeal of being 'an accident... a completely
futile being'. In this sense, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez
harnesses the existential angst of modern existence. There may be no scream,
yet still we bear witness to what Bacon referred to as 'The whole coagulation
of pain, despair...' (F. Bacon quoted in D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life
of Francis Bacon, London 1994, p. 106).
When discussing the Popes with Bacon, David Sylvester pointed out that
they could be an attack on his father, the Italian word for Pope being Papa.
This adds to the idea of personal anguish fuelling the painting. Another
target of Bacon's attack, though, was Velázquez himself. For in imitating his
work, Bacon was also laying siege to his superiority. The strange abuse of
what he considered the greatest portrait in the world reveals a paradoxical
mixture of reverence and irreverence. This is at once a homage and an insult.
Just as Duchamp drew a moustache on the Mona Lisa, Bacon has taken a
timeless masterpiece and twisted it to his own purposes. In this, he is in
part flexing his own new-found artistic muscles. For Study from Portrait of
Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is filled with a new painterly quality that
had only begun to feature in Bacon's works over the previous couple of years.
It was during this time that he had been creating pictures that were after, or
tributes to, Van Gogh. And it was through his interest in Van Gogh, in
expressionistic brushwork, and above all in Soutine that he began to adapt a
new means of painting. Gone are the thin and stretched oils of his earlier
works, replaced instead by the sumptuous, liquid-like swirls that make up the
muddied pool of Innocent X's face. Where Bacon's figures had seemed
skeleton-like and emaciated in earlier years, there is now a meatiness, an
interest in flesh, that heightens the sense of mortality and of decay in the
Pope's face.
The theme of Velázquez'
portrait had first appeared in 1949, in Head VI, which fused the
features of the Pope with those of the shot woman in Eisenstein's Battleship
Potemkin. Other such cross-germinations and changes feature in almost all
the Popes. By contrast, the vortex-like rendering of the face in Study
from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez is the only significant
divergence from the original. In fact, of all the oils that Bacon created on
this theme, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez remains the
truest to its source. The features of the Pope, despite being distorted and
smeared, remain highly recognisable, down even to the sideways glance. Bacon
has changed the colour of the background, replacing the plush claret-coloured
velvet of the original with the green that would form the backgrounds of
almost all his paintings of this period. In Study from Portrait of Pope
Innocent X by Velázquez, this restraint in dealing with the Velázquez
shows a Bacon more at ease with painting, at ease with the legacy of his
predecessor. It also places the meat-like, distorted features of the Pope
firmly at the centre of the work. In this simple way, Innocent X's shimmering
face is the indisputable focus of the entire painting, allowing Bacon to
explore what he termed, 'sophisticated simplicity...You have to abbreviate
into intensity' (F. Bacon, 1982-84, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality
of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York 1990, p. 176).
b
into intensity' (F.
Bacon, 1982-84, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact:

MISS
B’S PRIVATE COLLECTION
The private and
personal collection of the late Miss Valerie Beston, loyal
assistant
to artists of the ‘London School’, to be sold at Christie’s London in
February
2006
London –
Christie's is pleased to announce the sale of The Collection of the Late Miss
Valerie Beston: Artists from the London School will take place in London on 8
and 10 February 2006. Miss Beston was known throughout the London art world as
the person who loyally supported and nurtured many of the leading artists
working in London during her extraordinary fifty year career.
Totally discreet and loyal,
she preferred to remain in the background. This highly personal collection is
almost entirely comprised of works given to her by her artist friends in the
‘London School’ and ranges from important oil paintings and prints by
artists including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach to
photographs, prints, signed posters and other ephemera. Many bear personal
dedications and words of gratitude and appreciation. The Collection lends a
fascinating and personal insight
into the artistic environment in London during the 50s, 60s and beyond. Six of
the most important paintings will be included in Christie’s Post-War and
Contemporary Art evening sale at King Street on 8 February 2006 with the rest
of the Collection being offered in a single-owner sale at South Kensington on
10 February 2006.
The Collection is led by Francis Bacon’s raw and powerful Self Portrait of
1969 (estimate: £1,400,000- 1,800,000). Here, Bacon’s recognisable but
seemingly beaten-up and swollen features stare directly out of the painting
with an air of nonchalance that borders on disdain. Bizarre splashes, smears
and rubs of purple, orange and white paint articulate a brutish and vital
physicality. It is a portrait of a man aware of but ultimately indifferent to
the peculiarities of his own features. This painting is one of the
first of Bacon’s single-head portraits, as he turned to investigate his own
image, possibly reflecting a degree of introspection, and more certainly a
heightened existential awareness and increased psychological intensity in his
work. To Bacon, his self-portraits were essentially connected to his awareness
of the passing of time and the presence of death within life including his
own.
This painting was a gift
from the artist to his ‘dear Miss B’, his friend, confidante and personal
assistant, in appreciation of her friendship and loyalty. This exceptional
relationship between Bacon and Miss Beston has been well documented, and
lasted for more than thirty years ending with his death in 1992. She organised
his life – from paying off his Harrods account, organising his rent, and
paying utility bills to arranging for pictures to be taken straight from his
studio to his gallery by the Marlborough
driver, “as soon as the paint was dry”. It is well-documented that Francis
Bacon destroyed many of his paintings before they saw the light of day; Miss
Beston saw it as part of her role to rescue what she could before that
happened.
Frank Auerbach was another artist in the Marlborough Gallery stable whom Miss
Beston was to nurture during her career. Included in her collection are eight
powerful oils together with a number of drawings, painted over a period of
over twenty years; one a gift from Auerbach to Miss Beston. Auerbach’s
masterly painting style is clearly shown in Head of Julia, painted in 1983
(estimate: £100,000-150,000), where his desire to capture the essence and
reality of his subject can be seen in the
powerful surface layers of paint. Julia asleep (estimate: £70,000-90,000) is
an earlier work of the same sitter, painted in 1978/79. Landscapes by Auerbach
also feature including Tree on Primrose Hill (estimate: £70,000-100,000 and
Study for Primrose Hill, executed in 1986 (estimate: £2,000-3,000).
An important work by Michael Andrews, Study of a Head for Lights (estimate: £40,000-60,000)
is also part of Miss Beston’s Collection. Regarded as one of Britain’s
leading post-war painters, Andrews had an instinct for capturing the mood of
the period especially during the 1960s party scene. Miss Beston’s Collection
is rich in other important artists of the period including works by Graham
Sutherland, Henry Moore, Michael Clark
and Stephen Conroy together with photographs by Irving Penn and Richard Avedon
among others. In addition, there are many wonderful prints and posters with
personal dedications by the artist themselves, including ten examples by Frank
Auerbach, seventeen by Francis Bacon together with other works by Craigie
Aitchison, Victor Pasmore, Alexander Calder, Lucian Freud, Paula Rego, Joe
Tilson and Henry Moore.

BESTON
COLLECTION, Sale 7331
February 10, 2006, London, King Street-South Kensington Offsite sale
The
Collection of the Late Miss Valerie Beston - Artists from the London School

Creator: Cecil
Beaton (1904-1980)
Lot Title:
Francis Bacon, 1960
Estimate: 800
- 1,200 British pounds
Sold: 38,400
British pounds
Lot
Description: Cecil
Beaton (1904-1980)
Francis Bacon, 1960
each with credit stamp, and individually numbered in ink "554/13",
"554/27" and "554/32" (on the reverse)
three gelatin silver prints
varying sizes from 7½ x 7¼in. (19 x 18.2cm.) to 9½ x 9½in. (24.2 x
24.2cm.) (3)

Creator: Carlos
Freire (b. 1945)
Lot Title:
Francis Bacon in his studio in London
Estimate: 100
- 200 British pounds
Sold: 6,600
British pounds
Lot
Description: Carlos
Freire (b. 1945)
Francis Bacon in his studio in London; Francis Bacon in Soho; and Francis
Bacon in a bar 1977
each signed, two annotated in pencil 'Londres 1977' and each with copyright
credit stamp (on the reverse)
3 gelatin silver prints varying sizes from 9½ x 14in. (24.2 x 35.5) to 10¼ x
15½in. (26 x 39.4cm.) or the reverse (3)

Creator: Carlos
Freire (b. 1945)
Lot Title:
Francis Bacon in
Soho
Estimate: 100
- 200 British pounds
Sold: 6,600
British pounds
Lot
Description: Carlos
Freire (b. 1945)
Francis Bacon in his studio in London; Francis Bacon in Soho; and Francis
Bacon in a bar 1977
each signed, two annotated in pencil 'Londres 1977' and each with copyright
credit stamp (on the reverse)
3 gelatin silver prints varying sizes from 9½ x 14in. (24.2 x 35.5) to 10¼ x
15½in. (26 x 39.4cm.) or the reverse (3)
Creator: David
Montgomery (b. 1937)
Lot Title:
Francis Bacon, 1989
Estimate:
100
- 200 British pounds
Sold: 1,560
British pounds
Lot
Description:
David Montgomery (b. 1937)
Francis Bacon, 1989
signed and dated in ink 'David Montgomery 1989' (in the margin)
chromogenic print 15½ x 15½in. (39.5 x 39.5cm.)
Literature:
Francis Bacon,
Loan Exhibition in Celebration of his 80th Birthday, exh. cat., Marlborough
Fine Art Ltd., London 1989 (illustrated as frontispiece).

Creator: Jorge
S. Lewinski (b. 1921)
Lot Title: Francis
Bacon, circa 1960s
Estimate: 400
- 600 British pounds
Sold:
2,880 British pounds
Lot
Description: Jorge
S. Lewinski (b. 1921)
Francis Bacon, circa 1960s
one titled in ink, each with copyright/credit stamp (on the reverse)
fifteen gelatin silver prints
each approx.: 9½ x 7¾in. (24 x 20cm.) (15)

Creator:
Irving
Penn (b. 1917)
Lot Title:
Francis
Bacon, 1962
Estimate:
15,000
- 20,000 British pounds
Sold: 187,000
British pounds
Lot
Description: Irving
Penn (b. 1917)
Francis Bacon, 1962
gelatin silver print mounted on card with paint from Francis Bacon's studio
16¾ x 15in. (42.5 x 38cm.)
Literature: I.
Penn, Irving Penn: Passage, London 1991 (illustrated, p. 136).
Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Museo d'Arte Moderna, Lugano 1993 (illustrated, p.
14).
Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1996 (illustrated, p.
36).

Creator: John
Deakin (1912-1972)
Lot Title:
Francis
Bacon, 1968
Estimate:
1,500
- 2,000 British pounds
Sold: 7,800
British pounds
Lot
Description: John
Deakin (1912-1972)
Francis Bacon, 1968
signed and dated in ink under type written credit and date label (on the
reverse)
gelatin silver print
7 5/8 x 7½in. (19.6 x 19cm.)

Creator: Michael
Clark (b. 1954)
Lot Title:
Portrait of
Francis Bacon
Estimate:
1,000
- 1,500 British pounds
Sold: 50,400
British pounds
Lot
Description: Michael
Clark (b. 1954)
Portrait of Francis Bacon
oil on canvas
19¾ x 15¾in. (50.2 x 40cm.)
Painted in 1983-1984
Provenance:
Acquired directly
from the artist by Miss Beston.

Creator: John
Timbers (b. 1933)
Lot Title:
Muriel Belcher and Ian
Board, circa 1970s
Estimate:
200
- 300 British pounds Unsold
Lot
Description: John
Timbers (b. 1933)
Muriel Belcher and Ian Board, circa 1970s
numbered in pencil "4648 I 2 a" in credit stamp (on the reverse)
gelatin silver print painted probably by Francis Bacon
13¾ x 9¼in. (34.8 x 23.4cm.)
Bacon painting on block for £5 million
|
|

By
Linda Sandler Bloomberg News

MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 2006
|
LONDON
Francis Bacon made about 45 studies of the 17th-century Spaniard Velázquez's
portrait of Pope Innocent X. Christie's International will auction one of them
in London next month.
The
painting done in 1959 by the British artist shows a stumpy-armed pope with a
twisted face, draped in a reddish-black shawl and enthroned in a green chair.
The seller is a European collector who has owned the picture since the 1970s,
a Christie's specialist, Pilar Ordovas, said. The painting is expected to sell
for about £5 million, or $8.8 million.
Christie's,
which is owned by the French billionaire François Pinault, and the publicly
traded Sotheby's Holdings are gathering art for their February sales in
London. The Bacon picture is the top-priced lot so far for Christie's evening
sale of postwar art, which the auction house expects to take in about £18
million for collectors cashing in on the boom.
The
sale may provide a clue to price trends for postwar and contemporary art. Last
year, Christie's took in £24.5 million from its evening sale, with Lucian
Freud's "Red-Haired Man on a Chair" going for a record £4.2
million, and almost 60 percent of the works selling for more than the top
estimates.
Bacon,
who died in 1992, is among the top-priced British painters, along with Freud
and Damien Hirst.
Christie's
set a record for Bacon in November, when it sold another of the pope studies
in New York for $10.1 million.
"Bacon
is totally international," Ordovas said. His work appeals to both museums
and to wealthy individuals, she said.
Bacon's
most famous studies in the series show a screaming pope sitting in a chair,
twisted with pain. The Christie's picture is much more static; the artist
usually worked from postcards and photographs.
The Christie's
catalogue says the current owner bought the picture in London and that the
three previous owners were based in London. Christie's
will take Bacon's pope study on a tour to San Francisco and Palm Beach,
Florida, to show it to collectors there.
Bacon's
papal portrait expected to fetch £5m
Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
The Guardian, Saturday January 7, 2006
He may be not so much a screaming pope as a scowling one. But the painting none the less represents one of Francis Bacon's most famous subjects, Velázquez's 1649 portrait of Innocent X, which he painted over and over again, most famously depicting the pontiff's mouth locked wide open in furious agony.
A relatively early version, from 1959, is to be auctioned next month at Christie's in London, and is estimated to fetch at least £5m.
The auctioneers forecast that the painting could break price records for a Bacon, set last November when a later work, Study for Pope I, fetched $10.1m (£5.7m) in New York.
Bacon revered Velázquez, once saying that the artist "found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator".
He said he was "haunted" by the portrait of Innocent X, describing it as "one of the greatest portraits that has ever been made".
The Velázquez itself hangs in the pontiff's family home, the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, in Rome. Nevertheless, Bacon always claimed he had never seen the original.
The work to be auctioned, which has been in a European collection since the 1970s, is a one-off, according to Pilar Ordovás, a Christie's expert in postwar art.
The artist was born of English parents in Dublin in 1909, and died in Madrid in 1992.
Sandy
Fawkes: Obituary
The
Daily Telegraph
Filed: 30/12/2005
Sandy Fawkes, who
died on December 26 aged 75, was found as a baby in the Grand Union Canal and
later narrowly escaped death at the hands of a serial killer; she seemed a
fixture in the public houses of Soho, but found time to follow careers as a
journalist and author.
For her last 30 years
Sandy Fawkes was a familiar sight in the Coach and Horses and in the French
pub in Soho, consuming simply astonishing amounts of whisky. When she was
among generous company, the barman would change her glass for a more capacious
one as the gills mounted up. She wore clothes that had been in the height of
fashion in the 1970s, for, since she ate little, she had kept her figure. She
habitually wore a fur hat that made it look as if a cat was curled up on her
head.
The force of
character that had once brought her success in journalism she now used in
getting a stool at the bar, no mean feat in Soho pubs in the 1980s more
crowded than any cocktail party. Each night a tragicomedy was played out among
the regulars at these smoky bars. The conversation was often hair-raisingly
rude, and the clash of characters generated extremely funny incidents, but
death lay not far below the surface.
In an Arena
documentary for BBC2 (1986), Jeffrey Bernard, The Spectator's Low Life
columnist, was filmed conversing in the morning with the angular landlord of
the Coach and Horses, Norman Balon. "Anything much happen last
night?" Balon asked him. "Nothing special," Bernard replied,
"Sandy Fawkes was pissed."
The surprising thing
was not so much that Sandy Fawkes often appeared drunk, but that she survived
so long, even retaining a series of boyfriends. She never showed resentment,
during the many hours she sat at the same bar as Jeffrey Bernard, at his
frequent disparaging references to her in his Spectator column. She had even
more awkward customers to deal with each day. "She reminds me of my
mother," one regular, a former guardsman, Bill Moore, remarked one night,
"I hate her." He kicked out towards her, but missed.
Before 1988, Soho
pubs closed at 3pm, and committed drinkers adjourned to afternoon drinking
clubs. Off the Charing Cross Road, where Sandy Fawkes had a flat, there was a
leprous cellar, with damp forcing its way through the plaster, called the
Kismet Club. Its nicknames included "The Iron Lung" and "Death
in the Afternoon". One passing visitor asked what the strange smell was
there. "Failure," came the reply.
One afternoon in the
1980s, after a lunchtime during which Graham Mason, the drunkest man in the
Coach and Horses, had abused her at length for being "an ugly, horribly
drunk old woman", Sandy Fawkes found herself in the Kismet, familiar
territory. Within minutes she was in violent argument with a podgy man wearing
teeshirt and a gold chain. "I never did like you, you fat queen,"
she began, at loud volume, "just because you've got money." It was a
mere point of punctuation in a long Soho day. No wonder that any time after
half past five, when the pubs reopened, it generally felt like 10.30 at night.
One close friend for
30 years was Daniel Farson, the television journalist, chronicler of Soho and
spectacular drunk. He would suddenly turn from an intelligent
conversationalist into a growling monster. "I loathe you," he would
shout suddenly between fat, quivering cheeks. Sandy Fawkes would go to stay
with him in Devon, where he enjoyed comparative calm, though barred from local
pubs. Then for some years they would go without speaking. She was hurt when
shortly before his death, on the morning of the Princess of Wales's funeral,
while she sat in the French pub, he stood in the Coach and Horses imitating
her tears at the occasion.
Sandy Fawkes did go
through periods of abstinence, in 1987 doing without drink for more than three
months. She had once written a book called Health for Hooligans (with
illustrations by William Rushton), and knew what drink did to people. Oddly
enough she did not begin smoking till into her forties, making up for it then
with constantly lit Gitanes, each with its lipstick-mark, elegantly held
between nail-varnished fingers. When she kept a cigarette in her mouth, the
smoke would drift between the hairs of her fur hat, dyeing them a deeper
bronze.
Her life was
physically and emotionally exhausting, for all her courage and tenaciousness.
One night in the Coach and Horses, 20 years before she died, she found that
all her teeth ached, that whisky was not stopping it, that the memories of her
child who had died in infancy and her own childhood were preying on her mind.
She was very drunk and after a while the only words she uttered were:
"I'm scared."
Sandy Fawkes was born
on June 30 1929. She never knew her parents, but before her marriage settled
on the name Sandra Boyce-Carmichelle. After her rescue from the canal she was
sent to a series of foster parents. Some abused her. She was not able to write
about this until the case of Maria Colwell, who died aged seven in 1973,
encouraged newspapers to publish accounts of similar mistreatment of children.
A bright, artistic
child, she won a place at Camberwell School of Art. There she was encouraged
by John Minton, a gifted teacher who was to kill himself at 40. It was he who
introduced her to Soho, where she tasted her first alcoholic drink - gin and
orange cordial - in the York Minster, Dean Street, known as the French Pub.
"Perhaps I should have signed the pledge that day," she remarked
years later, "but I would have missed out on so much fun and so many
friendships. Disasters too."
On the same day, she
remembered, "I caught my one and only glimpse of Dylan Thomas sitting
slumped on the bench that used to run under the windows."
When her children
grew up, Sandy Fawkes missed making a home, though she delighted in
grandchildren. In the end, the French Pub, even after the retirement of its
stylish and cheque-cashing landlord Gaston Berlemont, was to be a second home
to her. She wrote a short history of the pub, The French (1993), and in her
last years its kindly bar staff would fetch prescriptions for her, and her
morning copy of The Daily Telegraph.
Through John Minton,
a trad jazz fan, she had met in the late 1940s Wally Fawkes, a clarinettist.
In 1949 he began his celebrated cartoon strip Flook in the Daily Mail; that
year too Sandy and he married. Their house in Hampstead became known for its
lively parties. They had four children, three girls and a boy; the early death
of a daughter caused her lasting sorrow.
From the 1960s Sandy
Fawkes returned to her drawing-board, making fashion drawings for Vanity Fair
and then the Daily Sketch, for which she became fashion editor, a job she
briefly retained when it merged with the Daily Mail in 1971. She became a
feature writer for the Daily Express and was proud of covering the Yom Kippur
War in 1973.
In the United States
in November 1974, after an unsuccessful trial period with the National
Enquirer, she met a man in his late twenties in a bar in Atlanta, Georgia. He
looked like "a cross between Robert Redford and Ryan O'Neal", she
thought. They began an affair, and she joined him on a leisurely drive down
the coast to Florida. She knew him as Daryl Golden. In reality he was Paul
Knowles, who killed at least 18 people. The day before Sandy Fawkes met him,
Knowles had killed two people, one of them a 15-year-old girl he had raped.
The car they drove in
had been stolen from a man missing for four months. Even the smart clothes
Knowles wore were those of a murdered man. "He told me he was going to be
killed soon, but had made some tapes which would make a world news
story," she recalled. "After a week, I just had a feeling I wanted
to get away from him."
Knowles had set off
on his trail of killings only that May. It ended with his arrest within days
of their parting. A month later he was shot dead by police.
She wondered ever
after what it was that had prevented Knowles from murdering her too. Her
escape from his company did not end her troubles, for the police took a dim
view of her sexual liaison with a murderer. Could it be that she was guilty of
some of the murders too, they asked? "Police in Macon, Georgia, make Rod
Steiger look like a fairy," she said.
She found it took a
year to recover from the incident. But it struck deep at her insecurity. In
1974 she published her account of the incident as Killing Time. It was always
going to be turned into a film, bringing her lots of money. But it never was.
The book, however, was republished in 2004 as Natural Born Killer: In Love and
on the Road With a Serial Killer.
Her other books
included Nothing But, a ghosted memoir of Christine Keeler. "Christine
was quite an odd woman," she was to recall. "About two years after I
wrote the book, she rang me and told me I'd ruined her life." In 1990 she
wrote Elena: a Life in Soho, the biography of the celebrated maitre d' of
L'Escargot (now at l'Etoile).
In 1998 Sandy Fawkes
had a small part in John Maybury's film about Francis Bacon, Love is the
Devil. She figures on the credits as "Person in the Colony Room
Club". She had indeed known Bacon and drunk with him in the Colony Room
Club, but she had not frequented it for some years, after a row with someone.
The club was recreated on the film set, and when Derek Jacobi, as Bacon,
walked on set, Sandy, with essential supplies of whisky to hand, burst into
tears.
Sandy Fawkes was
depicted in several episodes of the brilliant strip The Regulars, drawn by
Michael Heath in Private Eye. She also figures in an atmospheric full-page
colour drawing by Heath for Punch (March 13, 1984), showing Bill Mitchell
playing spoof, surrounded by regulars and crooks. Sandy Fawkes in the
foreground is anchored on a stool, quietly pouring whisky down her throat.

Volume 75, Number 30
December 14 - 20, 2005
Francis Bacon’s Studio
By Margarita Cappock
Merrell; $60
Several years after Francis Bacon’s death in 1992, the executor of his estate,
John Edwards, donated the contents of the English painter’s studio to the Hugh
Lane Gallery in Dublin, the artist’s birthplace. Inside Bacon’s legendary
studio were a maelstrom of photos, paint supplies, liquor bottles, destroyed and
half-finished paintings, and other detritus from his life’s work. The Hugh
Lane, utilizing a massive team of experts and archeologists, catalogued and
moved the studio piece by piece, down to every paint tube cap, from London to
Dublin and reconstructed the space for public view.
This book is an impressive
documentation of both the move and the contents of the studio itself. Cappock
pulls back the curtain on Bacon’s work, showing us hundreds of photographic
sources, dozens of drawings (Bacons always said he never drew), several
unfinished works including his last, and views of the studio in all its glory.
Cappock connects the various items
from the studio to Bacon’s paintings, and the reproductions include rarely
seen work from his entire career. We see Bacon’s obsession with his lover
George Dyer, and the reliance he had on photos before, during, and after a
painting’s completion. This book is a must have for fans of Bacon’s work, as
well as a unique look into the artist’s private laboratory.
 |
Medical
books 'inspired Bacon paintings'
Ireland
Online 11/12/2005
Controversial Dublin-born artist Francis Bacon used
gruesome images in medical books for inspiration for some of his
most shocking paintings, it was revealed today.
Dr Margarita Cappock, the head of the permanent collection at
Dublin’s Hugh Lane gallery said textbooks on skin disorders,
forensic pathology, surgery and x-ray techniques were behind some
of Bacon’s most eye-catching paintings.
“He was very interested in medical imagery,” said Dr Cappock,
who has just penned a book, Francis Bacon’s Studio, on the
rebuilding of the artist’s painting den in the Dublin city
gallery.
A painstaking restoration project got underway at the gallery in
1998 after his long-time companion donated the studio and its
contents.
Among the 7,500 items – including dirty paint brushes, books,
photographs, drawings and slashed canvases – found strewn across
the floor of Bacon’s chaotic studio in South Kensington, London,
there were sheets ripped from books containing images of diseased
toes.
“Twelve other medical textbooks were found in the studio. Some
contain relentlessly gruesome images, such as A Colour Atlas of
Forensic Pathology and A Colour Atlas of Nursing Procedures,”
she wrote.
“A lot of people are horrified by his paintings,” Dr Cappock
admitted, adding a close examination of his distorted paintings
can reveal people with skin flaws and bodies modelled on meat
carcasses.
More than 100,000 people have been to view the lifelike
reconstruction of the artists London studio in the Hugh Lane
gallery since the walls, ceiling, doors and entire contents were
moved to Dublin and opened in the gallery in 2001.
Dr Cappock said the 83-year-old artist, known to have a taste for
alcohol and socialising, had stuck to his cramped studio in No 7
Reece Mews in South Kensington between 1961 and his death in 1992
as he liked the light in the building.
Dr Cappock revealed: “He said he liked to work in chaos as it
bred images in him. The chaos was important to him.”
The book, which is being launched on Tuesday, revealed the
materials found in the studio have shown a host of topics captured
the attention of the artist including paranormal phenomena,
political leaders, war and assassination attempts.
“Several loose leaves with features on the assassinations of
Leon Trotsky, John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther
King were found throughout the studio,” she said.
The author said Bacon had experienced a lot of violence during his
life, from 1914 when his father went to work in the War Office in
London, to their return to Ireland during the war of independence
Dr Cappock said Bacon had found it inhibiting to work from live
subjects and had instead relied on photographs – with 1,000
black and white images and 420 colour photographs found in his
studio.
“He only painted close friends and contemporaries, rarely took
commissions, he felt he had to know a person’s character
intimately before he could paint them,” she said.
She said: “Some of his images are so distorted, looking at it
you see a distorted thing, but the amazing thing about Bacon is no
matter how distorted you can always see who the portrait was of.
In one way Bacon was trying to capture the essence of a person.”
Around 100 slashed canvases were found in Bacon’s studio after
his death. “They were very interesting as they were never seen
before. The interesting thing about the ones we found in the
studio was the meticulous way he cut out the faces, some were
slashed quite violently with a Stanley knife,” she said.
Dr Cappock said the art experts carrying out the reconstruction
had made a major find in the discovery of 41 drawings. She said
the works refuted Bacon’s persistent denials he had ever made
preliminary sketches for his paintings.
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Francis Bacon's Studio
Tate Britain
Free Lectures
Friday Lecture
Friday 10 February 2006, 13.00–14.00
Tate Britain Auditorium
Margarita
Cappock, author of Francis Bacon’s Studio (Merrell, 2005),
reveals the extraordinarily rich contents of Bacon’s South Kensington studio,
which total 7,500 objects, range from handwritten notes to slashed canvases, and
offer unprecedented insights into Bacon’s source materials and working
methods.
Free, no bookings taken
'Iran
is on brink of a dark age'
By
Lillian Swift
The
Sunday Telegraph
20/11/2005
Iran is on the brink of
entering another dark age under its new conservative regime, according to one of
its leading artistic luminaries.
Ali Reza Sami-Azar, who
recently resigned as the head of the Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art, said
the cultural glasnost of the past five years had come to an end.
"We are in very
grave danger of reverting back to the post-revolutionary days, when only those
artists who were deemed as expressing so-called Islamic values were
displayed," he said in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph.
"In those days
artists who had flourished under previous regimes were persecuted. Culturally it
was the dark ages for Iran."
Dr Sami-Azar spoke out
after the phenomenal success of what he called his "goodbye show" - a
big exhibition of 20th-century Western art that he knew would risk offending the
piety of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new administration.
The exhibition, which
included works by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon and
Jackson Pollock, has proved the most popular show since the museum's inception
in 1977 and will end this week.
Visitors have been
undeterred by the hardline rhetoric of Mr Ahmadinejad, who last week toured Iran
reiterating his campaign promise to rid the Islamic Republic of "corrupting
Western culture".
But its closure, said
Dr Sami-Azar, would also mark the end of the period of relative cultural freedom
begun by the reformist president Mohammad Khatami eight years ago.
"It took many
years for the atmosphere to become relaxed enough to show it," he admitted.
"We experienced a
certain cultural enlightenment under Khatami, there was a relative freedom of
artistic expression and a shift from controlling the artistic community to
supporting and encouraging it. But all this will come to an end now."
The collection, which
had been languishing in Teheran vaults since the 1979 Islamic revolution, is
controversial not only for its subject matter but because it was compiled by the
deposed shah's wife, Farah Pahlavi.
Among visitors to the
exhibition have been women wearing all-encompassing black chadors, who have
browsed works including Bacon's sexually explicit triptych, Two Figures Lying on
a Bed with Attendant, which Dr Sami-Azar sent on loan to Tate Britain last year.
In the censors' one
intervention, the central panel - which depicts two naked men lying on a bed -
was removed by Iran's morality police.
Staff at the museum say
the reaction to the exhibition has "been like a bomb".
Dr Sami-Azar also fears
for his personal safety. "I was instrumental in pushing the boundaries and
the conservatives won't forget that," he said. "I fully expect that
when they get round to it they will cook up some charges against me."
Thursday
17th November 2005
The
British painter Francis Bacon comes under the spotlight next Thursday, November
24.
Described by critics as the greatest British painter since Turner and by
Margaret Thatcher as "that dreadful man who paints those horrible
pictures", he remains one of the most challenging and controversial artists
of all time.
Pip Utton, acclaimed for his previous portrayal of Hitler in the play Adolf, now
adds Bacon to his list of performances.
He depicts a typical day for Bacon involving a morning painting and an afternoon
and evening drinking champagne and roaming the streets of Soho.
His lifestyle - full of alcohol, gambling and homosexual promiscuity - has
created an iconic enigma.
Bacon begins at 8pm and is suitable for audiences of 16-plus as it contains
swearing and sexual references. Tickets are £8.50, available from the box
office.
Thu, 24 Nov 2005
Bacon
Venue: Maltings Arts Theatre, The
Maltings, St Albans, Herts AL1 3HL.
Date: Thursday 24th November
Time: 8.00pm
Pip Utton Theatre Company
present...Bacon
"life is nothing but a series
of sensations. So one may as well try to make oneself extraordinary and
brilliant" - Francis Bacon.
This one man play focuses on the
disturbingly destructive life of Francis Bacon. Described by critics are the
greatest British painter since Turner and by Margaret Thatcher as "that
dreadful man who paints those horrible pictures", Francis Bacon remains
one of the most challenging and controversial artists of all time.
Tickets: £8.50

Junk
shock
After
Francis Bacon died, hundreds of unfinished works
were found littering a studio that resembled a
dump. Now the detritus is revealing the darkest
secrets of this intensely private artist.
Report
by Deirdre Fernand
The
Sunday Times Magazine
November 13, 2005
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|
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| 'People
think I live grandly, you know,' said one of the
richest painters of the 20th century, 'but in fact
I live in a dump.' The dump was 7 Reece Mews,
South Kensington, and the painter was the late
Francis Bacon, revered as one of the greatest
names in post-war British art.
The few
friends lucky enough to be invited home would
climb a steep, narrow staircase with the help of a
rope banister. At the top they would feel despair.
It was an unbelievable mess. There were discarded
baked-bean tins and empty bottles of Krug, paint
rollers, Dulux colour cards, brushes in pots,
cardboard boxes, passport photos, slashed
paintings, hundreds of scribbled-on photographs,
books and bits of cloth. He confided weakly to his
closest friend, John Edwards: 'I've been meaning
to tidy up in here for a long time... but never
seem to get round to it.' He would live and work
there profitably for over three decades without
ever clearing up.
In the
event the job was done for him - but in a way he
could never have foreseen. At a cost of £1.5m,
curators and archeologists moved the studio in its
entirety to Ireland, the land of his birth.
Bacon's fascinating chaos is now preserved for
ever. Painstakingly, they dismantled the room and
put it together again in Dublin's Hugh Lane
gallery. The whereabouts of every newspaper
cutting, photo, brush, daub and splodge was noted
and re-created. Never has such spontaneity been so
deliberately reproduced. One table in his studio
had so many items piled on it that it took eight
weeks to deconstruct and rebuild it in Dublin.
Even the dirt from the studio was carefully swept
up, labelled 'Bacon dust' and sent across the
Irish Sea. Such was the care involved, the Hugh
Lane team could surely have put Humpty Dumpty
together again.
The
gallery opened to the public four years ago and
quickly became a shrine. The French, who revere
Bacon as a master, come en masse, as do the
Italians and the Spanish. The exhibit has already
had over 100,000 visitors. Now, in a new book by
Margarita Cappock, head of collections at Hugh
Lane, the contents of the studio are finally
revealed in full. Cappock has spent more than six
years with Bacon, unpacking the crates as they
arrived. 'I often felt as if I was intruding, '
she says.
Weaving
a web of deceit about his work, Bacon never wanted
people to know what was going on behind the
scenes. Too bad, because Cappock takes us there.
'He
cultivated a myth of spontaneity,' she says. Bacon
always maintained that he drew very little,
preferring to paint directly onto canvas.
He
liked people to think he just sprang into action,
boom, on the canvas. But Cappock found
photographs, studies and sketches that prove
otherwise. Whether it was a likeness of a lover,
or a commissioned portrait of Mick Jagger, Bacon
sweated over his work. Like a detective matching
fingerprint to crime, Cappock has linked images
found in his studio with his finished paintings.
Not all
the items here pertain to his art. He left his
leather jacket, the one he was photographed in so
often, and his record collection. Not much
classical, but lots of Edith Piaf and Ella
Fitzgerald.
By the
time he died, leaving more than £11m to his
companion Edwards, he stood for bankable
blockbuster British art. His stark, bloody images
with distorted faces are instantly recognisable.
He
revelled in the money he made, quaffing Krug and
making stock with Château Pétrus. He would stuff
wads of banknotes into his canvases. Despite the
riches that came his way, Bacon never stopped
looking at the competition. Cappock has been given
a revealing letter that he wrote to the Irish
artist Louis le Brocquy, praising the work of
Damien Hirst. 'It was written just weeks before he
died, which shows how much he was still engaged
with his craft,' she says. He had visited the
Saatchi collection and had been impressed by
Hirst's dead cow. 'In the second part [of the
installation] they breed the flies which swarm
around the cows [sic] head,' he wrote, 'it really
works.' Bacon must have seen the connection: a
preoccupation with meat and carcasses is common to
both artists.
Bacon
discovered Reece Mews in 1961 and never left. 'For
some reason the moment I saw this place I knew
that I could work here,' he once said. Lovers came
and went (or died), but his relationship with his
studio was permanent: 'I feel at home in this
chaos because chaos suggests images to me. And in
any case I just love living in chaos.' He said the
mess was 'rather like my mind'. To visit Dublin
and peer at his studio is to appreciate the
creativity of a self-taught man. He didn't attend
life-drawing classes: he cut things out from
Picture Post. He didn't study sculpture: he looked
at books on Michelangelo. After he dispensed with
sitters early in his career, all his visual
references for his figurative painting came from
books, magazines and photographs - or 'compost',
as he once put it.
|
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|
|
|
| He
developed his own idiosyncratic techniques, using Marks &
Spencer corduroy trousers to add texture to the paint. Combs,
scrubbing brushes and brooms were also co-opted. He chose his
colours from Dulux cards. Sometimes he used an artist's palette,
but often he just used the door. He painted with knives, forks and
old socks. If dissatisfied with his work, he would destroy it. But
some of his earlier pictures are now destroying themselves, Bacon
having failed to achieve the right proportions of oil and
turpentine.
Born in Dublin in 1909,
Bacon had a troubled childhood. The son of Anglo-Irish gentry, he
was expected to like hunting, but he was asthmatic and horses made
him wheeze. The story goes that when he was discovered as a
teenager trying on his mother's underwear, his father threw him
out of the house. He arrived in Berlin in the late 1920s in time
for the last years of the Weimar Republic, then travelled to
Paris. It was here in 1927, he later recalled, that he saw
Picasso's work and resolved to become an artist.
Returning to London, he
toyed with furniture design (early Bacon work is highly
collectable) before painting the first of the many crucifixions
that would bring him fame. The French honoured him with a show in
1971, and in 1989 he became the world's most expensive living
artist when his triptych May-June 1973 sold at Sotheby's New York
for £3.53m.
His private life, with
a series of homosexual affairs, brought him fame of a different
kind. A politician, failing to recognise him at a formal
reception, once asked Bacon what he did. 'I'm an old poof,' he
replied. He was perhaps made to inhabit London's Soho, where he
hung out at the Colony Room drinking club. He rose at 6am, painted
until lunchtime and spent the rest of the day drinking. Yet the
next morning he was up again early in his studio. 'I am always
surprised when I wake up in the morning,' he said.
In Soho's bars and
clubs he cut an odd figure. He wore foundation, dyed his hair with
Kiwi shoe polish and brushed his teeth with Vim. One of his circle
described him as 'bringing home boys who were bad news'. Bacon
talked openly about his sexual tastes, including sadomasochism. An
early lover who indulged that preference was Peter Lacy, a former
fighter pilot.
Few of Bacon's
relationships lasted, some ending in tragedy. On the eve of his
Tate retrospective, he received a telegram telling him that Lacy
was dead. Then, nine years later, on the day before his exhibition
at the Grand Palais in Paris, he found his lover George Dyer
sitting dead on the lavatory, having overdosed on barbiturates.
Bacon had to carry on with the reception and dinners in his
honour. It wasn't until he met John Edwards, his closest and most
enduring companion, who died in 2003, that he found a semblance of
stability.
Bacon could see cruelty
everywhere, both in nature and in people. It had come from his
father, whom he despised, and from the lovers he chose. If there
is one idea that one takes away from contemplating his studio, it
is violence. Studies in pinks and reds, his canvases often depict
raw meat. They reveal tortured faces, their mouths gaping in
torment. His series of screaming popes, based on a painting by
Velazquez of Pope Innocent X, are some of his best-known images.
'Well, of course we are meat,' he once said. 'We are potential
carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's
surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal.'
Cappock and her team
unearthed more than 570 books, 200 magazines, 400 newspapers and
1,300 leaves torn from various sources. There are books about
diseases of the mouth and radiography. None of them make for happy
bedtime reading. He was preoccupied not just by death, but by
violent death. Cappock found magazines featuring the assassination
of Trotsky, showing the murder scene in Mexico City, and President
Kennedy's fateful motorcade through Dallas. There are plenty of
wartime photographs, including many of atrocities, and a great
deal of material about Hitler. But, for all the clipped articles,
there is no evidence that Trotsky, Kennedy or Hitler ever made it
to the canvas.
All is not unrelieved
gloom, however. As well as art books about his revered
Michelangelo and Ingres, Bacon left several illustrated weeklies,
including more than 20 issues of The Sunday Times Magazine. When
he appeared in our 100 Makers of the 20th Century, on June 15,
1969, he cut his entry out and pasted it on a board.
Though lionised early
on, Bacon faced constant criticism throughout his career. Why was
his vision so bleak? 'I am a painter of the 20th century,' was his
rejoinder.
'During my childhood I
lived through the revolutionary Irish movement, Sinn Fein and the
wars, Hiroshima, Hitler, the death camps, and daily violence that
I've experienced all my life. And after all that they want me to
paint bunches of pink flowers...'
There are no pink
flowers in 7 Reece Mews, or in its transplanted state in Dublin.
Just the chaos and the compost. And what might Bacon have made of
returning to the land of his birth like this? John Edwards said:
'I think it would have made him roar with laughter...'
Francis Bacon's
Studio, by Margarita Cappock, is published tomorrow by Merrell,
price £35. It is available from The Sunday Times BooksFirst for
£31.50, including p&p. tel: 0870 165 8585.
The Hugh Lane
gallery in Dublin is closed for refurbishment, and will reopen in
March 2006
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Iran Daily Thursday,
Nov 10, 2005
TEHRAN, Nov 9
- A portrait by the famous British artist Francis Bacon which was expected to be
returned to Iran for presentation in an exhibit at Tehran Contemporary Arts
Museum has instead been sent to the Museum of Modern Arts in Hamburg, said ISNA.
The portrait which was painted in 1972 and Tehran Contemporary Arts Museum had
given it on loan to Edinburgh Museum to be displayed in an exhibit of portraits
of Bacon until September 4, was sent to Germany instead of being returned to
Iran.
Tehran Contemporary Arts Museum had planned to present the portrait in Tehran to
replace three other paintings of Bacon which will not be displayed due to
ethical reasons.
Former head of
Tehran Contemporary Arts Museum Ali Reza Sami Azar said that the portrait was
given on loan to Edinburgh Museum as a trust and it is scheduled to be presented
in Hamburg Modern Arts Museum in November-December. Iran had asked for sending
it back to Tehran to be displayed in the exhibit, he added.
The head of
Tehran Contemporary Arts Museum Abdol Majid Hosseini said that the museum has
not received the portrait, despite an earlier call to Edinburgh Museum to return
it to Iran.
$23.8 Million Steel
Sculpture Sets Another Auction Record
Carol Vogel
The New York TimesB
Published: November 10, 2005
Prices for Francis Bacon's works have
soared this season. Last night Three Studies for Self-Portrait, a
1976 triptych being sold by Robert Shaye, the chairman and chief executive of
New Line Cinema, was estimated at $4 million to $6 million. Four bidders went
for the painting, which sold to Andrew Fabricant, the Manhattan dealer, for $5.1
million.
Record $22.4 million paid for a Rothko
|
By
Souren Melikian

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2005
|
Christie's sale this week of postwar
and contemporary art, which registered the highest total ever in the field at
$157.4 million, signalled the beginning of a new era. Three world records were
set at levels that would have seemed inconceivable until this week. All three
exceeded $10 million.
The third major record was
established for Francis Bacon, when the artist's Study for a Pope I,
dated 1961, climbed to $10 million. This exceeds by $1 million the previous
highest auction price paid for a Bacon - Portrait of George Dyer Staring
Into a Mirror was sold at Christie's in London on June 23 for the
equivalent of $9 million.
In the Flesh
by Mike Figgis
TATE ETC
Issue 4 Summer 2005

Francis
Bacon, Study of a Dog, 1952 © Tate |
 |
Artist
and film-maker Mike Figgis finds that a visit to Tate Britain is
"like walking through a collective unconscious that gives a sense of
intimacy that is unique". Then he discovers "incredible
beauty" in the work of Francis Bacon. . .
|
The
room at Tate Britain that stopped the film-maker in his tracks
I like galleries. I've spent much
of my life on the road and have always regarded them as places where I can
slow down and think and be quietly inspired. I've never really minded if the
art was considered good or bad. In fact, some of my favourite galleries have
been quite provincial with provincial art on display - landscapes and
portraits from the third division of the art world. I move freely in these
spaces, observing the people observing the art. I love this relationship
between the art objects and the people watching them. I marvel at how well
behaved and reverential the people are. How quietly everyone speaks and how
slowly they move, everything having a dream-like quality. Everyone walking
through a collective unconscious that gives a sense of intimacy that is
unique, different from being in a theatre or a cinema because one can still be
an individual in motion, not a collective. I look at the art as well as the
people, but for the most part I don't get so involved. The frames and the
formality of it all create a distance that is useful for my own thought
patterns.
Tate Britain in January was cool
and neutral. But in some of the rooms I was aware of a contradiction in
temperature. Warm air was gushing out of floor vents, while cooler air was
being dispensed from portable machines in the same space. It reminded me of
those department stores where you have to pass through very hot air to get in
or out and I always take a deep breath. I mention this because the temperature
of a gallery is a key factor - it has to be cool.
I enter Tate Britain with a brief:
I'm looking for a single work that can inspire me to write an article for this
magazine, so for once I am trying to focus not on the people, but on the
objects. It's difficult. I become fascinated by one of the security guards; by
the angle of his body and the way he is sitting and the fact that his shoes
are very large. I do a quick sketch of him and then realise that he knows I'm
sketching him, so I pretend to be sketching a painting.
And then I enter the Francis Bacon
room and everything changes. I stay in the room for a while. In fact, I have
no desire to leave at all, but I decide to go somewhere else so I can come
back again. I want to see what effect there will be entering a second time. I
visit the Turners, but become impatient and begin walking faster. I get to the
Bacon room and wait for a moment before going in. It is good to be back with
them. I feel a connection that for me is unique. It is impossible to keep the
images at a safe distance. I also feel very happy looking at them. There is
much talk of the violence in Bacon's work, but for myself I see incredible
beauty and a unique understanding of movement. They seem so modern; so much so
that it is hard to imagine what could be more modern than Francis Bacon. What
could be more modern than Beethoven's late quartets, or Eric Dolphy's 1964
album Out to Lunch? I particularly like Study of a Dog (1952) and I return
several times to this. I am reminded of a film I saw as a teenager,
Herostratus, by Don Levy. As far as I can find out Levy was an Australian who
died some years ago and made two films. In Herostratus, as I recall, there are
some Bacon-inspired images, some distortions of faces. I resolve to track down
the film and check this out. Maybe Tate should screen it (maybe it already
did).
Finally, I leave the room and go
directly to the book-store to buy some “research material”. I spend £200
on Bacon books and exit the gallery.
A display
of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Reg Butler is at Tate Britain and is part
of BP British Art Displays.
Mike Figgis is an artist and
film-maker based in London.
SOTHEBY'S
Contemporary Evening
Auction Date: SESSION
1 | 09 Nov 05 7:00 PM.
SALE:
N08129 Location:
New York

LOT 16

FRANCIS BACON
1909-1992
THREE STUDIES FOR SELF-PORTRAIT
4,000,000—6,000,000 USD
Lot Sold. Hammer
Price with Buyer's Premium: 5,168,000 USD
MEASUREMENTS
each: 14 x 12 in. 35.5 x 30.5 cm
DESCRIPTION
each signed, titled and dated 1976
on the reverse
oil on canvas in three parts
PROVENANCE
Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris
Roberto Shorto, London
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano
Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva
Private Collection, Europe
Christie's, London, June 30, 1999, lot 514
Acquired by the present owner from the above
EXHIBITED
Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, Francis
Bacon: Oeuvres Récentes, January 1977, cat. no. 3, n.p., illustrated in
color
London, Tate Gallery; Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie; Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Francis
Bacon, May 1985 - April 1986, cat. no. 100, n.p., illustrated in colour
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon:
Full Face and in Profile, London, 1983, pl. no. 106, n.p., illustrated in
color
Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Paris, 1987, pl. no. 95, n.p.,
illustrated in color
David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon,
London, 1988, fig. 109, p. 142, illustrated
John Russell, Francis Bacon, London, 1989 (revised edition), fig. 89,
p. 163, illustrated
Exh. Cat., London, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., Francis Bacon 1909 - 1992,
Small Portrait Studies, 1993, n.p., illustrated
Wieland Schmied, Francis Bacon, Commitment and Conflict, Munich, 1996,
fig. 115, p. 99, illustrated
CATALOGUE NOTE
When discussing his own work, Bacon
spontaneously turned to his portraits, as if these paintings came closest to
epitomizing his creative ambition. Capturing so concisely his distinctive lick
of hair and moonlike face, Three Studies for Self- Portrait belies a
masochistic pleasure and fascination with tracing his own features, and
corroborates Bacon’s view that, “one always has a greater involvement with
oneself than with anybody else.” (Bacon quoted in Milan Kundera and France
Borel, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London, 1996, p. 241)
Throughout his career, Bacon returned
to the portrait format steadfast in his belief that abstraction was merely
aesthetic, and that art devoid of human content lacked emotional resonance.
Along with the meticulously scrutinised faces of a handful of close friends,
lovers and acquaintances during the 1970s, it was Bacon’s own visage that
became the arena for his most ferocious and original investigations into
pictorial representation. Combining the sinuous paint handling, visceral
intensity and psychological depth of his mature oeuvre, the eye-catching
immediacy of this powerful triptych assaults the viewer with mesmerizing force.
Executed at the zenith of Bacon’s mature career, Three Studies for
Self-Portrait is arguably one of the most psychologically compelling and
physically engaging works of Bacon’s career; an iconic image of the artist who
is himself an icon of his age.
It is impossible to comprehend
Bacon’s portraiture and its organic mutations that simultaneously dismember
and complete the human image, without understanding something of his sources,
motivations and methods. In his work, Bacon sought to disturb not only the
viewer’s sense of self but also the conventions governing Western culture and
traditional artistic practice. Calling into question expectations of beauty,
narrative, chiaroscuro, likeness, the body and truth, Three Studies for
Self-Portrait puts forward important propositions about the premises of
figurative representation, setting in motion a process of narrative interaction
between the viewer and the work. Bacon’s oeuvre provides a self-conscious
intervention into the history of Western art, challenging, complicating and
undermining representation. Instead of the subject or reality, in Bacon’s
work, the process of looking itself is depicted, forcing the viewer to reassess
conventional illusion and our role in the viewer-object relationship. “The
eye, Bacon suggests, does not reveal but instead dissolves, does not produce but
instead destroys, does not make but instead unmakes the object of looking.”
(Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London, 1992, p.
13)
Bacon’s obsession with portraiture
stemmed from his desire to penetrate the innermost nature of human behaviour, to
lay bare the human psyche and expose our inner core. Resolutely unmoved by the
new forms of abstraction that were emanating from America, it was paradoxically
within the narrowly circumscribed parameters of portraiture that Bacon found the
most freedom to explore his creative voice to charter a wholly original
direction for painting. Traditionally viewed the most facile of the genres, for
Bacon portraiture was the most complex and in his own words “impossible”
genre. The crux of the challenge for Bacon was to convey the principal tenets of
portraiture – physiognomy, gesture and attitude, or what Bacon called
“fact” – in a non-illustrative way. Representational verisimilitude, what
he termed “illustration”, was as abhorrent to Bacon as it was to his
abstractionist peers. For him, painting had to expose something more brutal,
vital and irrational: “The living quality is what you have to get. In painting
a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the
pulsations of a person… The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has
to be caught is their emanation.” (Bacon quoted in David Sylvester, Looking
Back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 98)
In Three Studies for
Self-Portrait,
those pulsations and emanations, are enshrined in a rare painterly epiphany.
Charged with solitary reflection and existentialist angst following the demise
of his lover and muse George Dyer, the hidden depths of Bacon’s self are
exposed. Expressed in three brutally human images through a syntax of violently
flayed anatomical forms that leap from the canvas and assault the spectator, the
flurry of robust flesh-tones smeared onto the canvas are more akin to meat in a
butcher’s shop than human flesh. Bacon’s distorted features here eschew
physiognomic interpretation - not the autobiographical co-ordinates of an
individual’s life, but the physical sensation of living that life in all its
“joyous despair”.
While the intrinsic expressiveness of
the human head fascinated Bacon from the very outset of his career – his first
one-man show at the Hanover Gallery in 1949 showcased a series of anonymous Heads
– it is in his mature portraits that such expressivity is harnessed and
refined to an unprecedented degree. Just as the tragic moment in the
Shakespearean tragedies that so often inspired Bacon’s paintings is preceded
by a tranquil interlude, framed against a flat colour-plane background, Bacon is
here able to bestow a full intensity on the human drama. Unlike the artist’s
first self-portrait of 1956 in which the full-length figure is physically
located in a brooding, economically depicted abstract space, here his blurred,
contorted face is savagely rendered with broad, violent strokes and aggressively
pushed forward right up against the picture plane. Closely cropped, the focus
here is sharpened and the drama intensified.
This physical communication of
life’s flux is dynamically multiplied in the present work by the triptych
format which Bacon liked for its filmic, sequential quality, and the sense of
narrative and movement it gave his work. As each panel of the present work
illustrates, Bacon’s ability to condense multiple viewpoints and expressions
into a single image sees an improvised fusion of Futurist and Cubist dynamism
that animates the emotional complexity and inner vitality of the artist’s
self. The superimposed layering of distorted images maps the changing face of
the artist, as if captured on a long exposure film. Bacon mutilates his lower
jaw into a twisted animalistic blur that chews its way across the three panels.
Bacon is often quoted as saying: “I loathe my own face,” (David Sylvester, Brutality
of Fact, London, 1975, p. 129), and in the case of the present triptych, it
becomes an act of masochistic self-harm. Like a wasting disease eroding the
artist’s features, the paint around the nose is pulled, scraped and smeared
violently across the fragmented cheek bones and mouth. There is something almost
skeletal about the deep-set, cavernous eye-sockets and the whiteness of the
faces, perhaps gleaned from one of his most invaluable working sources, a book
on x-ray photography entitled Positioning in Radiography.
Unlike Lucian Freud, who spends hours
scrutinising his models in his studio with forensic precision, Bacon preferred
to paint in absentia. Painting by nature is an artifice and Bacon felt that
having the model before him suffocated spontaneous creative invention.
Furthermore, he saw what he did as injurious, a violent paroxysm on the human
figure that he did not want to practise before his subject. Bacon relied instead
on the combination of photographic material and memory to inform his image
production. Bacon often used photographic sources in his paintings, deriving
from it a readiness to accept the deformed or implausible image as true and as a
way of taking reality by surprise. The human figure caught in violent motion
does not look like a conventional figure, and the instantaneity of the medium
provided him with a new vocabulary of forms, neither fully human nor fully
abstract. Hence, in the present triptych, while we can identify the individual
with absolute certainty, the chaos of forms that make up the images are
abstracted distortions.
Bacon spoke admirably of Picasso,
especially his work of the 1920s and 1930s, in which he saw a syntax of
“organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of
it.” (Ibid., p. 10). There is a similar paradox at the very heart of
Bacon’s portraiture. In Three Studies for Self-Portrait the
inscrutable, amorphous forms of the head are inhuman, yet they bring us back
most vividly to the ethereal essence of humanity. They do not describe, they do
not illustrate; but they unlock an area of sensation that brings us back to the
“fact”, the brutal fact, in a violent immediate way that illustration could
never hope to achieve. The facts themselves are ambiguous and therefore this way
of recording form is brought nearer to the fact by its ambiguity. “I think if
you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of
distortion… What I want is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but
in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance.” (Hugh
Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York, 1986, pp. 39, 41)

Post-War and Contemporary Art
Evening Sale,
Sale 1573 November 08, 2005, New York, Rockefeller Plaza

Study for a Pope I 1961
Francis Bacon
Lot:
42
Creator:
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Lot Title:
Study for a Pope I
Estimate:
7,000,000 - 9,000,000 U.S. dollars
Sold: 10,096,000
U.S. dollars
Special Notice:
On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for
sale. This interest may include guaranteeing a minimum price to the consignor of
property or making an advance to the consignor which is secured solely by
consigned property. Such property is offered subject to a reserve. This is such
a lot.
Lot Description: Francis
Bacon (1909-1992)
Study for a Pope I
oil on canvas
59 7/8 x 46 7/8 in. (152 x 119 cm.)
Painted in 1961
Provenance: Marlborough
Fine Art Ltd., London
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery Inc, New York
Acquired by the present owner in 1966
Literature: Studio,
CLXIV, August 1962, p. 73 (illustrated).
Kunstwerk, XVII, August-September 1963, pp. 20-21.
J. Rothenstein and R. Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, pl. 186-I
(illustrated).
Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris, 1996, p. 259 (illustrated).
Exhibited: London,
Tate Gallery, Mannheim Kunsthalle; Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna; Zürich
Kunsthaus and Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon, May-July 1962, n.p.,
no. 84 (illustrated).
Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg, Grosse Orangerie, Zeichen des Glaubens, Geist
der Avantgarde: Religiöse Tendenzen in der Kunst des 20 Jahrhunderts, May-July
1980.
Mannheim Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon, Schreiender Papst, 1951, May 1980, pp. 7 and
42-43 (illustrated).
Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, 1993, pp. 63-65 and 146
(illustrated in colour).
Paris, Museé d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Passions Privées, Collections
particulieres d' art moderne et contemporain en France, December-March 1996, p.
441 and 447, no. 1 (illustrated in colour).
New Haven, The Yale Center for British Art; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts;
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,
Francis Bacon: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1999, p. 127, no. 38 (illustrated in
colour).
Basel, Foundation Beyeler, Francis Bacon und die Bildtradition, February-June
2004, p. 345, no. 8b (illustrated in colour).
Lot Notes: Study
for a Pope I is the first of six major images of a disease-ridden and tortured
pope that Bacon executed in April-May 1961, and which he exhibited for the first
time together as a series at his seminal retrospective at the Tate Gallery in
London in 1962. In this extraordinary group, Bacon seemed to show the slow
progressive descent of a man of pomp and circumstance into dementia and inner
hell.
Bacon's lasting obsession with portraying the Papal pontiff began with one of
his first mature paintings in 1949, entitled Head VI. In much the same way as
Andy Warhol's fascination with the legend of Marilyn Monroe prompted his best
pictures, so Bacon relentlessly returned to his famously harrowing depiction of
the most powerful figure in the church. The history of art is peppered with
examples of enthroned Popes. From Raphael to Titian, the greatest masters had
been commissioned to paint the likeness of successive Popes, but it was The
Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velasquez that had the most impact on Bacon.
Haunted by what he called "the perfection" of this image, Bacon made
it his own by recasting Velazquez's Pope as a victim of Twentieth century
neuroses, living on the edge of sanity and existence. It is no surprise that
Bacon stuck photographs of Goebbels and Himmler alongside a reproduction of
Velasquez's Pope on his studio wall. His Pope is a monster of our times,
perceived from an existentialist's standpoint; analyzed on the psychiatrist's
couch and caught in blurred freeze-frame by the photo-journalist's camera.
Bacon always avoided giving a precise explanation as to what it was that had
obsessed him about the Velasquez Pope, simply stating that he considered the
portrait "one of the greatest paintings in the world." He never wanted
to see the original painting in Rome, believing that it would have a negative
impact on his understanding of the work. Instead he painted from reproductions,
wishing to get behind the regal facade and to expose the cruel, corrupted power
and alienation that lies at its heart.
Bacon's paintings of Popes gained their historical status not only from the
grandeur of the time-honoured composition that they adhere to and the painterly
richness of their execution, but from their ability to defy and scandalize
tradition, and to vex and victimize the paternal aspect of the conventional
Papal portrait. Bacon used the very authority of Velasquez's portrait to
increase the iconoclastic potency of his own corrupted version, while elevating
himself as a successor to a distinguished tradition.
Velasquez's Pope Innocent X shows a cruel and suspicious man of God, smugly
aware of his position of supreme power and his capability for unmerciful
brutality. In accordance with convention, he is dressed in the attributes of his
office - the lavish silken robes, the regal throne, the papal ring and the state
document held so visible to convey his eminence as God's chosen representative
on earth.
Calling into question the sanity (and sanctity) of the church's supreme
potentate, Bacon substitutes Velasquez's official state portrait with a candid
glimpse of the pathetic man behind the aggrandized guise of his station. The
imposing throne now dwarfs and imprisons its incumbent. This Borges-like Pope,
shrunken and exposed in an unguarded second, has lost all efforts to maintain a
sense of dignity.
Just as Dorian Gray's corruption and depravity corroded his painted likeness in
Oscar Wilde's writings, so Bacon presents Innocent X physically disfigured by
his villainy. The Pope's excruciatingly contorted and bruised face has the
texture of flayed flesh, smeared into the grimace of insanity and loneliness.
Frustration, impotence, agony, all tear at his countenance. He is a madhouse
Napoleon whose robes are little more than fancy dress, a drag-queen with the
delusion of divinity.
This demented creature belongs in an institution and Bacon duly gives him his
own solitary isolation chamber. The artist transforms the enclosed pictorial
space created by Velasquez's baroque curtain into a dark and claustrophobically
vacuous cage. The piercing screams of Popes are sound-proofed.
Bacon's void has been seen to represent an existentialist's depiction of the
alienation of the human condition. In this way, Bacon's paintings mirror the
nihilistic viewpoint of his contemporaries Jean Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett.
American critic Donald Kuspit has commented that Bacon's figures are "sick
with death - not literal death, but rather the feeling of being nothing."
Bacon himself maintained, "We are born and we die, but in between we give
this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives."
Certainly Bacon's Popes show little control of themselves, let alone their own
destinies, and seem driven solely by their base urges. What better symbol for
existentialist thinking in a world ravaged by war and death than a Pope without
hope, bereft of belief and without the resource of a God to deliver him from his
perpetual suffering.
In this version of his celebrated Pope, Bacon remains relatively faithful to
Velasquez portrait. Having declared himself to be in awe of Velasquez's
"magnificent colour," Bacon matches the baroque hues of reds and
violets of the Spanish master. Instead of the muted purple that Bacon used on
earlier Popes, he now paints the robes their true scarlet. Similarly the inky
gloom of 1950s Popes is replaced by a haunting green - a colour which Bacon
would use often as the background for much of his best work in the early 1960s.

Post-War and Contemporary Art
Evening Sale,
Sale 1573 November 08, 2005, New York, Rockefeller Plaza

Two Figures 1961 Francis Bacon
Lot:
45
Creator:
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Lot Title: Two
Figures
Estimate: 2,500,000
- 4,000,000 U.S. dollars
Sold: 2,368,000
U.S. dollars
Pre-lot Text: Property
from the Collection of Edward R. Broida
Lot Description:
Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Two Figures
oil with sand on canvas
77 7/8 x 55 7/8 in. (197.1 x 141.3 cm.)
Painted in 1961.
Provenance:
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd.,
London
McCrory Corporation, New York
McKee Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1981
Literature:
S. Spender, Quandrum XI,
December 1961, p. 53 (illustrated).
J. Rothstein and R. Alley, Francis Bacon, London, 1964, p. 137, no. 184
(illustrated).
Exhibited:
London, The Tate Gallery;
Kunsthalle Mannheim; Turin, Galleria Civica d' Arte Moderna; Zürich Kunsthalle
and Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon, May 1962-February 1963,
p. 87 (illustrated).
Mannheim Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon, July-August 1962, p. 76
(illustrated).
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Art Institute of Chicago, Francis
Bacon, October 1963-January 1964, pp. 29 and 63, no. 53 (illustrated).
Orlando Museum of Art, The Edward R. Broida Collection: A Selection of Works,
March-June 1998, p. 34 (illustrated in color).
Lot Notes:
Painted in 1961, Two
Figures is filled with the signature torment that haunts Bacon's greatest
pictures. The figures of the title appear to be embroiled in some impossible and
endless struggle. Their representation as one mass in the canvas, within the
anonymous surroundings of a featureless room, renders them barely
distinguishable. They appear to be two parts of one entity, a yin and a yang
locked in battle. Some of the body parts and flesh-coloured elements could belong
to either. This is a tormented, psychotic and infernal struggle between two
facets of the same element, a battle for life. The forms of these figures appear
to be defining themselves through their fight and their exertions; like
Michelangelo's slave sculptures in the Accademia in Florence, they are fighting
their surroundings, writhing their way into flesh, struggling to become
incarnate.
In a sense, this appears to be a dark reimagining of the episode in which Peter
Pan meets Wendy, seeking his shadow from which he was separated. But where Peter
Pan has Wendy to reattach the fairly compliant shadow, here there appears to be
a form struggling to come into existence, to break through the veil and enter
our world. The fact that it is presented as black with the flesh tones of the
nearer figure thereby thrown into relief, enhances this shadow concept, and yet
the positions of the Two Figures are completely different from each
other, insisting just enough on their status as discrete entities.
The theme of fighting and wrestling recurs throughout Bacon's work. Sometimes
his source images came from the stop-motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge,
and indeed, there is something about the Two Figures that speaks of
different positions being taken by the same figure. There is a sense of
continuity, a flow of motion that increases the sense that these two entities
are linked at the most fundamental levels. Pugilism fascinated Bacon, and he
culled images from all manner of sources in order to focus his inspiration: 'I
don't only look at Muybridge photographs of the figure. I look all the time at
photographs in magazines of footballers and boxers and all that kind of
thing--especially boxers' (Bacon, quoted in David Sylvester, Looking back at
Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p.60). This interest in violence is central to
all of Bacon's most famous works. It is not only in the explicit fighting that
features in some of his paintings that we see it, but even in the distortions
and mutilations exacted upon his subjects.
Violence formed a constant backdrop to Bacon's life, be it in childhood
beatings, the threat of terrorism against the Anglo-Irish community of which his
family was such a prominent part, or even the First and Second World Wars.
During the Second, Bacon even painted in a studio in Cromwell Place whose roof
had been destroyed by bombing. In his personal life too, violence played a
constant role, not least in his turbulent relationship with his lover Peter
Lacy, who would die the year after Two Figures was painted:
"I have been accustomed to always living through forms of violence - which
may or may not have an effect upon one, but I think probably does. But this
violence of my life, the violence which I've lived amongst, I think it's
different to the violence in painting. When talking about the violence of paint,
it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to
remake the violence of reality itself" (Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, The
Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New York, 1990, p.81).
This distinction between the violence experienced and the darker, more elemental
violence of the human experience is telling. Bacon sought to create an artform
that was a jolt to the system. He wanted art to pass 'from the eye to the
stomach without going through the brain' (Bacon, quoted in F. Giacobetti,
'Exclusive Interview with Francis Bacon: I painted to be loved', The Art
Newspaper, June 2003).
His paintings evoke an uneasiness in the viewer that in itself prompts vivid
realizations about life. The strange, bared teeth of the skull-like face that
appears underneath a fleshy membrane in the front of Two Figures tells of
pain and torment. This is not just the pain of fighting, but the pain of living,
the greatest struggle of all. This picture is racked with a potent existential
angst, and the image of these distorted figures fighting in the centre is a
nightmarish invocation of the human scream, 'The whole coagulation of pain,
despair...' (quoted in D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon,
London, 1994, p.106).
The idea of subjecting the world to intense violence in order to reveal some
true, underlying essence or meaning was one that Bacon shared, to an extent,
with his friend William S. Burroughs, whom he saw a great deal in Tangiers
during this period. In a sense, the Cut-Up technique that Burroughs favoured,
taking words out of their original context and rearranging them to bring about
some new and more intense truth, was a parallel development to the smears and
distortions of Bacon's paintings which were often achieved by harnessing chance
in his oils. He made the most of the fortuitous splashes of paint or turpentine
that would suddenly reveal new ways of proceeding:
'One possibly gets better at manipulating the marks that have been made by
chance, which are the marks that one made quite outside reason. As one
conditions oneself by time and by working to what happens, one becomes more
alive to what the accident has proposed for one. And, in my case, I feel that
anything I've ever liked at all has been the result of an accident on which I
have been able to work. Because it has given me a disorientated vision of a fact
I was attempting to trap. And I could then begin to elaborate, and try and make
something out of a thing which was non-illustrational' (Bacon, 1966, quoted in
D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, New
York, 1990, p.53).
By 1961, when Two Figures was painted, Bacon's idiosyncratic paintings
were gaining more and more recognition. He had already had one small
retrospective at Nottingham University, but it was this year that the idea of a
retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London began to take form. The show, which
would take place the following year and in which Two Figures was
exhibited, was arguably the most important exhibition of Bacon's work to take
place during his lifetime. It was the first large-scale recognition of his
central importance to Modern art, both in Britain and internationally, and
sealed his fame and prominence in the art firmament. Its presence on Bacon's
horizon in 1961 reflected a general although short-lived sense of good fortune
and moving forward, for it was also that year that he began renting the famous
studio in 7 Reece Mews which, despite the coming and going of other homes and
studios in other parts of London and the world, would remain a constant until
his death.
Man in the mask
When Clare Shenstone unveiled a wall of stitched-cloth faces for
her student show, a passer by on the lookout for wine begged her for a 'head' of
his own. His name: Francis Bacon. Here, she tells Anthony Haden Guest about the
four years she spent painting and sewing Britain's greatest artist
The Observer, Sunday October 16, 2005


With her milk-white skin and
helmet of sheeny black hair, Clare Shenstone looks very much a Chelsea girl of
the Seventies. So it comes as no surprise to learn that a photograph of
Shenstone, aged 16, was used on the poster of Andy Warhol's movie of that name
(that was Chelsea, New York, but don't let's be pedantic). The Francis Bacon
portraits were a surprise, though. Not their existence, but their variety and
intensity. I can think of no artist who has been so possessed with - and by -
another artist as Clare Shenstone has been by Francis Bacon.
Sounds strange? Not as strange as it was.
Shenstone began making art
as a child. 'Drawing to me was like eating, sleeping, going to the toilet,'
she says. But it was a private passion. She showed her work only to her
architect father - he specialised in gothic churches - and never imagined it
could be a career. That was to be the stage. She had the talent. 'I won
awards,' she says. Soon she was landing the roles a pretty ingenue will get,
such as a landlady's daughter in Doctor in the House. She played Solveig in
Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Constansia in Man of the World. But she was also
painting. Large abstract canvases got her into Chelsea School of Art in 1976.
There was a tug of war between acting and art. Art won.
'I turned down a thing
Antonioni offered me,' she says. 'And I turned down Tony Richardson's I,
Claudius. I knew that if I did something like that I would be tied up in the
whole razzmatazz. A bit of me wanted that ... the theatre is fantastic. When
you are in a production, whether it's theatre, film or whatever, and it all
comes together, there's nothing like it. But nine times out of 10 you're not
playing the part you really want. The life is a compromise most of the time. I
am a very solitary person and making my own work had become the path I needed
to take. I was more and more obsessed with painting. So I had to say no to
these parts. I wasn't going to be tempted by anything!'
But Antonioni made art. 'I
would have loved to have done it, and I deeply regret that I didn't. Anyway, I
stopped.'
After Chelsea, she went to
the Royal College of Art.
'Then the Royal
Shakespeare asked me to do a production, Chekhov's Ivanov. I rehearsed through
the summer, then started at the Royal College. I was working there all day,
jumping on my bike and going to the Aldwych in the evening. It was the best
time of my life. I was doing my two loves.'
That was that for showbiz.
But Shenstone had learned how the human face transmits emotion and decided she
had to draw from life. She pressured the Royal College to let her draw from a
professional model, but this was even less modish in the late-Seventies than
it is today, and they only caved in in her third year. 'So I drew every
skeleton in the Natural History Museum. I was drawing the Assyrian friezes in
the British Museum.' Students got into London Zoo free, she found. 'I
particularly loved drawing ring-tailed lemurs.'
Then, in 1979, her art
took an unexpected turn. The Assyrian friezes made her want to make human
faces in relief. But in what material? Shenstone had spent some months at
Yale, looking at Oldenberg and Rauschenberg, and had become intrigued by their
use of fabric and sewing. The Egyptian rooms in the British Museum also came
to mind. 'There was a case with little mummified animals I adored. There was
one with two little birds and there was a kitten. They were bound in bandages
with the face sewn on top. The other thing that I was looking at was the Turin
Shroud. The idea of an image that was part of the cloth, not painted on top of
it, but actually existed inside of the material ... All of these were making
me feel that I could make a face out of cloth. I didn't know how I'd do it.
But I'd do it.'
She called her first cloth
head Janet. Why Janet?
'I finished it about 4am
in the morning. And when I say "finished" - the thing suddenly comes
alive. I remember going to the other end of the room and looking at it and
feeling concrete in my stomach. I recognised it. It was totally bizarre
because it was a lady I didn't know well. I still don't even know her surname.
My mother's twin sister worked in a dress shop and this lady was the
manageress. I thought, "Oh my God! It's Janet!"'
Janet has shortish, curly
brown hair, a prominent nose, an open mouth baring tongue and teeth, and she
seems to be laughing, but it might be a jeer or a scream. It is, I should add,
a risky piece of work. You won't see many cloth pieces in Chelsea,
Williamsburg, Cork Street, Hoxton or the other enclaves of High Art, and
artists who do work with it tend to use it as a 'degraded' material, like Mike
Kelley; or as a commentary on women's work, like Rosemarie Trockel; or as
both, like Tracey Emin. Janet was something else - unabashedly expressive, and
'craftsy'. Shenstone hung her and 11 other cloth heads along with some 60
drawings at her degree show at the Royal College in 1979.
'I had a side wall. I had
to fight for the space like a tiger. I had a fist fight with another student.
Because they think I'm skinny, and a little girl, and they can tread all over
me. No way!' She was there at nine every morning. On day three, a tutor rushed
over.
'He hands me this minute
little piece of paper with some numbers in pencil. He says, "You are to
ring this number at exactly 11 o'clock this morning." I said, "What
is this?" He said, "You had a very distinguished visitor." I
said, "Is this some kind of joke?" "No," he said.
"This is genuine. Just ring the number."'
Francis Bacon answered her
call.
'Francis arrived about
eight o'clock in the morning purely to collect some cases of wine, because he
got it cheap through the senior common room. He was waiting for them to bring
it down and looking around and he saw my wall of heads.'
Hence the number, the
call.
'I adore your work,' he
told her.
'I said, "My gosh!
Well, I think you're the best artist alive in the world today."
'He said, "Great
minds think alike! I love Janet. Will you let me buy it?"
'I said, "There's
nobody I would rather have a piece of my work." So Francis bought Janet.
I still hadn't met him.'
A couple of years later
Shenstone was offered a solo show at the inauguration of the Lyric Theatre,
Hammersmith. It was to be opened by the Queen.
'I completely panicked,'
she says. 'I rang Francis and said, "I need every piece of work I've ever
done. Can I borrow Janet?"
'He said, "Well, I'm
loath to part with it. But if you need it, have it. Anyway, she's got to be in
it."'
The show was up for six
weeks. Shenstone sent the piece back. Bacon telephoned.
'I am so thrilled to have
this piece of work back,' he told her. 'And I have been thinking, would you do
my portrait?'
A cloth head.
'I said, "Oh God! I
don't know whether I can."'
She had never made a
formal portrait. She would just play with cloth until things came out right.
'He said, "Will you
try?"
'I said, "OK, I'll
have a go. But I'm a bit scared."
'He said, "We'll just
see what happens."'
The first sitting was in
Bacon's studio at Reece Mews, South Kensington. 'I went round on my bike and
tied it up to a lamp-post. He peered down at me and said, "Come on
up." I went up these steps. It was like going up in a boat. He was
peering through this hole in the floor. This was the famous studio that's now
in D