For 25 years, it has languished in the vaults of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran. But a striking portrait by Francis Bacon, which is thought never previously to have gone on public display, is being rushed to Britain as a highlight of a new exhibition of the artist's works.

The deal with Iran was clinched after months of negotiations - although there is still a question mark over whether the work will arrive in time for this weekend's opening of Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

The show is the last scheduled to take place for four years after the Bacon estate decided on a moratorium on loans pending the centenary of the artist's birth in 2009.

Reclining Man with Sculpture, 1960-1961 was owned by the British collector, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, but was sold to the wife of the late Shah of Iran in the 1970s who founded her own gallery. But many of the Western paintings in her extraordinary collection ended up in storage when the fundamentalists seized power in 1979 and took control of what became known as the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Andrea Rose, director of visual arts at the British Council, spotted this portrait in the museum's vaults when she was visiting Iran two years ago.

The portrait is thought to be of Peter Lacy, a former RAF pilot who was Bacon's lover. They had a tense and violent relationship, although Lacy is often described as the love of Bacon's life.

By Anita Singh, PA Showbusiness Editor

The Hugh Lane Gallery on Parnell Square in Dublin will receive three unfinished paintings by Francis Bacon.

The gallery has put a lot of effort into installing and displaying Francis Bacon's studio, which was relocated from London seven years ago.

Deputy John O'Donoghue, Minister for the Arts says the conferring of an "approved body" status on the gallery helped it to acquire these important artworks.

Love is the Devil (Strand Releasing, 1998)
Written and Directed by John Maybury
Starring Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton
Unrated, 87 minutes

Director John Maybury recently enjoyed mainstream success with the surreal thriller, The Jacket. Back in 1998, however, he was testing the waters of independent queer cinema with Love is the Devil, a subversive bio-pic of British artist Francis Bacon.

Like many post-WWII artists, Bacon's collected work lays bare the horrors of the modern world. He was dubbed "the greatest English painter since Turner." Best known perhaps for his "Screaming Pope" series, modeled on a famous canvas by Valesquez, Bacon's finest work deconstructed the human figure. Spawned from his brush, his male nudes are often grotesquely distorted, almost eviscerated. A ghostly canvas, shown above, of two wrestlers is homoerotic with an undercurrent of violence.

Openly gay, Bacon was one of the great iconoclasts of the 1960s. He lorded over a pack of drunks and bohemians at the Colony tavern in Soho, buying drinks one minute, insulting his friends the next. Bacon had a taste for S&M sex with rough trade, usually taking the role of the masochist. He was in turns generous and abusive, driving one lover to commit suicide. Love is the Devil focuses on his stormy relationship with that man - George Dyer, a common thief who became his consort and his most frequent model.

The film opens with Dyer literally falling through a skylight into Bacon's studio - a chaotic mess that is accurately re-created onscreen. The walls are covered with splotches of paint, the floor littered with X-rays, medical pictures and crime photos. Bacon finds the clumsy burglar, attired in leather, and tells him to take off his clothes and come to bed and then he can help himself to whatever he wants. Dyer becomes the trick who won't leave. Bacon takes him under his wing, buying him expensive clothes and acting as his mentor. "Her ladyship might be going steady" declares one of the denizens at the Colony. Bacon introduces them to his new acolyte as "the twilight world of unhappy poufs" and "the concentration of camp."

Bacon was not a very nice man, and the film is unflinching in its portrait of the artist. He quickly tires of his new boytoy. Dyer is obsessive compulsive, suffers from nightmares, and drinks heavily. When Bacon finds Dyer passed out on the floor, he coldly places a compact mirror under the unconscious man's mouth to see if he is breathing and then walks away. Later, when Bacon receives the news that Dyer is on the roof of their hotel, threatening to jump, he snarls "What do you want me to do, give him a push?"

There are two compelling reasons to see this film. The first is a bravura performance by our own Sir Derek Jacobi as Bacon. Jacobi, best known for the title role in the BBC's I, Claudius, comes from the same generation of British stage actors as Sir Ian McKellen. (Jacobi also once played, on stage and then on film, Alan Turing, the mathematician who broke the Enigma code during WWII, helping the English win the war. Years later Turing was jailed for being homosexual and killed himself). In Love is the Devil, Jacobi literally becomes Bacon, inhabiting the role with the skill of a master thespian. He excels at playing a bitch but he still finds the painter's humanity beneath the surface. Amazingly, he is also a dead ringer for the late artist.

The second reason is the film's evocative visual style. Director Maybury was able to turn what normally would be a liability into a great asset. Because the filmmakers were depicting the painter's actual private life, the estate of Francis Bacon refused to allow any of his paintings to be used onscreen. Using great ingenuity, Maybury makes the film itself a Bacon. The artist's searing images become the film's visuals. Faces are distorted in smoked mirrors and beer glasses, naked lightbulbs dangle predominately in the frame, a reflection in a series of three bathroom mirrors recalls the painter's many triptychs. A nude and contorted acrobat perches on a diving board, symbolizing Dyer's final fall into the abyss. This, and the film's opening image - a key going into a lock - reproduce two panels from a famous triptych painted in memory of Dyer's death.

Those unfamiliar with Bacon's paintings will miss the many visual references though they would probably recognize the master's work immediately should they walk into an art gallery after seeing the film. . Love is the Devil is subtitled Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon and this is appropriate. This is not a conventional narrative, but a series of impressions; not unlike the countless self portraits the artist painted throughout his life. Love is the Devil is the antithesis of the usual Hollywood bio-pic where historical figures are usually de-gayed (like Charlton Heston as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy). This is a film that unfolds in layers and yields new discoveries on each subsequent viewing. Is it for everyone? Probably not, but adventurous filmgoers should find it spellbinding.

“This is the only time in Iran that a cultural manager has been supported by artists like this”
Sami Azar has been reinstated as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art following protests by artists

LONDON. Dr Ali Reza Sami Azar, who resigned from his post as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran in March as reported in this newspaper last month, has been re-instated in his post. In an exclusive interview with this paper, he talked about the circumstances behind this dramatic sequence of events.

With the recent swing in Iran’s political climate towards the conservatives who have, according to Dr Azar, “a restrictive attitude to art and culture”, he found himself under pressure from officials in the Ministry of Culture who “wanted to please the conservatives and were afraid of being sacked”. Exhibiting the work of Western artists and working with artists who do not follow a revolutionary or religious line is now regarded with disfavour, he says. Organising exhibitions with foreign institutions or doing shows with artists living abroad is, he says, becoming “impossible”. “We are in a conservative situation. We became conservatives by default”.

This plays havoc with the museum’s exhibition planning. “The problem is that with most of our projects we have to work a long time in advance. But now no one is prepared to support us looking ahead”. Dr Azar has had to cancel a planned Rebecca Horn show coming from Germany and is not able to make any commitments to other foreign shows. But he says his museum’s loan of a Francis Bacon painting to Edinburgh’s Museum of Modern Art later this year “will still happen”.

Cinema, music and theatre are, he says, “in even more jeopardy because of the red lines being drawn. I’ve worked for this community for six years or more and we’ve come a long way since I first started, when galleries had to get permission to do a show. They did not have experience of showing works abroad, there was no exchange of art and ideas with other countries and Iran was working in isolation. Now because people want to hold on to their jobs they’re more prepared to compromise. But I wasn’t prepared to do so, so I resigned”.

His resignation was accepted by the Ministry of Culture, where some officials were sympathetic to his position. “But then artists heard about it, and the next day they wrote letters of protest and demanded that the minister and deputy minister not accept my resignation. I want to say how much I appreciate the support of these artists, who come from all sides of the community. It was the way they united for the first time that persuaded me to take the job back. This is the only time in Iran that a cultural manager has been supported by artists like this”.

“Sami Azar’s international reputation rests not so much on what he’s achieved in terms of collaborations abroad, but on his remarkable track record in making exhibitions and encouraging artists in Iran in ways that the international community had assumed were impossible”, says Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain. “I think his success lies in his willingness to encourage international interest in the Tehran Museum’s collection. He quickly responded positively to my suggestion of lending Tate the Bacon triptych, despite the risk of controversy”. Asked whether other loans between the Tate and Tehran are being discussed, Deuchar says: “we’d like to pursue education-driven initiatives in a small number of Middle East countries, including Iran.”

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Seated Figure
signed, titled and dated 'Seated Figure 1979 Francis Bacon' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
77¾ x 58 1/8 in. (197.5 x 147.6 cm.)
Painted in 1979.

M. Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile, Barcelona, 1983, no. 125 (illustrated in colour).
Francis Bacon, London, 1985, p. 17 (illustrated).
W. Schmied, Francis Bacon, Commitment and Conflict, Munich, 1996, p. 199, no. 51 (illustrated in colour).
D. Sylvester, et al, Francis Bacon, Paris, 1996, p. 47, (illustrated).

New York, Marlborough Gallery, Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, April-June 1980, no. 8, pp. 22-23 (illustrated in colour).
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon Paintings, May-July 1985, no. 13, pp. 31, 30 & 43 (illustrated in colour).

Painted in 1979, Seated Figure is a searing representation of the human condition that shows the intense power of paintings from Bacon's mature period. Trapped in a rigid suit, encompassed by the strict geometry of the room, the mania of the mouth with its gnashing teeth distills the screaming anguish of Bacon's existentialism, and his belief in the agony and violence of life. The intensity of the sitter, the fearsome clenched teeth and their implication of pain and insanity engage the viewer directly. This is what Bacon described as art that passes directly '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).

Bacon's much-quoted minimalist take on the human condition, that 'You are born, you fuck, you die' (Bacon, quoted in Giacobetti, ibid, 2003) is made all the more powerful and poignant by the realisation that the silhouetted features of the Seated Figure resemble those of his former lover George Dyer. Bacon's art had often featured Dyer's image after his death in 1971, and his posthumous portraits comprise some of Bacon's strongest paintings. Seated Figure would be a particularly late recurrence of Dyer's features, coming almost a decade later.

Bacon was fascinated by the magnetic, tortured physicality of the East End petty criminal, and found it perfectly suited to his depictions of male figures. This tension came to flavour almost all Bacon's depictions of males for the rest of his career, and is again vividly evoked in the overtly gangster-ish men depicted in the related painting, Two Seated Figures. This underlying sense of violence, barely restrained in the Seated Figure by the rigid suit and sanitised surroundings, perfectly embodies Bacon's belief that life is a violent experience.

Bacon's art hinges around this existential anguish. In his world view, most human beliefs are simple distractions allowing us to hoodwink ourselves into believing that life means something. Bacon believed that Man resorts to concepts such as love, science and religion in order to lend life a framework, trying to fit it into a rational straightjacket. Seated Figure illustrates these trimmings in the surroundings and the suit, which are the accoutrements of the unstable and extraneous world of reason. To Bacon, humanity's insistence on a quest for reasons was a flawed and delusional, concealing the random and terrifying pointlessness of existence. The room and the suit in Seated Figure reflect this man-made attempt at control, but piercing it is the violent, thrashing and gnashing head, an irrepressible manifestation of the true essence of life. The solitude of the Seated Figure makes this intensely potent and personal. Where Two Seated Figures appears to show a pair of hoodlums in hats straight out of Capone's Chicago or the Krays' East End, the businessman in Seated Figure is emphatically alone, elevating him to the position of an everyman. Isolated on a dais, he appears to be the victimised subject of sadistic dentistry or medical tests. He is an existential guinea-pig, a martyr to life.

Bacon extends the contrast between the reality of life and Man's imposed thirst for reason extends to the composition of Seated Figure. The clinical sparseness of the surroundings, which accentuates the smeared flesh of the head while simple geometrical shapes, a few lines here and a few lines there, form the surrounding room. All this is in stark contrast to the distorted whirlpool of oils in the head. Bacon has left the opening behind the sitter as bare canvas, emphasising the painterly head, whose meat-like qualities, with the strange flesh-tones pierced by the mouth, are quintessentially Bacon. In order to capture life on canvas, even Bacon's painting process involved chance and violence. Any semblance of a literal depiction would be attacked, in order to create something that is not distractingly descriptive, but pulses with life.

Bacon almost never worked from life, but instead took images from his imagination and melded them with a wide array of assorted source pictures scattered throughout his studio. Bacon's reliance on source images was in part due to the discomfort that he felt in the presence of his sitters whenever he inflicted these violent distortions to their likenesses on the canvas. He felt that he was abusing his friends. This ability to work from photographs came to the fore especially in the increasing number of posthumous portraits that Bacon painted. At the same time, he liked to work from source images and photographs. These would not be used literally, but instead as springboards, as seedlings of ideas, little kernels of inspiration. When the contents of Bacon's litter-strewn studio were catalogued after his death, a John Deakin photograph of Dyer in profile was found that appears to haunt the dark silhouetted features of Seated Figure. Meanwhile, the pain-racked grin recalls the images of oral disease from a book entitled Diseases of the Mouth with hand-coloured plates that Bacon had bought in Paris in 1935. Images from this book in particular were to recur throughout Bacon's strongest paintings, as it was through these that he was best inspired to capture the anguish of existence, embodied in the 'cry'. This outpouring of existential angst, a universal scream for release, fills Seated Figure with what Bacon referred to as 'The whole coagulation of pain, despair...' (quoted in D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London, 1994, p.106).

PARIS, FRANCE.- Through about a hundred key works by Picasso and Bacon, this exhibition aims to show the fascination that Picasso’s art held for Francis Bacon from the early 1930s. The plastic, thematic and philosophic dimensions of this virtual dialogue are particularly clear in the “brutality of fact” which Bacon felt was the link between his work and Picasso’s art.

A study of his interaction with Picasso’s work is crucial to an understanding of Bacon’s oeuvre, especially its origins. Although the artist himself always explicitly acknowledged that his discovery of Picasso’s art prompted him to become an artist, and influenced the themes and styles he later explored, the relationship between the two has never been systematically analysed.

The exhibition covers the period which began with Bacon’s trip to Paris in 1927-1928; he first saw the Spanish master’s work at an exhibition of A Hundred Drawings by Picasso at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery (June-July 1927). Out of the blue, Bacon decided to start painting. 1933 to 1944 was a crucial period of experimentation which culminated in the triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) derived from Picasso’s Crucifixion, 1930, and the series of drawings that Picasso had done at Boisgeloup two years later.

The exhibition, which includes important loans from prestigious public and private collections from all over the world, has been designed around the major themes common to both artists.

It begins with an introductory room which brings several major testimonies to Bacon’s early work face-to-face with Picasso’s Surrealist drawings and paintings (1927-30), from which they were directly derived. (These testimonies are rare because Bacon destroyed almost all his youthful works.)

The main body of the exhibition is divided into several sections, each centred on a theme:

- Keys/Shadow: Picasso’s works Bathers with a Cabin, 1927-28, and The Studio, 1928, are shown opposite Bacon’s Triptych, In Memory of Georges Dyer.

- Crucifixion: here, grouped around Picasso’s Crucifixion, 1930, and his drawings from Boisgeloup, 1932, we see a small Crucifixion, 1933 and the second version of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1988, by Bacon.

- Nudes: Around Picasso’s Pan’s Flute, 1923, are gathered Bacon’s Triptych, 1972 (Tate Gallery), and Study from the Human Body, 1987. Similarly, Picasso’s Large Nude in a Red Chair, 1929, drawings for Women of Algiers After Delacroix, 1954, and his last Odalisques are hung opposite Bacon’s Lying Figure, 1969.

The presentation of this group of major works gives an idea of the importance of Picasso – a modern anti-model of the great master – in the puzzle of images in Francis Bacon’s “imaginary museum”.

Exhibition organised by the Réunion des musées nationaux and the Musée Picasso, Paris. Media partners: Le Figaroscope, i-télé, RTL, Le Point.

Great British Bacon

Francis Bacon, the subject of this week's Arena, was notorious for his wild lifestyle, but what of the work itself? Oliver Bennett assesses his place in British art

The Radio Times 19-25 March, 2005

Sinister part-formed figures writhe in a claustrophobic space, picked out in fiendish brushwork and backed by toxic colours - the paintings of Francis bacon repulse and attract in equal measure. They are as uncomfortable as they are compelling.

The same could be said of Bacon himself. Tempestuous, abrasive and extravagantly homosexual, his life has become indivisible from his art. The ex-chairman of the Arts Council, Lord Gowrie, called him the "greatest British painter since Turner", and this week's Arena delves yet further into the bacon legend.

Francis Bacon was born in 1909 into an Anglo-Irish family in Dublin, At the age of 16, wild and estranged from his parents, he left home and moves to London to become a drifter, then a designer of furniture. After stints in pre-war Berlin and Paris, he started to paint.

At first, critics and galleries did not know what to make of him. Was he a surrealist, an expressionist, or an unclassifiable eccentric? It took the post-war era for Bacon's reputation to flourish, and he became as well known for his social flamboyance as his discomfiting paintings. He came to embody bohemian London. drinking, painting and surviving on little sleep. This side of Bacon was captured in the 1998 biopic Love is the Devil, Arena reveals more of Bacon as emperor of the demimonde.

By the time Bacon died of a heart attack in 1992 he was considered one of the greatest painters in the world. But this barely starts to explain how Bacon managed in his art and his life to encapsulate a brute, truthful essence. To shed further light on his significance, I spoke to three people who know Bacon's work intimately.

Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary, Royal Academy "Bacon's Screaming Popes were taken from Velazsquez's painting of Pope Innocent X. The paintings make you shudder. They show that Bacon was an artist of huge cultural interests, and the most radical British painter of the last century. Actually, I think of him as an Anglo-Irish artist, somewhere in between Beckett and Joyce.

"Bacon was ruthless, self-centred, difficult, egocentric and highly intelligent. He was well known for being homosexual and never hid the fact, despite the era. He spent his money wildly, gambled, drank, was generous to his friends but never gave anything to charity, and was a dandy. He lived a life that I can only describe as being on the edge. He was a kind of Caravaggio figure.

Bacon originally started out as a designer and became an artist out of inner need. He didn't really care what others thought, and did what he had to do. He was a cynic and despised the work of his contemporaries. He identified with Van Gogh and, in a similar vein, Bacon's paintings send shivers down the spine."

Michael Peppiatt, author of the 1996 biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma and curator of of recent Bacon exhibitions in Spain and France "There's a picture of a screaming chimpanzee - a simian form with bared mouth - that goes to the core of Bacon's work. If you then look at Head 1 from 1948 and Head 2 from 1949, say, both are half-animal, half human, as if morphing between forms.

"There was no difference to Bacon. He knew humans were animals: primal and confrontational. You see it also in his figures of screaming popes. he always saw the animal in man, even in in the supreme pontiff. There's that ambiguity with Bacon: you don't know if you're witnessing a scream of pain, anger or release.

"I think probably that's why Bacon was such a great artist. He was an extremely cultured man, but the paintings themselves are like a punch in the face - raw, unexpected and exposed. But he hated anyone putting specific interpretations on his work. He felt it would rob him of his power.

"We were friends for bout 30 years. It as always something of a rollercoaster and you felt a certain insecurity. Controlling and manipulative, Bacon liked to be the centre of attention. But he was close to something powerful and mysterious, and he was a magnificent person. Perhaps there were many things unsaid about his life. After all, Bacon was thrown out of the house for wearing his mother's underwear when he was 15. He rocked with laughter when he told the story. But you wondered how he really felt about it."

Toby Treves, curator, Tate Britain "Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is the most important Bacon work in our collection. It's a kind of expressionist painting in the triptych format of a religious painting. But it isn't itself religious; actually it's a deeply atheist painting. The absence of the Christ figure is apparent, and Bacon said that it wasn't about Christian iconography; more the Three Furies (the avenging goddesses of Greek antiquity).

"When it was first exhibited in 1945, images were leaking out of the concentration camps, it resonated with the spirit of the time and was a bleak picture of humanity. Bacon's picture became part of the intellectual climate, characterised as 'existentialist'. While the image itself is somewhat repellent, in terms of colour and framing the painting is rather sumptuous. Bacon offers a picture of the world as a brutal place, but one that is also exhilarating. It chimes with his view of the world.

"Bacon painted in a rather loose way. He was self-taught and constantly experimenting. Bacon was hugely important in showing the ambitions of British art, but he transcended national identity. He was a world artist."

Screaming popes, tormented faces - there's a lot of unexplained anguish in Francis bacon's paintings, says Philip Hoare. Can new revelations about his torturous relationships shed any light on the subject?

Sometime in the mid-1980s in South Kensington, I saw Francis Bacon hoping on the back of a bus. I stared in recognition, nonplussed at the apparition, in the flesh, of Britain's most famous living artist, riding on public transport. I suppose I must have gazed too long, for his eyes stared back, out of a high-coloured, slapped cherub's face. Was he angry? Or was it a come-on? I'm still not quite sure. But in retrospect, that brief encounter seems symbolic of Bacon's life: so public a figure, so private a person, as paradoxical as his art.

Francis Bacon was as recognisable as his paintings His petulant yet impassive features, his aristocratic rough-trade dress sense and youthful figure were memorably described in Cecil Beaton's 1960 diary as "incredibly lithe for a person of his age and occupation, muscular and solid. I was impressed with his 'principal boy' legs, tightly encased in black jeans, with high boots. Not a pound of extra flesh anywhere." As the art critic Martin Harrison observes, Bacon was part Edwardian aristocrat, part teddy boy: "Even in his 80s it was difficult to predict whether he would attend a function wearing a leather coat or a hand-tailored Savile Row suit." And Michael Wishart, the artist, marvelled at Bacon's adept adaptability when it came to make-up: "He applied the basic foundation with lightning dexterity born of long practice. He was more careful, even sparing, with the rouge. For his hair he had a selection of Kiwi boot polishes in various browns. He blended them on the back of his hand, selecting a tone appropriate for the particular evening, and brushed them into his abundant hair with a shoe brush. He polished his teeth with Vim." It was as if the artist were making up to enter his own drama.

Bacon's appearance was a counterpoint to the controlled violence of his works; where his paintings reflect an apocalyptic century, his painted face seemed to give much less away. Only now, 13 years after his death in a Madrid hospital, is the private life of the artist becoming public as two new studies finally bring us face to face with the real Francis Bacon. The first of these, a new book called Francis Bacon in Camera by Martin Harrison, focuses on the source material that inspired the painter's work - from the 19th-century photographs of Edweard Muybridge to Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin - and illustrates how his use of such material was startlingly modern. What also comes as a revelation is the proof of how much Bacon drew on the popular culture of his time.

But the second study, a new BBC film called Francis Bacon's arena made by the Bafta-award-winning team of Adam Low and film editor Sean Mackenzie, goes even further in in its biographical reach. What the film uncovers is remarkable new evidence about the degrees to which Bacon's series of tempestuous relationships from the 1930s to the 1980s steered his art.

Famously, Bacon rejected interpretations of his work. "I am a direct and simple painter," we see him tell the camera, as though confiding in the viewer, over the rim of an ever-present glass of wine. But this was a deceptive statement, and it hides the truth about his complex emotional life. And yet, for all the high-octane manner in which Bacon lived, his bohemian addictions and sometimes dangerous loves, he survived most of the 20th century surprisingly intact, albeit a little beaten. In one telling moment in the Arena film, bacon's surviving sister Ianthe protests that, contrary to the impression his lifestyle might give, her brother was actually a "very, very collected" man. But this raises more questions than it answers. Did Bacon use as much as he was used?

Bacon's relationship with the dashingly handsome, former fighter pilot Peter Lacy was the most destructive in his life. Initially, things went well. they sojourned in Tangiers "a safe naughty haven", as Paul Danquah describes it, and home to the likes of Paul and Jane Bowles, and later William Burroughs and Joe Orton. But soon Lacy revealed his sadistic side. Danquah alludes to bacon's love of "the excitement of extremes - both the punished and punisher", yet, as both Low's film and Harrison's book reveal, it was Lacy's extreme behaviour that would overwhelm them both.

It was as if the violence enacted in Bacon's art was being replicated in his personal life. Or was it the other way around? Bacon's paintings recorded this self-destruction in overtly sadistic images, yet disguised their models to all but the cognocenti, with titles like Study for a Portrait of PL No.2. He and Lacy lived together in a Berkshire village, drinking all day in the pub next door - the prosaically named The Jolly Farmer - then fighting through the night. bacon was "physically obsessed" with Lacy, but it was Lacy's delight to debase his lover, at one point inviting Bacon to give up painting and live "in a corner of my cottage on straw. You can eat and shit there".

In an attempt to escape this terrifying scenario, bacon would retreat to the Imperial Hotel near by Henley-on-Thames. Here he struck up other fleeting, anonymous relationships - commemorated by paintings such as the Man in Blue series (1953-4). Such inconstancy melded with the gypsy-like nature of his life to shape Bacon's pessimism: "We're born and we die and in between we give this purposeless existence meaning by our drives." "I have a feeling of mortality all the time," he also said, "Because, if life excites you, its opposite, like a shadow, death, must excite you...You're aware of it like the turn of a coin between life and death...I'm always surprised when I wake up in the morning." What he could not control in his dramatic private life he tried to capture within the confines of his canvases.

Bacon's relationships had come full circle. In 1974, he met John Edwards, to whom he became a father figure. The pair were introduced by Muriel Belcher, the enchantingly foul-mouthed maitresse of the Colony room. Although he said "You don't want an old boiler like me", Bacon seduced Edwards, taking him gambling in casinos and cavorting in nightclubs. Edwards was dyslexic and illiterate - but as one friend remarked cattily, "He learnt to write his name quickly enough, as soon as he got a chequebook."

In his biography of the painter, Andrew Sinclair writes that their relationship echoed "the Pinteresque world of the play The Homecoming, where a refined menace pervades throughout". In the film, Edwards appears as an affable East-Ender, seen sitting on the arm of Bacon's sofa and looking a little like a Cockney John Travolta. Bacon steered and directed his protégé, forbidding him from wearing gold jewellery because it made him look cheap. He also moved in with Edwards' family, in a barricaded Suffolk house with signs declaring "GUARD DOGS - WARNING", while at dinner his friends found themselves seated next to convicted burglars.

Edwards would duly inherit Bacon's £11,370,244 estate and later donated the Reece Mews studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where its chaotic interior was painstakingly reconstructed. But by the time the painter met a handsome Spanish banker in the late 1980s, Edwards and Bacon had long been living separate sexual lives. Bacon pursued his new affair with characteristic passion, painting portraits of himself and José. It was fitting that this final love should take Bacon to Madrid, home of Velasquez, whom he venerated. And he he died, having suffered a respiratory crisis, a result of his life long asthma, on 28 April 1992. He was nursed on his death bed by a white-clad nun, an earthly representative of the religious certainties which he has raged against in life. And even in that unquiet end in a foreign land, I like to imagine that Francis Bacon still wrestled with dreams of his dark angels.

Arena - Francis Bacon's Arena: BBC 2, Saturday, 9pm. Francis Bacon in Camera: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, by Martin Harrison, is published by Thames & Hudson, £35.

Francis Bacon's notorious penchant for alcohol, his addiction to roulette and chaotic private life made him a scandalously decadent figure. But in his lifetime he created some of the greatest paintings in the history of Western art. His complex and disturbing canvases are instantly recognisable and enormously valuable. Yet Bacon, born in Ireland, only began painting in his late thirties after a career as a furniture designer. Bacon was probably the last Edwardian dandy and was thrust, as a teenager, into the fleshpots of decadent Berlin and the café scene in Paris. By the Fifties, he had become England's first rebel superstar, the painter of Screaming Popes and countless images of apocalyptic horror; with a vitriolic wit, a habit of guzzling Champagne and an addiction to the roulette wheel. However, despite his nihilistic and furious reputation, he spent much of his life in a series of committed relationships with six very different men. Arena tells the story of these relationships, including the tragic tale of his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of Bacon's great Paris retrospective in 1971. The film also includes images and recordings of all the men, which have never been broadcast before.

BBC Arena is the only broadcaster since Bacon's death in 1992 to be granted exclusive permission to make a film about his life and work. This definitive account of a true genius features unlimited access to bacon's work, previously unseen archive footage and contributions from many people who have never before been interviewed, including Bacon's sister Ianthe, his doctor Paul Brass, relatives of his lovers, critics, cllectors and many more. Music for the film has been specially composed by Brian Eno.

Adam Low began his career at the BBC as an assistant producer on Single Documentaries and Studio Book Programmes before directing his own films for the following series: Writers and Places, Omnibus, Global Report and Arena. He went on to specialize in art documentaries such as The Definitive Dali in 1986. Since leaving the BBC in 1991, he has worked as a freelance director / producer. Low has previously made a two part BBC 2 film The Private Dirk Bogarde and The Life and Times of Count Luchino Visconti for BBC's Arena in 2002.

Picasso, Francis Bacon's inspiration and his imaginary rival, the predecessor he sought to overthrow, said that a painting was the sum of its destructions. Those destructions were stylistic, the products of a dislocating, alienating vision. Picasso meant that the final image effaced the false starts that went into its making; he was also admitting that Cubism or Surrealism destroyed the familiar world, wrenching objects out of shape or subjecting them, like Dali's molten watch, to an entropic heat death.

For Bacon, the destructiveness was more dangerously literal. A painting by him resembled a massacre. His 1933 Crucifixion sees Golgotha as a slaughterhouse, an abattoir of excruciating pain. A painting completed in 1946, described by Martin Harrison as an 'unholy Trinity', was identified by Bacon as 'my butcher's shop picture', since it suspends bleeding carcasses and slabs of meat around an altar on which a predatory demon is enthroned. Bacon viewed the world as a 'lump of compost' and humanity as a mess of stewing, putrefying meat; the ordure left stains on the surface of his work.

Another study for a crucifixion is set in a bedroom, where a twisted figure writhes on a striped mattress and sprays the sheets with blood. The image may refer to one of the strenuous bouts of sado-masochistic sex that Bacon relished, but it could equally well be a scene in a maternity ward. As he once said: 'The very fact of being born is a very ferocious thing.' The trauma of our squealing arrival in the world was acted out all over again, for him, whenever he gave birth to a painting.

He acknowledged the brutality of his methods. When painting portraits, he worked from photographs, not live models, because he did not want to practise before his subjects 'the injury that I do to them in my work'. Cecil Beaton reacted with shrill horror when he saw what Bacon had done to his face: the portrait looked as if his head had been chopped off and boiled. Bacon, repentant, burnt the canvas.

Michael Sadler was less querulously vain than Beaton and when he commissioned a portrait in 1933 he sent an X-ray of his skull as a model. Bacon admired photographs that could look through the skin and expose the skeleton and our squashy organs. X was also for him a mark of incrimination: he probably knew and used a book called X Marks the Spot , which documented a Mob vendetta in Chicago.

Among Bacon's working documents painstakingly retrieved and analysed by Martin Harrison is an advertisement for Silk Cut cigarettes, ripped from a magazine and preserved among the ephemera in his studio. A ruffled purple theatrical curtain - a metonym, meant to turn the fags into stars - may have reminded him of the striped veils he had painted over his versions of portraits by Titian and Velázquez. But he might also have mordantly enjoyed the lines of print at the bottom of the image, advising that smoking can cause lung cancer, bronchitis and an infirmary's worth of other ailments. Paintings by Bacon needed to be accompanied by similar health warnings.

Perhaps because his work drew on neurotic compulsions and deviant fantasies, he covered up its origins. Late in life, he was asked to bequeath to an archive the photographs, newspaper clippings and art books that littered his studio. He promptly swept up his sources, bundled them into two bin bags and hurled them on to a bonfire. He liked to pretend that his monstrous births came into the world fully formed and claimed with defensive bravado that he couldn't draw. Harrison, patiently assembling his sketches, reveals that drawing was, as Bacon, when caught out, admitted, his 'secret vice'.

What could be vicious about the humdrum practice of drawing? The blushing phrase alerts Harrison to other concealments and sends him on a deductive route that tracks down further evidence of secret vices. Bacon indignantly denied that the Popes he copied from Velázquez were screaming and said they could be yawning or sneezing.

Yet Harrison, flicking through his pictorial quotations, finds that he constantly alludes to the wailing of the victims in Poussin's Massacre of the Innocents and to the screeched protest of the nurse shot by the soldiers in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Cries are inaudible in a painting and in a silent film. Bacon, as Harrison guesses, 'may have intended the stifled screams to suggest onanistic ecstasy, a private and secret act'.

Many of Harrison's discoveries concern the photographs that Bacon hoarded and recycled in his paintings. He admired the bleary, flash-lit documentation of bullet-riddled gangsters and slashed women in Weegee's book Naked City . He also kept a magazine article on the Paris photographs of Atget, who, as Walter Benjamin put it, could make the most innocuous, innocently empty street look like the scene of a crime.

Although Bacon used photos when making portraits, he flinched from taking them himself and commissioned accomplices to do so for him. The reason for his squeamishness could have been his suspicion that photography was a murderous, mortifying art. Old photographs fascinated him, he said, because everyone in them is dead.

He also liked the damage the prints had suffered: their cuts, scratches and blotches. Did the silvery photographic emulsion evoke the slime that represented the soiling trace of corporeal life? Wyndham Lewis likened his pigment to mucus. Bacon explained that he wanted to make his paintings 'look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail', and praised Cimabue's Crucifixion because it reminded him of 'a worm crawling down the cross'. The layered debris in his studio and its fuzzy coating of dirt gave him a similarly morbid pleasure. Dust, he said, was an eternal substance; the room he worked in was already a crypt, with decomposition visibly under way.

Sorting through this grubby gore, Harrison has produced an opulent, paradoxically beautiful book. Creation, for Bacon, involved a destructive mayhem; criticism, as deftly practised by Martin Harrison, who restores to visibility the sources Bacon suppressed, is an art of reconstruction.

An exploration of the interplay between photography and painting in the work of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon famously found inspiration in photographs, film stills, and mass-media imagery. This book draws on a broad range of source images and documents, many hitherto unknown, to reveal how these media informed some of Bacon’s most important paintings and helped to trigger significant turning points in his stylistic development.

Martin Harrison locates Bacon’s work in a tradition of artists making use of mechanical reproductions, including Picasso and Walter Sickert. Harrison also reviews Bacon’s painting in the context of key influences: film directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and John Deakin, and masters such as Velázquez, Poussin, and Rodin. In addition, Bacon’s work is considered in the context of his contemporaries, including Lucian Freud, Mark Rothko, Graham Sutherland, and Patrick Heron.

Analysis of elements of Bacon’s biography and psychology leads to some startling and original insights into the man and the unique iconography of his art. With the aid of over 260 superb illustrations and the advantage of privileged access to unpublished material from the artist’s archives, this is a book that addresses important questions about Bacon’s practice and that, in reassessing key paintings, sheds new light on his life and work.

Martin Harrison is an authority on postwar photography and art whose previous books include Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties and Young Meteors: British Photojournalism 1957–1965.

In Camera, Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting (Thames & Hudson, £35) by Martin Harrison, published on 7th March 2005.

For Francis Bacon the camera wasn't a threat to painterly creation but the perfect means to an end. A fascinating new book reveals how the artist used the 'significant falsehood' of photography to expose brutality even those he loved.

In Camera, Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting (Thames & Hudson, £35) by Martin Harrison, published on 7 March. An 'Arena' programme on Francis Bacon will be broadcast on 19 March at 9pm on BBC 2.

Francis Bacon: lost and found: Martin Harrison analyses the information that has recently come to light about paintings that Bacon destroyed, mutilated or radically altered. What do such incidents reveal about Bacon's attitude to his art?

When Francis Bacon died, in 1992, the floor of his studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington, was left in the state that had already become sedimented in the Bacon mythology, strewn with tattered magazines and books, and creased, torn and paint-spattered photographs (Fig. 1). Painstakingly excavated and transferred in its entirety in 1998 to the Hugh Lane Gallery in the city of Bacon's birth, Dublin, the studio is now preserved for study, and the cataloguing of its contents is enabling some of the obfuscation surrounding the relationship between Bacon's source material and his painting procedures to be penetrated.

Elsewhere, further previously unidentified artefacts continue to emerge. Among these documents is a handful of photographs that recorded, sometimes incidentally, paintings that Bacon subsequently either altered or destroyed: these, too, are proving to be invaluable in illuminating certain unresearched aspects of Bacon's practice.

Six months after Bacon's death, his paintings were hung together with Picasso's Crucifixion (1930), and some of the Crucifixion drawings Picasso made in Boisgeloup in 1932, in the exhibition 'The Body on the Cross' at the Muse Picasso, Paris. Intrigued and delighted at the prospect of sharing a space with the artist who, more than sixty years earlier, had inspired him to take up painting, Bacon agreed to be interviewed by Jean Clair for the catalogue of the exhibition. He told Clair of the profound impression made on him in 1971 when Valerie Eliot published her late husband's The Waste Land alongside the extensive corrections and deletions made by Ezra Pound to the original text. Although Bacon remained staunchly independent of any established literary or artistic circles, next to Picasso the poetry of Aeschylus and of T.S. Eliot inspired more of his paintings than the work of any artist. 'Pound made it ten times better', (1) commented Bacon on the excisions and alterations to Eliot's poem; he frequently reiterated his regret at not having a comparable guru figure to tell him what to discard, although he admitted that: 'Of course, it's true there are a very, very few people who could help me by their criticism'. (2)

It is hard to imagine Bacon being even remotely receptive to such trenchant advice, however distinguished its author. On the other hand, he was a ruthless self-editor, at least as hard on his own efforts as on those of his contemporaries. He was as scathing in condemnation of his widely-admired 'Popes', for example, as he was about the paintings of Jackson Pollock ('that dribbling of paint all over the canvas just looked like old lace') or Mark Rothko ('rather dismal variations on colour'); (3) even when praising the masters he most admired - Velazquez, Rembrandt, Seurat - he seldom omitted to qualify his approbation.

Dissatisfaction with his own paintings usually resulted in their destruction. Indeed, he was so ruthless that from the first fifteen years of his career, between 1929 and 1944, only fourteen paintings and drawings survive. Subsequently, as Bacon came under increased pressure from his dealers to fulfil scheduled exhibition dates, it is probable that he jettisoned proportionately less of his work, but even towards the end of his life either he, or more usually a friend, maintained the ritual slashing with a knife-blade of rejected canvases.

Today, notwithstanding these depredations, Bacon's oeuvre comprises nearly six hundred paintings - sufficient, it might be thought, to represent a great artist. How, then, could the urge be justified to resurrect works that Bacon presumably wished to remain buried? Firstly, Bacon, unlike most artists, did not make preliminary drawings, although, consistent with the stimulation he found in literature, he frequently compiled hand-written lists of ideas for paintings. Apart from his mass-media source imagery and a handful of vigorous but fairly schematic compositional sketches dating from around 1960, (4) there is scant surviving material that might elucidate the evolution of his paintings. Secondly, even Bacon himself regretted having destroyed certain paintings, in particular one of his earliest 'Popes', Study after Velazquez (1950). He had intended to send the painting to the Festival of Britain exhibition '60 Paintings for 51', but withdrew it and - or so he misremembered later - destroyed it. Included in John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley's 1964 catalogue raisonne of Bacon as a 'destroyed picture', it was in fact removed from its stretcher and stored away at the Chelsea artists' suppliers Bacon used. It was not until 1996 that it was rediscovered.

David Sylvester both confirmed the genuineness of Bacon's expressions of regret at losing the painting, and gave his own opinion that it was the 'finest "Pope" ever', (5) Bacon's dealers, Hanover Gallery and Marlborough Fine Art, arranged as a matter of course for his completed paintings to be photographed, but those he abandoned were, understandably, seldom recorded. Study after Velazquez was an exception, no doubt reflecting Bacon's ambivalence about the painting. But fortunately, a few of the definitely lost works were captured, partly fortuitously, by the camera, and in somewhat different circumstances.

In 1962, the first of two Tate retrospectives held in Bacon's lifetime substantially raised his public profile. Gregarious as a mainly nocturnal drinker and gambler, by day he was reclusive and solitary as a painter. There was an increasing demand for him to be photographed and filmed in his studio, but he always took the precaution of turning the painted side of his canvases away from the lens. Among his circle of friends, however, were several accomplished photographers, notably his fellow Soho-ites Dan Farson and John Deakin. After 1962 Bacon rarely painted from life. Instead he commissioned John Deakin to document the friends who became the models for many of his portraits during the next two decades - Lucian Freud, George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes and Isabel Rawsthorne. Probably operating under Bacon's direction, Deakin used a Rolleiflex rollfilm camera attached to a tripod. Other photographers had evolved a modus operandi with hand-held 35mm cameras that was more rapid, informal and relatively non-intrusive: having been photographed by the doyen of this technique, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and photojournalists such as Larry Burrows, Bacon was accustomed to the quick fire of the miniature format camera shutter. The wildlife photographer Peter Beard, whom Bacon met in 1966, became a close friend and the subject of more than twenty of Bacon's paintings between 1975 and 1980. He provided most of the self-portrait photographs of his head from which Bacon painted his portraits, and he in turn photographed Bacon constantly.

On his frequent visits to London, Beard's diaristic camera became a natural accompaniment to their socialising, and evidently Bacon was relaxed enough to allow Beard to continue photographing while his paintings remained visible. At least two of the paintings that can be observed in the backgrounds of Beard's photographs were, it transpired, eventually destroyed by Bacon. Beard's black and white images are, therefore, the sole visual evidence of two compelling, but in several respects atypical, paintings.

The first of these paintings, George Dyer with camera, is visible in Figure 5. Painted c. 1969, it depicts Dyer, Bacon's lover and muse, apparently metamorphosing into an organic version of a bulky, primitive, large-format bellows camera which is supported by a rather perfunctory tripod. This early example of Bacon's referencing of photographic equipment was an overt indication that photography was, by this time, established at the core of his practice; in the right-hand panel of the triptych Studies from the human body (1970), Bacon depicted himself as the voyeuristic operator of elaborate photographic paraphernalia. The attitude of the squatting figure in George Dyer with camera was almost certainly developed from the conflation of two (or more) of John Deakin's photographs of George Dyer: a profile head-shot taken in Soho (Fig. 3) and a seated, cross-legged semi-nude done in the Reece Mews studio (Fig. 4). A striking variant of this pose can be seen in the left-hand panel of Two figures lying on a bed with attendants (1968), the painting recently acquired by Tate Britain on extended loan from Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Bacon continued to explore this configuration until at least 1988, latterly transposing John Edwards's head for Dyer's, with Edwards's portrait identified as the nominal subject. In most of the paintings in which Dyer's identity is reliably established he is represented as naked, child-like and vulnerable; yet despite him wearing a collar and tie in George Dyer with camera (a typically Baconic 'reversal' tactic) the treatment was, on this occasion, among the most visceral and animalistic of the series based on this pose, and the paint is applied with a bravura violence and spontaneity in slashing, sweeping brushstrokes.

Since Bacon is unlikely to have been dissatisfied with the dynamic painting of the figure in George Dyer with camera, it could, therefore, be conjectured that there was a formal aspect of the painting that, in his judgment, had failed to coalesce. Given that the painting appears to have been conceived in his standard 78 x 58 inches (198.1 x 142.3 cm) format, and considering the shape and position of the arcing 'board' device on which the figure was supported, it is likely to have been intended as the left-hand panel of a planned triptych; it is comparable with the two outer wings of Triptych in memory of George Dyer (1971), which develops similar imagery and may represent the further development of a related composition, or alternatively Bacon's resolution of the original idea of 1969.

By comparison, The last man on earth (c. 1974), a painting recorded in several of Peter Beard's photographs of Bacon moving around the studio (Fig. 6), appears to have been both formally and conceptually completely resolved. The lone figure is loosely based on Eadweard Muybridge's serial photographs of a man throwing a discus, although Bacon's quoting of pictorial sources was seldom straightforward and he may also have had in mind a classical discobolus (he would have known the copies in the British Museum and the Terme Museum, Rome) and Rodin's bronze La grande ombre. Since the man's pose resembles that of the figure in the centre panel of Triptych March 1974, the painting may be another instance of a panel that was ultimately rejected from a triptych.

Another factor in Bacon's rejection of The last man on earth may have been that he considered the depiction of existential isolation, of Nietzschean solipsism, too literal in its poignancy. Apparently the painting (was this also an instance of the older pictorial sources having been conflated with a modern image of a cricketer about to field the ball?) evoked for observers either the Apollo space mission's moon landing, or a scene from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which case it would have approached dangerously closely to what Bacon professed was his greatest aversion, to illustration. He often demeaned paintings that illustrated a passage from a literary text, citing, for example, Fuseli's scenes from Shakespeare's plays. Bacon strove to avoid the kind of excessive pictorial data that threatened to impose a linear narrative on his paintings, although the extent to which he achieved the elimination of narrativity has recently become a matter of debate among art historians. (6) Nevertheless, his optical blurring, his strategies of spatial and temporal disjunction, tended to represent an action that was out of time, that had no before and no after.

The painting now known as Portrait of a dwarf (1975, private collection, Australia) is, uniquely, in a narrow upright format, the result of Bacon having eliminated two-thirds of the original canvas (Figs. 7 and 8). Formerly, the dwarf occupied the role of what Bacon called an 'attendant'; these attendants were either voyeuristic, or paradoxically disengaged, witnesses of a horrifying spectacle, or of sexual intercourse. In Portrait of a dwarf, the homunculus stares back implacably at the viewer, returning our gaze while apparently indifferent to the upturned, writhing nude male in a glass cage to his left.

It is interesting to speculate on Bacon's motives for excising the caged figure. He could have envisaged the achondroplastic man as representing Pygmalion and the convulsive figure as (an albeit distinctively Baconic) Galatea: if so, again he possibly considered the allusion to the Greek myth as too specific, too illustrational. He had notoriously inverted Cimabue's Crucifixion, and may have been performing a similar rotation in a regendering of the figure of Galatea in Jean-Leon Gerome's Pygmalion and Galatea (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, c. 1890). The dwarf's seated, cross-legged pose recalls both Velazquez's A dwarf sitting on the floor (c. 1645, Prado Museum, Madrid) (Fig. 9) and the ancient Egyptian statue of Seneb, the chief of the palace dwarves, in the National Museum, Cairo; Bacon, who considered Egyptian art to have been mankind's highest cultural achievement, had visited Cairo in 1951 and is likely to have seen the figure.

Bacon's cavalier cropping of canvases is evidence of his uninhibited attitude towards the picture field, another aspect of his technique that is paralleled in photography, in the facile enframings associated with the camera and with the darkroom. When questioned about his ubiquitous 'cages', the internal frameworks he placed around many of his figures, Bacon liked to pass them off simply as devices for seeing 'the image' more clearly. Critics have essayed more profound interpretations, but they bear a close resemblance to the Chinagraph markings that photographers employ on their contact prints to indicate the precise area of the negative that requires enlargement. On a visit to Bacon's studio in 1955, his patrons Robert and Lisa Sainsbury found him about to destroy a 'Pope' painting with which he was dissatisfied: when they remonstrated he produced a razor blade, cut out the central portion of the canvas (evidently he thought the head not unsuccessful), and presented it to them; as Study (Imaginary portrait of Pope Pius XII), 1955, it is now in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

A neccesarily approximate demarcation can be imposed in Bacon's oeuvre around 1968, after which date he sought to pare down his paintings, rationalising their spatial organisation and working with a more concise vocabulary of forms. It is probably not coincidental that this transition occurred at a time when Minimalism occupied a central position in art practice and critical theory; the acceptance at face value of Bacon's protestations of cultural isolation has belatedly come under question, and rightly so, since at no time were his paintings created in an ahistorical vacuum. The broadly applied and thickly impasted paint of his 'Van Gogh' homages in the 1950s invite comparison with the bold painterliness of his friend Karel Appel (and another contemporary, Asger Jorn) as much as that of Chaim Soutine, whose techniques Bacon is known to have revered. Similarly, in the 1970s, the densely absorbent black grounds he adopted for his posthumous tributes to George Dyer may well have been indebted to the looming negative swathes of paint in Robert Motherwell's Spanish elegies.

When Bacon embarked on a new painting, he generally had a rough idea of its overall structure in mind: his method was to paint the 'image' first--that is, the human form(s) - and the ground afterwards. While the success of the 'image' depended, for him, primarily on chance elements related to the application of paint, the flat backgrounds, ostensibly at least, presented less of a challenge. Bacon's deprecation of abstract art lends support to this, yet there is abundant evidence that he regarded the symbiosis of image and ground as important, and devoted considerable attention to the problem: he needed his 'chaos' to be 'deeply ordered'. Among the ceaseless modifying and perfecting of these 'abstract' backgrounds, a typical example is the small triptych Three studies of George Dyer (1969, private collection), the grounds of which were yellow in their first state but were altered soon after to dark blue, before Bacon finally rendered them in their present mauve-pink.

Bacon's elimination of superfluous pictorial elements can be observed in the history of a triptych he painted in 1974, its panoramic sweep and high horizon line inspired by Degas's Beach scene (?c. 1876, National Gallery, London). In the first version of the centre panel of the triptych, Bacon incorporated an unsettling, confrontational figure that peered back imperiously at the viewer through schematic binoculars. This image again reversed the role of his attendants or witnesses; each of the three panels represents a back view of the naked George Dyer, Bacon's then recently deceased lover, and the viewer's gaze was implicated in the act of voyeurism. Whether Bacon regarded the figure with binoculars as triggering an unwanted narrative, or as formally extraneous, after pondering the question for three years he recalled the central panel to his studio and painted out the figure, leaving uninterrupted the 'abstract' foreground across all three panels. Completed as Triptych 1974-77, the painting has remained in this simplified form (Figs. 10 and 11).

The figure eventually painted out from Triptych 1974-77 was probably based on Eadweard Muybridge's photographs Man falling prone and aiming rifle; considering Bacon's interest in avifauna, especially birds of prey, an image of a stalking birdwatcher may also have been in play. Manifestly, Bacon's intervention into the Degas painting transcends its sources, but typically, besides the borrowing from Degas, the triptych also referenced images he had kept in his archive--possibly since the 1930s - from Amedee Ozenfant's Foundations of Modern Art and Baron von Schrenck Notzings's Phenomena of Materialization. In Schrenck Notzing's book, the spectral images of seances that fascinated him are comparable with the vaporous effects present in many of Bacon's paintings, and of the traces of figures in movement through space and time. In the photographic darkroom, one can imagine he was intrigued (he would have been familiar with this process, if not at first hand then from its popular appropriation in movies) by the gradual revelation of the latent image in the developing tray. In a sense, he brought about a reversal of this process when he trapped the likeness of a 'sitter', only to deface it by smearing off the paint he had applied. Appearances are established then denied: Bacon the atheist was not about to offer either hope or closure.

One way in which Bacon demonstrated his receptiveness to the operation of chance was by his alertness to the way photographs would emerge from the chaotic piles of studio detritus, like organisms with an independent existence. An habitual gambler, no doubt he appreciated the way in which these suggestively accreted documents would reappear, transformed and reordered like a shuffled pack of playing-cards. In the background of the left-hand panel of Three portraits: Posthumous portrait of George Dyer; Self-portrait; Portrait of Lucian Freud (1973) he painted, as though it were pinned to the wall, a tightly cropped black and white photograph of his own head. The source photograph he used (Fig. 12) was only rediscovered recently, complete with pinholes and random flecks of paint, in colours corresponding exactly to the palette of the 1973 triptych. Fifteen years later, in Study from the human body and portrait (1988) (Fig. 13), Bacon reused this photo-portrait of himself, and on this occasion embraced the accidental marks that he had made on the original source photograph. Thus the studio floor is revealed as his personal genizah, an archive of talismanic images that on the one hand he allowed (or encouraged) to become worn and distressed, while on the other he preserved as bearers of the marks of time.

Bacon's synthesising of 'lens-based' imagery has been public knowledge for more than fifty years. It is important to recognise, however, that throughout the first half of his career (that is, until 1962) the images that suggested ideas for paintings were seldom 'original' photographic prints but almost invariably mechanical reproductions he encountered in books or magazines. Long before photography's acceptance as an art form, and its penetration of Britain's museums and art galleries, Bacon acknowledged that photographs (including photographic reproductions of works of art) had informed some of his decisive paintings. He came to regret this openness, however, believing it had caused his aims to be misapprehended. His cautiousness was not without justification: only six years ago, when the Barbican Arts Centre staged 'Picasso and Photography', the survey was greeted by sensational headlines such as 'Picasso Exposed', (7) as though a fraud had been uncovered.

Like Picasso, Bacon sought neither photorealism nor photographic verisimilitude, nor were his paintings merely the sum of their sources. Latterly, therefore, he ensured that a much tighter control was kept over the identity of the stimuli he was prepared to divulge. Since he also disliked appending fanciful titles to his paintings, most were kept deliberately vague and non-specific; a rare exception was Triptych inspired by T.S. Eliot's poem 'Sweeney Agonistes' (1967, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC), but despite the fact that the scenes in the outer panels clearly refer to the poem, Bacon insisted that the title was imposed by the Marlborough Gallery and pretended there was no connection with Eliot's text. He effectively censured, too, the iconological study of his paintings, initially by denying their iconographies. Most critics acquiesced in this denial of content, and those who transgressed risked his non-cooperation regarding reproduction rights; their enforced collaboration in this information clamp-down helped to ensure that Bacon's paintings, and his procedures, were investigated and understood largely on the terms he dictated, or of which he approved.

Bacon described his paintings of the human body as a balance of order and chaos, of preconception and chance. Yet his unique path through figuration in the twentieth century failed to resonate with the guru of American Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg, who perceived it as embodying 'an affliction of the English ... the Grand Manner'. (8) Greenberg appears to have wilfully misread the interventions onto works by Michelangelo, Caravaggio or Ingres, as though Bacon had slavishly emulated these masters. On the contrary, Bacon's view of the hopelessness of the human condition precluded the aspiration to anything as uncomplicatedly elevated or ennobling as grandeur. He aimed to subvert as much as to celebrate art-historical traditions, and sought to redefine issues of representation of the human form. Although the specifics of his image sources are ultimately secondary to the syntheses Bacon performed on them, and should not be over-stressed, the essential modernity and rich complexity of his figurative idiom depended to a considerable extent on its mutable dialogue with photography's engagement with transience, mortality and memory.

(1) Jean Clair, 'Pathos and Death', in G.Regnier et al. (ed.), The Body on the Cross, exh. cat., Musee Picasso, Paris, 1992, p. 136.

(4) Most of the surviving sketches are in Tate; see: Matthew Gale, Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, London, 1999.

(6) See especially Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, London, 1998.

(8) Clement Greenberg, 'Autonomies of Art', in The Edmonton Contemporary Artists Society Newsletter, vol. III, issue 2, 1996.

Martin Harrison is the author of In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, published by Thames and Hudson this month.

Opening Hours: Monday - Friday 10.00 am - 6.00 pm Saturday 12-4pm

Tel + 44 20 74 09 79 79 Nearest Tube: Green Park Buses: 9 14 19 22 38

Faggionato Fine Arts is pleased to announce their forthcoming exhibition Francis Bacon Studying Form. The exhibition focuses on Bacon’s core concern in art – the representation of the human body. Six works, ranging in date from 1959 to 1988, demonstrate his radical and varied approach to the subject.

The exhibition includes three works belonging to a series of paintings and sketches of lying and reclining figures that Bacon completed between 1959 and 1961. Lying Figure 1959 and two works on paper from the Tate collection (Reclining Figure No.1 and Reclining Figure No.2, c.1961) are shown as representative of a period when Bacon undertook a fundamental reassessment of ways of staging the figure in space. These are cited as illustrating a pivotal moment in Bacon’s art in which he investigates new pictorial formats and paint handling techniques. Here for the first time he experiments with articulated limb positions, sexually ambiguous figures, thinned pigments and fluid brushstrokes.

The three remaining works stand as further examples of Bacon’s varied response to painting the human body. Kneeling Figure (c.1982) draws on a theme Bacon investigated between 1979 and 1984: Oedipus and The Sphinx. In these fragmented torsos, painted with a complex blurring of gender distinctions, Bacon incorporated some of his most powerful representations of shifting sexual orientation. In Study for a Portrait of John Edwards (1988) we have a monumental, deceptively simple, yet subtly compelling late work, which demonstrates his ongoing exploration of portraiture. Finally the iconography of Triptych 1987 reveals Bacon’s continuing preoccupation with themes of violence and injury which had been an obsession throughout his career.

The catalogue, published by Faggionato Fine Arts and The Estate of Francis Bacon, will include David Sylvester’s final contribution to Bacon studies Francis Bacon and The Nude, written shortly before his death and delivered at the Dublin Symposium in 2001. These proved to be his last words on an artist who had been his close friend for more than forty years. Mr Sylvester was too unwell to deliver the lecture in person, but both the transcript and the illustrations are printed here for the first time in full.

The catalogue also includes an essay by Martin Harrison whose book In Camera – Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practise of Painting will be published on 7 March 2005.

Published by by Faggionato Fine Art and the Estate of Francis Bacon on the occasion of the exhibition Francis Bacon: Studying Form. Essays by David Sylvester and Martin Harrison. £20+p&p

Three Furies, Scenes from the Life of Francis Bacon

The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House; 392 Seats; A$51 ($39) Top

SYDNEY - A Sydney Festival presentation in association with Adelaide Festival of the Arts, Perth Intl. Arts Festival, Griffin Theater Company and Sydney Opera House of a drama with songs in one act by Stephen Sewell. Directed by Jim Sharman.

The painter - Simon Burke
The Model - Socratis Otto
Tisiphone - Paula Arundell

Variety Posted: Friday, Jan. 28, 2005

Only a few years ago, scribe Stephen Sewell couldn't get a theatre gig in Australia. The mainstage companies were not taking his calls, he'd outgrown the fringe scene and his next step wasn't immediately apparent. He dabbled in screenwriting, most notably with The Boys, and dreamed up the idea of exploring the lives of painters onstage. So followed The Secret Death of Salvador Dali, produced most recently by Griffin Theatre Company in 2004, and now, Three Furies, Scenes From the Life of Francis Bacon a much bigger production backed by three leading Oz arts festivals and harnessing the talents of The Rocky Horror Picture Show helmer Jim Sharman.

Compared with the super-conservative plays finding favour on Australia's mainstages this year, Three Furies occupies another realm, intentionally so. It is a festival piece - bold, explicit and challenging - and as such should enjoy a fruitful life.

It is a terrifically textured work. Sharman visually references Bacon's paintings, with the three-doored set conjuring any number of his triptychs. The drama centres on Bacon and his lover and model from 1964-71, the handsome, uneducated petty criminal George Dyer, the inspiration for much of the painter's work during that period.

Simon Burke and Socratis Otto work well opposite each other. Burke is the short-tempered artist forced to repeatedly quash the whining demands of Otto's rough, dim-witted model, whose ambitions have grown to dwarf his talent.

Dyer begins to become annoyed that Bacon doesn't include him in all aspects of his life, such as inviting him to the glamorous opening nights of his exhibitions. He also comes to believe Bacon's painting of him are him; the artist is forced to argue, in ever plainer terms, that it is his genius on the canvas and Dyer should remember he is but a piece of meat, albeit a pretty one.

Sewell constructs a wonderfully complex Bacon, a man predisposed to haughtiness and exasperated coolness, but not cruel. He is the product of an unstable childhood shuttling between Ireland and England, with a disciplinarian father inclined to horse-whip his offspring. That discipline finds its way into a predilection for sadomasochism in later life.

A chanteuse as Greek chorus, Tisiphone (Paula Arundell) completes the trinity, many of her lines sung in a raspy, Marianne Faithfull-with-less-range style.

The decision to forgo an intermission was wise. The spell of Three Furies, once cast, would suffer from being broken.

Sets, Brian Thompson; costumes, Alice Lau; lighting, Damien Cooper; music, Basil Hogios; production stage manager; Tanya Leach. Opened, reviewed Jan. 19, 2005. Running time: 1 HOUR, 40 MIN.

Sydney Festival: Bringing down the house

Sydney Star Observer

Issue 749

Published 27/01/2005

THE SYDNEY FESTIVAL WRAPS UP THIS WEEK, WITH TWO AUSTRALIAN PRODUCTIONS OFFERING BLEAK BUT BEAUTIFUL SPECTACLES. TIM BENZIE REVIEWS.

A tortured older gay artist, a cranky, pretty muse and a truly ugly break-up.

It’s a familiar tale to those steeped in gay theatre, film and even literature, and it took shape again this week with mixed results in Three Furies: Scenes From The Life Of Francis Bacon by Stephen Sewell.

Sewell’s concerns are not homosexual but aesthetic, and Three Furies takes the form of a Bacon painting: there are three doors forming a “triptych”; a cow’s carcass forms an occasional backdrop and his lover’s suicide visually echoes Bacon’s memento mori of the event, Triptych (May-June 1973).

Yet the work is painfully reminiscent of other excursions into dysfunctionalia such as Prick Up Your Ears. Director Jim Sharman too often steers the play towards dated, nasty hysterics. It’s difficult – they were surely an ugly couple – yet dramatically there is little on which to hang our empathy.

See it for the acting. Simon Burke (The Painter) gives a dazzling, tightrope performance, balancing amoral camp apathy with genuine horror, and Socratis Otto (The Model) and Paula Arundell (Tisiphone) are perfect satellites to his black sun.

Three Furies plays at the Sydney Opera House Playhouse until Saturday 29 January. Phone 9266 4890 for bookings.

Three Furies

Reviewer Bryce Hallett
The Age, Australia January 24, 2005

Paula Arundell swings from a chandelier during Three Furies.
Photo: Steven Siewert

SYDNEY FESTIVAL
By Stephen Sewell, The Playhouse, Opera House, January 19, until January 29

Stephen Sewell's intoxicating cabaret of the great and difficult artist Francis Bacon is exciting, absorbing and stridently performed.

At 90 minutes or so the biographical dissection fuses stark, ancient storytelling forms with the conventions of domestic drama and the biting flavour and force of German cabaret. It is audacious, angry, desperate, brutal, loving and mad - a tragicomedy embracing the spirit by which Picasso and Bacon sought to overturn the rules of appearance to fathom hard truths.

"We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death," said Bacon. It is this shimmering "scream" that Sewell and director Jim Sharman give potent representation to as they probe the artist's cravings, extremities, verbal lacerations and his explosive relationship with his model, "muse" and lover, George Dyer.

Three Furies unleashes the demons as though Bacon's own rough, expressive, butchered, distorted figures and forms have sprung on to the stage, not in any literal sense, but in the repellent force and beauty of the language, and the beat, growl and ironic tenderness of Basil Hogios' compositions.

"The men I painted were all in extreme situations, and the scream is a transcription of their pain," explained Bacon. No truer words were uttered, given the rage that spews forth from Simon Burke in his outstanding turn as the brutally objective painter, drinker and gambler. It is one of Burke's most shining performances to date as he sinks deep into the demanding role by keeping a cool head, projecting the essential vanity and communicating an abiding sense of the detached, intense, lonely core where art is made.

Socratis Otto is excellent as the model: easy on the eye, witless, affectionate and no match for his virtuosic creator. Dyer succumbs to excess and rejection, and pathetically rails against being reduced to a carcass on his vivisector's table. Sewell masterfully tempers sheer nastiness and terror with an underlying sweetness and recognition of human difficulties and flaws. With echoes of Christopher Isherwood's writings of Berlin and wartime bohemia as well as reminders of Joe Orton and his destructive relationship with his lover Kenneth Halliwell, Three Furies is wildly illuminating, dark and unsentimental. It is, however, strangely moving in places, especially when Dyer, broken and abandoned, commits suicide on the eve of Bacon's 1971 Paris retrospective. He is found dead on the lavatory of their hotel room while the "ageless" Anglo-Irish artist is anointed the greatest figurative painter of the 20th century.

The paradoxes of mortality and fame, the sexual ambiguities, the tortures, the yearning for liberation and love colour the world of Three Furies - a tale amplified by the commentator/chanteuse, the fury Tisiphone, played with raunchy vigour by Paula Arundell. Her singing and passion add wonders to the show, although some of Hogios' musical reprises are overdone and strain for effect. I could have done without the "hoity-toity artist" refrain, but it's an effective score on the whole and the lyrics are deft, biting and suggestive.

It's one of the brightest and boldest bio-plays I've seen and ultimately a metaphor of life in all its traumatic, monstrous, unknowable, glory.

Brutal beauty of the everyday

The Australian January 21, 2005

The Arts John McCallum

Three Furies. By Stephen Sewell. Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, January 19. Tickets: $46-$51. Bookings: (02) 9266 4890. Until January 29.

"I'VE never known why my paintings are labelled as horrible. I'm always labelled with horror, but I never think of horror . . . You can't be more horrific than life itself."

The speaker is the painter Francis Bacon, quoted in the program to writer Stephen Sewell's and director Jim Sharman's shocking, sensual and provocative new production. Like Bacon they find a terrible beauty in the brutal everyday reality of the world – an aestheticisation of the sordid, as in Genet, and a vivid theatrical meditation on the power of art to bring together the spiritual and the physical.

Sewell has been working on a new dramaturgy ever since his great, neglected Golgrutha trilogy in the 1990s. Last year, in The Secret Death of Salvador Dali, he let the style of the iconic, self-promoting pop surrealist guide the form of the work, playfully and with a lot of humour.

Here is another play about an artist, but the dramaturgy is as different as Bacon is from Dali.

In this production Simon Burke, Paula Arundell and Socratis Otto are stunning – beautiful bodies and voices playing out the facts of grubby lives transformed by art. The play, with music by Basil Hogios, circles around one central event – the suicide of Bacon's model and muse George Dyer on the night before the opening of a major retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971.

The story is horrific, and emblematic: Bacon, the artistic darling wanting his moment in the limelight, leaving Dyer, the rough-trade, working-class Apollo who inspired him, to die alone in their flash hotel room as he goes out to be applauded as the greatest figurative artist of the 20th century. And then going on to produce one of his major works – three images of his lover dying in the toilet.

Like Bacon, Sewell, Sharman and Hogios turn the ugliness of the bare facts into a beautiful piece with their words, images and music. The style of the show is a dark but enchanting cabaret, with Burke alternating between dry wit and muscular needy passion as Bacon, Otto full of wide-eyed naivety and eroticism as Dyer, and Arundell, as the ancient Greek muse Tisiphone, seductively beguiling as she sings a savage lyric commentary.

Brian Thomson's terrific set is like a cabaret stage, but with three doors that end up as a Bacon-like triptych. The three performers are caught in framed poses like tormented figures in an existentialist nightmare – three furies.

Three Furies, The Playhouse

Sydney Morning Herald 21st January, 2005

Reviewed by Bryce Hallett

By Stephen Sewell

The Playhouse, Opera House
January 19
Until January 29

Stephen Sewell's intoxicating cabaret of the great and difficult artist Francis Bacon is exciting, absorbing and brilliantly performed.

"We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death," said Bacon. It is this shimmering "scream" that Sewell and director Jim Sharman give potent theatrical representation to as they probe the artist's cravings, extremities, verbal lacerations and his explosive relationship with his model, "muse" and lover, George Dyer.

"The men I painted were all in extreme situations, and the scream is a transcription of their pain," explained Bacon. No truer words were uttered given the rage that spews forth from Simon Burke in his outstanding turn as the brutally objective painter, drinker and gambler. It is one of Burke's most shining performances to date as he sinks deep into the demanding role by keeping a cool head, projecting the essential vanity and communicating an abiding sense of the detached, intense, lonely core where art is made.

Socratis Otto is excellent as the model - easy on the eye, witless, affectionate and no match for his virtuosic creator. Dyer succumbs to excess and rejection, and pathetically rails against being reduced to a carcass on his vivisector's table. Sewell masterfully tempers sheer nastiness and terror with an underlying sweetness and recognition of human difficulties and flaws. With echoes of Christopher Isherwood's writings of Berlin and wartime bohemia as well as reminders of Joe Orton and his destructive relationship with his lover Kenneth Halliwell, Three Furies is wildly illuminating, dark and unsentimental. It is, however, strangely moving in places, especially when Dyer, broken and abandoned, commits suicide on the eve of Bacon's 1971 Paris retrospective. He is found dead on the lavatory of their hotel room while the "ageless" Anglo-Irish artist is anointed the greatest figurative painter of the 20th century.

The paradoxes of mortality and fame, the sexual ambiguities, the tortures, the yearning for liberation and love colour the world of Three Furies - a tale amplified by the commentator/chanteuse, the fury Tisiphone, played with raunchy vigour by Paula Arundell. Her singing and passion add wonders to the show, although some of Hogios's musical reprises are overdone and strain for effect. I could have done without the "hoity-toity artist" refrain but it's an effective score on the whole and the lyrics are deft, biting and suggestive.

Three Furies has many of the showman Sharman's hallmarks for vivid, transformative theatre. Together with designers Brian Thomson (set), Alice Lau (costumes) and Damien Cooper (lighting) he has produced a startlingly inventive, austere vaudeville and drama. Like the best theatre it's not the least bit dull and persuades the audience to make discoveries of its own. It's one of the brightest and boldest bio-plays I've seen and ultimately a metaphor of life in all its traumatic, monstrous, unknowable glory.

Lifting the veil on Bacon's dark world

Sydney Morning Herald Australia January 14, 2005

Jim Sharman is driven by the power to transform, writes Angela Bennie.

Driving force...Jim Sharman says he is relying more on instinct as he directs work based on Francis Bacon's Triptych of May-June 1973. Photo: Peter Morris

Take the facts of the matter: it is the eve of the huge 1971 Paris retrospective exhibition of the artist Francis Bacon's work, the big splash that would have him declared the greatest figurative artist of the 20th century. The French president Georges Pompidou himself is to open it. Bacon's muse and lover, George Dyer, alone in their hotel room, dies in his own vomit and excrement sitting on the toilet bowl in his underpants, apparently from an overdose of drugs and feelings of rejection and abandonment.

Bacon goes on to paint a triptych depicting his lover in various stages of his lonely death throes; and the Triptych of May-June 1973 comes to be regarded as one of Bacon's greatest works.

Tragedy? Soap opera? Pathos? Bathos?

Now take up a scalpel knife. No palette knife will do here. Scrape away these facts from the surface of the matter and smear them instead across a word canvas. Let them flow like runnels of paint across the canvas in contrapuntal or syncopated rhythms of vivid feeling and sloughs of contorted flesh. Sideways with the knife push them hard into the prose of ordinary, everyday speech, or let them burst into verse patterns like those in Eliot's The Waste Land or Sweeney Agonistes's lurid descriptions of "Birth, and copulation, and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks".

Now mix in the wrath of the Greek Furies and the raw pain of Bacon's grief - and you might be close to the performing text of Stephen Sewell's new play, which opens on Wednesday night at the Opera House, as part of the Sydney Festival.

The work, Three Furies: Scenes from the Life of Francis Bacon, is described as a play with songs, but this is too coy. Its music scheme is operatic and yet vaudevillian; its drama stretches from Euripides to Joe Orton, and across all boundaries into the howling soul of a Francis Bacon painting. It is definitive Sewell, working in top gear.

"I believe he has created a new form," says Jim Sharman, who is directing the new work. From someone who has experimented with just about every form the theatre can offer - and has mastered all of them - this could not be hyperbole. This is a fact, as far as Sharman is concerned. It is clear he is very excited.

Perhaps Sharman's positive response is coloured by his own great interest in Bacon's work.

"Like others of my generation, I was greatly influenced by him," he admits. "He showed me another way of looking at the world and of seeing the world. Though I don't necessarily share his point of view, he gave me a certain insight into the way things were behind appearance. You draw back the curtain, as he did, and the truth is there. Dark it might have been, but true it was."

This vision was generational, Sharman says. Bacon comes out of a postwar period where half of Europe had been destroyed, the atom bomb dropped, the facts of the Holocaust revealed.

"This is a time that produced such artists as Bacon and Beckett, Giacometti, and Patrick White is in there, too," says Sharman. "Bacon describes himself as an optimist about nothing. I sympathise with this. Behind the veil lies the truth, the real. This is what he was after in his painting, the brutality of the fact."

Sharman first encountered Sewell's work on Bacon when it was sent to him in very early draft form, almost embryonic. Even then, he says, he recognised something about it that made him sit up and take notice.

"I engaged with it straight away," Sharman says. "Apart from the fact that it was about Bacon, it was the quality of the writing that impressed me. It was its musicality. I recognised that this was Stephen aiming at something very ambitious. I responded to that."

Sharman has always responded to the ambitious, you might say, especially to that strain of it in himself. But perhaps he would not call it this. "I am not frightened of the imaginative, no," he says instead, with some irony.

"So we began collaborating together on it, Stephen writing, me in the background helping with the structuring, because some of it was very difficult, finding ways to take the work where he wanted to take it.

"In the early stages of the collaboration, at first we approached each other with mutual caution. But when he realised that I, too, wanted to row the boat out, not bring it back to shore, be safe, that I wanted him to take it into uncharted waters, that the whole collaborative thing took off. I would say, 'Let's go, let's go, let's go out there!" And he would respond with this wonderful writing, this remarkable shifting he is doing between great tragedy and comic vaudeville playing at one and the same time."

Theatre, for both these artists, has never been small happenings in little rooms. It is a great force for change and revelation; and both artists have built careers on finding ways of harnessing that force to push the boundaries as far out from the shore as they dared to go.

"The theatre of the Greeks and the Elizabethans, that is the kind of theatre I like," says Sharman. "And Stephen has written a modern version of an Elizabethan play; it has something of its vitality in its form. The notion that theatre has the power to really transform, through laughter, tears, song, dance, whatever, is at the heart of what I've ever done in the theatre.

"I have felt a sense of wrapping up lately. But this is the first thing for a long time where I have felt this feeling of something happening that is completely new.

"I find I rely very much more on instinct now, than thinking things out, as I have in the past.

"Bacon, too, worked very much on the theory of chance, or what he called ordered chaos."

Between them, Sewell and Sharman have delved deep in the realm of ordered chaos, and found a way to lift the veil once more from our eyes, so that we may see a truth, whether the brutality of fact, or its beauty, in the life of Francis Bacon.

"Between life and death," Bacon once said, "it's always been the same thing. It is what it is. It is the violence of life."

There lies the fact of the matter.

Three Furies: Scenes from the Life of Francis Bacon, a play with songs by Stephen Sewell, is at the Sydney Opera House Playhouse, January 19-29.

Confessions of an amoralist
Sebastian Smee
The Australian, January 14, 2005

LOOSENING their tongues is not always easy, but artists are generally much more interesting on the subject of art than critics. No surprise there.

The 19th century produced a bonanza of artists' writings about art, and books such as Delacroix's journals and the letters of both Cezanne and Van Gogh have long been recognised as literary masterpieces.

They contain more than their matchless insights into the business of making art; their ostensible frames of reference tend to dissolve as you read, so that you find yourself reading not about art but about life itself.

In the 20th century, there were few records of an artist's thinking more influential than Francis Bacon's interviews with the critic David Sylvester. First published in 1975, the book which collected and reprinted these interviews is now in its fifth edition, and has had a huge influence not only on artists, but on novelists, playwrights, poets, musicians and film-makers across the world.

It has also done wonders for Bacon's posthumous reputation, leaving scholars and curators with an almost endless source of ideas. Just last year, a huge exhibition called Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art was organised by the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland; the pairing of Bacon paintings with works by Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh and Picasso were almost all inspired by what Bacon said about those artists in the interviews.

Bacon the man is the subject of one of the Sydney Festival's main attractions - Stephen Sewell's Three Furies: Scenes From the Life of Francis Bacon, a play with songs.

Two films about Bacon are also being screened on Sunday as part of the festival's film program. One of them is the recording of an encounter between Bacon and the poet William Burroughs in Bacon's London studio in 1982. The other is an interview with Bacon conducted by Melvyn Bragg for The South Bank Show in 1985.

It has to be said that by 1985 (he died in 1992) Bacon was almost interviewed out. The Sylvester interviews in the book are published in nine parts. They were taped conversations conducted privately or in studios for radio and television. The last ones, conducted in the mid-'80s, are full of tiresome repetitions, mannered formulations and barely veiled self-regard - a lot like Bacon's late paintings.

But the earlier interviews, like Bacon's best work, are quite unforgettable. They reflect on his own life ("I live in, you may say, a gilded squalor"); his upbringing in Ireland; his love of gambling; his homosexuality (in one extraordinary dialogue he discusses being sexually attracted to his father); his fascination with photography and film; his distaste for abstract art; the success and failure of his own work (he dismisses outright some of his most famous paintings, including those of the human scream and the series after Velazquez's Pope Innocent X: "they're very silly"); and the unique condition of art today.

"You see, all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself ... I think that is the way things have changed, and what is fascinating now is that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all."

Bacon is especially good on other artists. His comments on Degas's pastels and on Velazquez's sophisticated recording of the Spanish court ("You feel the shadow of life passing all the time") have stayed with me ever since I first read them as a teenager.

Bacon was adamantly amoral, and along with this came a contempt for all forms of artificial security, including government welfare: "I think that being nursed from the cradle to the grave would bring such a boredom to life ... But people seem to expect that and think it is their right. I think that, if people have that attitude to life, it curtails the creative instinct."

Although he was irreligious, one of Bacon's prevailing obsessions was the art historical theme of the Crucifixion. He famously likened the figure of Christ in Cimabue's 13th-century Crucifixion to "a worm crawling down the cross".

After a while you begin to suspect that a lot of what Bacon says is calculated to shock. When he says: "You know in my case, all painting is accident. So I foresee it in my mind and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint" - it sounds a brilliant and explosive thing to say.

But examined more closely, it begins to feel jerry-built. To the extent that it is true, isn't it more or less true for all successful forms of creativity? And then, to the extent that it is false, it is self-evidently so: a good painting, as Bacon himself knew, is hard work, and it usually involves making thousands of decisions, both conscious and instinctive.

Look at Bacon's own work and one sees instantly that the best of it is highly calculated and beautifully finished. Chance plays a crucial role. But he exaggerates this role for rhetorical purposes.

No matter. As he said: "As existence in a way is so banal, you may as well try and make a kind of grandeur of it rather than be nursed to oblivion."

David Sylvester's Interviews with Francis Bacon is published by Thames & Hudson

Bacon Meets Burroughs and Portrait of an Artist: Francis Bacon screen at the Dendy Cinema, Opera Quays, Sydney on Sunday.

Three Furies: Scenes from the Life of Francis Bacon is at the Sydney Opera House, January 15-29.

A tale of sound and furies

Arts Performance Sydney Star Observer Issue 747 12.1.2005

The gayest event of the Sydney Festival, a sensual and hallucinogenic exploration of the life of painter Francis Bacon, can be seen in previews from this week.

The versatile Simon Burke plays the tortured gay artist, who on the eve of a major Paris exhibition is faced with the suicide of his muse and lover George Dyer.

Three Furies: Scenes From The Life Of Francis Bacon features strong language and nudity, is directed by Jim Sharman and co-stars Socratis Otto as The Model and siren Paula Arundell as Tisiphone.

Take the trip at the Sydney Opera House, Playhouse from 15 to 29 January. Phone 9250 7777 for bookings.

Sydney Morning Herald Australia January 7, 2005

Arts By Clare Morgan

Things will be quieter but no less intense a few days later for the world premiere of Australian playwright Steven Sewell's latest work, Three Furies: Scenes From the Life of Francis Bacon, directed by Jim Sharman. The play with songs explores the tempestuous relationship between Bacon and his model, muse and lover, George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of the artist's great Paris retrospective.

Brett Sheehy says he has seen the work evolve from a text-based two-hander when he first spoke to Sewell about it several years ago, "to a hybrid work that is half musical theatre, half lunar cycle".

"I love that Brian Thomson and Jim Sharman are together again after The Rocky Horror Picture Show all those years ago. Both have, in a kind of theatrical way, created a Bacon tryptich on stage. What this looks at is the role of the model, the muse and beauty in art."

This is Sheehy's final festival. Whatever the verdict, he confesses he might shed a tear once it's over - in private, at least.

"One of the primary roles of a festival is to present something that moves people and touches them and affects them," he says. "The idea that you can deliver a great artistic moment to people for the price of a railway ticket, I kind of love that. To watch people's faces light up, and see that they're moved and touched by something, makes my heart sing."

The party's over

Dr Thomas Stuttaford
Advice on treating hangovers

Health features The Times December 13, 2004

THE face of Soho has changed. The paint and ink-stained doyens of yesteryear have slipped away. Their alcohol-fuelled chatter that once resounded in pubs is now only a memory that occasionally disturbs the muted conversation of the elderly survivors of a passing generation.

The ghosts of Augustus John, Francis Bacon, Henrietta Moraes, Elizabeth Smart, Dylan Thomas and Daniel Farson would all be able to surprise the hordes of young people who now throng Soho with accounts of life as it was. Media chatter still rings around the bar of the Toucan pub, or the Coach and Horses (famous for Norman, its landlord, and as the second home of Jeffrey Bernard and Private Eye).

The creativity displayed by the generation that frequented Soho was bought at a cost of heavy drinking. Not all pay the supreme sacrifice like Dylan Thomas, who died young. However, even for those who are more circumspect about drinking, or who are better endowed with the enzymes that metabolise alcohol, there is still the likelihood of a punitive hangover. Many who have had a hard night in Soho are later disturbed by pillow spin, and a sickening feeling each time they need to crawl out of bed and navigate their way to the bathroom.

Some may even remember Francis Bacon’s words: “I have never found any panacea for a hangover. I don’t think one exists apart from suicide.”

Only advancing age, with its concomitant progressively shrinking brain, finally removes the peril of a splitting headache after a night’s heavy drinking.

Compared with the headache of a hangover, the other adverse affects of alcohol, such as an upset gastrointestinal system, nausea, sweating and confused thinking, are as nothing. Even if Bacon is correct in suggesting there is no one panacea for a hangover, there are many ways in which one can be prevented or relieved.

How drunk someone becomes depends entirely on how much alcohol they have imbibed, their sex, their genetic make-up, their size, and how experienced their liver is in dealing with it. It is a myth that mixing drinks makes people more drunk: it merely gives them a worse hangover. Practice at the bar may not make perfect but it can increase the amount drunk without untoward effects by as much as a third. The body’s enzymes which metabolise alcohol can dispose of a unit much more quickly if the drinker is an established one whose liver is not yet beginning to fail. Women metabolise alcohol more slowly and less efficiently than men, so they get drunk faster and sober up more slowly — and may well have a worse hangover. Thin, muscular people can take it better than short, fat, couch potatoes.

The hangover, as opposed to drunkenness, is also dependant on the type of drink consumed. As a rough guide, the darker the drink the greater the hangover. Eating a proper meal — cashew nuts don’t count — while drinking not only reduces the hangover but also boosts the medicinal qualities of alcohol when taken in moderation.

For a century or two those who wined, dined or merely drank in the clubland district of St James, London, have had a refuge that they can attend the following morning: the long-established chemists D. R. Harris and Co of St James Street have been dispensing their pick-me-up made from a secret recipe of tincture of gentian and cardamom, clove oil and a little bit of camphor, diluted and served in a special glass. It clears the head and settles the stomach. Few people believe that a little alcohol the following morning can help, but as iniquitous as the habit may be, it can do so.

The scientific approach to a hangover is to study the effects of the alcohol and counteract each one. Alcohol dehydrates so that every part of the body is shrunken other than the brain, and needs refreshing. The brain swells because of the damage, usually only temporary, that has been done to the nerve cells by the alcohol. Old people don’t develop headaches because their age-shrunken brain has room to swell within the rigid skull without becoming crushed and painful.

Alcohol causes a great tide of insulin to flow out from the pancreas. As a result the blood sugar level is lowered, hypoglycaemia sets in and the drunken person becomes hot, sweaty and shaky, and the mind turns over rather more slowly than usual. Just as dehydration should be treated with a high water intake before and after drinking, so should the hypoglycaemia be treated by asking the hungover person to eat a diet with as much protein and carbohydrate — a classic fry-up will help those with a strong stomach — as they can without being sick.

Finally, alcohol also irritates the gastrointestinal system. Alka-Seltzer, Rennie, or any other popular remedies ease the inflammation and Alka-Seltzer has the advantage of helping the headaches, too. For the headache alone, there are the analgesics, preferably paracetamol — no one wants to make the inflamed gut bleed with too much aspirin.

MoMA reborn—back to front
Expanded $858 million new building complex unveiled

The Art Newspaper By Mark Irving

Wednesday 17th November, 2004

On 20 November, the largest, grandest and richest modern art museum in the world reopens after a two and half year closure to allow for an $858m architectural expansion. The project to reshape the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), located between 54th and 53rd Streets in midtown Manhattan, is huge. At the hands of Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi, it has become twice its former size.

The official line is that after the war New York took over from Paris as the centre of contemporary art, but since then suzerainty has shifted between America and Europe, with new centres also opening up in the Far East and Latin America. It is now the type of contemporary art, not where it is being made, that determines critical and commercial success. In this regard, Britain has recently proved to be an important hub. MoMA’s latest acquisition of Francis Bacon’s Triptych (1991), for example, “allows us to look at figure painting in the 1980s in a very different way”, says Mr Lowry.

Art Auctions Continues to the End, as Recent Works Dominate

By CAROL VOGEL

The New York Times November 13, 2004

Oedipus and the Sphinx After Ingres, 1983 Francis Bacon
1983

A dead pope, a giant bear, a bright yellow puppy with its ears standing upright and shelves of jars filled with bovine internal organs preserved in formaldehyde were just a few of the artworks that a loyal and growing group of contemporary-art collectors snapped up on Thursday night at Phillips, de Pury & Company.

Artists of the 1980's and 90's dominated the offerings in the packed Chelsea salesroom on the last night of two solid weeks of the important fall art auctions. Of the 58 lots, only 4 failed to sell. The auction totaled $25.5 million, right in the middle of its estimate of $20.9 million to $29.3 million.

The top lot was a 1979 Francis Bacon "Oedipus,'' which was the cover image on the sale catalog and was inspired by Ingres's "Oedipus and Orestes.'' Two bidders went for the painting, which sold to Lawrence Graff, the jeweler, who was sitting in the front row. Mr. Graff paid $3.5 million, after an estimate of $4 million to $6 million. Bacon's work has not performed well at this week's auctions, so the fact that the painting sold for less than its estimate was not surprising.

$17.4 Million Rothko One of Many Records at Sotheby's

Reuters New York 10.11.2004

Among the few casualties were Gerhard Richter's "Drei Geschwister (Three Sisters)" and Francis Bacon's "Pope and Chimpanzee," works estimated from $3 million to $5 million that failed to sell when bids fell off at $3 million or less.

Sotheby's

Contemporary Art, Evening

9th November 2004 New York

Pope and Chimpanzee 1962 Francis Bacon Lot 32

PROVENANCE

Estate of the artist
Faggionato Fine Arts, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

EXHIBITED

New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Francis Bacon, Important Paintings from the Estate, October 1998 - January 1999, p. 55, illustrated in colour, and p. 57, colour illustration of detail.

CATALOGUE NOTE

Pope and Chimpanzee, from 1962, displays a number of Bacon’s celebrated motifs, channeling their concomitant tributaries of thought onto the same canvas. This complex, deeply intelligent canvas continues Francis Bacon’s impassioned and celebrated exploration of the Pope and, specifically, his reaction to reproductions of Diego Velazquez’s masterpiece, Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650, Rome, Galleria Dora Pamphili). For nearly twenty years, Bacon filled his canvases with bold, searching swathes of oil paint in an effort to render, both physically and psychically, the most senior and powerful figure in the Catholic Church. One finds in this ‘series’ of ‘portraits’ brushstrokes that engender an unerring sense of presence, giving the viewer the overriding sensation of the fullness of life sweeping through these paintings. Such drama is born from Bacon’s obsession with the Velazquez painting, placing this Pope into his own cast of isolated, existential figures who all appear to live at the very edge of life. Accompanying this papal figure is another of Bacon’s familiar motifs: that of the monkey. Here, a chimpanzee bursts out of the pictorial space, aggressively confronting both the Pope and the viewer; its active, almost cruciform pose is in stark contrast to the more static, regal pose of the Pope. Like the Pope, the monkey provided Bacon with a subject that allowed him to explore a series of emotions. Bacon famously painted Study of a Baboon (1953, New York, The Museum of Modern Art), focusing on the arched head of the isolated animal, clearly depicting it screaming. Its fanged mouth is found in earlier works such as Head II (1949, Belfast, Ulster Museum), and all relate to another of Bacon’s obsessions: the scream, and, in particular, the filmic rendition one finds in Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and the shrieking, wounded character of the nursemaid. A silhouette of a walking figure, delineated in lilac paint, is curiously layered over the chimpanzee figure, as if to further connect these two motifs, as well as linking the veiled spatial device below the two motifs with both the throne and the figure of the Pope.

Francis Bacon famously turned down the opportunity to go and see the Velazquez portrait of Innocent X. He was in Rome in 1954 and had the chance to see the painting, but he turned it down, worrying how he might react to the original. Bacon was enamored with the grand portrayal of the Pope that he saw in reproduction. As the present work clearly exemplifies, Bacon’s task was not one of representing the image, but rather re-presenting the Indices of meaning inherent to the portrait: stature, presence, role, and the very mechanics of being. In essence, Bacon gets under the skin, goes beyond the surface of the representation, and engages us with a series of emotions that lie at the heart of existence. Here, the papal figure is seated in a traditional ‘three-quarter’ pose, set against the bright red background of the throne, configured here as a three-dimensional rectangular block of unadulterated color from which the figure seems to step out and into the composition. The light blue veil below can be seen to represent the Pope’s dress, yet is delineated architectonically, providing a space for the chimpanzee; its cubistic construction in contrast with the more curvilinear marks setting out the neutral amphitheatre of the background. Such an intricate composition reveals Bacon’s interest in stretching the boundaries of painterly tradition as well as the confines of this traditional subject. Here, he reverses the expectation of religious obedience by vexing the figure; setting him (and his viewer) in a state of flux. Paternal serenity is now replaced with an itchy agitation of self and status. Discussing the status of the ‘figure’ in the post-war canon, Bacon’s Popes straddle both the abstract and the figurative, depicting the extreme forms of human experience.

The chimpanzee appears as if it is about to pounce on the papal figure; its action in stark contrast with the more hieratic pose of the Pope. For Bacon, this animal was the embodiment of chaos. Like many of his human subjects, Bacon’s animals are generally shown in tortured states, where they shriek and twist in physical contortions. The chimpanzee is depicted with an almost violent attack of the brush, causing the blurring of the image, reflecting Bacon’s interest in frozen motion and the effects of photography and film, and making it difficult to interpret the pose or expression. In composition and treatment it is close to paintings of simians executed in the fifties by Graham Sutherland, with whom Bacon became friendly in 1946. The faint, schematic framing enables Bacon to unleash the action of the chimpanzee better, while the monochrome red background of the papal throne provides a starkly contrasting field that helps to define its form. The violence of the chimpanzee must be linked to that of Bacon’s own technique. Bacon augmented his firsthand experience of animals by referring to the photographic plates of Marius Maxwell’s Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa (1924). As Davies and Yard note, “In pursuit of his dangerous subjects, Maxwell had been forced to act quickly, and many of the resultant images have a blurred, dreamlike insubstantiality that must have appealed to Bacon.” (Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p. 32). Indeed, the figure of the chimpanzee is so blurred here as to take on a phantasmagorical, rather than a physical presence, presented as a charged sweep of pigment across the Pope. Compositionally, this adds an electric charge to the landscape of the painting. Layered on top of the chimpanzee figure is a plain silhouette of a figure. Like a negative shadow, this simple delineation seems to conjoin the two motifs; man and beast becoming one and the same.

Both motifs sit neatly together on the canvas, in unison becoming the architecture of the painting itself. The closed, claustrophobic interior, often delineated as a cage-like construction within the composition, is crucial to Bacon’s art. They provide theatre spaces in which the existential drama takes place, enacted by his cast of players. Here, that space seems almost fused with the figures. The throne becomes the Pope; his dress becomes a smaller stage for the chimp. The background, sliced with a couple of simple curved lines, is rendered in exactly the same way as the dress. The interior architecture of self now becomes the exterior environment of the theatre of existence. Indeed, the extraordinary compression of the images, blurred to a point where they become meaty passages of pure pigment, together with the scumbled burgundy background heightens the drama of the scene before us. Bacon draws broad sweeps of his paint-filled brush as if trying to mimic the psychological conflict into physical action. Incorporating a rich array of colours, techniques and textures the image brings the paint to life. The alliance of the weave together with the scumbling and meandering areas of thick and thin paint, creates a living, breathing action that is nothing short of mesmerizing.

Sotheby's

Contemporary Art, Evening

9th November 2004 New York Sale 8026

Pope and Chimpanzee 1962

Art/Auctions, The City Review

Lot 32 is a superb work by Francis Bacon, entitled Pope and Chimpanzee. An oil on canvas, it measures 64 ¾ by 56 inches and was executed in 1962.

In its painterliness, it could be a fine companion to the Rothko, especially for schizophrenic collectors.

The catalogue provides the following very incisive commentary on the Bacon, noting that it "displays a number of Bacon's celebrated motifs, channeling their concomitant tributaries of thought onto the same canvas":

"This complex, deeply intellectual canvas continues Francis Bacon's impassioned and celebrated exploration of the Pope, and, specifically, his reaction to reproductions of Diego Velasquez's masterpiece, Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650, Rome, Galleria Dora Pamphili). For nearly twenty years, Bacon filled his canvases with bold, searching swathes of oil paint in an effort to render, both physically and psychically, the most senior and powerful figure in the Catholic Church….Accompanying this papal figure is another of Bacon's familiar motifs: that of the monkey. Here, a chimpanzee bursts out of the pictorial space, aggressively confronting both the Pope and the viewer; its active, almost cruciform pose is in stark contrast to the more static, regal pose of the Pope...A silhouette of a walking figure, delineated in lilac paint, is curiously layered over the chimpanzee….Francis Bacon famously turned down the opportunity to go and see the Velasquez portrait…,worrying how he might react to the original…..Bacon's task was not one of representing the image, but rather re-presenting the Indices of meaning inherent to the portrait: stature, presence, role, and the very mechanics of being. In essence, Bacon gets under the skin, goes beyond the surface of the representation, and engages us with a series of emotions that lie at the heart of existence….The chimpanzee appears as if it is about to pounce on the papal figure; its action in stark contrast with the more hieratic pose of the Pope. For Bacon, this animal was the embodiment of chaos. Like many of his human subjects, Bacon's animals are generally shown in tortured states, where they shriek and twist in physical contortions. The chimpanzee is depicted with an almost violent attack of the brush, causing the blurring of the image, reflecting Bacon's interest in frozen motion and the effects of photography and film, and making it difficult to interpret the pose or expression….The closed, claustrophobic interior, often delineated as a cage-like construction within the composition, is crucial to Bacon's art. They provide theater spaces in which the existential drama takes place, enacted by his cast of players…."

The lot has a modest estimate of $3,000,000 to $4,000,000. It failed to sell.

Sheehy sees off Sydney Festival

The Age Australia - Nov 4, 2004 by Raymond Gill

The

Sydney Festival director Brett Sheehy launched his fourth and final festival program yesterday before he moves on to direct the 2006 Adelaide Festival. And true to form, it's another festival perfectly pitched for a Sydney summer, with a broad sweep of crowd-pleasing high and popular arts featuring well known artists. Playwright of the moment Stephen Sewell turns his attention to artist Francis Bacon in his new work Three Furies - Scenes From the Life of Francis Bacon. Billed as "a play with songs", it stars Simon Burke as Bacon, is directed by Jim Sharman and features songs and music by Basil Hogios.

Bacon estate: partner’s will published

The Arts Newspaper, Friday, 24 September 2004

John Edwards, heir to the Bacon fortune, left a surprisingly modest estate, valued at £787,000, following his death in Bangkok last year. Mr Edwards, a former barman and companion of the artist, was the sole beneficiary of Bacon’s £11 million legacy in 1992. The Edwards will was published a month ago. It had been assumed that Mr Edwards would have left considerably more, benefitting his close friend, Philip Mordue, who has been involved with the Thai nightclub scene. Mr Edwards’ assets, however, were reduced by heavy spending and gifts. Most of the money went to the John Edwards Charitable Foundation, set up last year to promote Bacon’s work. One of the first beneficiaries of the Edwards (and Bacon) estate is the National Portrait Gallery in London, which was given a contribution towards the purchase of Larry Rivers’ “Mr Art”, a portrait of art critic David Sylvester.

TATE Britain

Saturday 2nd October 2004
14.00–17.00

Reconsidering Francis Bacon

Led by Ben Jones

Francis Bacon occupies a central position in the history of modern art. He reinvigorated figurative art and his celebrated Triptychs, of single figures in action, are both visually powerful and psychologically disturbing. They frequently deal with the horror of the human condition in the mid and late twentieth century - as the critic David Sylvester has said, ‘not at the literal level of observation, but by imaginatively crystallizing the conflicts into mythical figures.’

The highlight of Tate Britain's new Francis Bacon display is the triptych of 1968, on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran, and never before shown in the UK. This study day uses slide lectures and gallery discussion to review the principal themes and continuing influence of Bacon's work in the context of this painting.

Tate Britain Studio 1
£15 (£10 concessions), booking required
Price includes refreshments

Francis Bacon
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c1944
© Tate, London 2004. Presented by Eric Hall 1953

The lover who blew Bacon's millions

Francis Bacon left his barman boyfriend £11m: last week there was almost nothing left. Andrew Sinclair, who knew them both, on a spectacular spending spree

The Times, September 05, 2004

Francis Bacon was the most famous British painter of his age. His horrific pictures changed the face of art and sold for millions of pounds. But one day in 1988, instead of going to Moscow for a show of his paintings he joined me at the Groucho club in London’s Soho.

Four hours and four bottles of champagne later, I was legless. His last words to me were: “Andrew, unless I leave to see a lawyer, £3m will go to my sister in South Africa. Have you got a bad cause?” “What about yourself, Francis?” I said.

He laughed and left. He was looking, at about 80 years old, like a pantomime Prince Charming, jaunty in high boots, teeth washed in Persil and short slick hair rubbed down with brown boot polish.

I do not know if he got to his lawyer that day. But eventually he did — and left his entire £11m fortune to his final lover, a docker’s son named John Edwards, when he died in 1992.

Edwards died last year and last week his will was published. In 12 years he had managed to squander virtually the whole of his famous friend’s wealth. After tax and other deductions, Edwards’s estate was worth just £786,702.

He was Francis’s last great love. Not least due to their age difference — Bacon was nearly 40 years older than Edwards — the painter and his companion have been described as the art world’s odd couple. Publicly they denied being lovers — homosexuals in that era often did — but I have no doubt they were. What is indisputable is that the two were together for the last 15 years of the painter’s life, and Edwards featured in 30 of Bacon’s works.

They met in the mid-1980s. Edwards, a dark and handsome East Ender with a square jaw and a brooding presence, was working in a pub when Francis first saw him. Living in the seedy area of Cable Street with his five brothers, Edwards wanted to get away from the East End — and the patronage of his new friend was just the ticket.

Bacon set up the Edwards family in the antiques business, bought houses for them and enabled them to enjoy lives that bore no resemblance to their former existence.

Francis and Edwards would meet after breakfast at Bacon’s jammed and cluttered studio at Reece Mews in South Kensington. The artist would often paint Edwards, but his lover recalled that he always made painting into a drama, “as if he was fighting with the canvas”. When Francis slashed up his pictures with a Stanley knife, sometimes John saved the bits and pieces. But he was a minder in real life, not just in art.

The painter needed protection from the swarms of raffish young men around him, looking for a free lunch and more. All rich gays need a warning system in Soho and elsewhere. Bacon realised this. It was for this reason he left his cash and the contents of his studio to Edwards.

So where did the money go? After Bacon’s death, Edwards lived on the Florida Keys and later Thailand.

A sizable portion of the Bacon estate was lost in an extremely foolish legal battle with Marlborough Fine Arts, the gallery, headed by the Duke of Beaufort, through which Bacon had sold his works. A £100m lawsuit claimed the Marlborough had exercised “undue influence” over Bacon, charged too much commission and failed to account for 33 paintings. The gallery rightly denied any wrongdoing — indeed I was lined up as an expert witness in its support.

Then, suddenly, Edwards dropped the case after years of legal wrangling, leaving him lumbered with a bill that ran into millions.

The Bacon money also went to finance Edwards’s life in Thailand with his lover, Philip Mordue — better known in the London underworld as Thailand Phil or Phil the Till — where it was invested in bars and brothels in the über-seedy resort of Pattaya. Does it matter that the money was frittered away? Such things did not matter to Francis Bacon, who never cared about money or whether he was poor or rich.

The Marlborough Gallery used to give him £10,000 every Monday in a roll of £50 notes. Some of these he used to pay for our champagne at the Groucho club. Otherwise he would gamble what he still had at the weekend, playing roulette at the Soho casino of Charlie Chester. The rest he gave to his companions.

Francis moved the Edwards brothers to the Suffolk village of Long Melford. Pamela Firth Matthews, his first cousin, lived there at Cavendish Hall and was the lady of the manor. Long ago at a local dance, the young Francis had shocked everybody by dressing in women’s clothes as a 1920s flapper and declaring his preferences.

Francis bought a gamekeeper’s cottage and then the headmaster’s house at the rear of the village school. The aged Edwards parents would end up living there in green retirement far from Wapping. Later, a pub was bought and two large houses.

Fortunes and the fortunate climb the ladder of success, as Mae West said, wrong by wrong. The Edwards family became the largest landowners in the village and were richer than the Firths. With the help of Bacon, whose family had come from the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, the cockney lads would do better than landed aristocrats from Kildare. This was pure Bacon. His disasters and his pleasures lay in trying to bring opposites together.

In the words of Caroline Blackwood, once married to Bacon’s friend, the painter Lucian Freud: “Francis had an anarchic fearlessness which was unique. I can think of no one else who would have dared to boo a member of the royal family in a private house.”

That was the late Princess Margaret, who had made the mistake of trying to sing in front of him.

He never booed John Edwards in the 15 years they were together. Edwards, like nobody else, always treated him like a good mate from the pub.

Andrew Sinclair has written a biography of Francis Bacon. His recent book is An Anatomy of Terror (Pan-Macmillan)

Bacon's fortune 'was not wasted'

The Times, September 04, 2004

By A Correspondent

THE companion of Francis Bacon, accused of squandering the artist’s £11 million legacy, had disposed of his fortune carefully, knowing he was dying, his brother said yesterday.

John Edwards, to whom Bacon left his entire estate, had ensured that no one took advantage of the artist’s generosity, David Edwards, an antiques dealer from Long Melford, Suffolk, said.

John Edwards, the illiterate son of an East End docker, appeared in 30 of Bacon’s paintings. He died last year, aged 53. Recent probate showed that Mr Edwards’s estate was worth less than £1 million after tax and debts.

David Edwards claimed that £50 million would be a closer estimate of his brother’s wealth. “He was already a multimillionaire when he inherited the £11 million. My brother knew he was going to die for 18 months. Like any businessman he planned what he was going to do with his money. He also set up the John Edwards Charitable Trust, which promotes the work of Bacon and supports up and coming artists.”

Much of Bacon’s work has remained unaccounted for, but David Edwards said his family knew the whereabouts of many of the paintings.

My brother didn't squander £11m fortune

East Anglian Daily Times, September 3, 2004 07:15

By Patrick Lowman

A BUSINESSMAN has defended the reputation of his brother after he was accused of squandering a celebrated artist's multi-million-pound fortune.

John Edwards has been accused of frittering away an £11m legacy left to him by his long-time companion, the artist Francis Bacon, on a Champagne lifestyle.

Bacon shocked the art world on his deathbed when he left his entire fortune to John Edwards - the illiterate son of a London docker.

He was Bacon's favourite model, appearing in 30 of his paintings, including Three studies For A Portrait of John Edwards that sold for more than £3m in 2001.

John Edwards died last year at the age of 53, but his reputation is still dogged with national newspapers claiming he engineered his friendship with the artist and used the bond purely for financial gain.

Recent probate revelations, which showed John Edwards' estate was worth just over £3m, reduced to less than £1m after tax and debts, have added fuel to the fire.

Now his younger brother David, an antiques dealer from Long Melford, has decided to speak out in defence of his sibling.

He insisted the pair had a true friendship, adding his brother had cared deeply for Bacon and looked after him during his life, ensuring no-one was able to take advantage of the artist's generosity.

“My brother never used Francis for personal gain, they were the greatest of friends. Francis didn't suffer fools lightly, but my brother was a great judge of character and he made sure nobody took advantage of what he had,” said David Edwards.

“They were never lovers, just the closest of friends. Francis had hundreds of lovers, but he never left them anything, that tells its own story.”

David Edwards also refuted suggestions his family's substantial financial successes had been funded by Bacon's “missing millions”.

He said: “John did look after his family, but our family has not been successful off the back of Francis' fortune, we all made money independently.

“A lot has been said about John and our family in the newspapers, but that doesn't bother us.

“People have often assumed John was stupid because he wasn't formally educated, but anyone who knew him knows the truth and that is all he cared about.”

John Edwards, who owned homes in Long Melford and Hartest, near Sudbury, has been accused of squandering Bacon's £11m fortune in less then a decade.

But his brother, who is a multi-millionaire in his own right, insisted the money had been well invested and claimed £50m would be a closer estimate of his sibling's wealth.

“You have to remember he was already a multi-millionaire when he inherited the £11m. Then later more of Francis's paintings were uncovered, which John also owned and received royalties for. His fortune was in excess of £50m,” said David Edwards.

“What people do not realise is that my brother knew he was going to die for 18 months. Like any true businessman he planned what he was going to do with his money long before he died and disposed of most of it before his death.

“He was a very shrewd and clever man and I can assure you he never squandered any of Francis' money, in fact he used it very wisely.

“John was a multi-millionaire in his own right through his property dealing before Francis died. John didn't need to use Francis for any reason, he knew lots of talented and famous people and they all loved him dearly.”

He added: “John was a fantastic and clever businessman. He may not have been able to read or write, but he could certainly add up.

“John didn't squander any of the money. We as a family know exactly what has happened to all the money, but John's wish was that everything was kept confidential and we will not breach his trust and neither will anybody else.

“He also put a huge amount of money into setting up the John Edwards Charitable Trust, which promotes the work of Francis Bacon and supports up and coming artists.”

Since his death much of Bacon's work has remained unaccounted for, but David Edwards said his family knew the whereabouts of many of the paintings.

“It is fair to say some of Francis' work is still in the family hands, but I will not say more than that,” he added.

National newspapers have also suggested that John Edwards' partner for more that 20 years, Phil Mordue, had inherited the Bacon fortune.

The pair had a homosexual relationship and had homes in Hartest, Long Melford, New York, London and Florida. They were together at their penthouse department in Thailand when John Edwards died of cancer.

David Edwards said Mr Mordue had received some of the estate, but stressed money had also been shared between other friends, family members and charitable causes.

“My brother was an extremely generous person who looked after those he loved. He loved Philip dearly and he has been looked after, and so he should be,” he added.

John Edwards was one of six children born to his East End parents. The family was initially involved in the pub trade and property dealing in London and all the children have become financially successful..

David Edwards moved to Suffolk several years ago and is a successful business property owner and antique dealer, owning antique shops in Long Melford and Cavendish.

patrick.lowman@eadt.co.uk

Handyman brings home Francis Bacon

But Barry Joule himself is real gift to National Gallery


Paul Gessell
CanWest News Service

National Post, Canada September 2, 2004

CREDIT: Wayne Cuddington, The Ottawa Citizen

Barry Joule the eccentric handyman is pictured here in front of Francis Bacon's Study For Portrait No. 1.

Barry Joule, handyman to the stars, lives summer and fall by the shores of Big Rideau Lake, south of Ottawa near Portland. He does not, he insists, have 50 vintage speed boats, as the British press persistently claims. Actually, there is only one old wooden boat, the tanned, 50-ish Joule says.

When winter comes, he retreats to an estate in Normandy, chi-chi parties in Britain where he faces headlines, usually of a catty nature, in all the best newspapers.

Joule was displayed this week for the news media at the National Gallery like a piece of exotic sculpture, or perhaps a stunning work of performance art. One could not escape the feeling that Joule, not his donation of a few souvenirs from the late British artist Francis Bacon, was the real prize for the gallery.

Indeed, Joule is far more fascinating than the objects he donated. This is a man who has become famous by unplugging sinks, driving the cars and dining out with the likes of Bacon, ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and American artist Andy Warhol.

Expect to hear more about Joule at the National Gallery. The gallery's wish list includes moun-ting a major exhibition of Bacon's wondrous (and slightly demented) 20th-century art in the coming years.

Joule owns some Bacon paintings, along with other paraphernalia from the artist the gallery would love to display. He is clearly someone the gallery wants to cultivate as a friend.

Diana Nemiroff, the gallery's curator of modern art, is exceedingly tight-lipped about the tentative Bacon show down the road: "I have been working on the project but I'm not prepared to say if and when yet." Bacon is part of art royalty even though he refused to abandon figurative art 50 years ago (most artists deemed it just too 19th-century) for abstract art (the only style of painting deemed acceptable in the latter part of the last century). Clearly, Bacon was a genius, but one with a tortured soul, a wide streak of self-destructiveness and a vigorous embrace of homosexual masochism.

Joule was Bacon's friend, neighbour and handyman from 1978 until the artist's death in Madrid in 1992 at age 82. They met, according to Joule, when he fixed an errant television antenna on Bacon's roof. A 14-year platonic relationship was born. "He was probably the most important man in my life," Joule says.

The gallery is displaying only two of the objects donated by Joule in a mini-exhibition about Bacon running until Oct. 30. The remainder of the items are not being exhibited, nor were they identified in a news release announcing the donation. They include studio accessories, such as photographs and magazines, which helped inspire Bacon. The artist preferred to paint portrait-like images from found photos rather than live models. One of the Bacon artifacts on view is a heavily scratched, greeting card-sized reproduction of Diego Velasquez's 1650 Portrait of Innocent X, which inspired Bacon's famous series of Pope portraits of the 1950s, including the glorious and ghostly oil painting owned by the National Gallery titled Study for Portrait No. 1. (Bacon scratched marks on the small reproduction; he did not create the reproduction itself.)

The other Bacon object on display from Joule's vast archive is a page ripped from the artist's sketch book. This is a Bacon study of Innocent X. It has been heavily painted over as the artist experimented with various approaches.

These objects are of most interest to academics, says Nemiroff.

Art historians are fond of anything any famous artist ever touched, especially if there was brush, knife, hammer or other implement involved in the touching. Any Picasso show is incomplete without at least one doodle from a dinner napkin or some piece of broken pottery rescued from the trash bin.

Joule says he received no tax breaks or other financial considerations for donating these materials to the National Gallery. He also claims he had these objects valued at $1.2-million. So, why did he donate this valuable loot?

"I'm Canadian," Joule replies.

Joule also says he is a fan of the National Gallery and of its single Bacon painting, Study for Portrait No. 1. Some of his Bacon artifacts related to the painting, so the National Gallery was simply the best home for them.

(Ottawa Citizen)

How barman spent Bacon's £10m booty

By Michael Horsnel,l, The Times, August 31, 2004

THE Cockney barman who inherited Francis Bacon’s £10.9 million fortune in 1992 was down to his last £800,000 when he died last year, it was disclosed yesterday.

John Edwards, 53, drank a large portion of the legacy and gave much of it away to friends and relatives before his death from lung cancer in Thailand.

The art world was mortified when Bacon bequeathed his entire estate of artworks to the man who, though 41 years his junior, he described as his “only true friend”.

But the painter, one of the towering figures of 20th-century art, liked the fact that, from the outset of their 16-year friendship, Edwards refused to put him on a pedestal or to think of him as any more than a “good mate”.

Although both were homosexual, Mr Edwards, the son of an East End docker, insisted that he and Bacon, who died from a heart attack aged 82, were never lovers.

The uneducated, dyslexic Mr Edwards would visit Bacon’s South Kensington mews house every morning to make the artist breakfast and sit with him while he painted.

Probate records reveal that Mr Edwards left a gross estate of £3,125,704, reduced after liabilities to a net figure of £786,702.

It is believed that he had earlier bought properties in Suffolk for his parents and other family members. It is also thought that he sold some of Bacon’s paintings through galleries in London and New York.

Mr Edwards, who featured in 30 of the paintings, set up the John Edwards Charitable Foundation a year before his death to promote Bacon’s work.

His will stated that the bulk of his estate should be left in trust — his trustees having the power to distribute it to any charity or individual.

Mr Edwards’s lawyer John Eastman, the brother of the late Linda McCartney, was left a silver plate and framed certificate given to Edwards by the Lord Mayor of Dublin in 2001 after he presented Bacon’s studio to the city.

Bacon’s messy studio in South Kensington, which included around a hundred canvases that he had cut up because he was not satisfied with them, has been faithfully recreated at a gallery in the Irish capital, the artist’s home city.

But, true to form, Mr Edwards also stated that he wanted £50,000 spent on a party at the Harrington Club in London, for his family and friends to celebrate his life. He ordered that Krug champagne should be served.

In his will he also stated that he wanted his ashes scattered at Dales Farm in Hartest, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, which he bought after Bacon’s death.

Mr Edwards initially moved to the Florida Keys, but spent the last nine years of his life in a luxury penthouse in the sex resort of Pattaya, Thailand.

He lived with his boyfriend Philip Mordue — a fellow East Londoner nicknamed “Phil the Till” — who survived a bullet through the neck on Pattaya’s sex-bar strip in 1997.

Mr Edwards said in an interview in 2002: “I think (Bacon) felt very free with me because I was a bit different from most people he knew. I wasn’t asking him about his painting. He liked the way I didn’t care about who he was supposed to be.”

After Mr Edwards’s death there were claims that the money Bacon had left him was used to prop up bars and brothels in Thailand — thus helping to explain the plummeting value of his inheritance despite the burgeoning value of the painter’s work.

Bacon left his best friend an £11m fortune.

So where has it all gone?

By Charles Arthur

The Independent 31 August 2004

Even for an arts world where the unusual is quotidian, the decision by the painter Francis Bacon was remarkable. After his death in 1992 at the age of 82, his will left most of his £11m fortune to a former Cockney barman and gay model, John Edwards, then aged just 41.

Bacon called Edwards his "only true friend"; but some in the business wondered how good a friend Mr Edwards would be to the artist's works.

But the story has acquired a remarkable twist - with the revelation that Mr Edwards, who died in a Bangkok hospital in March 2003 of lung cancer, left an estate with a gross value of £3.12m; after liabilities, it is worth just £786,702.

Now the question everyone is asking is: where did the rest go? As the price of works by dead artists only ever rises, Bacon's estate should have been worth between £30m to £50m. Yet the will suggests it has been dissipated.

Early suggestions are that Mr Edwards spent the money on properties in Suffolk for his parents and other family members. A year before his death, he also set up the John Edwards Charitable Foundation, intended to promote Bacon's work. He willed the bulk of his estate to trustees who could distribute it to "any charity or individual".

But there are some indications he may have given away many of the paintings that made up the collection before his death, perhaps to avoid death duties. Mr Edwards's mother, Beattie, has a triptych by Bacon, valued at about £3m, hanging on the wall of her Hackney home. David Edwards, his brother, said in July: "The fact is John has been very, very generous to all of his family and all those he loved."

Many speculated that John Edwards's estate, with the cash and paintings he had been bequeathed, would go to his long-time boyfriend Philip Mordue, a fellow East Ender. But the paucity of the estate suggests he sold off or gave away many of the paintings, and used the proceeds to fund a lavish Bangkok lifestyle.

But some of the cash remains for going out in style. He willed £50,000 should be spent on a funeral party for his family and friends at the exclusive Harrington Club in Chelsea, London. For Mr Edwards, such a send-off will be a fitting end to a life which began anonymously but soon encompassed worldwide fame through his contact with Bacon.

The painter's reputation continues to grow after his death, with his paintings selling for millions. In January, the Tate gallery announced it had been given 1,200 items that were no more or less than the sweepings from his studio floor.

Yet art world rumour says that after Bacon's death the Tate turned down Mr Edwards's offer to donate it the studio itself. Thus it is now on show - painstakingly recreated - in Dublin at the Hugh Lane Gallery.

Mr Edwards, the dyslexic son of an East End docker, used to visit Bacon's south Kensington mews house - which also housed his ramshackle studio - every morning. He was the only person ever allowed into Bacon's studio while he worked, and was Bacon's confidant and muse. Mr Edwards featured in 30 of Bacon's paintings and was his closest companion for 18 years. Yet although both men were gay, Mr Edwards always denied they were lovers.

After Bacon's death, Mr Edwards moved to Thailand with his boyfriend Philip Mordue (nicknamed Phil the Till), ostensibly to escape the attentions of the press. But there may have been other pressures: Mr Mordue, now 54, was reportedly shot in a bar in Pattaya in 1997, and spent four days in hospital from a bullet wound in the neck.

Friends described Edwards as "a typical East End diamond geezer".

Boyfriend of artist Bacon frittered away £10m

By David Sapsted

The Daily Telegraph 31/08/2004

Most of the £11 million fortune left by Francis Bacon, one of the 20th century's most acclaimed artists, was frittered away by his male companion in little more than a decade.

Bacon died of a heart attack in 1992 at the age of 82 and, in a shock to the art world, left his entire estate to John Edwards, the uneducated son of a London docker, who was half the artist's age.

Mr Edwards died of cancer in Thailand last year and there was speculation that the Bacon fortune had grown to £30 million. But details of the will show that Mr Edwards, a former barman, spent most of the money on high living and on gifts for friends and relatives, leaving him with a net estate worth less than £800,000.

Mr Edwards, 53, was Bacon's companion for 16 years and featured in 30 of his paintings. Although both were homosexual, Mr Edwards denied in an interview a year before his death that they had been lovers.

After Bacon's death, he moved first to the Florida Keys before spending the last nine years of his life living with Philip Mordue, his boyfriend of 27 years and a fellow Cockney nicknamed "Phil the Till", in a penthouse apartment in the seaside town of Pattaya south of the Thai capital, Bangkok.

There were reports at the time of Mr Edwards's death in March last year that he had made Mr Mordue the main beneficiary in his will.

But probate records show that the estate - worth £3,125,704 gross but reduced to £786,702 after liabilities - was left mainly to the John Edwards Charitable Foundation, a trust set up by Mr Edwards a year before his death to promote Bacon's work.

Mr Edwards also stipulated that £50,000 was to be spent on a party for his family and friends at the Harrington Club in Kensington, west London. The principal drink was to be Krug champagne.

After inheriting the Bacon estate, Mr Edwards is believed to have bought properties for his parents and other members of his family in Suffolk.

He is also believed to have sold some of the paintings left to him by Bacon, primarily later works which were less well regarded by critics, through galleries in London and New York.

The will stated that Mr Edwards wanted his ashes scattered at a farm near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, which he bought after Bacon's death.

His bequests included Bacon's 1962 Sketch for Seated Figure, which he left to Tony Shafrazi, the owner of a New York art gallery.

John Eastman, Mr Edwards's lawyer and the brother of the late Linda McCartney, was left a silver plate and certificate presented to Mr Edwards by the lord mayor of Dublin in 2001 after he presented Bacon's studio to the city.

Rich pickings

Friend who inherited Bacon's £11m fortune went on 11-year spending spree

Sam Jones, The Guardian, Tuesday August 31, 2004

Despite a reputation for being difficult, Francis Bacon did - in death at least - live up to his celebrated toast of "Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends".

So it's hard to know what the artist would have made of the behaviour of John Edwards, the man to whom he left his £11m fortune when he died in 1992.

It appears that Edwards, a former cockney barman once described by Bacon as his "only true friend", spent most of his inheritance before he died last year - mostly on homes in Suffolk for his family.

Records show that Edwards, who died of lung cancer in a Bangkok hospital, left an estate with a gross value of £3,125,704. After liabilities, that figure comes down to £786,702.

Although Edwards was Bacon's closest friend for 16 years, the art world raised its collective eyebrow when the artist bequeathed his entire estate - including his shabby studio in South Kensington and several of his paintings - to a man summed up by his friends as "a typical East End diamond geezer".

Their suspicions may have been confirmed when rumours circulated that he had sold some of Bacon's paintings in London and New York. However, the art he inherited was mainly made up of late Bacon works which were less well regarded by critics.

There is also speculation that his legacy, which could have risen to £30m by the time he died, may have been left to Philip Mordue, his boyfriend of 27 years.

He and Mordue - a fellow east Londoner nicknamed Phil the Till - lived together in a luxury penthouse in Pattaya, Thailand, for the last nine years of Edwards' life.

His will stated that the bulk of his estate should be left in trust, with his trustees having the power to distribute it to any charity or individual.

But Edwards also specified that £50,000 should be spent on a funeral party for his family and friends at the exclusive Harrington Club in London.nd, in a final flourish worthy of his old friend, he decreed that Krug champagne should be served to those gathered.

National Gallery gets U.K. expressionist's marked-up memorabilia

CBC Art News Canada Last Updated Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:11:46

TORONTO - A friend and neighbour of the late English painter Francis Bacon has donated a number of items from the studio of the expressionist artist to the National Gallery of Canada.

Gallery officials announced Wednesday the donation by Barry Joule, a Canadian who lived next to and was friends with Bacon during the last 14 years of his life.

The gallery already owns Francis Bacon's 'Study for Portrait No. 1'
(Photo: National Gallery of Canada).

This fall, the Ottawa gallery will mount an exhibit featuring Study for Portrait No. 1, which it already owns, alongside two of the donated items related to the work. The exhibit will also include a film and photographic display inspired by Bacon.

Before his death in April 1992, the self-taught, surrealist-inspired artist – perhaps best known for his series of pope portraits – left several bundles of material from his famously chaotic studio to Joule. The material included an album of sketches, annotated books and more than 900 worked-over photographic images.

Joule exhibited this collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and at London's Barbican Centre before donating most of it to London's Tate Gallery. He also donated some items related to cubist painter Pablo Picasso – one of Bacon's early influences – to the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Joule's gift to the National Gallery was made in memory of former Queen's University Professor Charles Pullen, who was a great admirer of Bacon's work.

Among the items bequeathed to the gallery is a reproduction of 17th century Spanish painter Diego Velasquez's Portrait of Innocent X that Bacon marked up heavily. Velasquez's painting inspired Bacon's eventual pope portraits.

Bacon's marked-up reproduction of Velasquez's painting "is fascinating," says curator Diana Nemiroff
(Photo: National Gallery of Canada).

"The reproduction of Velasquez's painting is fascinating," said Diana Nemiroff, the gallery's curator of modern art and organizer of the upcoming exhibit.

"The lines scratched into the paper recall Bacon's use of a sort of linear cage around the figure of the pope in his own paintings. Bacon only knew Velasquez's painting from a reproduction, and this gives us an idea of how he imposed his own vision on it."

The exhibit will be displayed in the gallery's European wing from Aug. 30 through Oct. 24, after which the donated material will be added to the gallery's Library and Archives collection, available for study by art scholars.

Francis Bacon: The Sacred and The Profane

Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, 61, rue de Grenelle – 75007, Paris (AR)

Seen and Heard Art Review July 2004

Alex Russell

In the catalogue, exhibition curator and Francis Bacon biographer, Michael Peppiatt, states: "This exhibition sets out to explore the varieties of the sacred and the profane in Bacon’s art. It focuses on some of the enigmas that persist at the heart of his profoundly searching and subversive imagery…An exhibition of this kind will not necessarily take us to the mysterious core of Bacon’s paintings – they are infinitely elusive and, like the sphinx that became one of Bacon’s emblems, they raise questions to which we have at best a faltering reply. But the exhibition will bring us face to face with unexpected and discomfiting reflections."

The title of this exhibition of 41 of Bacon’s paintings - ‘The Sacred and The Profane’ - became lost once one was immediately confronted by the brutality of paint, for the paint speaks louder than any narrative thread. It is seeing – I would say – sensationing - Bacon’s paintings ‘in the flesh’, in the paint, that negates the kind of ‘story-telling’ that Bacon himself so despised. Curiously, the paintings that did not work anymore were the famous images of paranoid Popes which seemed over time to have taken on a mixture of nostalgic naivety and melodramatic campness. This amateurish naivety can be seen in Study for Portrait (Pope) 1957 where Bacon’s handling of the raised arms is clumsy and crude.

In the catalogue the reproduction of Pope II, 1951 is richer and darker and oddly more powerful than the original which appeared muddy and sloppy; indeed, the reproductions in the catalogue tended to be darker than the paintings themselves and also to homogenise the textures of the paint. For instance, in the flesh, Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950, has a nerve-wracking quality, with what seem to be white puffs of wool on the back of the headless beast which hangs over the top of the cross. These furry textures with grainy paint are what bring Bacon’s images to life and no reproduction can ever faithfully capture the violent graininess of the paint. This is evident in Reclining Figure III, 1959 where the flesh-paint takes on sinuous swirls of rainbow hues with Bacon’s brush making musical imprints in the figure’s muscular rhythmic vitality.

By far the finest painting on display was Man in Blue V, 1954 where the head seems to smoulder between being and non-being, with the fragile face being woven together by thin slivers of white silvery paint leaking into darkness. The right eye is painted without being painted-in, evoked without being filled in; it is an eye without being a literal eye. Being made out of arbitrary, non-rational marks, this is anti-illustrational painting at its most poignant and powerful.

This is also sensationed in Study for a Self Portrait, 1963 where again the arbitrary paint smudges fuse facial features through non-illustrational marks. It was indeed between 1954 and 1963 that Bacon was at his inventive painterly best. In stark contrast, by far the worst was Self Portrait, 1978 where Bacon looks like a bloated botox baby; the older he became the younger he made himself look, like a parody in reverse of the Picture of Dorian Gray - and here the image is inanely illustrational, the paint smooth and etiolated – as was also the case in Triptych, 1983 - directly opposite - with its dead orange ground and flat figures: here was a bored Bacon as a ghost of his former self.

Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1963 is hardly ever reproduced yet it is one of Bacon’s finest studies of his tragic loser lover. With its curls and flourishes it is strikingly baroque while having the spiritual aura and mystical mood of Jawlensky’s Meditations.

I have seen Paralytic Child on All Fours (after Muybridge) 1961 only in reproduction and never realised what a sensitive and refined image it is in reality. The reptilian half-moon face has a Vermeeresque luminous serenity; the body’s gestures are balletic; here Bacon brings out the animal in man with a suave graceful elegance.

A similar reptilian alien creature is sprawled out in Reclining Figure in a Mirror, 1971 which seems caught in a state of shape-shifting between animal and human. Both these animalesque images dispel the myth that Bacon’s figures are distorted. Indeed, the images at this exhibition all displayed a tranquil radiance devoid of the usual clichés associated with the Bacon canon: ‘horror’ and ‘pain’ were absent.

Shown on the lower ground floor was a 1964 TV documentary with Bacon speaking fluent French in the only interview I’ve ever seen conducted in movement: a euphoric Bacon twirls around with camera crew and interviewer and hangers-on trying to keep up with him. Edgar Varese’s Integrales was an apt sound track to go with Bacon’s primitive-modernism.

Michael Peppiatt has curated a beautifully balanced show; every image seemed to be at the right place at the right time and all images were bathed in perfect light. Bacon would have been delighted by such a finely pitched exhibition. Originally scheduled to close on June 30^th it has been extended to August 15^th due to popular demand.

mailto:contact@museemaillol.com

BBC News

Last Updated: Wednesday, 28 July, 2004, 11:28 GMT 12:28 UK

Bacon painting could go overseas

The painting was twice withdrawn from exhibition

A painting by Francis Bacon valued at £9.5m could be sold overseas after a UK export ban ran out on Tuesday.

A temporary banning licence for Bacon's Study After Velasquez was granted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in May.

The DCMS hoped the ban would ensure a buyer could be found in the UK for the 1950 artwork.

Bacon believed it had been destroyed and it was only rediscovered after his death in 1992.

Withdrawn from exhibition twice, Bacon sent the work to his art material supplier and later expressed regret at its loss.

The piece was based on the work of Spanish renaissance painter Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted in 1650.

The DCMS's reviewing committee on the export of works of art said Bacon's painting had been recommended for the temporary export ban because of its "outstanding aesthetic quality".

The government recently placed an export ban on The Burgomaster of Delft, by artist Jan Steen, which dates from around 1655 and is owned by a family in Wales.

All the world desires a Brit

Colin Gleadell on the latest movements in the contemporary art market

The Daily Telegraph 28/06/2004

British artists with worldwide appeal were among the stars of the select evening sales of contemporary art at Sotheby's and Christie's last week when more than £28 million changed hands - more than ever before in London.


Sinister, sought after: a self-portrait by Francis Bacon

But it wasn't the radical, conceptual art of the YBAs that dominated. For its sale on Wednesday, Sotheby's had assembled a strong group of figurative paintings by the post-war "School of London" artists - Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff - and the results showed how global their market has become. As auctioneer Tobias Meyer said:

"There needed to be a big jump for British art - and it happened tonight."

The most spectacular results were for Bacon and Auerbach. A small self-portrait, just over 12in square, made the highest price to date for a Bacon painting of that size, selling to private dealer Ivor Braka for £1.6 million - twice the estimate. The self-portrait last sold in 1991 for £363,000.

Braka also tried to buy an exceptional painting by Frank Auerbach, but without success. Auerbach's market has revived recently after more than a decade in which his solid, painterly values have appeared out of fashion. Yet not even Sotheby's was prepared for the interest shown in Head of J.Y.M.11 (1984-5), a painting that the artist considered one of his best.

Until Wednesday, no portrait by Auerbach had made more than £170,000 at auction. But for this one, estimated at £60,000 to £80,000, 11 telephone bidders from as far as Asia and America lined up against the British art trade, driving the price to £352,500 - paid by a European collector.

Christie's Sells $25.7 Million of Artworks by Bacon, Kapoor

Bloomberg 24th/25th June 2004

June 25 (Bloomberg) - Christie's International sold 90 percent of its offered works by artists such as Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, taking in 14.1 million pounds ($25.7 million) and breaking records for Anish Kapoor, Emilio Vedova and Eduardo Chillida at a London auction of contemporary art last night.

The top-priced lot was Bacon's 'Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne,' a 1966 triptych portrait valued as high as 2 million pounds that brought 2.4 million pounds after adding Christie's commission. The auction competed with the England-Portugal Euro 2004 soccer game and people started leaking out of London-based Christie's King Street rooms halfway through the event.

Tate Britain put on show yesterday a virtually unknown homo-erotic triptych painted by the late Francis Bacon in 1968.

Improbably, the piece is owned by the Iranian state and, for obvious reasons, it has never been displayed.

Experts in the West had lost track of the work, titled Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, and regarded it as a lost masterpiece.

For 30 years, the risque triptych was squirrelled away in the vaults of Teheran's Museum of Contemporary Art, out of sight and out of mind, made safe from the disapproving eyes of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeni.

Stephen Deuchar, the director of Tate Britain, stumbled on it on a family holiday to Iran in 2001.

Making a courtesy call on Dr Sami Azar, the director of the Teheran museum, he was led to the storerooms and the treasure was unwrapped before him.

Dr Deuchar said yesterday: "I didn't even know of its existence. I was astonished to see it and was exhilarated by its quality.

"Quite rapidly, I decided that I might broach the idea of it coming on loan to Tate Britain.

"I don't think that it is surprising that it hasn't been seen in Teheran but in the context of Bacon's work as a whole it's not remarkable for its homo-eroticism so much as its quality."

Bacon, a Soho high-lifer and promiscuous homosexual, was probably not, it is safe to assume, one of the favourite Western artists of Iran's Islamic revolution.

Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants was, in fact, bought for the country in 1975 in the dying days of the Peacock Throne, by the ruling Pahlavi dynasty, whose pro-Western policies - and rigorous secret services - fanned the revolution in 1979.

Through a foundation that she controlled, Farah Pahlavi, the widow of the last Shah of Iran, quietly built up a small but significant collection of Western art for the museum.

When the Shah was deposed, works by Henry Moore, Renoir, Picasso, Warhol and Dali joined the Bacon in the museum's strongrooms.

Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants was last seen in Europe in 1972 at an exhibition in Dusseldorf. In the catalogue for a big Bacon retrospective at the Tate a decade ago, its whereabouts were listed as unknown.

It is on loan to this country for six months, joining nearly a dozen other pictures by the artist owned by Tate Britain.

Dr Azar, who must still walk a the tightrope as reformers and traditionalists struggle for ascendancy in Iran, finally plans to show it in Teheran on its return, Dr Deuchar said yesterday.

A major triptych by Francis Bacon is about to see the light after languishing for more than 30 years in the store of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants (1968) was bought, having been shown in Europe in 1972, by the wife of the last shah of Iran. It became part of the collection of the Tehran museum, but it is thought to have been on display there only once in 30 years.

Then, in 2001, Tate Britain's director, Stephen Deuchar, holidayed in Iran. He stopped off at the Tehran museum, asked to meet the director, Ali Reza Sami Azar, and was shown the gallery's reserve collection.

"Even under the fluorescent lighting of the store we could see it was a strong work," Dr Deuchar said yesterday. "An idea of exchanging works emerged - we recently lent them a Bill Woodrow sculpture for a British Council exhibition in the Tehran museum."

The triptych is on loan to Tate Britain for six months, where it forms the centrepiece of a new Bacon room.

The work did not remain in store merely because of its overtly sexual content, though that may have been a factor. "Dr Sami Azar did acknowledge the need for caution over one or two female nudes in the collection," Dr Deuchar said, "but he would say that it was as difficult finding a proper context for the Bacon's display - the revolution brought to an end collecting of contemporary art."

The work is one of a number of vast triptychs that Bacon produced. The left and right panels mirror each other, with a seated figure nude on the left and clothed on the right. It is possible that this represents George Dyer, Bacon's lover who died alone of drink and drugs on their hotel lavatory in Paris in 1971.

The central panel shows two male figures, with simian facial features, in bed. The bed is identifiably that which Bacon used in Morocco and on which he received many beatings by lovers.

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 consigned property. Such property is offered subject to a reserve. This is such a lot.
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Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne
oil on canvas, triptych
each: 14 x 12in. (35.5 x 30.5cm.)
Painted in 1966

Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1971.

Throughout the 1960s and '70s Bacon painted his close friend Isabel Rawsthorne repeatedly. One of the most frequent subjects of his art, Bacon's portraits of Rawsthorne are today widely regarded as among his finest works. Bacon's art, which was strongly reliant on the human figure as the vehicle by which his unique and disturbing vision of life was expressed, was greatly dependent on portraiture and Bacon is well known to have chosen to paint only a select group of people whom he knew well. Peter Lacy, George Dyer, John Edwards, Henrietta Moraes Lucian Freud, Muriel Belcher along with Isabel Rawsthorne, were all close friends and lovers mainly drawn from the Soho bohemia of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life'. They were the gritty 'real-life' characters whose strong individuality and unique humanity Bacon drew on to fill the empty void of his often stark and alienating canvases.

Like character actors in modern dress taking part in some epic ancient Greek tragedy each of these unique and memorable individuals fulfils a vital role in Bacon's art. Their raw individuality, so powerfully captured and conveyed by Bacon's distortions and visceral use of paint, is also transformed into a physical prison. Each figure in Bacon's art is isolated and alone, trapped within their body in the midst of an alienating and empty abstract space. A raw and pulsating piece of meat animated solely by the electric pulse of their nervous system, they are unique animals yet also ultimately, in Bacon's hands, part of an ugly and generic humanity.

It was largely because of the intense and specific nature of Bacon's powerful and disturbing art that the artist only felt comfortable painting those individuals he knew well. What these friends and lovers had in common for Bacon and what made him able to paint them so successfully was that he knew them. He had lived alongside them. They were people and faces he had not only seen, but observed and scrutinized in everyday life, taking in their variety of expression and the way they moved or how they responded to a whole range of differing circumstances recording each in a series of photographic-like flashes that stuck in his memory like mental snap-shots which captured the uniqueness of their innate individuality. In the studio, Bacon would paint from a photograph which would help to prompt this visual memory and, as he once explained to David Sylvester, enable him to 'drift' from the outward appearance more freely. "Even in the case of friends who will come and pose,' he recalled, 'I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from them, It's true to say I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I don't know. But, if I both know them and have photographs of them, I find it easier to work than actually having their presence in the room. I think that, if I have the presence of the image in there, I am not able to drift so freely as I am through the photographic image. This may be just my own neurotic sense but I find it less inhibiting to work from them through memory and their photographs than actually having them seated there before me.' (David Sylvester (ed.), The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1990, p. 40)

Bacon's portraits of Isabel Rawsthorne are among the most powerful and successful of his works because of all of the friends he painted, Isabel Rawsthorne was one of the closest and, perhaps with the exception of Muriel Belcher, the woman with whom he felt most comfortable. With her strength of character and her illustrious history as a model and mistress of several great twentieth century artists she was also, in direct contrast to Bacon's former lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer for example, a powerfully independent character whom Bacon not only respected but also to some extent looked up to. When Bacon bragged to Paris Match , 'You know I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful woman who was Derain's model and Georges Bataille's girlfriend', he, perhaps unwittingly, revealed this aspect of his relationship with her. Other than one other youthful attempt at heterosexuality - with a prostitute who reportedly ate chips while Bacon attempted intercourse - Rawsthorne, as Bacon's friend and biographer Michael Peppiatt tells us, appears to have been the only woman with whom Bacon ever even attempted to have sex. (Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 1996 p. 17)

Rawsthorne, was born Isabel Nichols in the East End of London in 1912 the daughter of a master mariner. She grew up in Liverpool and attended Liverpool School of Art and later studied at the Royal Academy Schools. A model and mistress of Sir Jacob Epstein, by whom she had a child, she moved to Paris when she was 22 where she worked in Derain's studio, often modeling for him as well. "I adored Derain' she once recalled, "he was the most French person you could ever meet. That's how I learned the language.' Through Derain, Isabel Delmer, as she then was, met Giacometti, who also took her as his model and mistress. According to Giacometti's biographer James Lord, Giacometti recalled Isabel standing at midnight on the Boulevard Saint-Michel - remote and imperious - and it was this image that gave rise to his many sculptures of extraordinarily thin, unreachable women. In addition to this, Giacometti's painting Isabel dans l'atelier, and two sculptures Isabel I of 1936 and Isabel 2 from 1938-9 are direct portraits of her.

It was through Giacometti that Isabel also came to be painted by Picasso. 'Alberto worked all night,' she told Bacon biographer Daniel Farson, 'but at five every evening we drank at the Lipp. Picasso used to sit at the table opposite and one day, after staring at me particularly hard, he jumped up and said to Alberto: 'Now I know how to do it.' He dashed back to his studio to paint my portrait - with little red eyes, wild hair and a vertical mouth - one of five he painted from memory." (Daniel Farson The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London, 1993, p. 165)

Isabel was separated from Giacometti by the outbreak of war in 1939 but she joined him again briefly in 1945 before marrying the composer Constant Lambert. When Lambert died in 1951 she married his friend and fellow composer Alan Rawsthorne. She met Bacon in the early 1960s and soon became one of his closest friends as well as a frequent figure in his portraiture. Strong-willed, fiercely independent and greedy for life Isabel Rawsthorne had a warm, and distinguished face that evidently fascinated Bacon. It wore, what Daniel Farson once described as a 'surprised expression of someone who has just heard a marvelous joke and wishes to share it.' (op. cit. p. 166) In addition to her burgeoning friendship with the artist Rawsthorne was also particularly instrumental in strengthening Bacon's ties with the city of Paris during the 1960s. Like Bacon she was a friend of the poet and writer Michel Leiris and it was through her that Bacon, a great admirer of Giacometti, whom he once declared to be 'the greatest living influence on my work', came to meet the Swiss sculptor, on two occasions in London in 1965.

Painted in 1966 Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne is a return to the subject that Bacon had first developed in two triptychs the year before; one on a dark and one on a light background. Split into three separate sections, this 1966 triptych is a composite work that develops like a series of film stills with each portrait operating like a snap shot of Rawsthorne caught in motion. Each portrait depicts a radically different facial expression that Bacon has enhanced by the use of dramatic and seemingly chance-driven splashes of white paint to articulate a sense of nervous movement and frozen animation. These deliberate, so-called 'distortions' are used by Bacon to emphasize the living nature of Rawsthorne's flesh and to animate the portrait. Sweeping marks that link her recognisable but illustrative features to her essentially abstract surroundings, they reinforce the notion that collectively the three frames of the portrait bracket something of the essence of the raw reality of life that animates all humanity. As Bacon himself expressed it, "Whether the distortions which I think sometimes bring the image over more violently are damage is a very questionable idea. I don't think it is damage. You may say it's damaging if you take it on the level if illustration. But not if you take it on the level of what I think of as art. One brings the sensation and feeling of life over the only way one can. I don't say it's a good way, but one brings it over at the most acute point one can.' (op. cit. Sylvester, p. 43)

Through the seeming 'damage' or 'violence' of these 'distortions' and the 3-D-like fragmentation of the portrait into three constantly shifting parts, a composite but recognisable and animated image of Rawsthorne asserts itself in our minds. It is an image that Rawsthorne herself described as "fabulously accurate'. (op. cit. Peppiatt, p. 208.) Bacon, somewhat more cautiously described this successful painterly process as being able to 'clear away one or two (of reality's) screens'.

Bacon's rare portraits of a female lover go to auction

John Ezard, arts correspondent
The Guardian, Tuesday June 8, 2004

Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, which are expected to fetch £1.5m to £2m when they go under the hammer at Christie's this month.

Paintings by Francis Bacon of one of his two known female lovers were forecast yesterday to fetch £1.5m to £2m at auction in London this month.

They are of the friend about whom the famously homosexual painter bragged to the magazine Paris Match: "You know, I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful woman who was Derain's model and George Bataille's girlfriend."

Isabel Rawsthorne was one of the strikingly independent, good-looking people of her time, with a warm and distinguished face. Yet her fate - as model and mistress to several great 20th-century artists - was to be shown in strange ways by her lovers and admirers.

Picasso gave her wild hair and a vertical mouth. The sculptor Alberto Giacometti based some of his stick people on her. And Bacon's canvases, titled Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne, make her look lion-faced, with a nose and cheeks which appear to have had skin flayed from them.

Raised in east London and herself a painter, Rawsthorne was one of Bacon's closest friends and more frequent models in the Soho milieu they moved in, centred round the Colony club. In his book about the artist, Michael Peppiatt says Bacon respected and to some extent looked up to her.

She had the "surprised expression of someone who has just heard a marvellous joke and wishes to share it", according to the journalist Daniel Farson, another club regular.

When she met Bacon in the early 1960s, Rawsthorne was 48 and most of her artists were behind her. By the age of 22 she had had a child by the sculptor Jacob Epstein. Living with the painter André Derain in Paris introduced her to Giacometti, who drank at the same brasserie as Picasso.

"Picasso used to sit at the table opposite and one day, after staring at me particularly hard, he jumped up and said to Alberto: 'Now I know how to do it,'" she told Farson. "He dashed back to his studio to paint my portrait - with little red eyes, wild hair and a vertical mouth - one of five he painted from memory."

She married the composer Constant Lambert and, after his death, the conductor and composer Alan Rawsthorne. She died in 1992.

Bacon's only other known excursion into heterosexuality came while he was a young man, according to Peppiatt.

This was with a prostitute who, Bacon said, ate chips while he attempted intercourse.

Prophet of a pitiless world

John Berger used to think Francis Bacon painted only to shock and his appeal would soon wear thin. But at a new show in Paris, he realised the painter's personal preoccupations have become terrifyingly relevant

The Guardian, Saturday May 29, 2004

Bacon (photo: Jane Bown) repeatedly painted the human body in discomfort or want or agony

Visit the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Maillol Museum in Paris. Read Susan Sontag's latest book, Regarding the Pain of Others. The exhibition, despite the stupid subtitle of Sacred and Profane, represents succinctly a long life's work. The book is a remarkably probing meditation about war, physical mutilation and the effect of war photographs. Somewhere in my mind the book and exhibition refer to one another. I'm not yet sure how.

As a figurative painter, Bacon had the cunning of a Fragonard. (The comparison would have amused him, and both were accomplished painters of physical sensation - one of pleasure and the other of pain.) Bacon's cunning has understandably intrigued and challenged at least two generations of painters.

If, during 50 years, I have been critical of Bacon's work, it is because I was convinced he painted in order to shock, both himself and others. And such a motive, I believed, would wear thin with time. Last week, as I walked backwards and forwards before the paintings in the Rue des Grenelles, I perceived something I'd not understood before, and I felt a sudden gratitude to a painter whose work I'd questioned for such a long while.

Bacon's vision from the late 1930s to his death in 1992 was of a pitiless world. He repeatedly painted the human body or parts of the body in discomfort or want or agony. Sometimes the pain involved looks as if it has been inflicted; more often it seems to originate from within, from the guts of the body itself, from the misfortune of being physical. Bacon consciously played with his name to create a myth, and he succeeded in this. He claimed descent from his namesake, the 16th-century English empiricist philosopher, and he painted human flesh as if it were a rasher of bacon (tranche du lard fumé).

Yet it is not this that makes his world more pitiless than any painted before. European art is full of assassinations, executions and martyrs. In Goya, the first artist of the 20th century (20th, yes), one listens to the artist's own outrage. What is different in Bacon's vision is that there are no witnesses and there is no grief. Nobody painted by him notices what is happening to somebody else painted by him. Such ubiquitous indifference is crueller than any mutilation.

In addition, there is the muteness of the settings in which he places his figures. This muteness is like the coldness of a freezer which remains constant whatever is deposited in it. Bacon's theatre, unlike Artaud's, has little to do with ritual, because no space around his figures receives their gestures. Every enacted calamity is presented as a mere collateral accident.

During his lifetime, such a vision was nourished and haunted by the melodramas of a very provincial bohemian circle, within which nobody gave a fuck about what was happening elsewhere. And yet ... and yet the pitiless world Bacon conjured up and tried to exorcise has turned out to be prophetic. It can happen that the personal drama of an artist reflects within half a century the crisis of an entire civilisation. How? Mysteriously.

Has not the world always been pitiless? Today's pitilessness is perhaps more unremitting, pervasive and continuous. It spares neither the planet itself, nor anyone living on it anywhere. Abstract because, deriving from the sole logic of the pursuit of profit (as cold as the freezer), it threatens to make obsolete all other sets of belief, along with their traditions of facing the cruelty of life with dignity and some flashes of hope.

Return to Bacon and what his work reveals. He obsessively used the pictorial language and thematic references of some earlier painters - such as Velásquez, Michelangelo, Ingres or Van Gogh. This "continuity" makes the devastation of his vision more complete.

The Renaissance idealisation of the naked human body, the church's promise of redemption, the Classical notion of heroism, or Van Gogh's ardent 19th-century belief in democracy - these are revealed within his vision to be in tatters, powerless before the pitilessness. Bacon picks up the shreds and uses them as swabs. This is what I had not taken in before. Here was the revelation.

A revelation that confirms an insight: to engage today with the traditional vocabulary, as employed by the powerful and their media, only adds to the surrounding murkiness and devastation. There are a number of words and cliches, filched from the past, whose currency has now to be categorically refused. Liberty, terrorism, security, democratic, fanatic, anti-semitic, etc are terms that have been reduced to rags in order to camouflage the new ruling pitilessness.

This does not necessarily mean silence. It means choosing the voices one wishes to join. The present period of history is one of the Wall. When the Berlin one fell, the prepared plans to build walls everywhere were unrolled. Concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist, zone walls. Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich. The walls cross every sphere from crop cultivation to healthcare. They exist, too, in the richest metropolises of the world. The Wall is the front line of what, long ago, was called the class war.

On the one side: every armament conceivable, the dream of no-body-bag wars, the media, plenty, hygiene, many passwords to glamour. On the other: stones, short supplies, feuds, the violence of revenge, rampant illness, an acceptance of death and an on-going preoccupation with surviving one more night - or perhaps one more week - together.

The choice of meaning in the world today is here between the two sides of the wall. The wall is also inside each one of us. Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to. It is not a wall between good and evil. Both exist on both sides. The choice is between self-respect and self-chaos.

On the side of the powerful there is a conformism of fear - they never forget the wall - and the mouthing of words that no longer mean anything. Such muteness is what Bacon painted.

On the other side there are multitudinous, disparate, sometimes disappearing, languages with whose vocabularies a sense can be made of life even if, particularly if, that sense is tragic.

   "When my words were wheat
   I was earth. When my words were anger
   I was storm.
    When my words were rock
   I was river.
   When my words turned honey
   Flies covered my lips".
   - Mahmoud Darweesh

Bacon painted the muteness fearlessly, and in this was he not closer to those on the other side, for whom the walls are one more obstacle to get around, even if it involves risking their lives for those following? It could be ...

LONDON, ENGLAND.- Arts Minister Estelle Morris has placed a temporary export bar on a stunning rediscovered masterpiece by Francis Bacon, entitled Study after Velasquez, 1950. The work is from Bacon’s “Pope Series” of over forty-five paintings resulting from the his fascination with Velasquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1650, which Bacon used as a springboard for his own intense exploration of the human condition.

The painting has an interesting history. Withdrawn from exhibition twice, Bacon eventually sent it to his art materials supplier with instructions for it to be removed from its stretcher, presumably so he could begin another work. Later thinking the painting had been destroyed the artist allegedly often expressed regret at its fate. The work remained undiscovered until after Bacon’s death in 1992. This will provide a last chance to raise the money to keep the painting in the United Kingdom.

The Minister’s ruling follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art that the export decision be deferred. This reflects the painting’s outstanding aesthetic quality and its significance for study as Bacon’s first completed full-length Pope portrait, reflecting his ambition to develop the grand manner portrait.

The deferral will enable purchase offers to be made at the following agreed fair market price:

A painting by Francis Bacon, Study after Velasquez, 1950, deferred at the recommended price of £9,500,000, until after 27 July 2004, with the possibility of an extension until after 27 November 2004, if there is a serious intention to raise funds with a view to making an offer to purchase.

Anyone interested in making an offer to purchase the painting should contact the owner’s agent through:

The Secretary

The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art

Department for Culture, Media and Sport

2-4 Cockspur Street

London

SW1Y 5DH

The Government stepped in yesterday to try to prevent an important long-lost painting by Francis Bacon, thought to have been destroyed years ago, from being sold to America for almost £10 million.

The picture, Study After Velasquez, was rediscovered after Bacon died in 1992, though its current ownership is unknown.

Bacon, Britain's foremost post-war artist, left a tangled web on his death with some of his works owned by his gallery and others left to his homosexual long-term companion, John Edwards.

Estelle Morris, the minister for the arts, yesterday called the painting, one of a series of 45 in Bacon's Screaming Pope Series, "a stunning rediscovered masterpiece".

She issued a temporary export bar giving public collections in Britain six months to keep the 1950 painting in this country by matching the £9.5 million private sale price to America.

The artist's Screaming Pope Series was inspired by his fascination with Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X and the insight it showed into the human condition.

This painting shows a snarling Pope, snared inside a curtain of rods, apparently screaming into oblivion.

Bacon agreed to show the work first at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1950 and then at the Festival of Britain in 1951, but on both occasions he mysteriously withdrew it.

He eventually sent the piece to his art materials supplier with instructions for it to be removed from its stretcher but later, thinking that it had been destroyed, he is said to have expressed profound regret at its loss.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport was unable to shed any light on when and where it was rediscovered, who the seller is or the American buyer's identity.

Bacon astonished the art world by leaving his £11 million estate, including a number of pictures, to Edwards, the illiterate son of an East End docker who was 40 years the artist's junior.

Edwards, described as "a typical East End diamond geezer", said he never had a sexual relationship with Bacon, but he was his closest friend for 16 years. They frequented Soho together and Edwards visited Bacon's South Kensington mews house every morning to make him breakfast and sit with him while he painted.

Edwards died from lung cancer last year in Thailand where he had gone to live after Bacon's death with Philip "Phil the Till" Mordue, another East Ender.

"We have sadly decided that it is simply beyond our means, though it is an important and wonderful work," a spokeswoman said of the Study after Velásquez 1950, a painting which Bacon, who died in 1992, believed to be destroyed.

The arts minister, Estelle Morris, granted an export bar yesterday, which will keep it in Britain at least until July, and can be extended to November.

This is intended to give a British institution a chance to match the £9.5m price. With the Tate admitting defeat, it is unlikely that any other museum will try to raise the money.

David Barrie, director of the Art Fund, the charity which helped the National Gallery acquire Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks for more than £20m, said: "It is certainly true that there is a massive weakness in the system, which undertakes to compensate vendors at the current market price without providing any means for museums and galleries to afford that price.

"It is particularly serious at the moment, with the Heritage Lottery Fund unable to move quickly in a rapidly moving art market and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, which can move very fast, having seriously depleted its resources."

The vendor is believed to be Bacon's estate. No public announcement was made, but most major disposals from the estate in the past decade have been made discreetly.

The painting is from Bacon's most famous series, The Screaming Popes, based on Velásquez's great portrait of Pope Innocent X.

Bacon never saw the 17th century painting, though he obsessively bought prints of it; he once said that he would have been afraid to confront the original, after manipulating it "so atrociously".

He twice withdrew this painting from exhibitions, and in the 60s sent it to his materials supplier with instructions to take it off its stretcher and replaced it with a new blank canvas. He believed it had been destroyed, and is said to have regretted it. It was rediscovered after his death.

His estate was valued at £11m when it was left to his friend John Edwards, who died last year in Thailand.

Bacon was regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, and in 1989 became the world's most expensive living artist when a triptych sold for £3.8m in New York. Since his death his reputation and prices have continued to soar: the previous record is just over £6m for another triptych.

The Tate's decision points to the hole at the heart of the export bar system. Experts such as Sir Nicholas Goodison, who recently completed a review for the Treasury, have warned that the gap can only be filled by a serious injection of government money for acquisitions.

Last year the Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, said his galleries were losing major works every week because they could not afford to bid for them.

Although the Tate owns 50 works definitively by Bacon, the pope painting would be a major addition. Last year it got the most eccentric Bacon collection: thousands of sheets and torn scraps of paper from the legendary knee-deep litter on his studio floor.

Alfred Hecht, London
Sotheby's, London, Post War and Contemporary Art, 27 June 1991, Lot 40
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner.

London, Tate Gallery; Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie; Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Francis Bacon, 1985, no. 83, illustrated in colour
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., Francis Bacon 1909-1992 Small Portrait Studies, 1993
New Haven, The Yale Center for British Art; Minneapolis, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; San Francisco, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Francis Bacon: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1999, p. 160, no. 52, illustrated in colour.

Lorenza Trucchi, Francis Bacon, London 1976, no. 169, illustrated in colour
John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1979, p. 157, no. 81, illustrated
Dawn Ades and Andrew Forge, Francis Bacon, London 1980, p. 83, illustrated in colour.

“People have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint but myself … I loathe my own face, and I’ve done self-portraits because I’ve had nothing else to do” (Francis Bacon in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1975, ps. 129-133).

The love of Francis Bacon’s life to date, George Dyer, died in 1971. It was two nights before the grand opening of his retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris and Dyer had committed suicide by overdose in their hotel room. A handsome ex-petty criminal, Dyer offered Bacon a different take on life and their relationship from 1963 onwards inspired arguably one of his most fertile periods of creation. Filled with bold, confident swathes of joyous colour and distinguished by brushstroke upon brushstroke of self-assured representational genius, the over-riding sense of the fullness of life swept through the paintings, like never before. However, Bacon’s art had always been aware of the direct opposition between life and death, and the period immediately following Dyer’s suicide was characterised by a deep sense of mourning. Infused with grief and self-accusation, the depth of despair in the works between 1971 and 1973 show the reverse of Bacon’s painterly coin.

On the one hand this period confronted Bacon’s desolate sense of loss, but on the other it also represented a period of intense loneliness for the artist. With the loss of his right hand man, Bacon withdrew from society in a kind of self-imposed exile. As such, apart from his outstanding triptych epitaphs to George, most of the paintings of this period were self- portraits. Bacon had always been an incredibly gregarious bon-viveur, but with nobody else around him, he was forced to confront himself, and this he did with his usual unerring sense of painterly presence.

Painted during this period of intense drama, turmoil and self-reflection, Study for Self Portrait of 1973, represents one of the most powerful smaller single panel works in Bacon’s oeuvre. The larger full-body studies of the same period show his body in a state of extreme reluctance. Slumped back into a chair with his head held in his hands or holding his legs towards his head in a kind of adult foetal position, all of these works show him dressed in black, with his head cast in various tones of grey. This is Bacon plumbing the depths. The extraordinary Study for Self-Portrait closes right in on a profile of his head. Fidgetting nervously, his right hand and arm are drawing across his face, seemingly surprised at the attention he is receiving. The extraordinary compression of the image, together with the scumbled pale blue background heightens the drama and magnifies the prominence of his wristwatch. The wristwatch was present in a few of the works of this period and would appear to remind the viewer of the transitory nature of existence. As Bacon reflected “Time does not heal. There isn’t an hour of the day that I don’t think about him [George Dyer]” (Francis Bacon in Exhibition Catalogue, Lugano, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Lugano, Francis Bacon, 1993, p. 44)

As with all of his self-portraits, this image would have been painted from memory and, up close and personal, Bacon covers the canvas with his immediate presence. Dressed once again in black, the contemplative profile is picked out in delicate detail right down to the flick of hair which appears to disappear into the background sea of pale blue. Equally, as the face merges with the appearance of the movement of the arm across it, Bacon draws broad sweeps of his paint-filled brush as if trying to mimic the action. Incorporating a rich array of colours, techniques and textures the image brings the paint to life. Bacon has primed the back of the canvas to allow the pigment to seep into the weave, this alliance of the weave together with the scumbling and meandering areas of think and thin paint creates a living, breathing action. Bacon here appears to have achieved his aim: “What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance” (Francis Bacon in conversation with David Sylvester, Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, 1967, p. 37)

If Bacon’s art sought the height of painterly expression as a reflection of life, then his self-portraits represented the heart of that exploration. Bacon’s life itself was filled with extremes and, from his very first self portrait in 1956 to the last in 1986, one can sense a man who responded directly to the ups and downs of life. If the late 1960s provided some of his happiest moments, the early 1970s provided undeniably his most introspective moment. The counterpoint of the two, as in Study for Self-Portrait, contrived to provide some of the most complex depictions of emotional presence in the history of art.

7 Reece Mews, David Brendan Hopes' play about a young artist's interest in painter Francis Bacon, makes its New York City debut May 20 at the Westbeth Arts Center in Greenwich Village.

The performance space is inside the courtyard at 155 Bank Street between Washington and West Streets, across from the Bank Street Theatre.

Jamie McGonnigal directs the new Off-Off-Broadway work, about "Mark, a young American artist who goes to Dublin to be near painter Francis Bacon, the man he has taken as his master and teacher. Bacon, being dead, could only communicate through his jumbled possessions, and perhaps through John, a mysterious man who may or may not have been Bacon's last lover. The play is about the mystery and the unfairness of art, which may be taken as a prime type of the mystery and unfairness — and yet the extreme beauty — of life."

Some call Irishman Francis Bacon as "the finest painter of the second half of the 20th century, certainly the best on Britain," according to production notes. "He painted most of his productive life at 7 Reece Mews in London, in a room of almost incredible disarray, which, nevertheless, may have possessed a mystical order which was preserved intact when the studio was moved bodily to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, as a gift from John Edwards, Bacon's last and luckiest life partner."

The play features Tate Ellington as Mark, Paul Finbow as John, Amanda Jones as Nora and Mick Bleyer as Naill.

Playwright Hopes is professor of literature and language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, founder and editor of Urthona Press, founder and director of the Black Swan Theater Company. He is the author of the Juniper Prize and Saxifrage Prize-winning book, "The Glacier's Daughters," and of "Blood Rose" (Urthona Press, 1997), the Pulitzer-and-National-Book Award-nominated "A Childhood in the Milky Way" (Akron University Press), and "A Sense of the Morning" (Milkweed Editions, 1999). His new book of nature writing, "Bird Songs of the Mesozoic," is due from Milkweed in 2005. His works have appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, Audubon, Christopher Street and The Sun.

Director McGonnigal has been represented in New York City most notably for directing and producing the New York City premiere of Stephen Schwartz's Children of Eden, which benefited The York Theatre Company and The National AIDS Fund. He also directed productions of The Ritz (Lincoln Center's Clark Studio), Love! Valour! Compassion! (to benefit for the Twin Towers Fund). Other recent credits include Miracle on 47th Street at The King Kong Room, a benefit for God's Love We Deliver (director/producer), Embrace!, a concert benefiting The Matthew Shepard Foundation (director/producer), Snoopy! The Musical in concert with Tony Award winner Sutton Foster and more.

The producer, Monday Morning Productions, is a production company in its third year. Other theatre productions have included A Month of Sundays by Jason Cicci at Theatre Row Theatre, and him & her and Closet Chronicles (starring Marilyn Sokol) at Ground Floor Theatre.

Performances of 7 Reece Mews play Thursdays Sundays May 20-June 5. On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays doors open at 7 PM for a pre-show wine reception, with performances at 8 PM. On Sundays, May 23 and 30, the wine reception begins at 6:30 with performances at 7 PM.

Tickets are $20 for performances and refreshments. Tickets can be purchased through Smarttix at (212) 868 4444.

PARIS.- Fondation Dina Vierny - Musée Maillol began yesterday the exhibition “The Sacred and the Profane” featuring the oeuvre of painter Francis Bacon. The exhibition including 42 paintings that shed new light on his profoundly disturbing masterpieces will end on June 30, 2004.

Francis Bacon was, to an extreme, living proof of William Butler Yeats’ saying that: "No mind can create until it is divided in two". In his life as well as in his art, he was able to maintain a precarious yet lasting balance between totally conflicting points of view. This ambivalence, which appears clearly in his works, reaches extraordinary proportions in his interpretation of Christian symbols.

Bringing together 37 paintings and 5 triptyches provenating from museums and private collections, a certain number of which have rarely been exhibited, this show serves as an inventory of the Sacred and Profane within Francis Bacon’s art. Crucifixions, popes or irreverent images of couples entwined on the grass, isolated men screaming in cages and women nailed to their bed by a syringe in a lather of paint. Bacon inverts all traditional concepts of the Sacred and the Profane, replacing them with his own ,both unsettling and unpredictable visions. A crucifixion may appear in the guise a cut of meat or a threatening animal, whereas the lustful embrace of two bodies assumes all the tender suffering of a Pieta.

This show addresses some of the underlying enigmas which the intensely disturbing iconography of this great English painter embodies. It is remarkable that someone as fiercely atheist as he was relentessly kept on painting, in an obsessive manner, the motif of the Crucifixion or variations on a specific theme. A case in point is the portrait of the pope Innocent X by Velasquez., of which there are at least forty-five variations. At the same time, his uncanny powers of transformation enabled him to lend an almost mythic dimension to the most commonplace everyday scenes: a man alone in a room becomes a kind of crucifixion of modern life.

The event is being curated by Michael Peppiatt.

The Tate Britain has acquired an archive of controversial material from Francis Bacon's London studio at 7 Reece Mews. It was donated to the museum by Barry Joule, the artist's friend, chauffeur and handyman. Called the Barry Joule Collection, the trove contains more than 1,200 items from the artist's studio, including source material, sketches and photographs of the painter with friends. The material will be catalogued and studied over the next three years before being displayed or made available for loans. Joule kept some items, which he has promised to bequeath to the Tate.

According to press reports, Joule claimed that Bacon had given him a group of some 700 works just before his death, though some accounts state that Bacon had asked Joule to discard sackloads of rubbish from his studio, saying "You know what to do with them." Joule was often asked to destroy works that Bacon wasn't satisfied with, but Joule maintains that, in this case as in several earlier instances, the artist meant to keep the works.

When the artist died in 1992, the Tate was reportedly offered the studio and its contents (less the items in Joule's possession) by Bacon's companion and heir, John Edwards, who died last year. The Tate declined the offer and, in 1998, the studio and the bulk of its contents were given to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin--Bacon's birth city--where it is meticulously preserved in its famously chaotic state [see "Front Page," Feb. '00]. Much of the controversy about the Joule collection arises from a number of works on paper that would seem to counter Bacon's assertions that he never made preparatory studies for his paintings, but worked directly on the canvas. Several scholars, including the late David Sylvester, expressed doubts as to the drawings' authenticity.

In 2000, Dublin's Irish Museum of Modern Art worked out an agreement with the estate to display some 100 of the disputed items as "work attributed to Francis Bacon," in a show that inaugurated new galleries devoted to the artist. The following year, the Barbican Gallery in London also showed selections from the Joule archive with the same disclaimer. The Bacon estate stressed that the Tate's acceptance of the gift does not constitute an authentication of the contents, and that it will take years for experts to sort through the material.

Digging for sources of inspiration

Exhibit shines light on painter Francis Bacon

BASEL, Switzerland (AP) -- Archaeologists had to retrieve the more than 7,000 objects cluttering the late artist's London studio.

They collected countless brushes, empty tubes, rags and tin cans encrusted with paint. They also picked up many crumpled and torn pages of magazines and books. And they catalogued close to 1,500 photos, often in poor condition.

Chaos seems an understatement in describing the place where Francis Bacon lived and worked for his last three decades until his death in 1992 at the age of 82. But the studio, since reconstructed to its original, messy state at The Hugh Lane gallery in his native Dublin, was a treasure trove for art historians seeking a deeper insight into the enigmatic painter's disturbing and distorted imagery.

Showcases with some 65 newspaper clippings, photos, book leafs and other samples from this "studio material" are for the first time part of a unique exhibition on the artist. Titled "Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art," it focuses on his main sources of inspiration by confronting some 40 of his paintings with an equal number by old masters and other artists. They are on loan from museums and private collectors in the United States and Europe. The show runs through June 20.

For Barbara Steffen, curator of the show at the Beyeler Foundation museum in suburban Riehen, Switzerland, the studio material presents the missing link between the "the sublime horror of Bacon's own imagery and the often complex, ambiguous beauty of the artists he accepted as his idols."

Among the paintings, special prominence is given to Bacon's interpretations of an austere 17th-century portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velazquez, which fascinated him for many years. Some of Bacon's images, which are up to 78 inches high, suggest the papal throne, supposedly a symbol of power, holding an anguished, isolated figure.

They include versions of his "screaming pope" shown together with the still of a terrified victim taken from film director Sergey Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," the 1925 silent film about the Russian revolution. Confronting them are sketches of a weeping woman by Picasso. The close-up still, his source for the pope's stunned features, was found in Bacon's studio as were numerous colour and black-and-white reproductions of the Velazquez original, which he never saw.

Distance from subjects

Also on view are other examples of how Bacon merged several sources from his studio collection in his paintings, sometimes with absurd results. In two versions for "Study for Bullfight," shown along with Goyaesque prints on the same theme, Bacon has introduced a section of a Nazi party rally, presumably inspired by a newspaper photo.

"The arena doubles as a place for mass rallies where violence on a broader scale can be fomented," comments Margarita Cappock, co-author of the 400-page exhibition catalogue.

Bacon became interested in bullfights during visits to Spain and southern France. Cappock notes he once told an interviewer that "bullfighting is like boxing - a marvelous aperitif to sex."

Bacon was a flamboyant gay whose lurid sex life began long before 1967 when homosexuality ceased to be a criminal offense in Britain. In 1953, a painting suggestively showing two men on a bed caused a scandal when it was exhibited at London's Hanover Gallery. The painting was based on photographs of wrestlers by Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century American pioneer of photographic art.

Bacon kept several copies of Muybridge's book "The Human Figure in Motion" in his studio. Several leaves from the book allow visitors to see how Bacon used them in depicting overtly homosexual themes through most of his artistic career.

A deeply shocking Bacon triptych displayed at the Beyeler Foundation museum recounts the 1971 suicide of George Dyer, an almost illiterate one-time petty thief and Bacon's lover for eight years, who became addicted to drugs and drinking. On the eve of a large Bacon retrospective in Paris' Grand Palais, Dyer was found dead on the toilet in a Paris hotel where they had shared a room.

Bacon almost never painted from life. Even portraits of his closest friends were based on photos he had ordered for the purpose; sometimes they were based on pictures of other people. He repeatedly said he felt inhibited by the presence of models and that he needed a distance from what he was painting. His many self-portraits, shown with some of the Rembrandts he admired, also were done from photos, including some taken in automatic photo booths.

No palette was found in his studio. Walls, doors and abandoned canvases served Bacon as substitutes. Sometimes, he left brushes aside and used his hand or rags to apply the paint.

Bacon died of a heart attack on April 28, 1992, during a visit to Madrid. Long before his death, he had amassed a fortune but never changed his lifestyle, continuing to live in his tiny apartment and studio above a garage in Kensington. His sole heir was his last lover, John Edwards, who died of lung cancer last year at age 53. He once said in an interview that despite his seeming flamboyance, Bacon was actually "a lonely and shy man."

Three years before Bacon's death, the disturbing Dyer suicide triptych was sold at a New York auction for $6.27 million, believed to be an all-time record for a Bacon work. And there still seems to be a good market for his papal portraits although he did more than 45 of them in a span of 20 years. One, dated 1963, fetched $5.43 million at a recent London sale.

The charm of the alien

Bill Brandt always thought of his nudes as his most important work. But, Paul Delany argues, he has a particular place among great British photographers for bringing an outsider's eye to his adopted country and capturing a strangeness that has come to seem familiar and true.

The Guardian, Saturday February 21, 2004

Cyril Connolly described Brandt's portrait of Francis Bacon as "a symbol of the despair of his generation". It is certainly a quintessential Brandt portrait, with Bacon's haunted look matched by what he does not see behind him: the ominous trees on the skyline, the path in an impossible perspective, the leaning lamp-post seemingly transported from a German expressionist film. Does it matter that Bacon himself hated the picture?

PROVENANCE
Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London & New York
Lord Weidenfeld, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

EXHIBITED
London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1962, n.p., no. 84f, illustrated
Mannheim, Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon, 1962, n.p., no. 72f, illustrated
Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, 1962, p. 21, no. 77f, illustrated
Zürich, Kunsthaus, Francis Bacon, 1962, pl. 11, no. 71f, illustrated
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon, 1963, n.p., no. 63f, illustrated
Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg, Grosse Orangerie, Zeichen des Glaubens, Geist der Avantgarde: Religiöse Tendenzen in der Kunst des 20 Jahrhunderts, 1980
Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, 1993, p. 63, pp. 64-65 (colour) and p. 146, no. 29, illustrated
New Haven, The Yale Center for British Art; Minneapolis, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; San Francisco, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Forth Worth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Francis Bacon: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1999, p. 127, no. 38, illustrated in colour

LITERATURE
In: Kunstwerk, XVII, August-September 1963, p. 21, illustrated
John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, pl. 186, illustrated
Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Francis Bacon, 1996, p. 259, illustrated as part of installation at Tate Gallery, 1962

CATALOGUE NOTE
Beginning in 1949, Francis Bacon’s obsession with arguably his most renowned and iconic subject, the Pope, lasted almost two decades. In much the same way as Andy Warhol’s profound fascination with the legend of Marilyn Monroe spanned a 20 year love affair, so Bacon continuously returned to his famously harrowing depiction of the most senior and powerful figure in the church. The history of art is peppered with examples of the subject of the enthroned Pope. From Raphael to Titian, many others had attempted his portrait, but it was the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velásquez of 1650 (Fig. 2) which clearly had a huge impact on Francis Bacon. “Haunted and obsessed by the image, … by its perfection”, Bacon adopted Velazquez’s Pope into his cast of isolated and tortured figures who all appeared to be living at the edge of existence.

Working from reproductions, Bacon famously turned down the opportunity to go to see his beloved Velazquez during a trip to Rome in 1954 because he was worried about his reaction to the real painting. Obsessed by the magnificent colour and grand portrayal of the many reproductions that he saw, Bacon did not want to make a representation of this image, rather he wanted to get beneath the surface, to get behind the façade of the representation and depict the feeling which lies at the heart of existence. Bacon’s paintings gained their historical momentum not only from the time honoured composition and the painterly richness of the realisation, but from the opportunity to defy and scandalise tradition, and to reverse the expectation of religious obedience by vexing and victimising this paternal serenity. Many of the older masters had worked in the tradition of great religious painting, but by 1949 the artistic faith in religion had been replaced by the harsh realities of two bloody wars in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Immediate Post-War art either sought to remove itself completely from painted reality in its reverse form, abstraction, or sought to depict the extreme forms of human existence.

In 1650 the Pope was just about the most powerful man in the world and everything in Velazquez’s portrait points to it: the throne, the robes, the ring, the state paper held in the left hand and the note of perfectly balanced and incorruptible authority which is set by the relaxed way in which the Pope’s arms rest lightly on the throne. Everything is sumptuously re-created. Bacon could have chosen many different subjects for this kind of portrayal but in choosing the Pope he seemed to be purposefully alighting on one of the grandest examples of humanity and one who showed very little public emotion. Beginning with the relatively ambiguously titled painting, Head IV of 1949, Bacon executed roughly twenty-five completed variations on the theme of the Pope. During this time, Bacon took this image, stripped it of all pretension to perfection and luxury and turned the cool, calculated Pope of Velazquez’s portraits into a fragile specimen of human life. One of raw emotion, just like any of his other subjects.

The six Studies for a Pope (FIg. 4), executed in April-May 1961 represent the last consecutive treatment of the theme, although Bacon was to complete further, separate studies from Velazquez’s Portraits of Pope Innocent X later in the decade. Study for a Pope VI, the last of the series, shows the Pope engulfed by his throne. Massive in proportion, this formerly luxurious and ornamental seat of power, has now become a simplistically utilitarian object whose construction is made up merely of flat plains. Cast against a jet-black background and slumped deep into his chair, he is not seen here as an all powerful spiritual leader, but as a shrunken, rather impotent and lonely figure. Wilting in a gesture of complete regression, Bacon here appears to be exploring the private anguish of a very public figure, who despite the outward trappings of power, seems powerless to control events.

Across the breadth of the six studies, one can trace the movement of the figure, much like a series of film-stills. Relatively calm, yet seemingly agitated, the pope fidgets through the series, before raising his arms in panel five in a moment of surprise or joy. The irreverence has turned to a moment of excitement, before the Pope settles back into his own introspection in the sixth panel, the present work. The viewer somehow feels like they are watching a caged animal in a zoo, not the most powerful figure in the religious world. In each canvas the background and clothes are sketched out with a quick fluidity as the canvas seeps up the pigment in readiness for the main event, the face. Set against the imperious scarlet, green and black background, the main expressive tool in Bacon’s armoury is a densely textured face, it is a picture of brooding and pent-up emotion. Sweeping the fully loaded brush in a series of brilliant, swift gestures, Bacon carves out the three quarter profile of a head, blurred as if in movement. With its accentuated curves, somehow a combination of menace and calm seems to animate his face.

The Tate announced yesterday it had acquired what looks less like a national treasure than the sweepings of a studio floor - which is exactly what it is, but from the studio floor of a genius.

The 1,200 items were once part of the legendary chaos of Francis Bacon's studio at Reece Mews in south Kensington, where the artist was known to work knee-deep in a litter of scraps of paper, paint rags, old envelopes and newspaper clippings.

The Tate said the acquisition was "the generous gift of Barry Joule, a friend of the artist", neatly sidestepping a decade of controversy.

The Francis Bacon estate stressed yesterday that the Tate's acceptance of the archive did not constitute an authentication, and said much work remained to be done on the contents.

It will take experts years to work through the hoard to see exactly what they have been given by Mr Joule, the artist's friend, chauffeur and handyman.

Art world legend insists that when Bacon died in 1992 the Tate was offered the studio by his heir and last companion, John Edwards, who died in Thailand last year.

The gallery is said to have rejected the offer and the room, with every scrap of paper and cigarette stub forensically recorded, went to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it is a popular exhibit.

The history of the material donated to the Tate is as eccentric as the artist.

Mr Joule, a Canadian living in London, met Bacon in 1978 when he saw a head sticking out of an upstairs window of the neighbouring house. It turned out to be the artist, worrying his television aerial had blown off in a storm. Mr Joule offered to replace it, and the men became friends.

He says Bacon asked him to take away sackloads of rubbish from his studio before he died. The circumstances of the removal have been disputed ever since. The donation to the Tate ends bitter controversy over the archive.

Some of the scraps of paper are drawn over, many with images recognisable from Bacon's work. One sheet is a map showing the shortest route between Reece Mews and the Colony Club, Bacon's favourite drinking place in Soho.

There have two very successful exhibitions of part of the Joule archive: one in 2001 at the Barbican Gallery in London and the other in Dublin.

Mr Joule, who has homes in England and France, has kept some items, but has promised to bequeath them to the Tate.

The gallery said yesterday it could be three years before the material was displayed.

Bacon Collection Donated to Tate Gallery

By Sherna Noah, Arts Correspondent, PA News

Which South Bank Show interview do you consider the most revealing?
Charlotte Smith, Peterborough

Francis Bacon. I'd known him for over 20 years and when he eventually agreed to do the interview, he was prepared to give everything. Both of us got what can only be described as rather drunk, and he revealed himself in a way that was wonderful. I, emphatically, don't mean that he revealed his homosexual life - which was totally beside the point and taken for granted - but rather that he revealed himself as an "optimist about nothing", as he put it. He was a nihilist who despised almost every work of art in the world and who had a totally unyielding tunnel-vision about his painting.

Very useful in the case of Francis Bacon, but basically I'm an alcohol-free interviewer. You need all your wits about you.

	19 February 2002[Arts]: Eggs, Bacon and jellied eels
	23 May 2001: Francis Bacon studio recreated in Dublin
	7 January 2001: Bacon discovery excites art world
	4 July 2000: Artist Bacon 'had a Swiss account to dodge income tax'


	On display in Iran for the first time in three decades: Bacon’s sexually explicit 1968 tryptych: but the central panel was removed and censored.

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

Francis Bacon ; Paintings at the Sainsbury Centre

Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s

Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII)

Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh I

Two Figures in a Room

Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst

Francis Bacon: Triptychs

Humanity in all its agony and emptiness

Hirst transforms his mutton into Bacon

Our correspondent is stunned, appalled and exhilarated by Damien Hirst’s homage to his great inspiration, Francis Bacon

Self-portraits of the artist as a mortal man

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent

The Independent, 17 June 2006

A triptych of self-portraits hidden from public view for 26 years is to be auctioned

'I had nobody else to paint'

Francis Bacon embalmed

BALLET TAKES YOU UP CLOSE TO MODERN DANCE IN A SMALL HOUSE

A portrait of Bacon

No More Francis Bacon

Hockney? He's such rubbish, Bacon said

Tapes reveal the late artist's scorn for his rival's 'dreary' work

Inspired by Francis Bacon, Miles Davis and all that jazz...

Bacon painting on block for £5 million

Thu, 24 Nov 2005

Record $22.4 million paid for a Rothko

So take a good look at my face

EDINBURGH: ART

I'd say that, of all the portraits I can think of, the ones Bacon made of Lucian Freud in the mid-1960s are among the most painful. What Bacon saw when he looked at the famously beautiful Freud was his own loathsomeness reflected.

Artist's 'lie' over meeting gay lover

Great British Bacon

Francis Bacon, the subject of this week's Arena, was notorious for his wild lifestyle, but what of the work itself? Oliver Bennett assesses his place in British art

The Radio Times 19-25 March, 2005

Paris exhibition artfully unites Picasso and Bacon

Three Furies

Bacon left his best friend an £11m fortune.

So where has it all gone?

By Charles Arthur

The Independent 31 August 2004

National Gallery gets U.K. expressionist's marked-up memorabilia

Digging for sources of inspiration

Exhibit shines light on painter Francis Bacon

Distance from subjects

A Loan From Tehran

By CAROL VOGEL, The New York Times, January 9, 2004

Too risqué for Iran, Bacon's nudes could be shown in London

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent

Contemporary Art Strong for a Second Night

Art News Online November 2003

Bangkok Stories: Teens, trains and too-tight tops

The Independent 05 October 2003

By Jan McGirk

PANDORA Sholto Byrnes

The Independent June 12th, 2003

Obituary: John Edwards

Companion and heir of Francis Bacon

Bacon: A mystery in the East

Ten years after his death, the legacy of Francis Bacon remains as complicated as his work. His heir died last week and no one knows what will now happen to the estate.

By Mike Bygrave in London and Jan McGirk in Thailand

Francis Bacon's heir dies

Solicitors for John Edwards' estate deny that his lover has inherited the art

The Arts Newspaper Issue: 135 01/04/2003

Solicitors for John Edwards' estate deny that his lover has inherited the art

John Edwards, 53, a Confidant of Francis Bacon, Is Dead

An insightful view into an artist’s world

Francis Bacon Studio at Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

World Socialist Web Site WSWS.ORG

By Jason Murphy 5th February 2003

PD Newswire - 05.29.02

By KEN JOHNSON April 26, 2002, Friday

Testy tosspot never quite doused anger

Buyers stampede for 'bleak' Bacons

THREE PAINTINGS by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon sold for nearly £2m at auction last night. The three works were snapped up during an auction of post-war art at Christie's in London.

The bleak pieces have been described as demonstrating Bacon at his most existential and are good examples of the confrontational, angst-ridden style of the artist's later years.

His 1954 work, Man In Blue VII, was the earliest of his paintings up for sale and was sold for £707,750. It was the culmination of a series of pictures that Bacon painted while staying in the Imperial Hotel in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, near the house of his lover, Peter Lacy.

Head, painted in 1962, depicts the head of a surgeon with a lamp strapped to it. Described as one of his darker works, it was completed in the year Lacy died and was sold for £311,750.

The sale comes the week after Bacon's estate and his former gallery settled a long-running financial dispute.

Heir's illness ends the battle between Bacon's estate and his gallery

**Francis Bacon, the subject of this week's Arena, was notorious for his wild lifestyle, but what of the work itself? Oliver Bennett assesses his place in British art**