Contemporary Art Evening Auction

  New York | 13 November 2012 | N08900 | Lot 26

  PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTION

  Francis Bacon

Estimate: 18,000,000 - 25,000,000 USD   LOT SOLD: 29,762,500 USD

oil on canvas
59 7/8 x 37 in. 152 x 94 cm.
Executed circa 1954.

This work will be included in the forthcoming Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, being prepared by The Estate of Francis Bacon and edited by Martin Harrison.

Provenance

Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris
Galleria Galatea, Turin
Galerie Krugier, Geneva
Private Collection, Geneva
Sotheby Parke Bernet & Co., London, December 4,1975, Lot 238
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Exhibited

Geneva, Musée Rath, Musées d’Art et d’Histoire de Geneva , L’Art XXe Siècle dans les Collections Genevoises, June - September 1973, cat. no. 176, p. 164, illustrated

Literature

Monelle Hayot, "Marché de l’art: Artistes contemporains britanniques," L’Oeil, nos. 270-271, Paris, January - February 1978, p. 83, illustrated

Catalogue Note

“Terror and atrocious suffering make the mouth an organ of searing screams.”
Georges Bataille, ‘Dictionnaire – Bouche’, Documents, No. 5, 1930, pp. 298-99

“Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence….tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time.”
Francis Bacon interviewed by Hugh Davies, June 26, 1973, in Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York, 1986, p. 110

“Consciousness of mortality sharpens one’s sense of existing.”
Francis Bacon interviewed by Hugh M. Davies in 1973, in Martin Harrison, ed., Francis Bacon: New Studies, Göttingen, 2009, p. 96

It is perhaps the most singularly devastating personification in figural art of the post-war period. It is a vision so universal and immediate that it threatens to traverse the threshold between viewer and object, simultaneously leaping into our domain and sucking us into its own. It is an unrepeatable image, borne specifically of its time and of the unique experiences of its creator, yet stands as an allegory for perpetuity. Emerging from the desolate shadows of the Second World War and its abject annihilation of over fifty million souls, a Pope looms forth from the depths of Francis Bacon’s formidable genius and draws near, into our focus. The Vicar of Christ, Successor of Saint Peter and God’s temporal representative on earth; this Supreme Pontiff has transmogrified into a chimera of awesome terror. It has become the anguished epitome of humanity’s excruciating scream: deafening to our collective interior, yet silent in the existential void. Encaged within insufferable isolation, this Pope – totem of enlightened perception, of authoritative faith, of order against chaos – is violently racked by the brutal fact of the human condition. It is the proposition of a world turned upside down, of established systems shattered, and, as such, is the perfect response to Theodor Adorno’s legendary 1951 axiom “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” Having remained in the same private collection for over thirty years and hidden from public view, this painting embodies, of course, Bacon’s most celebrated and recognizable iconography. Even more than this, as a Pope it crystallizes a thunderous climax in the long arc of that elusive and indefinable engine of innovation known as artistic genius. Within the Twentieth Century, perhaps only Picasso’s Guernica, with its monumental, monochrome nightmare apparition of a Nativity scene being torn apart by massacre, parallels the impossible figurative potency of Bacon’s Screaming Popes.

The phenomenal specter of papal imagery and its inspiration had seeped into Bacon’s work since the end of the 1940s, but the present painting is more precisely allied to his most revered cycle of Popes; the eight Study for Portraits that were executed in the summer of 1953 for his first exhibition outside England, at Durlacher Brothers Gallery in New York in October to November of that year. Constituents of this corpus today reside in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Minneapolis Institute and the Lehman Loeb Art Center. However, it is to the seminal masterpiece Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X of 1953, housed in the Des Moines Art Center, that the present work bears especially close parity. In terms of the composition of space, the bodily expression and the figure’s portrait, the two paintings harbor close formal correspondence. Indeed, the visceral physiognomic intensity of the contorted features and flashing teeth of the gaping mouth in the present canvas, so deftly fashioned by the artist’s daubs of writhing paint, achieves a heightened psychological import – shooting the desperate papal cry straight into the realm of the viewer – that surpasses any of the eight Studies and is matched only by the Des Moines work. Bacon’s painting here is unleashed and urgent, unencumbered by any stodgy deliberation or revision, and his unbridled protagonist delivers a primal clarion call that summons Georges Bataille’s potent proclamation: “Terror and atrocious suffering make the mouth an organ of searing screams.” (Georges Bataille, ‘Dictionnaire – Bouche’, Documents, No. 5, 1930, pp. 298-99)

Bacon’s typically eloquent declaration that he wanted to “unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently” aptly explains how the genesis of this most ambitious body of work was seeded by an inspirational touchstone of resounding familiarity. The archetype Bacon appropriated as starting point for his Pope series was Diego Velázquez’s extraordinary Portrait of Pope Innocent X of 1650, held in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome; a painting for which Bacon was “haunted and obsessed by the image…its perfection.” (Francis Bacon interviewed by Hugh Davies, June 26, 1973, in Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York, 1986, p. 23) Having travelled to Rome from the Spanish court of Philip IV in 1649, Velázquez was afforded the great honor of depicting the Pope, Giambattista Pamphilj, known as Innocent X, whom he had met as papal nuncio in Madrid in 1626-30. The painting was executed in a Jubilee year when 700,000 pilgrims descended on Rome, and Velázquez dutifully portrayed the Bishop of Rome as the most powerful man in the world, encased by the trappings of his office. Yet the spectacular achievement of this portrait is that within the gold, silk and lace vestiges of papal supremacy resides a mortal human being beset by flaw and fallibility. While Pope Innocent X resides literally ex cathedra in the papal throne, official document clutched in hand and glinting ring proffered for all to pay homage; the man Pamphilj wears a pained and suspicious countenance that betrays the unscrupulous and duplicitous pitfalls of his tenure as Pontiff. The brilliance of Velázquez’s embedded juxtaposition, pitting the Papacy’s supposed omnipotence against Man’s inevitable frailty, while also delivering a likeness that was so highly received that he was awarded a golden medallion for his services, ignited an ambition within Bacon to equal this achievement, albeit in a godless world that had been literally torn to shreds by chaos and destruction. Moreover, beyond the substrate of canvas and layers of oil paint, Bacon perceived the voice of the artist speaking across the centuries: “If you look at a Velázquez, what do you think about? ... I don’t think about his sitters, I think about him… I think about Velázquez, I think people believe that they’re painting other people, but they paint out their own instincts.” (Francis Bacon interviewed by Hugh Davies, August 13, 1973, in Exh. Cat., Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953, 1999, p. 34)

It has previously been noted that Bacon had not at this stage in his career seen the Velázquez painting in Rome first-hand, and for this initial series of papal portraits he worked from a black and white illustration of the work. This in turn has been suggested as the cause for the purple color of the garments in these paintings differing from the original cardinal red. However, while Bacon’s extensive enlistment of and reference to photographic sources is beyond question, it also seems more than likely that he was familiar with another version of Velázquez’s painting; one that has resided in Apsley House, the seat of the Duke of Wellington in London, since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. This smaller painting by Veláquez, either a study made before or copy made after the larger work, was gifted to the Duke of Wellington by the King of Spain in 1816, together with over 150 other pictures from the Spanish Royal Collection, in recognition of his defeat of Napoleonic forces and liberation of Spain in the Peninsular War. The British commander had recovered these works from the fleeing carriage of Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, after the Battle of Vitoria in 1813. Under the Duke of Wellington’s great-grandson, Apsley House and its art collection was opened to the public in 1952, the centenary of the first Duke’s death and, conveniently, shortly before Francis Bacon initiated a grand cycle of papal portraits including the present painting. That Apsley House sits at Hyde Park Corner, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the Royal College of Art where Bacon was using a studio between 1951 and 1953, readily invites the hypothesis that he was able to study this highly accomplished version at close quarters.

However, the Velázquez painting is merely a template that becomes a delivery system for Bacon’s radical and unrelenting reinvention. Indeed, the present work is Bacon’s concrete realization that “Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence….tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time.” (Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Op. Cit., p. 110)  Thus Bacon replaces the subjective idiosyncrasies of the grand state portrait with an intimate visage of pain and suffering that stands as proxy for the torment of the human race. His source for this all-encompassing cipher was provided by a film still of a screaming female character in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 movie The Battleship Potemkin. Bacon had first seen the movie in 1935 and viewed it frequently thereafter, and this specific still was reproduced in Roger Manvell’s 1944 paperback Film, though Bacon also kept other reproductions of the startling image. The frame shows a pince-nez wearing elderly woman, commonly referred to as a nurse, shot through the eye and caught at the instant of death. It belongs to the movie’s massacre sequence on the Odessa Steps which, though it veers wildly from historical accuracy, remains one of the most iconic pieces of propagandist film ever made. Within its remorseless tragedy it is this character, part blinded and dying while also witnessing a baby in a pram being brutalized by the sword of a tsarist soldier, that embodies the conception of absolute horror and the abandonment of all hope. By supplanting Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X with this twentieth-century essence of ultimate despair and its tortured last gasping breath, Bacon unites two extremes of enduringly vehement imagery.

It is also important to note the personal biographical import of this vision to its author. Since a small child, Bacon had suffered chronic asthma, greatly aggravated by the dogs and horses that had attended his upbringing. According to Caroline Blackwood, “When he was a little boy his parents had put him astride a pony and they had forced him to go fox-hunting. He loathed the brutality of the “Sport of Kings” and developed a violent allergy to horses. He turned blue once he found himself on the hunting field and he started to choke with chronic asthma…The subject made him freeze. He became agitated whenever I broached it. He started to tug at the collar of his shirt as if he were trying to loosen some kind of noose which he found asphyxiating; for a moment he resembled the agonized figures in his paintings whose faces turn a truly dangerous shade of indigo purple as they go into the last stages of strangulation.” (Caroline Blackwood, ‘Francis Bacon Obituary’, The New York Review of Books, 24 September 1992)  Bacon’s papal figure is caught in a symphony of movement; its representation comprised all of shadows and flashing motion and evolving in constant flux. This also recalls the photography of Edweard Muybridge, which used multiple cameras and an elaborate trigger device to capture successive stages of motion. Bacon possessed many illustrations of Muybridge’s images and this Pope’s right hand, veering towards us out of the darkness, recalls something of Muybridge’s photograph series ’Striking a Blow with the Right Hand’, a fragment of which was found in the artist’s studio after his death. While the right hand of Velázquez’s Innocent X hangs limply from the support of his gilded throne, Bacon’s papal fury lashes out at the viewer with a clenched fist, once again destabilizing the barrier between viewer and subject.

The drama of all this corporeal expression is greatly intensified by the artist’s complex framing of the composition and the many facets that define an uneasy sense of flux and unknowable dimensions within the canvas. Bacon’s overlapping linear schema here act as cage-like space frames that enclose this Pope inside its solitary nightmare. Indeed, the present work proves to act as prototype for Bacon’s consequent declaration: “I like the anonymous compartment, like a room concentrated in a small space. I would like to paint landscapes in a box…If you could enclose their infinity in a box they would have a greater concentration.” (the artist interviewed by Hugh M. Davies in 1973, in Martin Harrison, ed., Francis Bacon: New Studies, Göttingen, 2009, p. 111) This compositional organization echoes Picasso’s strategy of reducing three-dimensions to a scored network of diagrammatic black lines, such as in the groundbreaking Painter and Model of 1928. It is also strongly redolent of the frantic inscribed urgency of Giacometti’s autograph portraiture style and architectonic construction, so harshly graphic in his visceral drawings, and evident in Portrait of Peter Watson of 1953, which, as noted by Martin Harrison, was a work that Bacon probably knew given his close relationship to the sitter. It is also reminiscent of Bacon’s work as a furniture designer in the late 1920s, where he defined the parameters of actual space with folding screens and curved metal tubes inspired by the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant, and which are well-evidenced in a 1930 article in The Studio magazine and the documentary paintings of his fellow painter and friend Roy de Maistre. The space frames of the papal portraits mark the mature inception of these translucent compartments of literal, psychological and somatic space that would subsequently trap anonymous businessmen within midnight blue voids and imprison countless actors in triptychs throughout Bacon’s oeuvres of the subsequent three decades.

Aside from the formal compartmentalization of space, Francis Bacon was also transfixed by the potentiality of material strata and layers of perception, as he described to David Sylvester: "We nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens." (Francis Bacon cited in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1993, p. 26) The vertical and diagonal, tonally-polarized hatching that spans the present work is another iconographic device that is both rooted in illustrious precedent and foreshadows Bacon’s later output. In a way similar to the Des Moines Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, the upright bands that strike through this protagonist and unite it with the background are at once evocative of Titian’s Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto of circa 1551-62, in which a diaphanous veil bisects the sitter’s right eye and dramatically blurs his left hand behind the drapery. This shuttering effect takes Bacon’s character in and out of coherence, like the staccato pulsations of a half-glimpsed memory disappearing and returning to our focus. Aspects of the forms merge and blur, instilling a sense of dynamism and movement, and we are afforded alternative descriptions of the pictorial content, such as the suggestion that this pope has his tongue fully extended out of his mouth. Bacon’s screens and veils complicate our perception of his vision, and as such deliver a fitting coda to one of his favourite passages from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which he told Hugh Davies had been a continual source of inspiration to him: “I have heard the key/ Turn in the door once and turn once only/ We think of the key, each in his prison/ thinking of the key, each confirms a prison” (read by the artist in interview by Hugh M. Davies in 1973, in Martin Harrison, Op. Cit., p. 102)

Perhaps more than any other theme associated with his canon, the threat of mortality inhabits every pore of Bacon’s art. Danger, violence and death constantly linger in the recesses of his canvases, acting like a continual incantation of his deft maxim: “Consciousness of mortality sharpens one’s sense of existing.” (Ibid., p. 96). Of course, many of his greatest later works became directly associated with the sudden and brutal deaths of his respective lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer, but in fact the risk of impending fatality imbued his existence from its most formative stage. Raised by English parents living in Ireland’s County Kildare during the violent era surrounding the Easter Uprising, Bacon’s upbringing was intensely fraught and immersed in the threat of harm: “My father warned us that at any time, not that we would be shot, but at night someone might break in or whatever. My grandmother married three times, at that time her husband was the Head of Police in Kildare and in their house all the windows were sandbagged. I lived with my grandmother a lot. I grew up in an atmosphere of threat for a long time… And then I was in Berlin at the beginning of the Nazi thing, my whole life had been lived through a time of stress.” (Ibid., pp. 104-5) Aged no more than sixteen, in 1926 he was abruptly driven from his home, away from hearth and kin by his father, and embarked for London. At the beginning of 1927 he was in Berlin and by the Spring he had arrived in Paris, staying that summer with a family in Chantilly before moving in the Fall to the Hôtel Delambre in Montparnasse, where he endured an impoverished subsistence lifestyle for almost a year. Alongside the actual events of his life, he of course became a voracious devourer of the canon of western Art History, and he purposely sought out those most powerful narrators of the tragedy of the human drama, from Michelangelo to Velázquez to Poussin to Picasso, to provide an analytical framework for his own experience. The dramatic shadow of this illustrious precedent is readily evident in the present work, and perhaps none more so than a work that Bacon would have encountered in the Tate, Henry Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, which in execution, subject and spirit stands as an eerily prescient predecessor for Untitled (Pope).

Bacon’s coming of age was thus forged in a crucible of uncertainty and risk, and this heritage violently coursed through his subsequent life and art. Fifteen years after Paris, in 1944, he delivered the searing cry of his masterpiece Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion; shrieking into existence to announce that figurative art could never be the same again. A decade after that, the Popes declared that everything we thought we knew – the history that was meant to bind us, the psychological and emotional journeys we supposedly shared, the promise of futures entwined together – were all merely veils to mask the thunderous yet silent solitary scream that lies within us all. It remains one of the most pertinent, universal and affecting visions in the History of Art, and the full force of its power is trapped forever on the surface of this sensational painting.

       The artist in his studio, 1950 © Derek Bayes                     Diego Velázquez Pope Innocent X, circa 1651 Apsley House, The Wellington Museum

Dark night of the soul

Two decades after his death, Francis Bacon continues to enthral.

Now this confronting artist’s work is to be exhibited here, writes Janet Hawley.

JANET HAWLEY  |  LIFESTYLE  |  THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD  |  NOVEMBER 3, 2012 

                                                         Tortured artist … Francis Bacon, aged 62 in 1971.   Henri Cartier-Bresson

Why do uber-rich Russian tycoons, American hedge-fund managers, Qatar royalty and British football club owners eagerly pay up to $86 million to hang the terrible beauty of a Francis Bacon painting on their wall? Do they identify with Bacon’s lonely, angst-ridden screaming popes and the vulnerability of his solitary, contorted figures?

Why has Damien Hirst, Britain’s richest living artist, spent fortunes reaped from his own diamond-encrusted skulls and sharks in formaldehyde to buy five Bacons for his private collection?

Why does the dowager Lady Jane Willoughby, a train-bearer at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, cherish her magnificent Bacons – especially a work showing two entangled, naked, male figures, known colloquially as “The Buggers”?

Australians will finally get the chance to experience the alluring Baconian power for themselves when a major exhibition of this confronting, conflicted British artist’s work comes, at last, to Australia. It will span the five main decades of Bacon’s painting life, from the 1940s until his death in 1992 at the age of 82.

It has taken the exhibition’s curator, Tony Bond, five years to organise, liaising with the Bacon estate and persuading wealthy international private owners, such as Hirst, and major museums to lend 53 treasured Bacons, including five large triptychs.

Bacon is renowned for painting the most raw, disturbing and gruesome aspects of the human experience – be it sadomasochism or the tragic spectacle of his drunken lover dying on a Paris toilet seat – “in the most sublimely beautiful manner”, explains Bond.

Hirst lavishes praise on his uncompromising hero: “He’s up there with Goya, Soutine and Van Gogh: dirty painters who wrestle with the dark stuff. Bacon has the guts to fuck in hell. They give you the shivers, his best paintings.” His best images, adds Hirst, remind him of “spaces I imagined in nightmares”.

While many regard Bacon as the greatest figurative painter of the second half of the 20th century, those who aren’t seduced by the artist’s fluent, painterly hand and lush colourist skills label him “a monster of depravity” and “the black night of the 20th-century soul”. Margaret Thatcher, while in office, famously called Bacon: “That dreadful man who paints those horrible pictures.”

Looking at Bacon’s distorted human figures, grappling couples, screaming popes, hysterical businessmen in suits and grotesque mythical beasts, you might imagine him to be a morose, pessimistic character. But those who knew him describe him as a fascinating firecracker of creativity and a mass of contradictions.

Like Picasso (his first mentor), Bacon’s work is a visual diary of his life. Whereas Picasso, rampantly heterosexual, painted series of his six female lovers, Bacon, rampantly homosexual, painted series of his six male lovers. (Bacon, like Picasso, was also dangerous to love: two of his broken-hearted lovers would perish by their own hand, as did two of Picasso’s.)

British art historian Martin Harrison has spent the past 13 years working on publications for the Bacon estate, enjoying privileged access to Bacon’s intimates, most of whom have now passed away. Harrison is still poring over diaries, private letters and photographs, and has almost completed a catalogue raisonné of all Bacon’s surviving 600 paintings. “Bacon destroyed probably another 6000, being a ruthless editor of his own work,” he explains. “The standard Bacon set himself was the National Gallery or the dustbin, so failures were slashed to pieces.”

It’s not possible to understand Bacon, the person and the art, unless you also understand that he was homosexual, says Harrison. “It informs a lot of his imagery and psychology, and also makes interesting his works which have nothing to do with gay men,” he says. “Bacon did magnificent paintings of his women friends – he liked women who were strong-minded, daring and independent.”

The artist’s childhood is illuminating. “Bacon knew he was homosexual from an early age and made no attempt to hide it,” Harrison continues, “though he always regarded it as an affliction, something he had to bear. He was quite posh in his manner, despite his notorious love of a louche lifestyle. Even when drunk, he maintained the demeanour of an Edwardian gentleman, and was at ease mingling with both high life and low.”

Bacon was born in Dublin to privileged English parents. His father, retired army captain Eddy Bacon, trained racehorses; his socialite mother, Christina, hailed from a wealthy family of Sheffield cutlery manufacturers.

Young Francis, an asthmatic, was allergic to horses and his father responded to this perceived weakness by having him regularly whipped by stable hands to toughen him up. Francis’ retaliation was an unexpected one: to initiate his first sexual encounters with said stable hands.

When he was 16, Francis was discovered by his father dressing in his mother’s underwear and was banished from home. Handsome and alone, he drifted around London, working in gentlemen’s clubs and having affairs with “men in suits”. He liked wearing make-up and developed a penchant for wearing women’s stockings or fishnet tights under his trousers.

In 1927, when he was 18, Bacon, at his father’s insistence, left for Berlin with a family friend, whose job it was to “cure” him of his homosexuality. Instead, the older man seduced him and the pair revelled freely in the decadent atmosphere that prevailed in Berlin at this time. Soon after, Bacon moved to Paris, where he saw a Picasso exhibition, which changed his life. He decided to become a painter. It would take him until 1944 to perfect his distinctive style, and he would destroy nearly all his early work in the process.

At 20, Bacon began the first of several protracted affairs. “His first two relationships were with older men, father figures, mentors and generous patrons,” says Harrison.

Untrained in art, Bacon began work as a furniture designer in London where, in 1930, he met Australian artist Roy de Maistre, who guided Bacon in painting technique and art history. A deeply religious man, de Maistre was painting crucifixions. Bacon, who was defiantly atheist, painted a ghostly crucifix, Crucifixion, 1933. In a coup initiation, it appeared in Herbert Read’s book, Art Now, opposite a painting by Picasso. (This seminal work, now part of Hirst’s Murderme private collection, is in the AGNSW exhibition.)

A few years on, nascent author Patrick White arrived in London, and became de Maistre’s lover. White commissioned a writing desk from Bacon, later describing him in Flaws In The Glass as having a “beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it”.

Bacon took up with Oxford graduate Eric Hall, a wealthy businessman who left his wife and children to become Bacon’s benefactor. The pair travelled together, enjoying gambling holidays in Monte Carlo, with Bacon painting sporadically.

In 1944, when he was 32, amid the senseless destruction of World War II, Bacon painted a highly original work that shocked the art world – Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. The startling orange triptych depicted three vile, snarling, freakish figures inspired by the Furies, Greek mythical agents of vengeance and justice. Bacon explained the work had no religious significance, but symbolised mankind’s bestial capacity for cruelty and evil. Bacon’s work was now drawing attention, but his challenging images were proving hard to sell.

During the 1950s, Bacon embarked on a series of affairs with younger lovers. Says Harrison: “Francis was sadomasochistic; he often took a fancy to rough trade, and got a sexual thrill submitting to beatings and pain. He began an obsessive love affair with ex-RAF fighter pilot Peter Lacy, who also enjoyed sadomasochism. But their alcohol-fuelled arguments became so violent that the two almost killed each other. Lacy eventually moved to Tangier, becoming a piano player in a bar.” Bacon regularly visited his despondent lover there but, by 1962, Lacy had drunk himself to death.

The next year, the most celebrated and productive era of Bacon’s career began. In 1963, aged 54, he moved into a modest two-storey London mews house, 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. This would be his main residence and studio for the remainder of his life.

Here he lived in “gilded squalor”, as one of his posthumous biographers, Dan Farson, puts it in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon. He took a new lover, George Dyer, a handsome, strongly built petty thief 25 years his junior, who he’d paint more frequently, more ominously, than anyone else.

 “Bacon was attracted to underworld characters,” explains Harrison, “who, like the dark side of himself, enjoyed hanging out in sleazy clubs, drinking, gambling and being promiscuous. Bacon loved taking risks, in art and life. Dyer was poorly educated, clueless about art, but worshipped Francis and did his bidding like a pet puppy – to his ultimate peril.”

Bacon kept a disciplined routine. Most days, he worked alone, in silence, in his studio from 6am till 2pm, trusting that creative spontaneity would spring from his unconscious to enable a kind of alchemy on canvas. Work over, he’d don a bespoke Savile Row suit to wear to lunch in an expensive restaurant, where he’d typically order oysters and champagne. Then, several afternoons a week, he’d adjourn to the Soho drinking club, the Colony Room, a haunt of artists, writers, bohemians and fringe-dwellers. Here, he’d hold court, surrounded by a growing crowd of sycophants and genuine admirers, displaying his wit and conversational skills and also, at times, his vicious temper and belittling tongue. 

Bacon had the classic genius-artist, sacred-monster personality. Ferociously talented, he allowed nothing or no one to get in the way of his work and was often furtive, selfish, demanding and extremely cruel. He could also be utterly charming and seductive in his generosity. “Bacon would hand out pocketfuls of money to spongers bludging off him, and perversely enjoy this,” says Harrison. “His kindness was as legendary as his scorn and treachery.”

Bacon’s lovers were never permitted to move in and live with him full-time: he purchased Dyer and subsequent lovers apartments nearby and they came to him when summonsed. Bacon never wanted a domestic arrangement. “He hated what he called ‘the billing and cooing’ side of relationships,” says Harrison, “and only liked the sex. Essentially, he was a loner.”

      “A sweet-natured, good-hearted young man, who worshipped Bacon” … John Edwards in 1983

The inside of Bacon’s studio resembled a rubbish-filled squat: “Bacon maintained he needed to work amidst chaos,” says Harrison. The floor was smothered in avalanches of books, pages ripped from magazines and newspapers, photographs in their hundreds. “Many photographs were folded like origami models, giving Bacon ideas on distorting portraits,” adds Harrison. He would appropriate reproductions of old masters, in particular Velázquez’s 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X, the inspiration for his “screaming popes” series. Paint tubes, brushes, rags, champagne bottles and boxes were banked up, the walls covered in slapped-on paint where the artist experimented with colour mixes. 

As Bacon’s success and celebrity grew, he tired of Dyer and tried to buy him off. But Dyer, now drinking heavily to fill his days, was totally dependent on his revered artist.

In October 1971, Bacon was honoured with a major exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Dyer accompanied Bacon’s party to Paris but, unable to cope with the melee of dignitaries and admirers that permanently surrounded Bacon there, went on an alcohol–and pill–fuelled bender. “Dyer took a Venezuelan gigolo back to the hotel room he shared with Bacon, but Bacon complained the man’s feet stank, and moved to a different bedroom,” relates Harrison. “Next morning, Dyer was found dead on the toilet.

“Bacon sailed through the opening the next night as if nothing had happened, but Dyer’s death affected him deeply for years to come. He realised that showering Dyer with money to stop his petty thieving had removed his identity and raison d’être.”

Bacon painted three posthumous triptychs of the stark death scene, one of which shows Dyer slumped on the toilet, vomiting into the basin, which Harrison describes as “haunting dark elegies; exorcisms and expiations of guilt. The fluid that flows in the 1972 Dyer triptych seems to represent the life leaking out of him.”

Although Bacon’s carousing at the Colony Club was legendary, the artist had another group of friends who satisfied his hunger for intellectual discourse and appreciation of art. He was especially close to British critic David Sylvester and French critic Michel Leiris.

“Yet even with them, Bacon would avoid discussing any meanings to his work,” says Harrison. “He maintained his only intention was to create a visual shock to the viewer’s nervous system. He didn’t want narrative story to get in the way of the paint. People find this hard to accept, as Bacon’s work seems to invite interpretation.”

Nor would Bacon answer questions on the meaning of life. He believed in living for the moment: “I’m profoundly optimistic – about nothing,” he told British interviewer Melvyn Bragg in 1986. “I just like to drift … from bar to bar, and see what comes up.”

For more than three decades, Bacon had an intense friendship with fellow artist Lucian Freud – until it soured. The senior British art critic, William Feaver, now completing a biography of Freud’s life, says the friendship began in London during World War II, when Freud was 21 and Bacon was 34.

“Bacon’s work was more startling, unrestricted, wildly amazing than that of any other contemporary painter, and Lucian was a huge admirer,” explains Feaver. “Lucian also admired Bacon’s attitude of not giving a damn about high society or respectability, and his courage in taking risks with the law; homosexuality was illegal until 1967.

“Both men were extremely intelligent, well-read, appreciated serious conversation, but also liked being funny and provocative. Both enjoyed consorting with dukes and duchesses on one hand, then carousing with roadworkers until dawn.

“Lucian [the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud] understood Bacon’s complicated psycho-sexual, masochistic side. To the younger Lucian, he was a dramatic, recklessly romantic person to tag along with. But as time went on, things changed a great deal.”

By the 1970s, Freud was an acclaimed painter. Unlike Bacon, he worked all day and late into the night, his method slow. It would take him two to three years to complete a portrait, always wanting his sitter to be present.

“There was a complete separation of sympathies between the two artists,” says Feaver. “Bacon started to say waspish things about Lucian, and Lucian could no longer praise Bacon’s new work.”

Freud was renowned for his love affairs with beautiful English socialites, yet at the foot of his bed, he always kept a wall-high Francis Bacon painting of two entangled naked men, Two Figures, 1953, known among friends as “The Buggers”. “Lucien said the painting inspired him so much, he wouldn’t let it out of his sight,” says Feaver, “and he wouldn’t lend it for exhibitions.”

Heiress Lady Jane Willoughby became friends with Freud in her 20s. There was talk that she would become his third wife, which didn’t eventuate, but the pair remained dear lifelong friends. Slowly, over the years, she pieced together a major art collection that included works by both artists. Freud died last year, and Two Figures, 1953 now hangs in her bedroom.

Five years after Dyer’s death, Bacon began a new relationship with a 40-years-younger, good-looking, illiterate bar worker from London’s East End, John Edwards. Once again, Bacon showered money on his new lover and bought him an apartment nearby, plus a country cottage. Edwards was devoted to his benefactor, but he differed from Dyer in one key respect.

“Edwards was a sweet-natured, good-hearted young man, who worshipped Bacon,” explains Harrison, “but he wouldn’t stand any nonsense. When Bacon started throwing tantrums or unleashing his acid tongue, Edwards would just say, ‘I’m off now, Francis’ and leave.” 

Like Dyer, he had no understanding of art, nor of Bacon’s many portraits of him. Brian Clarke, director of the Bacon estate, says, “The only question John consistently asked Bacon was: ‘Why the fuck do you always paint me looking like a monkey?’”

Bacon was now older and calmer and his relationship with Edwards became more fatherly. Besides, Edwards was embroiled in his own long-term relationship with a younger man, Philip Mordue. The arrangement obviously suited them both: Bacon made Edwards his sole heir.

By 1975, 66-year-old Bacon had begun spending more and more time in Paris, where he had a big following. He bought a studio apartment in the Marais district, where he met his neighbours, Australian art historians Eddy Batache and Reinhard Hassert. “We had some new Brett Whiteley drawings which Bacon wanted to see,” explains Batache. “Whiteley had visited him in London and he liked Brett’s work.”

       A master’s makeover … Bacon’s Paris neighbours, art historians Reinhard Hassert and Eddy Batache, with the double portrait Bacon painted of them in 1979

In pride of place on their wall is the double portrait Bacon painted of the couple in 1979. “We’d known Francis for four years, then one day he suddenly announced: ‘Now I’m ready to paint your portraits,’” remembers Batache. “I had a beard at the time and Francis said: ‘Eddy, you must shave your beard because it’s a mask; I cannot get through to your face’. Reluctantly, I shaved it off. Then Francis said: ‘Oh no, you looked much better with a beard; grow it again.’ So I did, and he painted our portraits in his Paris studio. It took him three weeks, and we weren’t allowed in to see till it was finished. Sometimes Francis would say, ‘Oh, today I’ve destroyed you, Reinhard.’ After he gave it to us, he wanted it back, to distort my right eye more – but I said no!”

Unlike his chaotic Reece Mews London studio, Bacon’s small Paris atelier was immaculate. “Francis slept and painted in the same room, so he had to keep it spotless because of his asthma,” explains Hassert. “Sometimes he’d invite us in for breakfast, and cook scrambled eggs.”

In all their discussions about art, Bacon was often highly critical of his own and other artists’ work, but rarely supplied clues as to the meanings of his paintings. “Francis would say, ‘A painting needs to unlock the valves of sensation inside us’ – both the artist and the viewer,” says Batache. “He’d say, ‘The purpose of painting is not to illustrate or decorate, but to thicken – i.e. enrich – the quality of life.’ Not to lead you on a spiritual meditation – he was furiously against that idea. Often he’d get a grin on his face and quote Macbeth: ‘Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ ”

In the last four years of his life, Bacon became infatuated with a handsome young Spanish man, José Capello. “Francis still had tremendous appetite for life, but he was slowing down,” says Hassert. “He’d undergone several operations and often struggled with asthma. He said to me: ‘Sometimes one feels that one has been around for long enough’.” Bacon maintained everything ends when we die, that there is no afterlife. “For quite a time, he contemplated the idea of being buried instead of cremated, saying he liked the image of a skull being left behind,” says Hassert.

In December 1991, Bacon visited Paris for a Giacometti exhibition. “He was bloated with cortisone for his asthma and unwell, but we enjoyed a few days together, and it was the last time we saw him,” explains Hassert. “In April, Francis rang me from his hospital bed in Madrid. He’d gone to Spain to visit Capello, against doctor’s orders, and been taken to hospital with pneumonia. He was worried about cancelling his planned visit to Paris to see us, and I said he mustn’t worry; we’re always here for him. Three days later, I heard on TV he’d died from a heart attack.”    

Bacon hadn’t wanted any memorials, famously instructing the barman at the Colony Room: “When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter.” But Edwards, his major heir, was keen to honour Bacon’s legacy, and donated the contents of the Reece Mews studio to Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. Some 7000 items were excavated and reassembled with archaeological precision, along with the paint-splattered walls and floor.

The Bacon estate was established using some 20 paintings that had been stored in the Reece Mews garage and the framers before Edwards died of lung cancer, aged 53, in 2003.

“Francis never cared about money,” remembers Batache. “He’d say the prices of his works could all collapse the moment he died, and it could all be worth nothing. He just painted for himself, and if others liked his work, that’s luck.”

Bacon’s prices hit US$1 million before his death and, in the decade following, soared to US$10 million. They peaked at US$86 million in 2008 for Triptych 1976, which was bought by Russian tycoon and Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich.

Other buyers reportedly include Sheikha Al Mayassa, daughter of the Emir of Qatar, who paid US$53 million for Study From Innocent X (1962); British currency trader and Tottenham Hotspurs owner Joseph Lewis, and US hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen, who paid an undisclosed sum for a “screaming pope” series portrait.

The Bacon estate’s main dealer, Gerard Faggionato, says he regularly receives requests from vastly wealthy buyers – these days in Russia, Korea, South America, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the US and Europe – wanting a specific Francis Bacon work.

“The trouble is these days, most of the 600 Bacon paintings are owned by major collectors and museums, who refuse to part with them. If they’d release them, many would sell today for US$120 million.” 

Bacon’s ghost must be shrieking louder than one of his screaming popes at his posthumous fate. How strange that his eerily dignified triptych of his handsome, petty-thief lover, George Dyer, dead on a Paris toilet seat, could now fetch more than $100 million and be hung in the world’s finest art collections. That’s wall power.

As the late Robert Hughes wrote in 2008: “This painter of buggery, sadism, dread and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable, lyrical artist in late 20th-century England, perhaps in all the world.”  

Francis Bacon: Five Decades will open at the Art Gallery of NSW on November 17, and run until February 24, 2013.

     STUDY FOR HEAD OF ISABEL RAWSTHORNE   

Estimate: 9,000,000 –12,000,000 USD   LOT SOLD: 9,322,500 USD

Provenance

Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
Redfern Gallery, London
Sotheby Parke Bernet & Co., London, March 23, 1983, Lot 73
Waddington Galleries Ltd., London
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Exhibited

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, March - April 1967, cat. no. 19, p. 81, illustrated

Literature

France Borel, introduction by Milan Kundera, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London and New York, 1996, p. 62, illustrated in colour

Catalogue Note

George Embiricos (1920-2011) was a Greek shipping magnate. Following legal studies in Athens and Cambridge he entered the family business and built it into a leading concern during the Post-War period. Embiricos moved to New York after the War and began collecting art. Passionate and erudite, he retired early to devote his life to art and learning.

Over several decades George Embiricos assembled a legendary collection of paintings, works on paper and sculpture. His profound connoisseurship was eclectic, spanning centuries and cultures. Masterpieces by El Greco, Goya, Cézanne, Kandinsky, Picasso, Van Gogh and Bacon, among others, were brought together in his beautiful home in Lausanne. Sotheby’s is honoured to present here Francis Bacon’s remarkable Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne of 1967 from the Estate of George Embiricos. Important pictures from Paul Cézanne to Max Ernst and by Francisco de Goya will be offered in Sotheby’s auctions of Impressionist and Modern Art on November 5 and Old Master Paintings in January 2013, respectively.

"Her face would assume a look of extreme indignation, followed by one of raucous good humour, and then a glance of seduction, all dropped like masks and as readily replaced".
Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 1996, p. 205

A masterful essay on the analysis of facial landscape, Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne is a deeply personal portrayal of one of Francis Bacon’s closest female friends. Bacon only painted a handful of female confidants, insisting that he must know his sitters intimately. Isabel Rawsthorne provided unique focus for the artist: she was his preferred female muse and inspired a greater number of small portrait canvases than any of his other friends. Bacon and Rawsthorne had first met in the late 1940s at the home of Erica Brausen, who represented both artists at her Hanover Gallery in London, yet this spectacular portrayal was painted two decades later and today marks the nearly forty years of their close friendship as well as Bacon’s breathtaking ability to navigate the very threshold of abstraction and figuration in rendering the human form.

In the 1960s Bacon had commissioned John Deakin to photograph Rawsthorne so that he could paint from secondary images. As he told David Sylvester, "I’ve had photographs taken from 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." (David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1990, p. 40) Rawsthorne died at the beginning of 1992: the following May, Bacon divulged that they had had an affair and famously told 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." Bacon’s relationship with Rawsthorne was thus singularly unlike that of any of his other female acquaintances.

Michael Peppiatt has described Rawsthorne’s prodigious facility for physiognomic change: "Her face would assume a look of extreme indignation, followed by one of raucous good humour, and then a glance of seduction, all dropped like masks and as readily replaced." (Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 1996, p. 205). Bacon was inevitably seduced by this expressive variety and this painting epitomizes a rare mode of description that can only stem from a lifetime’s worth of close observation. In 1984 Bacon told David Sylvester "I am certainly not trying to make a portrait of somebody’s soul or psyche or whatever you like to call it. You can only make a portrait of their appearance, but I think that their appearance is deeply linked with their behavior." (Francis Bacon in conversation with David Sylvester, 1984, Op Cit, p. 234)  Rawsthorne described Bacon’s paintings of her as "fabulously accurate" and this deeply personal work is the consummate conflation of her worldly exterior appearance and phenomenal interior character (Michael Peppiatt, Op Cit, p. 208)

The painting schematizes physiognomy in diagrammatic swathes, whose edges carve through the layers of accumulated paint material among patterns of pigment applied with cashmere sweaters and smeared on the surface. The head looms like a sculpture in paint, reminiscent of Rawsthorne’s other lover Alberto Giacometti’s busts of her, and is virtually superimposed onto the stark flatness of the pale backdrop, whose tonal polarity emphasizes the prominent silhouette of amalgamated profiles. Throughout the work there is this tension between graphic dexterity and the raw power of colour, as is so typical of Bacon’s most enthralling masterworks. Within the scribed lines of the head Rawsthorne’s idiosyncratic features – high forehead, long cheek-bones and arched eyebrows – are confidently incised in flecked streaks and variegated smears of densely worked paint. Variance of expression is revealed through the veiled layers of shuttered hatching, so that "sensation doesn’t come straight out at you; it slides slowly and gently through the gaps" (Francis Bacon in conversation with David Sylvester, Op. Cit., p. 243).

Born in London’s East End in 1912, Isabel Nicholas studied at Liverpool Art School before briefly attending the Royal Academy in London. As a young girl she lived with and modelled for the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose Isabel of 1933 communes a hypnotic sexual allure. In 1934 she moved to Paris and started modeling for André Derain and Alberto Giacometti. She lived with the latter and his sculptures of her bear witness to a statuesque composure and almost celestial assuredness. She also befriended the poet Michel Leiris, who was the son-in-law of Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Picasso’s famous patron. Her first marriage was to Sefton Delmer, a war correspondent for the Daily Express and together they reported on the Spanish Civil War.

Having divorced Delmer after the Second World War, she married the composer and conductor Constant Lambert. She had her first major solo exhibition in 1949 at the Hanover Gallery, where Bacon also exhibited, after which she designed stage sets, including at the Royal Opera House in 1953. Lambert had died in 1951 and in 1954 she married his friend, the composer Alan Rawsthorne. During the ’50s and ’60s she mixed in Soho circles along with Bacon at Muriel Belcher’s "Colony Room" drinking club and "The George" pub. By the end of the 1970s her eyesight had deteriorated to such a degree that she stopped painting. In this context, Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne is not only the valediction to a truly epic life that spanned the devastating excesses of the Twentieth Century, but also punctuates the closing chapter of her own creativity as an artist.

In Bacon’s existential zone

FRANCIS Bacon seduces the viewer like a bottle of whisky and a grope under the table.

One way or another, he’ll drag you into his thrillingly dangerous world – 

or you’ll straighten your skirt and run from the room.

MATTHEW WESTWOOD  |  THE AUSTRALIAN  |  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2012 

His most famous image is that one of the screaming pope, based on Velazquez’s portrait of Innocent X and as primal in its howl of existential terror as one of Edvard Munch’s pictures. Bacon depicts the pontiff trapped by his throne and with what look like flames from the underworld shooting skyward.

Many more of Bacon’s pictures are portraits of his friends, especially his doomed lover George Dyer, and self-portraits. Bacon’s figures are unlike anyone else’s. Their flesh seems entirely malleable, even squishy, as his subjects twist in chairs, on beds and in weird geometric contraptions. The faces are scrapes of colour: like an after-image or memory of someone who has already left the room.

Often, his male figures are shown wrestling in a pictorial theatre with sets of lurid colour. He painted female figures, too, but Bacon’s is a man’s world.

His pictures have a masculine glamour that recalls Michelangelo or, more recently, Robert Mapplethorpe.

Bacon’s story is a gift for biographers, dramatists and hagiographers. Born in Dublin in 1909, he was thrashed by his puritanical father, who discovered him wearing his mother’s underwear.The beating gave him an appetite for sado-masochistic sex, he said.

Untrained as an artist, he began his career as an interior decorator – he designed a desk for Patrick White – before turning to painting at the encouragement of Roy de Maistre, the Australian artist who was briefly, at different times, Bacon’s and White’s lover.

Bacon’s orgies of gambling and drink were legendary, as was his bitchy tongue.

His tormented lover Dyer committed suicide on the eve of a major retrospective in Paris, where a poll in an art magazine would declare Bacon the greatest artist alive.

Fascination with Bacon seems only to have increased after his death in 1992. His London studio was spirited away to Dublin and painstakingly reconstructed, with 7500 objects encased in glass. In 2008 he became the most expensive post-war artist at auction when Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich paid $US86.3 million for a 1976 triptych.

In his centenary year of 2009, Bacon was the subject of a comprehensive retrospective that toured from London to Madrid and New York.

And claims continue to be made for his supremacy in 20th-century art. Just this month, Tony Bond, head curator of international art at the Art Gallery of NSW, declared him a better painter than Picasso.

"What you experience with Bacon is sheer paint," says Bond. "You look at Picasso carefully and basically you find he does drawings and fills them in."

Bond has organised the first Australian survey of Bacon that will open at the AGNSW in Sydney next month. (He had first attempted a Bacon show in the late 1970s, but the artist disabused him of that idea when, at dinner in London, he dismissed him as a "fucking curator".)

Francis Bacon: Five Decades contains 54 works from international collections including the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bacon estate and several private, anonymous lenders.

Arranged chronologically, the exhibition will chart Bacon’s progress from his creepy crucifixion pictures of the 1930s and 40s to his formulaic figure paintings of the 80s. As surveys go, it is shorter than the 2009 retrospective, and just as well. In quantity, Bacon’s appeal starts to wear thin and the hyperbole surrounding his abilities becomes ever more like hot air.

Bacon declared that he had no interest in illustration or narrative.

Everything in his pictures happens in an existential zone where story, sentiment and nostalgia are left at the door. He painted the human form not as a figure but, as French theoretician Gilles Deleuze put it with a capital F, a Figure. In this formulation, the Figure is a conductor of sensation directly into the viewer’s nervous system.

But Bacon’s denial of narrative contradicts the evidence of the pictures, which are all about narrative. In his grief for Dyer, Bacon painted his portrait repeatedly, often in the scene of his suicide. Elsewhere he alludes to classical mythology or art history. In so many paintings, figures are accompanied – like saints in devotional images – by attendants, attributes and other story signposts.

Another false myth that Bacon perpetuated was that he never made drawings, that his pictures were spontaneous gestures with paint: applied by brush, scrubbed on with a scrap of fabric or spurted on to the canvas.

That is a clever ruse because Bacon was no draughtsman. In fact, it appears he did make preparatory sketches for some of his paintings.

Margarita Cappock from Dublin’s the Hugh Lane gallery was responsible for reconstructing Bacon’s studio there. Among the masses of papers, paints, photographs and books, she says, were about 70 drawings that Bacon had made. Also found were stencils for the arrows that he included in some of his late works.

"He obviously pinned them on to a canvas and painted around them," Cappock says. "It’s not something you expect."

Bond, in his AGNSW exhibition, has attempted to get beyond the Bacon myth and to get a look at the artist and his contradictions.

On a recent Friday afternoon, he took me down into the AGNSW storeroom to inspect the gallery’s own Bacon, Study for Self-portrait, 1976. Although a single panel rather than a triptych, the self-portrait could stand in for any number of Bacon’s paintings.

The familiar tropes are there: the seated Figure on a chair, twisting itself into anxiety, the coloured ground and black void, an impossible geometric solid, something icky leaking on the floor.

He habitually painted on the wrong side of the canvas, preferring the rough texture of the back to the smooth, primed surface. The paint could not be manipulated and worked over until he was satisfied with the result: he had to get it right the first time.

Bond points out the different methods Bacon used.

The blue upholstery of the seat is done with spray paint. The arc through the middle of the face is the same arc as a crease in a photo of actress Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima Mon Amour. The light blue shading on the face may have been wiped on with a scrap of corduroy.

There’s that void, a white circle, the figure isolated in space.

"What’s extraordinary is the very typical pose of Francis: the legs crossed, the arms folded in towards the legs, the whole thing has this corkscrew feeling to it," Bond says. "The face itself, you barely recognise it as a self-portrait. The most typically Francis thing is that lick of hair at the forehead."

We are looking at this painting in an unusually frank state. It is having some conservation work done before the exhibition and is without the glass-fronted frame that Bacon always insisted on. He consigned his paintings to the fine art museum or the rubbish, nowhere between.

Around the back we can see where Bacon named, signed and dated the picture in black marker. At the front, the tactile quality of the picture is inescapable: the raw brushstrokes, the paint being wiped on with a rag. The immediacy of the mark-making on the canvas makes the artist seem incredibly present.

This, perhaps, is the way to look at Bacon: not behind the safety glass but with the mask off, face to face.

Francis Bacon: Five Decades is at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, November 17-February 24.

           Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (1979-80).  Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Brian Sewell: I regret being a critic

He had an affair with a married male media star and shielded a spy,

DAMIAN WHITFORD  |  INTERVIEW  |  THE TIMES  |  MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2012

He may be best known as Britain’s most waspish critic, but Brian Sewell’s views on contemporary art are pretty much the least outrageous thing about him. He has been the loyal friend of one of Britain’s most notorious traitors; the errand boy for one famous artist and the confidant and pornographic model for another; and a sexual athlete whose endless stamina and rapacious approach to other people’s husbands is exhausting just to read about.

To Francis Bacon he was an “errand boy” driver. “So ungrateful. I never got a Bacon out of it.” Their weekly habit was to take breakfast at Harrods’ juice bar, where Bacon would invent strange potions. “He would swallow it, then he’d lean back on the stool and very deliberately pick up his right buttock and emit the most appalling of farts.” He chuckles at the idea that this might inspire PhD students: “The influence of the fart on his brushwork.”

Sewell hung out in bars with Lucian Freud, watching him pick up girls, but while he believes that the artist had periods of “bravura painting”, he says that later on “the obsessions creep in. David Dawson’s scrotum. To be so obsessed with the redness of the scrotum — why? It’s so anti-classical. With Freud: enormous testicles, big floppy penis all over the place . . .”

He looks stricken. As for women, “Freud looks at women’s cunts as if he is looking for something. It is a concentrated curiosity which is very disturbing. It isn’t beautiful. Absolutely zoomed in. Pubic hair all over the place, rather untidy labia. Why? Throughout a very long life Freud had such a shrewd eye, but then this obsession.”

Many in the contemporary art world loathe Sewell. He has been punched in the eye by an artist, pummelled by a leather-clad lesbian and the subject of a letter to the Evening Standard from art-world figures calling for his sacking.

“It feels very uncomfortable and I don’t much care for it,” he says. “It is a way of evading any kind of debate.”

He regrets that “I have never been consulted on anything by a minister of the arts or any civil servant in the DCMS [Department for Culture, Media and Sport]. Never.” Still, he is part of a vigorous conversation about art that encourages huge numbers of people to attend exhibitions. “I think they go, but I am not sure that they think,” he sniffs.

He regards his decades of reviewing exhibitions as “a waste. What is the point of writing for newspapers? I would much rather have poured my life into the minutiae of the history of art and left a few odd notes here and there in scholarly magazines.”

Marlborough Fine Art tries to throw off burden of the Rothko scandal

Mayfair’s Marlborough gallery effectively invented the modern art market in the 1960s,

but the notorious Rothko case badly dented its image.

Now a new space to showcase today’s art world stars is giving it fresh direction

TIM ADAMS  |  THE OBSERVER  |  SUNDAY, 14 OCTOBER, 2012

                 Denis Wirth-Miller, Frank Lloyd, Gilbert Lloyd and Francis Bacon leaving The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1975.

JONATHAN JONES | THE STORY OF BRITISH ART | CULTURE | THE GUARDIAN | TUESDAY 2 OCTOBER 2012

Francis Bacon at the Palazzo Strozzi

EXHIBITIONS   |   ART NEWS   |   ART & ARTISTS   |   CASSONE   |   OCTOBER  2012

The Palazzo’s recently restored cellars, traditionally known as ‘La Strozzina’, are Palazzo Strozzi’s main platform for contemporary culture, hosting a broad range of events, activities and exhibitions representing the entire spectrum of contemporary creative activity.

Francis Bacon and the Existential Condition in Contemporary Art, co-curated by Franziska Nori (Director of the CCCS) and Barbara Dawson (Director of the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin), hosts work by contemporary artists who breathe life into states of mind and into the kinds of questions we ask ourselves in our relationship with our own interior being, our own body and the outside world, especially today as we face the crisis in values that is gripping contemporary society.

The exhibition gets off to a masterly start with a core of paintings by the great Francis Bacon, whose work dialogues with that of five contemporary artists of international renown – Nathalie Djurberg, Adrian Ghenie, Arcangelo Sassolino, Chiharu Shiota and Annegret Soltau – all of whom share Bacon’s reflection on man’s existential condition and on the depiction of the human figure.

Alongside major works from international collections, the exhibition presents, for the first time in Italy, four unfinished works by Bacon which he kept in his workshop for many years and which have been on display in the DCG The Hugh Lane since 2005.  They include what is thought to be the artist’s last work, discovered on an easel in his Reece Mews workshop in London while he was on his deathbed in Madrid in 1992.  These canvases bear witness to one of the typical work processes espoused by the artist, involving setting aside but holding on to a partly finished painting in order to then return to it and complete it later on.

Bacon used time as a tool for working on images and on the decaying process of his support materials, causing traces of the passage of time to build up in layers.  These traces went on to become ‘scars’, which play a crucial role in helping us to understand the creative process on which his work is based.  The individual human figures, incapable of finding complete definition in the space offered by the painting, become effective visual syntheses that condense and reflect the traces of memory of the artist’s troubled life.

Francis Bacon and the Existential Condition in Contemporary Art    5 October 2012 to 27 January 2013

                                                                            Francis Bacon, Turning Figure, 1962

Out & About: Francis Bacon

Nicola Harvey | ABC Arts | Friday 28 September, 2012

What role does art play in your day to day life? In an ongoing series ABC Arts’ bloggers discuss the events, shows and artists who have inspired and excited them. This week, Nicola Harvey learns about Francis Bacon at the AGNSW Study for self-portrait: Francis Bacon’s Britain 

Francis Bacon was born in 1909 and died in 1992. In the words of Anthony Bond, the curatorial director at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the British artist “saw an extraordinary century”. His art – paintings, drawings, and early on furniture design – tracks this century and the great events that unfolded throughout. In November, AGNSW will present Francis Bacon Five Decades an exhibition featuring over 50 of Bacon’s works sourced from collections around the world. 

It’s the first major exhibition of Bacon’s work in Australia and marks 20 years since his death. For many, Bond included, his legacy still looms large. Damien Hirst has said Bacon took painting to a new level, “there’s no-one really like him.” 

This month and next, the gallery is hosting a series of lectures exploring Bacon’s work. In the first, on September 16, Anthony Bond regaled us with tales of Bacon’s youth. I learned things few art history books have imparted. Did you know, for example, Bacon was a chronic asthmatic? It was a condition his domineering father found intolerable. He considered his son a wimp for not ‘mucking in with the horses’ (Bacon’s father was a military man turned racehorse trainer). But while Bacon may have found working in the stables difficult, playing in the stables (with the young grooms) was a regular source of amusement. 

In 1927, according to Bond, Bacon’s father, Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer Bacon, Eddie as he was known to friends, discovered the young man wearing his mother’s underwear. It was the final straw and Bacon was banished from the farm and sent to Berlin, straight into the heart of the extravagant, dazzling nightlife of the Weimar Republic. There his artistic career commenced and over the following decades he slowly established himself as one of the great figurative painters of the 20th century. 

In coming months, Meredith Burgmann, Tom Wright, Justice Michael Kirby and Craig Judd, among others, will talk about Bacon’s life and career, and the culture movements that rocked Britain during his lifetime. 

Related information

The eight-part lecture series is hosted at the AGNSW from September 16 - November 18. Coming up this Sunday at 10.30am, Dr Christopher Hartney examines shock tactics in the Bacon’s work and British cinema. 

Top image: Francis Bacon in his Reece Mews studio. May 1970 (Photographer: Michael Pergolani, Dublin Gallery The Hugh Lane, Art Gallery New South Wales)

WATCH:  Behind the scenes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as they prepare for Francis Bacon: Five Decades 

                                      A detail from Francis Bacon’s Untitled (Pope), to be sold at Sotheby’s in New York

Endnotes

1. David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 8.

2. David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, (1987) New York 2004, ‘Editorial Note’, p. 202-203. The original interview can be listened to on the BBC archive website – Francis Bacon at the BBC -

 3. Sylvester 2000, Looking back at Francis Bacon, p. 8. They met in 1950.

4. ‘David Sylvester on Francis Bacon in conversation with Andrew Brighton’, Tate Modern June 6, 2000, TAV 2217 A. Tate Audiovisual Archive, Hyman Kreitman Research Centre, Tate Gallery, London, hereafter referred to as TAV.

5. A similar analysis of the painting process, not as a static form of intention, but as a “numberless sequence of developing moments of intention”, is given by Michael Baxandall in Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, (1985), New Haven and London 1986, p. 63.

6. Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p. 14.

7. See for a discussion of the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion as ‘primary work’, Sandra Kisters, ‘Orchestrating the beginning – Francis Bacon’, in Véronique Meyer and Vincent Cotro [eds.], Le Première Oeuvre, Universities of Tours and Poitiers, forthcoming 2013.

8. See Martin Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, New York 2005, p. 38. Harrison refers to Roy de Maistre, Bacon’s mentor and lover in the 1930s, who painted Bacon’s studio at Royal Hospital Road in 1934. In the painting Bacon’s studio is clearly filled with semi-abstract paintings.

9. As Martin Hammer, Andrew Brighton, Anne Baldassari and Martin Harrison already have shown, Bacon was influenced by Roy de Maistre, Pablo Picasso and Graham Sutherland, amongst others. See Martin Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, New Haven and London 2005, Andrew Brighton, Francis Bacon, London 2001, Anne Baldassari, Bacon-Picasso: The Life of Images, Paris 2005, Martin Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, New York 2005.

10. Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p. 70.

11. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of an Enigma, New York 1996, p. 67-68.

12. He for instance told this to John Rothenstein, the director of Tate Gallery at the time of Bacon’s first retrospective exhibition at the Tate. See John Rothenstein ‘Introduction’, in John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley (eds.), Francis Bacon, London 1962, exh. cat. Tate Gallery.

13. The importance of the friendship with Graham Sutherland for the development of his career as a painter has been described thoroughly by Martin Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, New Haven and London 2005. See for instance, p. 14 and 30.

14. In the catalogue of the 1962 retrospective at Tate Gallery, four works from before 1944 were included, while in later catalogues, such as the catalogues for retrospectives in respectively 1971 Grand Palais in Paris and 1985 at the Tate all start with the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion as the first (colour) plate. A more detailed discussion of the growing influence of Bacon on his retrospective exhibitions at Tate Gallery in 1962, 1985 and even the posthumous exhibition in 2009 can be found in Kisters, ‘Orchestrating the beginning – Francis Bacon’, in Meyer and Cotro (eds.), Le premiere Oeuvre (forthcoming 2013).

15. Op. cit 9. 16. Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p. 38.

17. See Harrison 2005, In Camera, Barbara Dawson and Martin Harrison [eds.], Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: Incunabula London 2008 and Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, exh. cat. Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, Dublin 2009.

18. See the analysis of Bacon’s studio contents in Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon’s Studio, London 2005.

19. Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p. 21.

20. Ibid., p. 194-195

18. See the analysis of Bacon’s studio contents in Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon’s Studio, London 2005.

19. Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p. 21.

20. Ibid., p. 194-195.

21. Matthew Gale researched and described the collections of poet Stephen Spender and Bacons friends Peter Pollock and Paul Danquah in Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, London 1999. Other collections, such as Barry Joule’s, are still the topic of debate.

22. Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p. 189. 23. Ibid, p. 191. 24. Ibid, p. 189,

25. Brighton 2001, Francis Bacon, p. 75

26. See for instance the catalogue Francis Bacon. Recent Paintings, London 1965.

27. The Marlborough Fine Art Gallery did all kinds of other promotional activities, such as initiating retrospective exhibitions, like the one in Tate Gallery in 1962. This is discussed in my dissertation Leven als een kunstenaar. Invloeden op de beeldvorming van beeldend kunstenaars. Auguste Rodin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Francis Bacon, VU University Amsterdam 2010, p. 321-326.

28. He edited the interviews together with Shena Mackay, see Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p. 203. In an ‘Editorial Note’ at the end of the edition of 2004 he gives additional information about the sources for each edited interview.

29. Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, p 6-7.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid, p. 7.

32. Sylvester 2000, Looking back at Francis Bacon, p. 8. In part 3 ‘Fragments of Talk’ Sylvester included leftover material of the 18 recordings, which is grouped in themes.

33. I would like to thank Margarita Cappock, Head of Collection at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, for bringing the manuscripts of the interviews that were found in the studio to my attention.

34. Stephen Spender, ‘Armature and alchemy’, Times Literary Supplement, March 21, 1975, p. 290-291.

35. Sylvester 2000, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, p. 191.

36. They were found during the relocation of the studio from London to the Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, and can be consulted through the database of the Francis Bacon Studio Project, Dublin under the numbers F1A:122A, F1A:122F, F1A:122G, F1A:122J, F1A:122K and F1A:122M. 36. I would like to thank the Francis Bacon Estate for their permission to include a few quotations from these manuscripts.

37. Francis Bacon Studio Project, F1A: 122A. The answers are partly typed, partly handwritten and partly crossed out.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid. p. 5. 40. Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, in particular p. 170-71.

41. Francis Bacon Studio Project, F1A: 122G. Typed manuscript of an edited interview of Sylvester with Bacon entitled ON REALISM: interview with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester recorded in 1982, 15 pag.

42. ‘The personal and professional papers of the curator, writer and art historian, David Sylvester, 1940s–2001’, purchased from the Sylvester’s Estate, 2008. Tate Gallery Archive, Hyman Kreitman Research Centre, Tate Gallery, TGA 200816. The Sylvester papers are currently uncatalogued and are therefore difficult to consult.

43. TAV 2217 A. 44. William Feaver, ‘All flesh is meat’, The Listener, May 15 1975, p. 652-653. 45. TAV 2217 A.

46. Sylvester 2000, Looking back at Francis Bacon, p. 8. 47. The Francis Bacon Studio Project has a large amount of books covered with drawings or paintings in their archive: studio relocation and Cappock 2005, Francis Bacon’s Studio.

48. Sylvester in Matthew Gale, Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, London 1999, p. 9.

49. TAV 2217 A. This superimposing of images; the combination of several inspirational sources within one work has been analysed in depth by Martin Harrison. Op. cit. 17.

50. TAV 2217 A.

51. Sylvester 2004, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Interview 2, p. 30-67, p. 44.

52. Ibid, p. 46.

53. Recently, a new study has appeared discussing this very theme: Rina Arya, Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World, London 2012.

54. For instance, the ‘Artist Interview Project’ of the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art.

“Bacon started working with this imagery, looking at the true nature of the regime that had emerged,” said Hammer. “He used it to explore the instinctive, savage, bestial nature that was dominating everyone’s lives.”
 

                                            Francis Bacon Untitled (Pope), ca. 1954

                    Bacon never went on record referring to the Nazis

            Crucifixions and Popes

Religious Imagery in the works of Francis Bacon

PROCEEDINGS OF 33RD CONGRESS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE HISTORY OF ART

Bacon’s paintings were screams from the abattoir, cries from the execution pits of World War II. His deranged executives and his princes of death in their pontifs’ robes lacked all pity and remorse. His popes screamed because they knew there was no God.

(J. G. Ballard)1

The subject of this paper is the analysis of the reinterpretation of religious motifs in the works of Francis Bacon, the crucifixions and the portrait of the popes, not as a Christian motif but as an emotional response to personal dramas and historical events witnessed by the artists.

Bacon always worked with photographs and printed images rather than with life models. In his studio he stored material on very different subjects, such as books on art, forensics, ornithology, medicine, poetry, Greek tragedies or contemporary history. He used them as a visual and intellectual reference for his paintings.

Too risqué for Iran, Bacon’s ‘lost’ painting goes on show

For the past quarter of a century, a major painting by Francis Bacon has languished in a storeroom in Iran, its eroticism deemed too inflammatory for public display. But now British art lovers are to get the chance to see the work which has been kept from Iranians. Tomorrow the extraordinary triptych Two figures lying on a bed goes on display after years of negotiations by the Tate.

The work is owned by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, an institution originally founded by the wife of the last Shah of Iran and the holder of an extraordinary collection of Western paintings. But it was one of dozens of depictions of nudes consigned to storage after the fundamentalists seized power in the 1979 revolution.

Like most younger Western academics, Stephen Deuchar, the director of Tate Britain, knew the work only through reproduction. So when he was on holiday in Iran in 2001, he naturally asked to take a look.

Even under the harsh fluorescent lighting of the underground store, it was striking. He asked whether he could borrow it. And the Iranian Ministry of Culture finally agreed. Surveying the work on the walls of Tate Britain yesterday where it is the highlight of a new temporary Bacon display, he said that it was even more striking seen properly.

"When you saw it under the fluorescent lighting in the store, you could tell it was a strong work, but it looks very vibrant here. The lilac background is very surprising," he said. Toby Treves, who has curated the display, said the work, which was painted in 1968 not long before it was sold to the Shah’s wife, clearly showed a homoerotic strand of Bacon’s work that was largely ignored.

"At the beginning of his fame after the war, there was a concentration on the existential aspect of the work, but not much discussion of the quite frank eroticism in many of the paintings," he said. "This triptych is probably the most overtly erotic of the paintings in this room."

The work shows figures in two flanking panels who appear to spy on two naked men lying on a bed in the central panel, with a splatter of white paint flung across them. "It is deeply ambiguous and deliberately so," Mr Treves said.

The Iranian loan is hung alongside another celebrated triptych, his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, dating from 1944, and a work apparently based on photographs of the former cricketer David Gower. Bacon triptychs now command as much as £6m at auction.

The generosity of the Iranian museum and its director, Dr Ali Reza Sami Azar, was returned earlier this year when the Tate lent a Bill Woodrow to an exhibition of British sculpture organised by the British Council.

And extraordinarily, it now looks as if the Bacon may even be seen in Tehran itself. Dr Sami Azar is hoping to include Two figures lying on a bed in an exhibition provisionally entitled Figurative Tendencies in Western Art when it is returned to Iran in the autumn.

The only club in which Francis Bacon felt happy was the Colony Room, in Soho. Now a lifestyle e-shop has been set up to flog products based on his paintings and quotations. What, his drunken rants? The items include cashmere throws, silk scarfs, espresso cups, T-shirts, belts and beach towels. Fancy lying on a screaming pope?

Not too happy, however, is David Edwards, brother of the late John Edwards, Bacon’s close companion and inheritor of his estate. Edwards thinks this shopping venture, sanctioned by the artist Brian Clarke, now the sole executor, is a tad tacky. Yet it will be a useful earner for the estate, as there is a levy payable on every Bacon item sold.