FRANCIS BACON

By DOROTA KOZINSKA | FEATURES | VIE DES ARTS | VOLUME 52 | NUMBER 213 | SUPPLEMENT | WINTER 2008–2009

This vast retrospective of the work of one of Britain's greatest contemporary artists, Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) is a major celebration heralding the centenary of his birth, and a comprehensive and exhaustive document of his prolific career.

Born in Dublin of English parents, Bacon first worked as an interior designer. He started painting around 1928, but destroyed most of his early work. He revealed his talent as a major artist in 1945 with an instantly unforgettable and shocking work titled Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

This was the start of one of the most controversial and disturbing careers in the history of modern art. Bacon's demoralizing philosophy that man is simply another animal in a godless world, subject to the same natural urges towards violence, lust and fear, was at times in contrast with his paintings infused as much with unbearable emotional anguish, as with love. They are often extremely beautiful despite their gut-wrenching subject matter.

This, the first UK retrospective of Bacon's work since 1985, is a form of re-assessment of his oeuvre, afforded by new research that has emerged since the revelation of his studio and its contents following the artist's death. One of the rooms in the exhibition, Archive, offers a glance into the inner sanctum of the artist, revealing to what extent he relied on photography, and how he manipulated photographic imagery. The imagery itself, like Bacon's paintings for that matter is often brutal, on the theme of violence and conflict, but also focused on works of art, including stills from old film.

Bacon's preoccupation with the human body and its suffering, is the central theme of all of his works. He developed a unique way of depicting the physical and emotional torment racking the body, by twisting and deforming it, reducing it to a fleshy mass emitting a silent scream of pain. His flamboyant homosexuality and personal transgressions only added to his mythical stature, and are an intrinsic element of his work.

The Tate retrospective brings together many famous paintings and triptychs including Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), In Memory of George Dyer (1971), and Two Figures in the Grass (1954).

This, however, is but the tip of the iceberg. The exhibition is chock full of recognizable paintings, but that is perhaps due to Bacon's unmistakeable style.

It is divided into ten sections, or rooms, starting with Animal, showing works done in the 1940s and reflecting the artist's original theory of man as an animal in a world without redemption. The bestial depiction of the human form is at times combined with specific references to the horrors of the Second World War. It is in this room that we are first introduced to one of the early variations on the theme of the Velazquez painting, which became an obsession with the painter, Head VI (1949). All it really is, is a screaming face, featureless except for the gaping mouth.

Room 2, Zone, focuses on Bacon's experiments with pictorial space, and the interaction between subject and setting. In most of his works, the figure is solitary, isolated, yet placed centrally, almost on a stage, therefore exposed to public scrutiny in all its vulnerability. This visual formula weaves throughout his career, and is symbolic of the artist's sense of being alone in his suffering.

Room 3 is under the heading Apprehension, and the sense of dread permeating the works in this section is of a very unusual kind. The Man in Blue reigns in this hall, a haunting, looming figure behind an enormous desk, a sinister, shadowy presence exuding a particularly personal menace. This series refers to the continued illegality of homosexuality, and on a personal level, to Bacon's sometimes violent affair with Peter Lacy. This room also holds the Chimpanzee (1955), a terrifying depiction of confinement and cruelty.

Through Crucifixion, Crisis, and Portrait, to Epic, Memorial and Late, each section is a world onto itself, a mini exhibition within the framework of a large one.

Portraits is like a burst of colour in the otherwise sombre palette that predominates in Bacon's oeuvre. Gone is the cage-like grid holding the figure, the space is infused with light, ochres and greens. His lover and most frequent model, George Dyer, is seen in many of the works, like Three Figures in a Room (1964), in which he is represented with a mixture of pathos and affection section is a world onto itself, a mini exhibition within the framework of a large one.

But it is in the room titled Memorial that one finds perhaps the most accomplished, and the most painful of Bacon's works. The room is entirely dedicated to Dyer, who was the artist's closest companion as of 1963, and who committed suicide in 1971, two days before Bacon's major exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Racked by loss and pain, Bacon created a series of works in the memory of Dyer, that speaks a subtly different visual language. The fines are cleaner, the imagery less raw, the setting staged, as if the horror of the event was too much to bear and had to be presented in a theatrical, detached manner.

The figure, as always, is placed centre stage, exposed in all its physical degradation and beauty, terribly human in its vulnerability and helplessness.

Presented in triptychs – Bacon's way of fulfilling his longing for cinematic expression – it shows Dyer slumped on a toilet seat, dying, a giant black shadow spilling from the central image like a great pool of blood

Bacon was legendary for his resigned defiance in the face of mortality, but the death of his friend was devastating. "Death is the only absolute certainty," he told a friend. "Artists know that they can't defeat it, but I think that most artists are very aware of their annihilation – it follows them around like their shadow."

For someone wrestling with such overwhelming forces, Bacon exhibited an impressive discipline at work, pouring his torment onto the canvas with an unconscious, or perhaps very deliberate, sense of it being his only salvation.

In the last room of this magnificent exhibition, we come face to face with the artist so to speak. A series of wonderful selfportraits reveal the man behind the easel; a profound, deeply thinking, complex personality. In Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (1979-80), the face is a twisting, undulating patchwork of colour against a dark background. The features are typically contorted, but what draws the attention are the eyes that see, and look back at us.

What strikes one when contemplating the expanse of Bacon's prolific production, is how very consistent he was in his style and subject matter, and yet at the same time how endlessly, surprisingly fresh each of his painting is to this day. Despite the scatological, eviscerating nature of his work, the viewer is instantly immersed in its story, often unaware of, oblivious to the fabulous calibre of the art. The two go hand in hand in Bacon's paintings, the horror and the beauty, life and art, united by the indomitable creative spirit that helped him survive and fed his talent.

EXHIBITION    FRANCIS BACON   TATE BRITAIN    Upper Galleries  London, UK   11 September 2008 – 4 January 2009

Francis Bacon

London

By DEXTER DALWOOD | EXHIBITION REVIEWS | THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE | VOLUME 150 | NUMBER 1269 | DECEMBER 2008

AS FRANCIS BACON’s third retrospective at Tate Britain (to 4th January) ¹ has been timed to coincide with the centenary of his birth in 2009, it seems appropriate that it should attempt a recanonisation of the painter’s achievements. Bacon, always a sacred cow and regarded as a titan of painting since his death in 1992, has been awarded a coveted status accorded to only a few artists in every generation. Cy Twombly is perhaps the most recent to achieve this, and he has done so by disengaging his work from its origins in Arte Povera and washing himself of contemporary allegiances. In Bacon’s case, enough time has passed since the last major exhibition in London (1985; Tate Britain) to permit the viewing of his work in a very different context. Back then, painting, which since the 1970s had been marginalised in favour of new art forms, was the subject of a renewed interest, specifically figurative painting. This interest was identified closely with the Royal Academy’s 1981 exhibition A New Spirit in Painting, which spawned a surge of market-friendly Neo-Expressionism. This was followed in 1984 by the more parochial The Hard-Won Image at the Tate Gallery, which embraced figuration in a cadaver-pumping bid to bring painting back in from the cold. The subsequent 1985 Bacon retrospective provided the much needed impetus for a debate about the relevance of painting, and satisfied the intellectual requirements of people who liked art but still did not really approve of painting. Gerhard Richter went on to make this role of the intellectual painter his own, and brought about a renewal that Bacon’s work always rooted in much older concerns, could never effect. Studying at St Martin’s School of Art in the early 1980s and poring over well-thumbed, paint-splattered monographs the early 1980s and poring over well-thumbed, paint-splattered monographs on Bacon’s work (long before Gilles Deleuzes’s The Logic of Sensation was translate into English), it seemed to me that his concerns were those of an earlier generation.

The current exhibition aims both to reinforce Bacon’s reputation as Britain’s greatest modern painter, but also to question how Bacon propagandised his own work and, further, how it might now be reinterpreted. The juxtaposition of works enables the viewer to test new lines of approach. However, the new groupings that emerge from the interpretation-led presentation at the Tate do, however, result in some misleadingly themed rooms: ‘Crisis’, ‘Apprehension’ and ‘Zone’ for example, manage to be simultaneously vague and over-prescriptive. It is also perhaps misleading to lay such emphasis, as the centrepiece of the show, on a display of documentary and source material. This is the result of a long history of obsessive archiving of the ephemera from Bacon’s Reece Mews studio and, although it includes some interesting photographs, is diluted by some unremarkable works on paper. Since the early 1990s this material has been the main focus for Bacon scholars and should have enhanced the exhibition, but here the effect is more anecdotal than one of powerful elucidation. The one exception is that Bacon’s notebooks, containing lists of potential paintings, revealingly highlight the degree of premeditation and planning of the images, and in doing so support the case for Bacon as a highly methodical, strategic painter.

One of the most successful rooms is filled with the early 1950s dark inky-blue portraits of businessmen in suits, spatially flattened in airless niches – surely these have never looked better. But this room seems restrained in comparison with the histrionically titled ‘Crisis’ room. Here Bacon veers off course with the slashed-on, painterly Bomberg/Soutine mash-ups done in 1956–57 such as Figures in a landscape (1956–57;Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery) and Figure in a mountain landscape (1956; Kunsthaus, Zürich) but returning to some sort of form with the Study for portrait of Van Gogh VI (1957; Arts Council Collection).

These days it is becoming harder to stomach the critically reiterated idea that the horrors of the early twentieth century, apparently depicted in these paintings, underpin Bacon’s pre-eminence as a painter of the human condition. One of the successes of the current exhibition is to show that Bacon’s paintings may have less to do with ‘real’ violence than with imagined violence. Such violence is conjured up as an antithesis of boredom, fantasised to enrich the artist’s daily life, in the manner of Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel America Psycho (1991). The Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion (c.1944; Tate), Bacon’s ‘year zero’ painting, here tightly grouped in a small room with two other large-scale triptych Crucifixions from 1962 and 1965, rebuff the pundits’ view that they somehow represent the more grotesque atrocities of the Second World War without actually illustrating them. Indeed, even Bacon’s own claim that ‘paint should come across directly onto the nervous system’ wears thin when pitched against such subject-matter.

Martin Harrison’s catalogue essay goes some way towards exploring this dilemma, which is, in short, how to consider Bacon’s statements about his own work in the context both of research into previously unavailable material and of the simple experience of looking at the paintings. For example, it is interesting to question how much Bacon’s often repeated statement ‘I do not know what accident will occur’ actually played in his work process.² It seems obvious now that the paintings made after the late 1950s are very formulaic in their construction – and this is not necessarily a bad thing. This interpretation liberates the viewer from considering Bacon’s work only in a traditional expressionist context, following the credo that every brushstroke can be considered to have been torn from the artist’s soul. It is appropriate that the 1956 film Lust for Life (the biopic of Van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas) is mentioned in the catalogue essay by David Alan Mellor as the inspiration for the Study for portrait of Van Gogh series that Bacon knocked out a few days after seeing the film.

To simply accept Bacon’s version of how images floated into his head and then appeared on the canvas is to detract from his great skill as a painter which is in the composition and execution of the works. What makes him such an interesting artist for other painters has as much to do with what he leaves out of his paintings as it does with what he puts in, and his continual short-circuiting of traditional figurative mannerisms. In order to rupture traditional readings Bacon developed a series of devices, which can be seen, for example, in the grouping entitled ‘Portrait’ in the current exhibition. The paintings Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963; Fig.34), Three figures in a room (1964; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) and Study of George Dyer in a mirror (1968; Museo Thysse Bornemisza, Madrid) all adopt either the chevron shape or the curved ellipse – which first emerged in the Pope paintings – as a device which operates in the bottom half of the painting as an effective way of breaking the foreground/middleground/background convention of figurative painting. Two studies for a portrait of George Dyer (1968; Fig.35) is a good example of the potential for failure of this device. Bacon allows the ground to drop off the bottom of the canvas and hence the space of the painting becomes recessive and even conventional – just a portrait of a sitter. Viewed in this light, it is as if the ejaculation of paint over the figure’s legs functions solely to prevent the painting from becoming nothing more than a portrait of a man in a room with a distorted face. Bacon’s depiction of space only really works when the spatial arena is a believable distortion so that he makes it his own.

It is also tempting to align Bacon’s work with that of Graham Sutherland, but the latter’s surrealistic and symbolic images have not stood the test of time as well as has Bacon’s work. Is it the Miró-esque landscape or the insipid Englishness of Sutherland’s paintings which deadens them, in the same way that Paul Nash’s dumping of mangled pieces of modernity into English fields has dated? It is true to say that Bacon was operating  in the same socio-political context as Sutherland and Nash, but by setting everything he did within a hermetic personal arena (haunted by the ghost of Duchamp’s Large glass and furnished with tubular chrome and G-plan furniture), Bacon was able to create a unique contemporary modernism which has not dated in the same way.

What is not suppressed in the current exhibition, although hardly emphasised in the catalogue, is the older ideal of cruelty that presides over Bacon’s imagery: the dark end-of-the-pier humour of Punch and Judy, the nasty after-taste of nineteenth-century British Colonialism unveiled and exposed as ‘the bible, the bottle, and the lash’. Bacon deliberately and very effectively steered his work away from pictorial convention and flaunted controversy, for example, by disingenuously palming off the motif of a hypodermic needle away from pictorial convention and flaunted controversy, for example, by disingenuously palming off the motif of a hypodermic needle sticking into the veins of one of his subjects as a formalist device. Bacon’s shock tactics were as calculated as those of Turner, who enjoyed the drama of pulling back the curtain to his blacked-out studio to an audience full of nervous expectation. 

It is also tempting to align Bacon’s work with that of Graham Sutherland, but the latter’s surrealistic and symbolic images have not stood the test of time as well as has Bacon’s work. Is it the Miró-esque landscape or the insipid Englishness of Sutherland’s paintings which deadens them, in the same way that Paul Nash’s dumping of mangled pieces of modernity into English fields has dated? It is true to say that Bacon was operating in the same socio-political context as Sutherland and Nash, but by setting everything he did within a hermetic personal arena (haunted by the ghost of Duchamp’s Large glass and furnished with tubular chrome and G-plan furniture), Bacon was able to create a unique contemporary modernism which has not dated in the same way.

What is not suppressed in the current exhibition, although hardly emphasised in the catalogue, is the older ideal of cruelty that presides over Bacon’s imagery: the dark end-of-the-pier humour of Punch and Judy, the nasty after-taste of nineteenth-century British Colonialism unveiled and exposed as ‘the bible, the bottle, and the lash’. Bacon deliberately and very effectively steered his work away from pictorial convention and flaunted controversy, for example, by disingenuously palming off the motif of a hypodermic needle away from pictorial convention and flaunted controversy, for example, by disingenuously palming off the motif of a hypodermic needle sticking into the veins of one of his subjects as a formalist device. Bacon’s shock tactics were as calculated as those of Turner, who enjoyed the drama of pulling back the curtain to his blacked-out studio to an audience full of nervous expectation.

Of course, by the time of the 1985 exhibition such tactics were no longer so effective. Bacon’s later paintings of dwarf-like figures in cricket pads, inspired by his lust for the cricketing legend Ian Botham, or his triptych of Mick Jagger, seemed like an ill-judged over-indulgence. In the Tate’s current show these works are mostly omitted in favour of the post-1985 work. This includes Jet of water (1988; Fig.36) an image without the presence of a figure which promised a new departure and which, confusingly, was painted in the same year as the Second version of Triptych 1944 (1988; Tate), which has the feeling of a disastrous come-back gig and is wisely relegated to the vestibule outside the exhibition. Incredibly, and in perverse defiance of the spontaneous nature of the subject, the 1988 Jet of water is in fact a fairly identical version to a first Jet of water painted in 1979. A display of these two works together might have instigated the kind of revisionism that Bacon’s work now needs.

R.B. Kitaj reportedly took to his bed for a couple of days after seeing Bacon’s 1985 Tate exhibition, overwhelmed and unnerved by the achievement of his contemporary. But the current exhibition avoids any homage to the aggrandising exhibition layouts typical of David Sylvester’s hangs, seen to particularly impressive effect in his posthumous homage to Bacon, The Human Body, mounted at the Hayward Gallery in in 1998. Although there are no great surprises in the loans to the show, and despite misleading interpretative categories, Bacon’s work is allowed to unravel. The catalogue essays are for the most part illuminating but fail to capitalise on this opportunity to challenge the hagiography. It will be interesting to see if this tangible difference is maintained when the exhibition tours to the Prado, and whether the themed rooms are retained at the subsequent and final showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By the end of this exhibition tour we might hope that some more of the myth surrounding Francis Bacon will have been debunked, in favour of the view that these are simply the most original inventive figurative paintings of their time.

1 The exhibition travels to the Museo National del Prado, Madrid (3rd February to 19th April) and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (18th May to 16th August). Catalogue: Francis Bacon. Edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, with contributions by Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield, Gary Tinterow and Victoria Walsh. 288 pp. ncl. 151 col. + 56 b. & w. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2008), £24.99. ISBN 978–1–85437–738–8. The exhibits are not numbered in the checklist; the bibliography is selective.

2  ‘Francis Bacon: Letters to Michel Leiris 1966-89’, in exh. cat. Supplement to Francis Bacon, London (Gagosian Gallery) 2006, p.23.

    Landscape near Malabata, Tangier, by Francis Bacon. 1963. Canvas, 198 by 147.5 cm.

Francis Bacon

Tate Britain, London.
11 September 2008–4 January 2009.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
3 February–19 April 2009

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
18 May–16 August 2009

Janet McKenzie, Studio International, 30 December, 2008

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) at Tate Britain heralds the artist’s centenary in 2009. It is the first retrospective since 1985, enabling a re-assessment of his work, although the exhibitions in Edinburgh, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads (2005) and Norwich, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (2006) at the Sainsbury Centre have been significant. The present exhibition is informed by the revelation, following Bacon’s death in 1992, of the contents of his studio. His working methods were revealed, especially his reliance on photographs.

In interviews, Francis Bacon insisted that he never drew, and that his compositions were intuitive. These claims were refuted by the posthumous revelation of figure studies from the 1950s. Bacon usually commenced painting a figure on to the blank canvas. In 1962 he claimed that the genesis of his paintings came whilst daydreaming. In fact his methods were often more orthodox. The works on paper and lists that came to light after his death indicate that he collected a wide range of material to use as points of reference. The present exhibition, which makes a powerful impact on the viewer, comprises 65 paintings and 13 major triptychs. It is the most comprehensive exhibition to date, which examines the artist’s sources, processes and thoughts. It is accompanied by an excellent, scholarly catalogue; edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens; with essays by Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield, Gary Tinterow and Victoria Walsh.¹

Widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, Francis Bacon can also be seen as one of the most powerful and searing commentators of the human condition in Britain since the Second World War, expressing unflinching images of sexuality, violence and isolation. The exhibition is profound, haunting and iconic. Bacon’s philosophy as an atheist is explored: man in a godless world is presented as simply another animal, subject to the same natural urges of violence, lust and fear. In this Bacon personified the age. The loss of faith in humanity in the late 1940s was such that the human image in art became increasingly difficult to portray. The existential despair expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea (1938), found a visual counterpart in the images of despair and alienation of Francis Bacon, the expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka and the apocalyptic visions of Arthur Boyd. For the most part, abstraction in the visual arts dominated because, after the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, artists found images of humanity impossible to create.

John Berger, formerly a harsh critic of Bacon, recently wrote:
“He repeatedly painted the human body, in discomfort or agony or want. 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”.² In spite of the hellish drama expressed, Bacon’s work is inspiring in the very dedication to the craft of painting, and the intellectual dialogue created. This is a profound exhibition, at once challenging and awesome. In spite of the bewilderment that can so often be experienced in confrontation with his painting, there is an unexpected affirmation in the choice of formal language and the precision and care applied to the act of painting: the placement of each head, each brush stroke, every subtle hue, the manner in which the figure inhabits the space, the form within the picture plane. A quiet authority is established by the artist amid the shrieking pain, due in large part to the dialogue he has with art from the past.

Bacon’s sources have been divided by various commentators now, to include ‘high art’ sources and ‘low art’ sources. Bacon chose only the most remarkable artists to aspire to: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Picasso. He also chose inspiration from the modern world: men in suits, modern furniture, dangling light bulbs, gay comic books. He depicted a low-life from gangster boyfriends, heavy drinking and sexually dissipated Colony Room artists and intellectuals, a collision of high and low culture, survival and destruction.  Chance played an important role in Bacon’s work – spontaneity was of key importance in a Post-Surrealist context. Although he retained the human figure in his work, he embraced the Abstract Expressionists’ love of chance in art as in life. A primordial energy is central to many works, the Bullfight paintings in 1969 being perfect examples of how Bacon infused the image on canvas with a reckless, fatal movement. Describing the collision of illustration of facts and an expression of the very deepest feelings, Bacon noted: “one wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object that you set out to do. Isn’t that what it’s all about?”³ Bacon had the highest ambition from a young age, claiming that his work should either be in the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between. His ambition as a painter was to define his existential, atheistic stance in a post-photography world. Bacon was a habitual destroyer of paintings; in 1962 he remarked that over-working was a form of destruction, of clogging. Spontaneity was a vital quality, which Bacon sought to capture.

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin, in 1909. He spent most of his life in London, working as a self-taught painter from the 1930s. The human figure was central to his work throughout his long and productive career. He died suddenly in Madrid in 1992. Time has played an important part in the appraisal of Bacon’s work; his unflinching approach to violence and the human condition is more poignant than ever. In 1973 he attributed his preoccupation with violence and war to the times in which he grew up, interwar Germany and the rise of Sinn Fein in Ireland:

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, and then World War Two, anyone who lived through the European wars was affected by them, they affected one’s whole psyche to that extent, to live continuously under an atmosphere of tension and threat.⁴

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, in which the most scholarly essays, explore the lasting significance of his work for the present day. Images of the abyss, of loneliness and the inescapable suffering of human existence dominate the exhibition.

Francis Bacon at Tate Britain is broadly chronological. Room One, Animal, examines Bacon’s early work from the 1940s where his attitude to humanity is already evident. His bestial depiction of the human figure combined personal feelings of anxiety with broader references to the Second World War. He used reproductions from books, catalogues and magazines. The male figure is used repeatedly in Bacon’s long career; he often includes a scream or shout to reveal the internal repressed and violent anxieties. The open mouth represents the tension that exists between the individual and the broader context of time and place.

Room Two, Zone, examines Bacon’s work of the 1950s where he carried out complex experiments with pictorial space. He described the processes, in 1952, as ‘an attempt to lift the image outside of its natural environment’. This work established his easily recognisable images with boxed figures in cage-like structures. Hexagonal ground planes establish tense psychological zones; the use of shuttering, the vertical lines of paint merge the foreground and background. This is the period in which Bacon came of age as a painter. Yet his personal circumstances were extremely difficult: homeless, in debt and in a tempestuous relationship with Peter Lacy. During this time he searched for and found appropriate subject -matter with which to express his deepest anxiety. In the 1950s Bacon used the painting by Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, (c.1650), as his starting point to explore the insecurities of the powerful. For Bacon, the choice of the portrait of a Pope had nothing to do with religion; as a non-believer he was concerned with the way man behaves to each other. For Bacon the portrait by Velazquez was one of the greatest portraits ever painted for it opened up feelings and prompted the imagination, beyond any real individual or other art work. The colour is magnificent, prompting Bacon to give his own images a sense of tragic grandeur, a sense of authority in painterly terms. The Pope as a unique figure in the world suited Bacon’s ambition to create a powerful image in which power is stripped of its essence.

Room Three, Apprehension, explores the pervading anxiety in all of Bacon’s work. The Cold War anxiety that limited movement and personal freedom was combined in Bacon’s case with the illegality at the time of homosexuality. His sometimes, violent relationship, with Peter Lacy, is captured in the Man in Blue series, which concentrates on a single anonymous figure in a dark suit. Although inspired by the greatest artists from history, Bacon powerful images are achieved by combining the authority of the history of art, with contemporary life. The figure is portrayed in isolation, sitting at a table or at a bar. Like many artists in the twentieth century, including the Italian Futurists, who worked with the figure, Bacon drew from the photographic work of Edweard Muybridge’s, The Human Figure in Motion, (1887) sequential photographs of animals and humans, which Bacon described as ‘a dictionary’ of the body in motion.

Room Four at Tate Britain is devoted to one of Bacon’s most famous and iconic series, of the Crucifixion. He made works throughout his career at pivotal moments. As an atheist Bacon saw the Crucifixion as a particularly poignant act of man’s violence. Brutality and fear are developed in a particularly cruel evocation of the famous religious scene. The ritual of sacrifice is given a new dimension, the brutality emphasised with extreme abandon. Meat carcasses are used by Bacon to diminish the human notion of superiority in the wider scheme of life according to Christianity. In an early interview Bacon describes how existing images breed others. He chose the Crucifixion by Cimabue as a starting point, but readily admits that without all the paintings that have been done on the subject, his could not have produced his own. Often under the influence of alcohol, and prone to drug abuse, and frequently suffering acute exhaustion, Bacon would create Crucifixion images of profound despair. He also juxtaposes fragments of films, such as those of Eisenstein, and isolated stills allowing accident to play a major part in the creative process. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, (c.1944) is a key work and one that paved the way for his use of the triptych format, and numerous later themes and compositions. The bestial depiction of the human figure was central to Bacon’s oeuvre. Displacing the traditional saints in Crucifixion paintings, Bacon later referred to them as Furies from Greek mythology.

In interview with David Sylvester in 1966, he was asked about the use of meat carcasses in these and other works. He stated, “Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses”.⁵ Being human in Bacon’s world was utterly debased. Bacon took works from the history of art that were created within a spiritual context and slashed them to bits. In this he felt completely justified, for the Vatican never openly condemned Nazism. This was Bacon’s vendetta for the hypocrisy played out in the name of God. Where artists such as Hieronymous Bosch created devastating images of humanity in works such as his Judgement Day paintings, Bacon chose the traditionally edifying form of portraiture, which entails a degree of trust between painter and sitter, and destroyed it. His disturbing papal images are like the burning of an effigy, leaving the viewer with a sense of physical revulsion.

Room Five Crisis, focuses on the period 1956-1961. Bacon travelled widely in Monaco, France and Africa, mostly with Peter Lacy. He used new methods of painting, choosing thicker paint, strong colour, often violently applied. Using a self-portrait, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh, as his source and inspiration, Bacon painted works that were criticised for their ‘reckless energy’. With hindsight the energy and drama in these works was necessary in introducing chance into the painting process itself.

Room Six is the Archive in the Tate’s exhibition, based on the revelations made by scholars after Bacon’s death. The source material found in Bacon’s studio revealed his reliance on photography and other sources that had not been fully examined during Bacon’s lifetime. There were photographs of athletes, film stills and reproductions of works of art. Further, his practice of commissioning photographs of his friends by John Deakin was fully realised, and formed an important component of the exhibition in Edinburgh, Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, (2005). Bacon also took many photographs himself, preferring to draw from photographs, for they were already two-dimensional images. In his studio there were also lists of potential subjects and preparatory drawings, which Bacon had denied making, preferring to emphasise the spontaneous nature of the act of painting directly onto canvas.

Room Seven Portrait, is important given the findings in Bacon’s studio. In descriptions in interviews, most famously those with David Sylvester, Bacon describes his intention to reinvent portraiture. He drew upon the works he admired of Velazquez and Van Gogh. His abiding concern was how a painter should create portraits in an age dominated by photography. He distorted the sitter’s appearance in order to extract a greater, more complete likeness, informed by internal issues of personality and mood. George Dyer his lover is depicted with a mixture of affection and contempt. Three Figures in Room, (1964) expresses a range of human characteristics including absurdity, pathos, and isolation.

Room Eight Memorial, is dedicated to George Dyer, Bacon’s closest companion and model from the autumn of 1963. Two days before the opening of Bacon’s exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Dyer committed suicide. The void created by Dyer’s death, under such tragic circumstances prompted Bacon to produce a number of works in his memory. The large-scale triptych suited the grand nature of Bacon’s statements, enabling him to isolate and juxtapose simultaneously. The energy in these works is overwhelming. The depths of despair experienced in the loss of his lover, are expressed with consummate skill and heartfelt anguish. Bacon told Sylvester shortly after Dyer’s death: “You don’t stop thinking about them; time doesn’t heal” He referred to his repeated depiction of homosexual copulation as a form of exorcism. Although he regretted its ‘sensational nature’, he was compelled to paint, Triptych, May-June, 1973, “to get it out of his system”. As well as repeated posthumous images of Dyer, he also made numerous self-portraits.⁶

Room Nine, Epic, examines the work Bacon produced in response to poetry and literature, particularly the work of T.S Eliot. Bacon was emphatic in wanting to make works that evoked the meaning and mood of the written word. They were not illustrations.

For me realism is an attempt to capture the appearance with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me. As for my latest triptych and a few other canvases painted after I read Aeschylus. I tried to create images of the episodes created inside me. I could not paint Agamemnon. Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that would have been merely another kind of historical painting when all is said and done. Therefore, I tried to create an image of the effect that was produced inside me. Perhaps realism is always subjective when it is most profoundly expressed.⁷

Bacon felt a great affinity for poetry, perhaps more so than contemporary art. He appreciated a wide range of poetry ranging from the work of Aeschylus, W.B Yeats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare and especially T.S. Eliot. From Aeschylus’ Oresteia Bacon found an evocative image: “the reek of human blood smiles out at me”.⁸ In turn Bacon admired T.S. Eliot’s recasting of Greek tragedy, seeing in it an appropriate model for modern society. Bacon appreciated Eliot’s preoccupation with, ‘mortality, the pathetic futility and solitude of life’, and the manner in which he located ‘those existential conditions within a specific set of modern circumstances’.⁹

Bacon’s description of the tightrope between abstraction and figuration can also be used for poetry. “You have to abbreviate into intensity”, he remarked, also an apt description for Eliot’s poetry. Bacon chose painting to assuage the futility of life as he saw it. “I think that man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game within reason... You can be optimistic and totally without hope”. Later, he said, “I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our existence”.¹⁰ By contrast, Eliot had a Christian faith and belief in an afterlife.

The use of triptych, Bacon insisted was its resistance to narrative: “it breaks the series up and prevents it having a story, that’s why the three panels are always framed separately”. Yet the sequence created by three canvases side by side could equally create a story through the interrelatedness of the three images and specific references within each. Specific intended meaning is always speculative in Bacon’s work. The triptych emphasises Bacon’s fascination with theatrical devices to observe the human condition. Likewise Eliot’s Wasteland, ‘describes specific scenes and events but does not tie them to a single story’.¹¹

Room Ten Late, examines the last decade of Bacon’s life. The confrontation with mortality was an abiding theme in his work, having lost key figures in his life already. In 1993 he stated: “Life and death go hand in hand …Death is like the shadow of life. When you’re dead, you’re dead, but while you’re alive, the idea of death pursues you”.¹² The very black paintings made in the 1970s which confronted the death of George Dyer, gave way to more contemplative works, with a palpable restraint and composure. In several paintings he draws on his admiration for the work of the nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Numerous reproductions of Ingres’ work were found in his studio, which he combined with incongruous images from sporting figures. Bacon also employed a controlled element of chance by throwing paint at the canvas. The aftermath of violence, blood gushing from a victim onto the pavement, for example, Bacon found exhilarating. Blood on Pavement, (c1988) is presented with the artist’s extraordinary detachment. “Things are not shocking if they haven’t been put into a memorable form. Otherwise, it’s just blood splattered against a wall.”¹³ The theme of detachment from violence and suffering is achieved throughout Bacon’s oeuvre, from an early Wound for a Crucifixion (c.1934) to the Bullfight works in the 1960s to Oedipus and the Sphinx after Ingres, (1983). The last paintings are the antithesis of Bacon’s early frenzied works, and have been criticised for being formulaic and lacking in tension. They have a monumentality and order, yet returning to the same themes that had occupied him for forty years. His last triptych of 1991 returns to the issue of sexual struggle, which permeates much of his life’s work. His most private feelings are laid bare, and to which he referred in 1971/3,  “I’m just trying to make images as accurately off my nervous system as I can. I don’t even know what half of them mean. I’m not trying to say anything”.¹⁴

1. Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, Francis Bacon, Tate Publishing, London, 2008.
2. John Berger, Prophet in a pitiless world, The Guardian,  29 May 2004.
3. Gale and Stephens, On the Margin of the Impossible, op.cit., p.26.
4. Quoted by Stephens, Epic, op.cit., p.218.
5. Quoted by Matthew Gale, Crucifixion, ibid, p.137.
6. Chris Stephens, Epic, ibid, p.214.
7. Ibid, p.216.
8. Gale and Stephens, op.cit., p.26.
9. Ibid, p.26.
10. Ibid, p.26.
11. Epic, op.cit., p. 213.
12. Rachel Tant, Late, p.233.
13. Ibid, p.233.
14. Ibid, p.237.

  Desperately seeking Daddy

    Lewis Jones is fascinated and appalled by details of the demons that drove Francis Bacon

   The Daily Telegraph Saturday, December 20, 2008

                                                      In search of a cruel father: Francis Bacon

Michael Peppiatt knew Francis Bacon for nearly 30 years, and in 1997 published an authoritative biography, Anatomy of an Enigma. The 14 essays and interviews collected in Studies for a Portrait necessarily cover much of the same ground, but offer fresh perspectives.

In Bacon’s Eyes, for example, he publishes extracts from a discarded memoir he wrote as a Cambridge undergraduate, when he drank with Bacon in the bars and clubs of Soho. This is brave of him, as the passages selected are embarrassingly self-conscious and derivative – his publisher remarked that they would sound better in French. Still, they catch something of the artist: “Gargoyle face jutting out on nightairs, with a bone structure from a butcher’s. Under barlight, pinkchopped, the smooth skin glistening over the powerful mandibles.”

Bacon was all of a piece, and his talk – recorded here in interviews laid out in the reverential French style – could be as brilliantly perverse as his paintings. “I always think of friendship,” he said, “as where two people can really tear each other to bits.” Such friendships are a staple of his work.

In the essays, Peppiatt writes perceptively about Bacon’s endlessly contradictory nature, his generosity and cruelty, his violence and tenderness, his dandyism and love of squalor, his spectacular dissipation and iron self-discipline, and what he called his “exhilarated despair”. There is a contradiction, too, in the biographer’s approach to his subject. On the one hand, he accepts the artist’s assertion that his paintings are inexplicable, signifying nothing, while on the other he naturally does his best to explain their significance. He is excellent on Bacon’s literary influences, particularly Aeschylus and TS Eliot, and quotes some lines from The Family Reunion (where the two meet) which perfectly describe the paintings:

In and out, in an endless drift

Of shrieking forms in a circular desert

Weaving with contagion of putrescent

embraces

On dissolving bone.

His main source of explanation, though, is the painter’s life, particularly his tortured adolescence. Bacon’s sexual feelings were first aroused by his father, a brutal military man turned unsuccessful horse trainer, who may have had his asthmatic son horsewhipped by the stud farm grooms – a possible inspiration for all the primal screams of the paintings (“the moment of truth, where all pretence and deceit fall away”). In 1927, when Francis was 16, Captain Bacon expelled him from home when he discovered him trying on his mother’s underwear. The boy was entrusted to a suitably manly uncle, who took him from the wilds of County Kildare to Berlin and to his bed, then left him to fend for himself on the streets.

Peppiatt argues persuasively that Bacon spent the rest of his life in search of a “cruel father”, a quest dramatised in his obsessive depiction of demented authority figures, whether subfusc businessmen or empurpled popes (“the ultimate Papa”).

He recreated his Berlin experiences in London, amid the depravity of post-war Soho, where he helped create the Colony Room, a seedy drinking club (still standing, just) whose bilious green décor provides the background for some of his paintings. In his novel England, Half English, Colin MacInnes captures the atmosphere in the club, which he calls Mabel’s: “To sit in Mabel’s, with the curtains drawn at 4pm on a sunny afternoon, sipping expensive poison and gossiping one’s life away, has the futile fascination of forbidden fruit: the heady intoxication of a bogus Baudelairian evil.”

It was there that Bacon met Peter Lacy, his perfect “cruel father”, a former Spitfire pilot who drank three bottles of spirits a day and had an extensive collection of rhino whips, with which he belaboured the painter and his paintings. The couple spent time in Tangiers, where Bacon was repeatedly found wandering the streets at night in an appalling state. A concerned British consul alerted the chief of police, who reported, “Pardon, mais il n’y a rien à faire. Monsieur Bacon aime ça.”

Bacon painted his voluptuous abattoir visions – screaming monkey men, snarling cripples, twisted, hacked and smeared – with the exquisite skill that Van Gogh brought to his sunflowers. A few are lavishly reproduced in Studies for a Portrait. Most of his masterpieces are to be found in full coffee-table format in Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon in the 1950s, first published two years ago as the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name at the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia. 

The first major New York exhibition in 20 years devoted to Francis Bacon (British, 1909–1992)—one of the most important painters of the 20th century—will be presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 20 through August 16, 2009. Marking the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth,

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective will bring together the most significant works from each period of the artist's extraordinary career. Drawn from public and private collections around the world, this landmark exhibition will consist of some 70 paintings, complemented by never-before-seen works and archival material from the Francis Bacon Estate, which will shed new light on the artist's career and working practices. The Metropolitan Museum is the sole U.S. venue of the exhibition tour.

The exhibition is made possible in part by The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation.

It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tate Britain, London, in partnership with the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

"Bacon is more compelling than ever: Despite the passage of time, his paintings remain fresh, urgent, and mysterious. Never before has this work been more relevant to young artists," noted Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. "For these reasons, we are very pleased to be able to present a retrospective spanning his entire career to our viewing public."

Entirely self-taught, Francis Bacon emerged in 1945 as a major force in postwar art. He rose to prominence over the subsequent 45 years, securing his reputation as one of the seminal artists of his generation. With a predilection for shocking imagery, Bacon's oeuvre was dominated by emotionally charged depictions of the human body that are among the most powerful images in the history of art.

The exhibition's loosely chronological structure will trace critical themes in Bacon's work and explore his philosophy about mankind and the modern condition with visually arresting examples. The earliest group of works, from the 1940s and '50s, focuses on the animalistic qualities of man, including: paintings of heads with snarling mouths (Head I, 1947–1948, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); images of men as pathetic and alone (Study for a Portrait, 1953, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany); and the human figure portrayed as base and bestial (Figures in a Landscape, 1956, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, England). The exhibition also features numerous versions of Bacon's iconic studies (1949–1953) after Diego Velazquez's Portrait of Innocent X (1650). Mortality is addressed directly in his last works (Triptych, 1991, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

In the 1960s, working in his classic style of much looser, colorful, and expressive painting, Bacon showed the human body exposed and violated as in, for example, Lying Figure, 1969 (Foundation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland). In the following decade he increasingly used narrative, autobiography, and myth to mediate ideas about violence and emotion, as in the 1971 painting In Memory of George Dyer (Foundation Beyeler) and Triptych Inspired by the Orestia of Aeschylus, 1981 (Astrup Fearnley Collection, Oslo, Norway).

A number of important works by Bacon will only be presented at the Metropolitan Museum, including Study for Portrait I, 1953 (Denise and Andrew Saul); Painting, 1946 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York); and Self Portrait, 1973 (private collection, courtesy Richard Nagy, London).

Central to an understanding of the artist's working methods are the large caches of archival materials that have only become available since Bacon's death, especially the contents of the artist's famously cluttered London studio. A rich selection of 75 items from the artist's studio, his estate, and other archives will be included in the exhibition. The objects include pages the artist tore from books and magazines, photographs, and sketches—all of which are source materials for the finished paintings on view in the exhibition.

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective is organized by Matthew Gale, Head of Displays, Tate Modern, Chris Stephens, Head of Displays, Tate Britain, and Gary Tinterow. The presentation of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum is organized by Gary Tinterow and Anne L. Strauss, Associate Curator, assisted by Ian Alteveer, Research Associate, all in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Martin Harrison, David Mellor, Simon Ofield, Rachel Tant, Gary Tinterow, and Victoria Walsh. The catalogue is published by Tate Publishing and will be available in the Museum's book shops.

Soho's bohemian Colony Room Club faces extinction 

The Colony Room Club, London's fabled drinking den beloved of artists from Francis Bacon to Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, is set to close in Soho. 

By Neil Tweedie, The Daily Telegraph, Monday, 15 December 2008

                                     Muriel Belcher with Francis Bacon

THE denizens of the Colony Room Club should have been gathering last night for a joyous, or at least well lubricated, occasion. London's fabled drinking den celebrated its diamond jubilee yesterday – 60 years of uninterrupted, heroic carousing.

If one place still captures the seedy glamour of post-war Soho it is the Colony, hidden up a dark flight of stairs on Soho's Dean Street. The peep shows may have been overtaken by trendy, overpriced bars, but the one-room dive remains, a bohemian reproach to modern, money-driven conformity. That, at least, is how its membership – once a roll call of the great and the bad in British art and which still includes the likes of Emin and Hirst (who once served naked behind the bar) – like to see it.

Vodkas all around, then. Except that this week could be the last in the club's history. The Colony is facing extinction at the hands of the man into whose care it was entrusted.

Such is the uncertainty over the club's future that it was unclear last night if any celebration would be permitted. Its fate has for months now been the subject of mistrust and rancour. Will the Colony survive? And should it be missed?

A brief history: it was in December 1948 that Muriel Belcher, a combative, foul-mouthed but enterprising lesbian, opened the Soho establishment as an intended meeting place for writers, painters and amusing hard drinkers. The room – it is a small place – was initially decorated in 'colonial' bamboo and leopard skin, in deference to Muriel's Jamaican squeeze, Carmel.

Thus began six decades of bad behaviour, involving some of the best names in the business. Dylan Thomas threw up there, Tom Driberg propositioned there and Jeffrey Bernard advanced towards literal leglessness in its smoky confines, decorated in industrial green from the Fifties onwards.

Painters in particular liked it, including Bacon (a lifelong regular who as a young man was paid by Muriel to bring in interesting types), Freud and the doomed John Milton. Bacon described it as: "A place to go where one feels free and easy."

Under the stewardship of Belcher and that of her protégé Ian Board (equally foul-mouthed and possessed of an enormous nose swollen and purpled by brandy), the Colony grew into and remained an institution. Its eclectic membership was bonded by a supposed capacity for dazzling wit and a definite capacity for enormous amounts of alcohol. Customers at its little bar wallowed in the agreeable air of seediness, their imbibing overlooked by sometimes fine works of art donated by the insolvent artists in settlement of bar bills.

Muriel, who liked to call her members "cunty", was mistress of the put-down, while Board punished the unwary with sudden, violent eruptions of invective. All forms of human frailty were indulged in the Colony, except one: dullness.

Following Board's death in 1994, the club was taken over by Michael Wojas, who had worked under Board. Things continued as before, but the club inevitably lost some of its lustre as its greatest characters drank themselves one by one to death.

The problems started a few years ago when the club's finances began to fall into disrepair. Accounts were not properly prepared and tax and rent went unpaid. The club is housed on the first floor of a Georgian house and its lease was secure, so long as the rent was paid. With a membership of 200-plus paying annual fees of £150 and expensive bar prices, the club should have been able to pay the £12,500 rent easily. But earlier this year, Wojas, citing financial pressures, announced he would not be renewing the lease and the club would have to close. He auctioned off some of the better artworks, which he claimed were his by virtue of Board's will. The sale raised £40,000.

His announcement sparked a rebellion among members who claimed he had no right to close a club which belonged not to him but to them. They succeeded in freezing the proceeds of the auction and securing a High Court ruling in favour of a formal meeting. Last week, a new governing committee was elected amid acrimonious exchanges between the pro and anti Wojas factions. The new body believes it can renegotiate the lease, secure a listing for the club from English Heritage and ensure its future. Wojas, though, still holds the keys to the bar.

Speaking yesterday, Michael Beckett, chairman of the committee, said: "It still is a great place; all the members love it.

"It's the last bit of old Soho. I always meet interesting people when I go in there. Everyone speaks to each other – it's not some dull pub. It's homely – it's a front room rather than a bar."

There will be those who argue that, like empires, clubs rise and fall. That, over time, what was once fresh and genuine becomes hackneyed and artificial, the hollow replaying of bygone glories.

Critics of the Colony would argue that nowadays there are rather more art students than great artists among its members; more aspiring bohemians and hell-raisers than real ones. But its members love it and that should be reason enough for its survival.

What would the formidable Muriel says about it all? There would be a few colourful phrases in there, for certain.

No buyers for Bacon at major Paris art auction

AFP  11 December 2008

PARIS (AFP) — Francis Bacon's Two Figures failed to find a buyer when it went under the hammer at the first major auction of contemporary art in Paris since the global financial crisis erupted.

The 1961 oil-and-sand painting by the late Irish-born English painter — depicting two naked, contorted bodies — had been valued at five million to seven million euros (6.68 million to 9.36 million dollars) by Sotheby's.

Featured at several Bacon exhibitions, most recently at the Palazzo Reale in Milan earlier this year, it was regarded by art experts as the top lot at the two-day auction that ended Thursday.

Overall, the auction — with an estimated 12 million to 17 million euros worth of art — raked in only 6.2 million euros, Sotheby's said, reflecting a softening in the global art market.

Bacon - the subject of an ongoing major retrospective at the Tate Britain in London — set a Paris record in 2007 when Sotheby's sold another of his works for 13.7 million euros. 

Фотография мертвого Фрэнсиса Бэкона стала частью коллажа

Британская фотохудожница Катерина Шекспир Лэйн для создания своего триптиха «Дань уважения Фрэнсису Бэкону» использовала фотографию мертвого художника.

СЕГОДНЯ, Ukraine, 9 December 2008

Фрагмент работыКатерины Шекспир Лэйн

В центре триптиха помещена перевернутая фотография тела английского художника-экспрессиониста Фрэнсиса Бэкона, сделанная в испанском морге через несколько часов после его смерти. Тело лежит на каталке, помещенное в прозрачный пластиковый пакет. Это изображение обрамляют различные фотографии внутренностей.

На двух оставшихся частях триптиха помещен Сальвадор Дали, стоящий у распятия. При этом изображение центральной части вызывает ассоциации с известной картиной Дали «Христос святого Хуана де ля Круус».

Свой коллаж Катерины Лэйн, лично знавшая Бэкона, объясняет отношением самого художника к смерти. По ее утверждению, художник заявлял: «Все мы потенциальные трупы. Когда я захожу к мяснику, мне всегда удивительно представить на прилавке себя, а не животных».

По одному из свидетельств, Фрэнсис Бэкон также говорил о желании, чтобы его тело после смерти положили в пластиковый пакет и выбросили в придорожную канаву.

Триптих будет экспонироваться в одном из лондонских баров в Сохо.

Британский художник Фрэнсис Бэкон умер в Мадриде в 1992 году от сердечного приступа.

The first dark image of Bacon’s death

NICK MATHIASON & VANESSA THORPE | CULTURE | THE OBSERVER | SUNDAY DECEMBER 7 2008 

                   A detail from Catherine Shakespeare Lane's Francis Bacon Homage Triptych work.

 It was a suitably macabre request from one of Britain's greatest and darkest 20th-century painters. 'When I'm dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter,'  Francis Bacon told the barman at the infamous Soho drinking club, the Colony Room Club.

Sixteen years after the colourful artist's death, one of Bacon's circle of friends has gone a long way to try to make his wish come true. A photograph taken in a Spanish morgue hours after his death and never seen before in public reveals that the artist had been placed in a transparent body bag. The shocking image now forms the centrepiece of a new work of art created by Bacon's friend, the photographer Catherine Shakespeare Lane. 

The photograph is mounted on a background of offal and framed by two images of Salvador Dalí standing by a crucifix. The bleakly humorous tribute to Bacon and to the Spanish surrealist Dalí will go on display for the first time this week at the famous London watering hole in London's Dean Street, which is under threat of closing down. 

Lane believes her triptych is an appropriate homage to her late friend. Bacon, she points out, once famously said: 'We are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal.' 

A lifetime honorary member of the club, Lane hopes the hanging of the image will serve as a fitting farewell to both the great painter and to a venue which, since the Sixties, has been the haunt of many of the leading creative names in the country, including Lucien Freud, Dylan Thomas, the actors Peter O'Toole and John Hurt and the writer Jeffrey Barnard. 

'I'm very sad that if the club closes at the end of the month,' said Lane. 'I sincerely hope it does not die and can survive.'

A last minute High Court order obtained by the so-called Shadow Committee of club members preventing its closure before an annual general meeting could yet save the day. 

In recent years controversial leading artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas and Sam Taylor Wood have all been habitues of the club, with the model Kate Moss even tending the bar one evening. The singer Lisa Stansfield and the film distributor Hamish McAlpine are also regulars and have both tried to save the club by paying off some of its debts.

Lane defends the treatment of Bacon's dead body as in keeping with the way that the artist saw the world. 'People always think of Francis as gloomy and tortured because that is what they see in his work,' said Lane. 'But he got all that out in his painting and when he was out with us it was not like that. He was out to play.'

No bed for Francis Bacon

Discipline and chaos, suffering and human meat, as seen in the works of an unusually articulate artist

Alan Jenkins, The Times Literary Supplement, December 3, 2008

When Francis Bacon said “The only really interesting thing is what happens between two people in a room”, he did not mean what happens between an artist and his model – or if so, only indirectly. Bacon’s portraits of himself, his friends and (male) lovers are among the most enthusiastically acclaimed of all his pictures, but they were done almost without exception from photographs and memory, not from life. From a handful of paintings, early and late, it is clear that for Bacon some of the most interesting things happened before, during or after copulation – “or buggery, however you want to put it”, as he himself put it in the late 1960s, with an insouciance that could have been dangerous at any time before then.

Yet, as John Russell pointed out nearly thirty years ago, “perhaps the most persistent of Bacon’s preoccupations is the problem of what a man is to do when he is alone in a room”, and with only a very few exceptions, his pictures until the later 1960s more often than not featured single figures: human males, animals, especially apes, heads or heads-and-shoulders, isolated in indeterminate spaces, framed or confined in a kind of geometric canopy or glass box, seen through strips of (shower?) curtain, paint cascading down the interiors or, in the few landscapes, deft strokes rendering wild grasses with Oriental precision. True, it is not always clear from its posture and mass whether the pictured form is human or ape; nor if in fact there is more than one of them pictured. Bacon would sometimes, to achieve the desired “thickness”, model his single figure on a sequence of photographs from Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Body in Motion that showed two men wrestling – though at a glance, they could be having sex. (“I very often think of people’s bodies that I’ve known, the contours of those bodies that have particularly affected me, but then they’re grafted on to Muybridge bodies”, Bacon explained.) Then, once he had begun to show two or more people, the coupling – as in those earlier exceptions – becomes explicit.

And, in his later vision, coupling is murder. In panel after panel of the large-scale triptychs which were Bacon’s preferred format from the 1960s on, the human carcass – mangled, butchered and bloodied, studded with entry- and exit-wounds, spilling muscle tissue and entrails, or intact but warped into terrible knots of tension, straining in climax or death agony – is pinioned on carpets or sprawled on stained mattress-ticking, like a police photograph at the scene of a sex crime. And indeed other panels actually show spectators or recorders – one holds a cinecamera – of the main event, be it coupling or crucifixion, which has left its protagonist eviscerated.

Bacon disavowed any moral or philosophical intention behind these images of human suffering and detachment, and still more emphatically denied trying to make a historical point – notwithstanding his brief flirtation with the idea of publishing a pictorial “History of Europe in [his] lifetime” (he was born in 1909). One of the most articulate of painters, with a strong sense both for drama and self-presentation, from the moment he became a succès de scandale Bacon was a tireless subject of interviews (with Russell and David Sylvester, preeminently): occasions he seized to rehearse a repertoire of anecdotes and apophthegms, some haughty and whimsical, some purposefully discomfiting in their frankness, but almost all prompted by the contradictory urges to elevate his calling to a higher mystery or deflate its pretensions with a rude reminder of fleshly limitation.

In this he was both disingenuous and provocative, refusing, for example, to allow in his own crucifixions the significance granted to the image by the entire Western tradition – it was an example of human behaviour, no more and no less. Behaviour, furthermore, that aroused in Bacon a sense of his own wounded or tortured nature: a crucifixion, he said, was almost a self-portrait. Almost from the beginning – in Painting, 1946, now too fragile to have made the trip from MoMA to the current exhibition at Tate Britain – the painter evinced a fascination with sides of meat, a motif that recurs in his later crucifixions and couplings. When asked about its preponderance in his imagination he was ready with a dual response. “Every time I go into a butcher’s”, he said, “I’m surprised that it’s not me hanging there”; yet the meat was simultaneously a purely aesthetic stimulus, its colours “absolutely beautiful”. Questioned about his more Grand Guignol scenes he would shrug, affect complete ignorance of their import, personal or otherwise, and insist on his overriding desire to make “beautiful paintings”.

From the very small number of canvases that survived Bacon’s apprentice years it is far from obvious that this was his ambition when he started (if it was, his idea of beauty was as convulsive as any Surrealist’s). The big, bold canvases in the grand manner of his gilded middle age, exposing lavish, ritualistic cruelties, are indeed very beautiful, and only a handful of pictures on show here, from the later 1950s, seem unsure in technique or faltering in composition. In the room titled “Crucifixion” (the Tate’s hang is a compromise between a chronological and a thematic arrangement), the body, whatever else it is being subjected to, mostly retains recognizable limbs and a torso. Not so in the first room, “Animal”, where a distended eye, mouth, teeth and phallic appendages dominate: to these organs of appetite and aggression, in some of Bacon’s early works, the human and the nightmarishly non-human alike are reduced. Assisted by Bacon himself, commentators have established an impeccably modern pedigree for these seemingly sui generis images: in Picasso’s “biomorphic” beach scenes, 1930s photojournalism and the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Luis Buñuel. (Lessons in form and handling were learnt from Graham Sutherland and the Australian Roy de Maistre, too, though Bacon was less prompt to acknowledge them in later years.) In her catalogue essay Victoria Walsh cites Foundations of Modern Art by Amédée Ozenfant (1931) as having perhaps fertilized the insatiably curious young painter’s imagination in ways that would lie dormant for years: “The search for intensity dominates the whole of modern painting. There can be no intensity without simplification, and to some degree, no intensity without distortion . . . of what is seen naturally”.

In 1931, Bacon was twenty-two, had made his way as, more or less, a rent boy in Weimar Berlin, had learnt French living in Chantilly and was working in London as an interior decorator and designer of Bauhaus-derived furniture for clients who included the editor of Vogue and the novelist Patrick White. But almost as soon as he began to paint in earnest (in oil on canvas, from which he rarely deviated for forty-odd years), the beauty was there as well, and was there till the end, in paintings that proclaim him one of the great colourists of the last century: from the startling orange ground against which the first three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) writhe and shriek, to the sumptuous deep reds of its grander, more imposing and artistically pointless second version (1988). Orange flames out at us again from the Figure Studies, 1945–6, while Figure Study II is the work in which another of Bacon’s motifs – or obsessions – unequivocally makes an entrance: the gaping mouth, open in a scream of terror, a snarl of hatred or a howl of impotent rage. Indelibly fixed in Bacon’s imaginary by Picture Post shots of Goebbels and Mussolini haranguing the crowds, Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents and the nurse’s silent scream in The Battleship Potemkin, in Figure Study II, where it is appended to a crouched or kneeling half-clothed form, the mouth powerfully subverts those reliable signifiers of bourgeois respectability, umbrella, herringbone tweed and potted plants.

In the late 1940s (with a series of Heads) and the early 50s (Study for Nude, 1951; Study of a Figure in a Landscape and Study for Crouching Nude, both 1952) Bacon’s pictures posit an extra-historical continuity between the human at its noblest, as in Michelangelo’s drawings and sculpture, and the simian – almost to the point of conflating them. Head VI (1949), though, returns us, whatever Bacon thought or said, to the human in historical time, combining the motifs of toothed, gaping mouth and wildly staring eye with the vestments of a little brief authority: the highest authority on earth, indeed, for many, though in Bacon the vestments are imperial purple rather than rich pontifical red, as in his master-image, the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez. Bacon’s remarkable travesty inaugurated a new series of studies “after” the great original, though his fixation was inspired, in fact, by a reproduction. (Even when he visited Rome, Bacon avoided seeing the Velázquez in the Doria Pamphilj, a diffidence in which embarrassment perhaps played a part. Much later he dismissed most of his repeated assaults on it as “silly”, and it is hard to disagree, despite or because of the presence in the current Tate show of two of his strongest and least familiar Popes, as well as Head VI: one, once thought lost, from 1950, the other from 1965 – this last looking as if he has been shot in the head at close range, or as if the rage or terror that animated his predecessors had finally exploded his face from within.)

That so many of Bacon’s motifs derived, in complex, vigilant ways from photography and film is entirely consistent with his acute awareness that these new art forms had rendered representation in painting obsolete, and with his horror of mere “illustration”. This was not to say that painting should not deal in “fact”: just that fact comprehended more than what is “seen naturally”. “One wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object”, as Bacon put it to David Sylvester. He was also one of the most literary of painters, an admirer of Ulysses, an avid reader of poetry and drama who saw that the Oresteia and T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes were blood relations, who liked to quote lines from both yet who repeatedly and sometimes fiercely repudiated attempts to read “a story” into his own work.

But he insisted too much. At one level, his habit of working in triptychs, and at a deeper one the suggestiveness he often in fact achieved, not just in triptychs but in single paintings, militates against that very insistence. It is hard to look at such works as the Crucifixions of 1962 and 65, Lying Figure (1969), Triptych, Studies from the Human Body (1970) or Triptych March 1974 without a sense of prelude, climax and aftermath – though not necessarily in that order. Some such adumbrated narrative, an intimate human drama about to be embarked on, concluded or aborted also haunts the restrained and very beautiful portrait studies of a suited Man in Blue, his face and hands bright-lit on a deep blue ground, that are at once the most “readable” of all Bacon’s male figures, and the most ambiguous.

What is common to all these images, early, late and middle, is the overwhelming presence or threat (or promise) of violence. Bacon’s obsession with the figure drove him repeatedly to disfigure it – to all but dismantle the heads and bodies he painted on his canvases, and destroy the canvases themselves, when he judged them to be failures. Working from photographs, so the artist said, enabled him to do the necessary violence to his subjects – the better to “distort them into appearance”; and that could not happen if the subject was actually present. (This showed an untypical délicatesse. Bacon’s definition of friendship was two people “pulling each other apart”, and in sex his pursuit of the roughest of rough trade bordered on the suicidal.) But he also spoke repeatedly of his desire to make paintings that would “return [the viewer] more violently to life”, by which he meant, as I understand it, shock that viewer out of habitual or self-protective ignorance and into awareness of his own physical reality. “An attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and poignantly” was how he described his own work. “There is an area of the nervous system”, Bacon believed, “to which the texture of [oil] paint communicates more violently than anything else.”

Paintings (some paintings anyway) could mysteriously “unlock the valves of sensation” or of “intuition and perception about the human situation”; could, by seemingly subliminal means, evoke a memory trace of raw, unmediated existence. Somewhere behind this lay Baudelaire and Proust, with their different ideas of involuntary memory. But for Bacon (who also liked to cite Paul Valéry: “modern man wants the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance”), to unlock the valves of his own subconscious was to bring up onto the canvas and “onto the [viewer’s] nervous system” an apprehension of life or “being-aliveness” as violent, primordial struggle, redeemed only by an instinctive grace, or a stroke of luck.

For Bacon, a chronic asthmatic, the struggle began early: it was the struggle for breath itself. The second son of a bad-tempered military man-turned-horse breeder and the heiress to a Sheffield steel fortune, he was brought up in Ireland and England in a succession of big houses where the omnipresence of dogs and horses was a perpetual challenge to his well-documented will to live. Bacon senior made no secret of his disappointment in his sickly, sensitive son, whose party piece was to appear at family gatherings in full drag. Michael Peppiatt is one among many writers on Bacon to make the connection, in his absorbing biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an enigma (1995, now revised, updated and reissued by Constable in paperback), between the father’s screaming rages, the child’s gasping for air and the importance of the gaping mouth in the work of the mature artist. The killings and house-burnings of the Irish uprising and Civil War (“Violence upon the roads; violence of horses”, in Yeats’s words) formed the backdrop to Bacon’s childhood, further enlivened by the attentions of the grooms who were encouraged to take horsewhips to the young master to punish him for the attentions he was over-fond of paying them.

Three of his four siblings died premature deaths, but Francis would enjoy long life, vigorous appetites and legendary resilience, physical and psychological. Ejected from the family at sixteen, he soon discovered the resourcefulness and the hunger for risk that would sustain him both as a homosexual adventurer and a painter, along with his preferred modus vivendi: to lurch between opulence and squalor, between a punishing creative routine and an equally punitive, if delighted (and delightful), dissipation. In later life the prices commanded by his paintings made him rich, but he had established his careless mastery over money much earlier, in the casinos of Berlin and Monte Carlo. The centrality to both gambling and painting of chance, risk, instinct – in painting Bacon subsumed these under what he called “accident”, the way one mark might suggest another, or perhaps an entirely new image, without the apparent intervention of the will or conscious direction – made them more than analogous: they were two sides of the same life force, the same compulsion to live at the maximum pitch of intensity, for the same high stakes and correspondingly high rewards.

In some sense all Bacon’s paintings represent another throw of the dice, a record not of how he “saw the world” but of the only way he, human meat and a carcass-in-waiting as he was, could yet feel himself to be truly alive. Peppiatt, Sylvester and other witnesses have made clear that this life-and-death struggle issued as often as not in despair and self-disgust; but of course for the artist there was no choice. The paradox – and it strikes with greater force in the final two large rooms of the Tate exhibition, showing works from the last fifteen years of Bacon’s very productive life – is that intensity itself could become a habit; that so many of these later works look as mannered and fussy, in their beautiful, wearyingly nasty way, as anything from the Academic schools of the nineteenth century, in theirs.

The great exceptions are the paintings shown here in a room titled “Memorial”. Bacon’s companion, George Dyer, committed suicide in their hotel room on the eve of the artist’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971; three extraordinary triptychs from 1971–3 recall Dyer’s living presence, and imagine his last hours, with monumental and moving factuality. Bacon often remarked on the “awfulness” of his personal life – another of his lovers, Peter Lacey, had steadily drunk himself to death in the 1950s – and while no one would wish he had known more unhappiness of this kind, we can regret that he did not always achieve, or desire, the direct appeal to human emotion these pictures make, while surrendering nothing of painterly value: they have a stunning aura in which grandeur, indignity and grief are all present, and inseparable.

As with Eliot in poetry, Bacon’s art sinks deep roots into the whole psycho-physical life and attempts a reinvention of tradition (“the figurative thing”), rather than the Freud-sponsored violation of the natural order to which Surrealism aspired. To that extent, the confusion of the Times reviewer, faced with Bacon’s very first solo show in 1934, was understandable: “The difficulty . . . is to know how far his paintings and drawings . . . may be regarded as artistic expression and how far as the mere unloading on canvas and paper of what used to be called the subconscious mind”. (Cited in “Bacon and his Critics”, by Gary Tinterow, in the Tate catalogue.) Mere! We like to think we have come a long way since then, but Bacon and the best of his commentators are part of the long way we have come. The catalogue contains a useful chronology, but none of its seven essayists adds substantially to what has already been written by Russell, Lawrence Gowing, Michel Leiris and Gilles Deleuze. Michael Peppiatt’s new book, Francis Bacon: Studies for a portrait, contains interviews with and recollections of the artist from the 1960s almost until his death: that is, either the raw materials of Peppiatt’s biography or bits of the biography distilled into essays and articles. For completists only, it does include the full, fascinating text of Bacon’s answers when he was interviewed for the first time by his future biographer, in 1963, before celebrity began to overtake some of his responses.

Much recent scholarly interest in Bacon has focused on the “drawings” controversy: whether the many preparatory sketches and studies found in the artist’s studio and elsewhere after his death – studies which, while he was alive, he insisted he never produced – could be genuine. (It seems pretty obvious that some are, and some aren’t.) A room at the Tate (“Archive”) is devoted to some genuine-looking sketches, over-painted photographs and “doctored” images, while Francis Bacon: Incunabula by Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels is a spellbinding pictorial record of the most significant of Bacon’s visual sources. The entire fantastic compost of rags, paints, brushes, magazines, torn-out pages and tattered reproductions laid down over decades in Bacon’s South Kensington mews has been reconstructed entire at the Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane. While the artist’s living space was almost monastic in its austerity, his workroom was a materialization of the rich, sedimented strangeness of his inner world. To him, both discipline and chaos seem to have been indispensable.

FRANCIS BACON
(Tate Britain, until January 4, 2009)

Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, editors
FRANCIS BACON
288pp. Tate Publishing. £24.99.
978 1 85437 738 8

Michael Peppiatt
FRANCIS BACON
Studies for a portrait
272pp. Yale University Press. £18.99 (US $35).
978 0 300 14255 6

Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels
FRANCIS BACON
Incunabula
256pp. Thames and Hudson. £39.95 (US $75).
978 0 500 09343 3

Bacon's theatre of the absurd

On Francis Bacon at the Tate Britain, London.

By David Yezzi, The New Criterion, December 2008

Notes

1. Francis Bacon opened at Tate Britain, London, on September 11, 2008 and remains on view through January 4, 2009. The exhibition will travel to the Museo National del Prado, Madrid (February 3–April 19, 2009) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (May 18–August 19, 2009). A catalogue edited by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, with essays by Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield, Gary Tinterow, and Victoria Walsh, has been printed by Tate Publishing (288 pages, £24.99 paper).

David Yezzi is the Executive Editor of The New Criterion.

Leading 20th Century Artists Present at Sotheby's Contemporary Art Sale in Paris

Art Daily, Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Sotheby's

Contemporary Art 

Sale: PF8020  |  Location: Paris
Auction Dates: Session 1: Wed, 10 Dec 08 7:00 PM

Lot 11 Francis Bacon 1909-1992  TWO FIGURES
 
5,000,000—7,000,000 EUR:  Unsold

                                                  Two Figures 1961 Francis Bacon

MEASUREMENTS

198 x 142 cm; 77 7/8 x 55 7/8 in.

DESCRIPTION

Exécuté en 1961.

Cette oeuvre sera incluse dans le Catalogue Raisonné de l'oeuvre de Francis Bacon actuellement en préparation par Martin Harrison.

PROVENANCE

Marlborough Fine Art, Londres
McCrory Corporation, New York
McKee Gallery, New York
Edward R. Broida, Los Angeles

EXHIBITED

Londres, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1962, illustré no.87
Mannheim, Kunsthalle, Francis Bacon, 1962, illustré no.76
Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, Francis Bacon, 1962, illustré, no.81
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Francis Bacon, 1962, no.75
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Francis Bacon, 1963, illustré, no. 66
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum et exposition itinérante à Chicago, Art Institute, Francis Bacon, 1963-1964, illustré pp. 29 et 53, no. 53
Orlando, Museum of Art, The Edward R. Broida Collection: A Selection of Works, 1998, illustré p. 34
Milan, Palazzo Reale, Bacon, 2008, no. 30, illustré p. 122

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Stephen Spender, Quandrum XI, décembre 1961, illustré p. 53
John Rothenstein, Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, édition Thames and Hudson Londres, 1964, no. 184, illustré p. 137

CATALOGUE NOTE

oil and sand on canvas. Executed in 1961.


« ... De ma prison, je vois tout. Dans ma cabine en verre isolant, on m'observe. Seuls mes pieds solubles s'échappent sur les soupiraux de l'inconnu, chiens perdus des rois déchus. Je chante, je hurle, je ricane, j'insulte, je sanglote. Alors explosion. Il tombe des flocons de chair qui s'accumulent et se transforment en paysages, en sphinx. De la terre, de mon corps, en fouillant, j'extrais les vestiges de leurs secrets. Les fantômes n'ont pas d'âge ; sous leurs travestis, ils sont humains. ... ».
Roland Penrose (in Francis Bacon, galerie Rive Droite, Paris, 1957)


« Bacon, à Paris, devrait faire l'effet d'une bombe. ».
(Cimaise, Michel Ragon, janvier 1963, compte rendu de la rétrospective Bacon à la Tate Gallery à Londres ouverte en mai 1962 dans laquelle Two Figures était exposée)


« Bacon, à Paris, devrait faire l'effet d'une bombe. ».

En écrivant ces lignes, extraites de la revue d'art française Cimaise parue au mois de janvier 1963, Michel Ragon rapporte l'actualité artistique anglaise. Il évoque en particulier l'événement survenu au mois de mai 1962, à la Tate Gallery à Londres. La respectable institution a offert à Francis Bacon une grande rétrospective composée de 90 œuvres de l'artiste, parmi lesquelles Two Figures était incluse. Cette exposition majeure ensuite itinérante et présentée, jusqu'en 1963, à Mannheim, Turin, Zurich et Amsterdam, marque aussi la prééminence de l'artiste parmi les peintres anglais qui lui sont contemporains.

Si Francis Bacon jouit en Grande-Bretagne, et cela depuis fort longtemps, d'une cote considérable, son succès s'illustre aussi en 1960 à Londres à la Marlborough Gallery où il réalise sa première exposition en collaboration avec cette galerie prestigieuse. Cette-dernière constitue à l'époque l'un des plus grands et des plus beaux locaux de Londres ou de Paris. Elle compte dans son programme le plus grand sculpteur anglais vivant, Henri Moore, et ne se limitant pas à l'art contemporain, elle organise aussi des expositions des œuvres de Vincent Van Gogh, de Degas, de Monet ou de Renoir.

Quand Two Figures est peint en 1961, Francis Bacon a 52 ans. Le corps et le visage de l'homme sont pour lui des leitmotivs depuis longtemps. Ils deviennent avec la représentation du mouvement des thèmes incontournables dans l'œuvre de l'artiste, aussi bien qu'un tableau intitulé Turning Figure apparaît en 1962. Il qualifie à l'évidence un mouvement de torsion de la figure sur elle-même, tout en conservant cette impression que le corps est comprimé nerveusement. Les prémices de Turning Figure s'observent précisément dans Two Figures qui est réalisé l'année précédente. Two Figures apparaît dès lors comme une œuvre essentielle, infléchissant l'ensemble du système figuratif que Francis Bacon mettra désormais en place. Ainsi coupée des formes conventionnelles de la figuration, l'œuvre de Francis Bacon témoigne de l'inutilité des anciens mythes et de l'impossibilité de raconter tout récit à partir de son œuvre.

«Vous avez compris que ce n'est pas pour les autres que je peins. C'est pour moi. Je n'ai personne à séduire, à tromper, à orienter.».
(Entretien avec Pierre Descargues, Marseille 1976, in L'Art est vivant, p. 311).

Pour atteindre ce moment crucial dans l'évolution de sa peinture, Francis Bacon est captivé: « Michel-Ange et Muybridge se mêlent dans mon esprit, ainsi je pourrais peut-être apprendre des positions de Muybridge et apprendre de l'ampleur, de la grandeur des formes de Michel-Ange. ...Comme la plupart de mes modèles sont des nus masculins, je suis sûr que j'ai été influencé par Michel-Ange qui a réalisé les nus masculins les plus voluptueux des arts plastiques.». Les fragments harmonieux des sculptures grecques, les dessins parfaits de Michel-Ange se confondent dans son souvenir des corps aimés et des photographies d'Eadweard Muybridge, pour enfin se concrétiser dans la pulsion du geste de peindre. Si les photographies d'Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) oscillent entre la science et l'art et sont célèbres pour leurs décompositions du mouvement, les modèles qu'elles représentent rejoignent le maniérisme caractéristique des sculptures de Michel-Ange (1474-1564). Ce dernier inspire, notamment dans l'aspect «inachevé» de ses Esclaves du musée de l'Académie à Florence, l'ouverture vers l'infini, traduisant la lutte de l'esprit cherchant à se libérer de la matière.

La figure se trouve dans l'alternance de sa présence et de son absence. Sortie dans un vide, ou plutôt dans un plein, elle semble sortir d'un miroir où les deux chairs se confondent. Two Figures sculpte les modèles dans le tableau. En évoquant le double mouvement de l'inscription et de l'effacement des corps dans l'espace, une telle tension renvoie vers l'œuvre d'Alberto Giacometti, avec qui Francis Bacon se nouera d'ailleurs d'amitié ; dans les sculptures de ce-dernier le corps de l'homme est souvent représenté, en rendant justement un peu plus indistincte la frontière entre l'absence et la présence de la matière. Les tourments du vide sont aussi évoqués dans Two Figures avec la présence de l'ombre noire, habillant le personnage qui est situé au premier plan de l'oeuvre. Le titre en anglais de celle-ci, dénombrant deux modèles, devient dès lors très ambigü. La lecture de deux personnage dans le tableau est assez difficile et renvoit directement au rapport que Francis Bacon entretient avec la mort: "La mort est comme l'ombre de la vie. Quand on est mort, on est mort, mais tant qu'on est en vie, l'idée de la mort vous poursuit... ." (Francis Bacon, Entretiens avec Michel Archimbaud, 1991-1992, 1996 Gallimard, Folio Essais p.126).

" On ne sait jamais d'ailleurs ce qu'une image produit en vous. Elles entrent dans le cerveau, et puis après on ne sait pas comment c'est assimilé, digéré. Elles sont transformées, mais on ne sait pas comment. " (Francis Bacon, Entretiens avec Michel Archimbaud, op. cité, p.18). Comme l'artiste donne à le comprendre, l'image se transforme souvent au cours du travail et la relation avec le sujet s'établit dans le mouvement même de la peinture. Ce que Francis Bacon cherche à créer sur la toile, c'est de donner au modèle la place centrale, en le situant au milieu des énergies tournoyantes créées par la tension intérieure des corps en mouvement. Dans Two Figures l'artiste réussit avec virtuosité ce tour de force esthétique et transmet ces énergies à travers l'ardeur des traces de sa main qui maintient le pinceau.

Se libérer de la matière pour mieux concevoir la beauté d'un être, c'est aussi le savoir disparaître dans l'ardeur d'une intolérable combustion. Les corps les plus robustes de Two Figures se tordent dans un mouvement apparemment brutal, convulsif, renforcé par l'impersonnalité croissante du visage grimaçant devenu presque illisible. Le modèle, pivotant dans un mouvement maniériste, superposant les attitudes comme il le ferait dans une construction cubiste, se contractant dans une position délibérément faussée, désaxée, est soumis à une volonté paradoxale consistant à le défigurer pour rendre sa figuration plus forte, directe et saisissante.

En plaçant Two Figures dans un décor abstrait, la solitude des modèles nus augmente, l'un d'entre eux n'ayant pour défense apparente que ses dents sorties avec rage. La captivité des personnages dans la couleur sourde du vieux rose et du blanc mêlé de gris composant le fond du tableau fige en outre l'espace et le temps. Temps voluptueux rendu visible, dont les personnages semblent vouloir briser le cours. En surgissant dans une pièce réduite à l'essentiel pour exister à la frange de l'abstrait, les modèles donnent l'impression de vouloir franchir les lignes de démarcations du tableau et en détruire la vitre. Quoique figés, ce que les modèles rendent paradoxalement explicite, c'est encore la vitesse du pinceau et des brosses. Vitesse d'ailleurs volontaire à la recherche de l'accident. Dans cette démarche, Francis Bacon rappelle également celle poursuivie par Cy Twombly dans une représentation purement abstraite: introduire le déséquilibre, l'erreur, la rature, et constituer un univers par le renversement des valeurs essentielles traditionnelles.

La tension intérieure de Two Figures démontre avec maestria le style puissant de Francis Bacon. L'artiste affirme aussi, en recherchant obstinément la vérité devant le sujet, que l'avenir de l'homme est dans l'homme: pensée peut-être la plus ouverte et la plus généreuse que l'on appelle l'humanisme.

Fig.1-2. Francis Bacon, 1984.
 

Fig.3. Michel-Ange Buonarroti, Male Nude, circa 1504.


Fig.4. Michel-Ange Buonarroti, Esclave, Académie Florence.


Fig.5. Michel-Ange Buonarroti, La Furie. Palais de Windsor


Fig.6. Turning Figure, 1962, huile sur toile, 198,2 x 144,7 cm. Gilbert de Botton, Family trust.

Art: Bacon with trimmings

Charles Darwent recommends spending Boxing Day with Kandinsky's colours or on Francis's studio floor

The Independent on Sunday, 30 November 2008

Freud's friend and nemesis, Francis Bacon, slyly affected never to draw, although this was a lie. Bacon, incredibly, would have been 100 next October, which explains the sudden outbreak of Baconia in art publishing. Among the best of the resultant books is Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (Yale £18.99) by the late artist's friend and chronicler, Michael Peppiatt, a collection of essays and interviews that offer a uniquely intimate glimpse into the life of a notoriously unintimate artist.

Martin Harrison can't match Peppiatt in the Boswell stakes, but his encyclopaedic knowledge of Bacon minutiae and connections to the artist's estate make him a pretty good runner-up. His earlier In Camera explored Bacon's debt to photography. Now, Francis Bacon: Incunabula (Thames & Hudson £39.95) picks through the sweepings on Bacon's studio floor. Scraps torn from medical books, reproductions of Velázquez portraits, Muybridge stills, over-worked shots of massacres from newspapers – all were grist to Bacon's satanic mill. Harrison presents this trove without intervening text, as though we were truffling through the detritus on the floor at 7 Reece Mews ourselves. It's a good way of approaching Bacon; also of whiling away a wet Christmas afternoon.

The Sunday Times books of the year: Art

The Sunday Times, November 30, 2008

It was, of course, an image inspired by the Bolshevik revolution — the bloodied face of the nurse from Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin (1925, and therefore too late for Bowlt to mention) – on which Francis Bacon based the heads of his screaming popes. He habitually painted from photographs, most torn from magazines and books, wilfully folded, daubed with paint and discarded feet-deep on the floor of his studio. Francis Bacon: Incunabula by Martin Harrison (Thames & Hudson £39.95) illustrates some 200 of these ephemeral images (everything from gay porn and pictures of skin diseases to, yes, stills from Potemkin), all furnished with brief explanatory notes. If you're a Bacon fanatic with an insatiable appetite for information about his guarded working methods you'll like this book. You'll also be drawn to Michael Peppiatt's Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (Yale £18.99), an anthology of interviews and essays, several unpublished, a few repetitive, all relevant. Peppiatt writes about Bacon with refreshing and sometimes revealing candour.

Bacon appears in several places (in one, seemingly pulling his trousers down) in Lucian Freud’s impressive On Paper (Cape £50). With an introduction by Sebastian Smee and an essay by Richard Calvocoressi, this is an extravagantly illustrated, satisfyingly fat volume about Freud’s drawings in every medium. It spans his entire career from juvenilia signed in old German script to recent, densely worked etchings. Some of it looks clumsy, but more is mesmerising in its clairvoyant intensity. All of it suggests that Freud's most considerable achievements are the result of his abiding desire to reconcile drawing and painting. The texts are helpful, too, though this isn't chiefly a book to be read.

Lucian Freud’s early obsessions

Lucian Freud’s early works speak volumes about the shy artist’s sensuality — and the combination of intensity and detachment that women find irresistible. Waldemar Januszczak looks at the formative relationships of a master in the making

 The Sunday Times, November 30, 2008

It was also around this time that Freud met Francis Bacon. They were introduced by Graham Sutherland and met at Victoria station while setting off for a Sutherland weekend. Bacon seems to have freed Freud of any remaining guilt he may have harboured. “His work impressed me, but his personality affected me.” Bacon, who talked fondly of “the sensuality of treachery”, showed Freud “how to wing it through life, how to court risk, tempt accident and scorn the norm”. When Freud drew him one evening, Bacon pointedly unbuttoned his trousers.

Art: From canvas to cameras

By Michael Glover , The Independent, Friday, 28 November 2008

It's been a good year for lovers of the energising, sado-masochistic gloom of Francis Bacon. The catalogue of his Tate Britain show does him proud (Tate Publishing £24.99), and two other books thicken the tortured plot of his life. Incunabula (Thames & Hudson, £39.95) shows us images of the photographs and visual documents which fed into the wild frenzy of his painting. His friend and official biographer Michael Peppiatt has assembled Studies for a Portrait (Yale, £18.99), a marvellously absorbing book of essays and interviews.

Colony Room closing time?

Studio International, Wednesday, 26 November 2008

A glorious hub for artists, dilettantes and drunks for the past 60 years, the Colony Room in Soho now faces imminent closure. Brawls and protests have inevitably ensued, parties have been planned to pay for legal fees and some members have been banned for fighting closure. Amid all of this, the magnificent art collection — which hangs modestly and cramped over the green walls of the tiny club — is the subject of much conversation and speculation as to where it will go if or when the party ends.

Fondly regarded as a ‘‘home for those who don’t have a home’’, the Colony Room has long been a meeting point for the most nomadic of the art world, its vagabonds, poets, drunks — and their muses, friends and hangers-on — in search of ‘‘a place to dissolve our inhibitions’’, as Francis Bacon would say. Muriel Belcher founded the infamous club 60 years ago, and paid the young Francis Bacon a ‘salary’ of free drinks to bring in his crowd.

And so Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud, Patrick Caulfield and others became regulars at the emerald dive, donating a picture here and there, and piece by little masterpiece built the collection that decorates the bar today, with additions from Damien Hirst, Sebastian Horsley, Sarah Lucas et al. Tracey Emin, the late Angus Fairhurst, Jay Jopling and Sam Taylor-Wood have all served the club's current owner, Michael Wojas, behind the bar.

Past the grimy buzzer, tucked into 41 Dean Street, through a door and at the top of some narrow stairs, the Colony Room has an almost mystical feel, damp with spilled gin (not beer), the odd tear and a general air of easy grimy debauchery: this is the downtime that follows the high art and the revelry to distract from the absurdity. But it’s not a pretentious place, and for all the mythology and wonder, it’s a cosy, grounded sort of place, all warm, vaguely stuffy, nicely scruffy, with swear words scrawled next to paintings and paintings scrawled in swear words. It is something akin to a gypsy caravan that decided to park. And yet now the vagabonds are being evicted. Where shall they go now? Damien Hirst’s new B&B? That would be a little too bourgeois, surely, for Soho’s surly rebels.

'Soho is dying!' moans Sebastian Horsley, ‘‘I have always said I will commit suicide when the Colony closes. Not that one needs an incentive.’’  Clearly, shutting down the Colony Room will have an affect on Soho similar to the effect of Prohibition on New York in the Twenties. But where Gatsby found a way to steer around the law then, so Soho’s residents will presumably find some moonshine of sorts as well, rather than an out and out Depression. One would hope so, anyway.

The rebellion continues, and legal action is being taken over the art and over the club. A party to raise funds for consequential expenditure will be thrown in December, and the resistance goes on. But is it too late? ‘‘The ship is sinking. Man the lifeboats. Women and children first. Fuck the women and children. Is there time?’’  wonders Horsley.

But whether they drown or not, in their sorrows or their wine, one hopes that the punters (who are the real draw) will colonise elsewhere if need be, even after Soho’s pirates push them overboard.

Rare works of Bacon defy art auction gloom

ABC News Australia, Tuesday, 25 November 2008

Two paintings of Francis Bacon, by an Australian artist believed to have been his lover, were sold for well over their pre-auction price last night.

The works by Roy de Maistre — Francis Bacon’s Studio and Portrait Of Francis Bacon — were sold for $180,000 and $96,000 respectively at Sotheby’s sale of modern Australian art in Melbourne.

The two paintings, among a collection of six de Maistre works, had not been seen by the public for nearly 50 years.

“I think both works illustrate very well that even in the present climate, works of exceptional provenance which carry conservative estimates are strongly competed for by enthusiastic collectors,” Georgina Pemberton, head of Sotheby’s Australian paintings, told Reuters.

“All of de Maistre’s paintings sold tonight.”

The de Maistre star lots, which depict one of Bacon's many studios and a portrait of the young artist with carefully drawn eyebrows and bright red lips, had been estimated by Sotheby’s at between $37,600-$50,000 and $5,000-$7,500.

Sotheby’s paintings specialist David Hansen said they had been painted in the 1930s, when the two artists were “associating.”

“They were certainly closely associated both personally and professionally. Close, but exactly how close is not known,” Mr Hansen said of the two artists.

De Maistre, who died in 1968, was considered a leading exponent of early modernism in Australia.

Bacon, who died in 1992, is believed to have made de Maistre’s acquaintance when he was about 20-years-old, possibly in France or London.  

Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait 

Michael Peppiatt. Yale Univ., $35 (208p) ISBN 978-0-300-14255-6

Publishers Weekly, 11/24/2008

Peppiatt, having already written Bacon’s biography (Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma), now submits a collection of essays and interviews spanning his career of writing on the artist. Some of the pieces, updated with material originally omitted because Bacon (1909–1992) was still living, take on new life. They also echo each other, as when, in an essay for Art International, Peppiatt writes that “comparatively few artists were admitted into Bacon's pantheon, and even they tended to be pared down to one or other aspect of their oeuvre”—Degas was one, as Bacon says in one interview: “Degas is complete in himself. I like his pastels enormously.” 

   Rare works about Francis Bacon defy art auction gloom

       Reuters, Monday November 24, 2008

         Portrait of Francis Bacon Roy de Maistre

MELBOURNE (Reuters Life!) — Two rare artworks by Australian painter Roy de Maistre, which feature artist Francis Bacon who was believed to be his lover, will be auctioned by Sotheby’s on Monday among a collection of Australian modern art.

Of the six de Maistre paintings, the two works — Francis Bacon's Studio and Portrait of Francis Bacon — have not been seen by the public for nearly 50 years.

"All six of the de Maistre’s works on offer were painted in London in the 1930s when the two artists were associating," David Hansen, senior researcher and paintings’ specialist at Sotheby’s, told Reuters.

Francis Bacon’s Studio, with a pre-sale estimate of between A$60,000-A$80,000 ($37,600-$50,000), depicts one of Bacon’s many studios while Portrait of Francis Bacon, with a pre-sale estimate of between A$8,000-A$12,000 ($5,000-$7,500), shows a young Bacon, with carefully drawn eyebrows and bright red lips.

"The young Bacon was well known amongst members of London’s gay subculture for his cosmetic display," Hansen said.

"They were certainly closely associated both personally and professionally - close but exactly how close is not known," he said of the two artists. "It was often said that de Maistre taught Bacon how to paint, though both artists denied it."

Sotheby's said the auction, which also includes works by Australian artists John Perceval and Brett Whiteley, had generated substantial interest with potential buyers from Britain and Australia.

The works on offer have a collective pre-sale estimate of A$3.3 million-A$4.4 million ($2.1 million-$2.75 million).

De Maistre, who died in 1968, was considered a leading exponent of early Modernism in Australia. Bacon, who died in 1992, is believed to have made de Maistre’s acquaintance when he was about 20 years old, possibly in France or London.

Sotheby’s

Important Australian Art

Sale: AU0724  |  Location: Melbourne

Auction Dates: Session 1: Mon, 24 Nov 08 6:30 PM

   Portrait of Francis Bacon  Roy de Maistre 1935

LOT 7
 
ROY DE MAISTRE, AUSTRALIAN, 1894-1968
PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BACON

 
8,000—12,000 AUD
Lot Sold.  Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium:  96,000 AUD

MEASUREMENTS

66 by 43.6m

DESCRIPTION

Signed lower right

Oil on board

Painted in 1935

PROVENANCE

Dimitri Mitrinoviæ
Trustees of the New Atlantis Foundation
Glady MacDermot; thence by descent
Private collection, Switzerland

EXHIBITED

Roy de Maistre: A restrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings 1917-1960, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, May-June 1960, cat. 40

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Neville Wallis, 'In the Humanist Tradition', The Observer, 15 May 1960, p. 20 (illus.)
Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Century, London, 1993, p. 28 and illus.
Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 26

CATALOGUE NOTE

Soon after moving to London in 1930, de Maistre began a relationship with Francis Bacon. Possibly a lover but certainly a good friend and benevolent father figure, de Maistre provided the technical advice and support which enabled bacon to make the transition from interior decorator to painter.

He was also a social and professional mentor; at de Maistre's Eccleston Street studio salon Bacon met people like the artists Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, the young writer Patrick White and the expatriate Australian collector and art dealer Douglas Cooper, as well as patrons such as R.A. Butler and Gladys MacDermot, who commissioned Bacon to entirely redesign her Bloomsbury apartment.

De Maistre painted his young friend's portrait in 1930, and included the work in the three-man exhibtion – de Maistre paintings, Bacon pictures and rugs and pastels by Jean Shepeard – held in Bacon's studio in 1930. The present work is dated to some years later and shows Bacon in his mid 20s, looking, as de Maistre put it, 'like a somewhat dubious choirboy'.

It is indeed a strange, tense, enigmatic portrait of the young artist. Posed in three quarter profile in a strongly lit, shallow space in front of a blood-red curtain, Bacon's oddly unexpressive, even doll-like face is at once abstracted and alert, while his clasped hands seem to convey both formality and anxiety. In addition to the familiar cowlick quiff and the piercing blue eyes, the painting also shows carefully-drawn eyebrows and bright red lips. The young Bacon was well known amongst members of London's gay subculture for his cosmetic display. Michael Peppiat records that 'shortly after he had gained some recognition as an artist, he walked into a London bar where a well known homosexual wit was sitting. When their gazes met, the wit said loudly: "as for her, when I knew her, she was more famous for the paint that she put on her face than the paint she put on canvas"' Later, Patrick White was to recall Bacon's 'beautiful pansy-shaped face, sometimes with too much lipstick on it,' while 'a young relative of de Maistre remembers meeting Francis and wondering whether she should tell him he must have sucked his paintbrush and got red paint all over his mouth.'

Portrait of Francis Bacon is an affectionate and revealing image of the celebrated British artist at the start of his career, and an important memento of his constructive relationship with the older and wiser Australian.

1. Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, Century, London, 1993, p. 28
2. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1996, p. 56
3. Patrick White, Flaws in the Glass: a self-portrait, Jonathan Cape, London, 1983, p. 62
4. Peppiatt, op. cit., p. 56

We are most grateful to Heather Johnson, Andrew Brighton and Elizabeth Gertsakis for their assistance in cataloguing this work.

Sotheby’s

Important Australian Art

Sale: AU0724  |  Location: Melbourne

Auction Dates: Session 1: Mon, 24 Nov 08 6:30 PM

                    Francis Bacon's Studio  Roy de Maistre 1932

LOT 69
 

ROY DE MAISTRE, AUSTRALIAN, 1894-1968
FRANCIS BACON'S STUDIO

Estimate  60,000—80,000 AUD

Lot Sold  Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium:  180,000 AUD

MEASUREMENTS

91 by 76cm

DESCRIPTION

Signed lower right; dated 1932 on the reverse

Oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Dimitri Mitrinoviæ
Trustees of the New Atlantis Foundation
Glady MacDermot; thence by descent
Private collection, Switzerland

EXHIBITED

(possibly) Roy de Maistre, Mayor Gallery, London, October-November 1934 (Mayor Gallery label on stretcher bar on reverse)
Roy de Maistre: A retrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings 1917 - 1960, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, May - June 1960, cat. 21
Francis Bacon, Tate Gallery, London, 24 May-1 July 1962, cat. 93 (as Francis Bacon's Studio, 1932, lent by Roy de Maistre). Partial Tate Gallery exhibition label attached to reverse.

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1964, p. 10
Mary Eagle, Australian Modern Painting Between the Wars 1914-1939, Bay Books, Sydney, 1989, p. 50 (illus.)
John Russell, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, pp. 16-17
Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times, Crown Publishers, New York, 1993, p. 64
Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pp. 24, 77, 234

CATALOGUE NOTE

When Roy de Maistre and Francis Bacon met, the 21 year old Bacon had begun to establish himself as a fashionable furniture designer, producing severe glass and tubular-steel tables and chairs and synthetic-cubist screens and woven floor rugs. This art deco aesthetic chimed with de Maistre's own taste for geometric flat pattern, and he responded with strikingly moderne but 'topographically precise' views of Bacon's studio: Francis Bacon's Queensbury Mews Studio (1930, collection of the late Francis Elek) and Interior (1930, Manchester City Art Gallery).

They were the first of some ten pictures of Bacon's work spaces that de Maistre would produce during the early 1930s. In addition to these two and to Still Life (1933, National Gallery of Australia) and Mr Francis Bacon's Studio, Royal Hospital Road (1934, private collection), there are no fewer than six related paintings of one of these rooms, a whitewashed attic prism with open door and pictures leaning against the walls.

The precise location depicted is uncertain. John Rothenstein maintains that these works, too, depict the studio at 71 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea , but Heather Johnson notes that 'sketches for the work were thought to have been made circa 1932, in which case the studio represented could have been one of the many Bacon occupied after leaving his Queensbury Mews studio in 1931 and before he moved into the Royal Hospital Road studio...Bacon had studios in Fulham Road, Cromwell Place and Glebe Place during this time.'

For those with an interest in the early Bacon, the picture's key interest lies in the two curious, Picassoesque works 'carefully, irreplaceably recorded by de Maistre'. 'Against bare boards and angular white surfaces, canvases are stacked, two turned towards the painter's brush, one of a skeletal and feathered bird, another of the quartered outline of a horse or dragon – the start of a movement from geonometric abstraction towards a more organic image... these are works of transition, those of an embryo trying to flesh itself.'

The picture also has a special importance for de Maistre scholars. The original version was purchased by Gladys MacDermot, de Maistre's great supporter both in Australia and in England, and attracted the particular interest of another of MacDermot's protégés, Dmitri Mitrinovic, political and aesthetic visionary and polemicist, and founder of the journals New Britain and New Atlantis. While MacDermot's painting was destroyed during the London Blitz, Johnson records that 'Mitrinovic commissioned a version...for himself, New Atlantis... almost identical to the original work' and that 'several other versions and variations of the work were also produced: a third, smaller work done for Mitrinovic and given to a follower, Jack Murphy... a fourth work also done for Mitrinovic and presently in a private collection associated with the New Atlantis Foundation...(the present work) and a sixth work, White Figure, Art Gallery of Western Australia. All the extant works are believed to have been done circa 1933 developed from sketches de Maistre made in Bacon's studio in 1932.'

1. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1996, p. 51
2. John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1964, p. 10
3. Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 77
4. John Russell, Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, p. 16
5. Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times, Crown Publishers, New York, 1993, p. 64
6. Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 77

We are most grateful to Heather Johnson, Andrew Brighton and Elizabeth Gertsakis for their assistance in cataloguing this work.

Francis Bacon: gesto y agonía de la figura humana

CARLOS M. LUIS, ARTES Y LETRAS Especial/El Nuevo Herald

El Nuevo Herald, Miami, 23 de Noviembre del 2008

Como parte de la celebración del centenario en el 2009 del nacimiento de Francis Bacon, la Tate Gallery de Londres ha inaugurado una retrospectiva de este pintor. Entre los meses de febrero y agosto la muestra viajará a los museos del Prado y al Metropolitan de Nueva York. Los 60 cuadros que serán expuestos permiten indagar sobre la vida y la obra de uno de los grandes pintores de todas las épocas. Pocos como Bacon - quizás ninguno - ha llevado tan lejos el tratamiento de la figura humana en la forma que este pintor lo ha hecho.

Habría que remontarse a las representaciones que los artistas medievales hacían de los condenados para acercarnos a las suyas. O podemos acudir a Goya como un antecedente. Para situarnos en el siglo XX, las mujeres de De Kooning, el ''Grito'' de Edward Munch, o ciertas obras de Chaim Soutine, de Van Gogh o los autorretratos de Artaud entre otros, pueden ubicarse a su lado. Pero nadie como Bacon realizó una visión tan escatológica del ser humano, abriéndole al mismo tiempo, un espacio para ser representado en la soledad y el sufrimiento. En su caso no podemos acusarlo de que lo hizo tomando la figura humana como un simple tema pictórico. Su vida de alcohólico y de homosexual sadomasoquista lo situó dentro de una realidad que él experimentó hasta la saciedad de los excesos, pues para Bacon los extremos se tocaban para desgarrarse entre sí.

Estamos prisioneros en nuestra piel dijo Wittgenstein en sus diarios. En el caso de Bacon podemos decir que éste encerró a la humanidad dentro de la piel de los cuerpos que él pintó. Ese permanente contacto suyo con las fuerzas elementales que emanan de la anatomía humana y animal lo convirtió de paso en un filósofo visual sin quererlo. Podemos a partir de sus cuadros especular toda una teoría acerca de la condición humana, partiendo de una ''lógica de la sensación'' como lo hiciera Gilles Deleuze en su libro sobre el pintor. En el mismo el pensador francés exploró las resonancias que pueden existir entre la filosofía y las artes visuales. Tomando ese concepto como punto de vista, Deleuze discute tres aspectos fundamentales de la pintura de Bacon: la figura, los espacios de color que la rodean y las estructuras que los separan. Esos tres aspectos aparecen claramente configurados en Bacon como parte de su dinámica pictórica. Veamos los tres por separado.

La figura: la atracción que posee el cuerpo humano para Bacon le brinda la ocasión para interpretarlo, de acuerdo con su visión de la existencia, como un acto límite. Es por eso que sus cuerpos van sufriendo toda suerte de distorsiones hasta llegar a ser irreconocibles. Bacon entonces actúa sobre los mismos como representando una especie de ritual frenético, cuyo sadismo hace palidecer a las coreografías sexuales del Marqués. Bacon se sintió influido por los experimentos fotográficos de Eadweard Muybridge, quien a finales del siglo XIX, realizara una serie de fotos de personas y animales sorprendidos en diversas posturas. Posiblemente pudo también sentirse atraído por los dibujos anatómicos del renacentista Andreas Vesalius. Por otra parte Velázquez le sirvió de modelo para interpretar sus retratos. La versión que el maestro español hiciera del papa Inocencio X fue objeto de una de las obras más emblemáticas de Bacon.

El color: contrario al tratamiento del color propio de los expresionistas, Bacon utilizó el suyo en forma plana, realzando su brillantez. El contraste que esto provoca con sus figuras retorcidas es notable. El color se extiende por el espacio de sus cuadros, creando zonas de intensas gamas, sin componer un contrapunto – como lo hacen muchos expresionistas – con el dramatismo de las figuras. De ese modo el color queda, sobre todo en los cuadros de su última época, como una especie de trasfondo donde podemos observar, si eliminamos las figuras de los mismos, una distribución constructivista del espacio.

La estructura: Bacon compone sus cuadros partiendo de un sentido espacial muy preciso. De esa forma coloca sus figuras dentro de compartimentos, semejantes muchos de ellos a grandes cajas de cristal. Esa manera suya de encerrar a sus personajes nos recuerda el juicio de Eichmann en Jerusalén, donde el famoso nazi permaneció dentro de un cubículo durante todo el proceso. También nos puede traer a la memoria la secuencia del filme Silence of the Lambs, seguramente inspirada en Bacon, cuando Hannibal Lecter tuvo que ser enjaulado en una gran cárcel de cristal en medio de un salón. Ambas escenas muestran una teatralidad que su pintura nos comunica a través de la gestualidad de muchas de sus mejores obras. Por otra parte y a la manera de los pintores medievales, Bacon gustaba de pintar trípticos como grandes retablos que reproducen variaciones sobre un tema determinado. Uno de éstos, basado en la crucifixión, llevó hasta el paroxismo de lo grotesco la representación de ese acontecimiento central de la cultura cristiana.

Baudelaire afirmó que el Romanticismo no consistía tanto en la verdad exacta como en la manera de sentir esa verdad. Bacon, que en el fondo pertenece a la tradición romántica, está interesado en capturar una verdad que le sirva para expresar un sentimiento ''agónico''. Cada uno de sus modelos que tuvieron en un momento dado existencia propia fueron sometidos a una interpretación delirante de la verdad que encarnaban. Fue de esa forma que Bacon logró crear imágenes que quedarán grabadas indeleblemente en la historia del arte. • 

Francis Bacon: Space and Surface, symposium organised by Brian Hatton

Symposium 22/11/08 - 10.00 Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES

This double aspect of Bacon's work has interested not only painters but also architects and filmmakers. Presentations will be made by: Andrew Brighton, James Cahill, Nigel Coates, Mark Cousins, Martin Hammer, Brian Hatton and John Maybury. The symposium will conclude with a roundtable discussion.

All welcome
No advance booking required

Please note: The AA Bar (1st Floor) will be open between 11.00 and 6.00 providing regular bar services.

Joel Cadbury seeks a Colony

It is the drinking den whose patrons have included such artists as Francis Bacon and Tracey Emin, but the Colony Room in Soho may be about to have a surprising new owner.

Richard Eden The Daily Telegraph 15 November 2008

Mandrake can disclose that Joel Cadbury, whose chocolate-producing ancestors were abstemious Quakers, is lining up a bid for the louche private members' club. "Joel has been approached about taking it over and is seriously considering it," says a friend of the 36-year-old son of Peter "the Cad" Cadbury. 

Joel, who is married to Divia Lalvani, the daughter of an Indian electronics tycoon, is a non-executive director the Groucho Club, the haunt of media and theatre professionals, which is next door to the Colony Room. 

Last year, Cadbury sold his Soho health and fitness club, The Third Space, to a management buyout team backed by private equity for £22 million. The deal came just over a year after he sold the Groucho to the same private-equity group, Graphite Capital, for £20 million.

Art boom over as auctions fail to bring home Bacon

Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter, The Times, November 14, 2008

When a Francis Bacon triptych became the most expensive contemporary artwork sold at auction earlier this year it fuelled hopes that the art market might be credit-crunch proof.

Six months later the failure of another important Bacon work to attract a single bid at auction in New York has underlined what the leading auction houses have long feared and recently suspected: the art boom is over and it will not be back any time soon.

A sobering fortnight of big sales in New York ends this afternoon with little prospect of transactions totalling $1 billion (£676 million).

That might seem like an obscene sum of money to lavish on art in the midst of an economic crisis but it is well short of the auction houses’ own combined minimum estimate for the sales of $1.7 billion.

The fortnight included four star-studded evening sales of Impressionist and Modern and Contemporary and PostWar art, which traditionally set the tone for the art market over the next six months.

This year, despite the presence of John McEnroe, the tennis player, Salma Hayek and Steve Martin, the actors, Valentino, the fashion designer and various billionaire art collectors in the auction rooms, the four sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s pulled in only $608.5 million, against a low estimate of $1.007 billion.

About a third of the works on offer failed to sell at all, including pieces by Picasso, Rothko, Manet, Monet, Modigliani, Matisse, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Warhol, Lichtenstein and Hirst, while many of those that did went for substantially less than the asking price.

Some records were set, brightening the gloom for the auction houses. Suprematist Composition by Kazimir Malevich, the Russian abstract pioneer, sold for $60 million and there were record prices for works by Munch and Degas among others.

Attention, however, was inevitably focused on the failures, notably the Bacon.

In May it was revealed that Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club, was the mystery buyer of an $86.2 million Bacon triptych. Days earlier he paid $33.6 million for Benefits Supervisor Sleeping by Bacon’s old friend Lucian Freud.

This double splurge was seized on as evidence that the art market would weather the economic downturn thanks to stupendously wealthy collectors from Russia, China, India and the Middle East.

But those buyers were notably absent on Wednesday night when a 1964 self-portrait by Bacon, estimated by Christie’s at $40 million, failed to sell.

There were gasps in the hall when it was withdrawn from the sale.

The differing fortunes of the two Bacons reflect the seismic shifts in the global financial markets in the past two months, a connection summed up by the presence in Wednesday’s sale of 16 works, belonging to the family of Richard S. Fuld Jr, a former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, that Christie’s had guaranteed at $20 millon. The price estimates for these sales were set before the markets went into meltdown in September and European buyers were handicapped by the strengthening of the dollar.

As a result dealers, sellers, collectors and auctioneers emerged from the New York sales looking for the bottom of the market whereas not long ago they were trying to spot the peak. Ian Peck, chief executive of Art Capital Group, a merchant bank specialising in art world affairs, said: “It’s like the aftermath of a rugby match with everybody limping off the field. It’s a different universe compared to where we were six months ago.”

Marc Porter, president of Christie’s North and South America, said after the Wednesday evening sale: “The market is adjusting down.”

The New York sales followed a pattern set in significant recent auctions in London and Hong Kong.

The auction houses are the most obvious victims of the downturn. Christie’s and Sotheby’s both spent tens of millions buying lots whose prices they had guaranteed but which failed to sell. Sotheby’s share price has collapsed from more than $40 a year ago to just over $8 yesterday.

Robert Read, group fine art underwriter for Hiscox, the insurer, said that the auctions could have been much worse. “It’s no longer a champagne market,” he said. “Its more of a modest chablis, but it is still drinkable, still functioning.”

Upper East Side: Linger (Quietly) for a While

By KAREN ROSENBERG, The New York Times, November 13, 2008

Works by Francis Bacon, left, and Giacometti at the Gagosian Gallery show Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers.

Chelsea has been the undisputed center of the art market for the last decade, and the young and the new are concentrated below 14th Street. The Upper East Side will always have Museum Mile, but what do the galleries in this staid enclave have to offer?

Simply put, the Upper East Side is a quieter, more idiosyncratic art neighbourhood. Particularly in the cloistered townhouse galleries off Madison Avenue, you have the sense of walking into someone’s living room. Chelsea can make you feel rushed, herded from one concrete-floored box to the next; uptown the atmosphere is much more conducive to lingering. You will often be the only visitor in the gallery, even on a Saturday.

At the ever-expanding Gagosian, as at Acquavella, the artist-muse relationship inspires an exhibition worthy of the Museum of Modern Art. Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon inaugurates the gallery’s new fourth-floor exhibition space. The show was organized by Véronique Wiesinger, the director of the Giacometti Foundation in Paris, and Martin Harrison, who is overseeing Bacon’s catalogue raisonné.

The woman singled out in the title is the model Isabel Rawsthorne, whose chiseled cheekbones inspired several paintings by Bacon and sculptures by Giacometti. Other captivating figures in the exhibition include Lucien Freud, in Bacon’s portraits, and Giacometti’s wife and mistress (in separate, and markedly different, paintings)

Francis Bacon portrait pulled from sale after failing to attract bids 

A Francis Bacon self-portrait was withdrawn half way though a Christie's auction in New York after bidding failed to take off. 

By Tom Leonard in New York, The Daily Telegraph, 13 November 2008

Study for Self Portrait, painted in 1964, was billed as the highlight of the contemporary art sale with an estimate of $40 million (£27 million).

However, when bidding dried up at $27.4 million, the sale was abruptly halted, prompting gasps of surprise in the auction room.

A Bacon triptych fetched $86 million – a record for the painter – at an auction in New York in May.

But the self portrait was among almost a third of works in the 75-lot sale that failed to find buyers. The auction brought in $113.6 million – half the pre-sale low estimate.

In keeping with other recent sales, the lots that did sell went for less than their estimate.

At Christie's, a collection of 16 drawings sold by Kathy and Richard Fuld, the controversial former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, brought in $13.5 million after being expected to fetch $20 million.

However, Christie's had promised the Fulds had an undisclosed sum regardless of the outcome of the sale. Mrs Fuld is a keen collector and the couple have kept most of their works.

The Christie's sale came a day after a similarly underwhelming New York auction at Sotheby's.

Prices at both sales were set earlier in the year before the financial crisis and are now considered far too high.

                                                              Study for Self Portrait 1964 Francis Bacon

Art market in shock as Christies calls halt to Francis Bacon sale

Anne Barrowclough, The Times, Thursday, November 13, 2008

A Francis Bacon self-portrait failed to sell at auction in New York last night, in a significant sign that the global financial tsunami is beginning to sweep over the international art market.

Bacon's 1964 Study for Self Portrait - billed as a highlight of Christie's contemporary art auction - was estimated to take in around $US40 million (£26.2 million). A Bacon triptych went under the hammer in New York last May for $86.2 million (£56.4 million), a record for the British painter and it was expected that the self portrait would fetch a similarly high price.

But when bidding reached $27.4 million (£179.3 million) the auction house dramatically halted the proceedings, to a chorus of gasps from a stunned audience.

Seventy-five contemporary works were on sale on Wednesday. Among the most important lots was a Jean-Michel Basquiat painter of a boxer, owned by Metallica co-founder and drummer Lars Ulrich, which fetched just over $13.5 million but short of the record $14.6 million for a Basquiat.

A chill had already entered the art market last month, when a rare portrait of Francis Bacon by Lucien Freud sold for £1.6 million less than expected, and the autumn season of art sales, which began on November 3, was being closely watched.

However in the fortnight since the autumn season began, there has been a big drop off of sales of impressionist, modern and contemporary works of art.

The number of unsold works has often exceeded 30 or 40 per cent of lots since November 3, and barring a few notable exceptions the sales prices are lower than the estimates for the majority of pieces.

Art sales were still high in the spring sale season earlier this year, with records set at Sotheby's and Christies' for works by Monet, whose Le Pont du chemin de fer a Argenteuil went for a record $41.4 million (£27.1 million) and Munch, whose Girls on a Bridge sold for $30.8 million (£20.2 million), a record for the artist.

The record sales were seen as a sign that the art market was protected from the deepening economic gloom.

At the time David Norman, chairman of Sotheby's impressionist and modern department, said the sales had displayed the "underpinnings of a really strong market that we believe is going to continue as long as we keep the estimates appealing to the consignors and choose the right property."

He added: "There is still so much liquidity and so many buyers from everywhere."

Such optimism has evaporated recently, and last night's sale will cast a further pall over the international market. Some experts say the fall in sales is due to the disappearance of hedge fund managers and Russian oligarchs from auction rooms.

But some of Francis Bacon's work still seem popular - at least within a certain market. His paintings of popes - of which there are just 40 in the world - are seen as a trophy by some collectors, according to Sarah Thornton, the author of Seven Days in the Art World.

"These paintings are of a very powerful man in purgatory, in like a free-fall into Hell," she told National Public Radio (NPR) in the US on Tuesday. "The popes look terrified. I think, oh my God, that must be what it's like to be a hedge fund manager right now."

                                                           Francis Bacon's self portrait failed to sell at a Christie's auction last night   

No buyer for a Bacon as New York art sale ends

By Christopher Michaud, Reuters, Thursday 13 November 2008

NEW YORK, Nov 13 (Reuters) - The fall New York art sales limped to a close on Wednesday, leaving a market bruised and bloodied but still standing.

Christie's post-war and contemporary auction took in $113.6 million, half a low pre-sale estimate of $227 million, with 68 percent of the lots on offer finding buyers.

The spotty sale was consistent with Impressionist, modern and contemporary art auctions at Christie's and rival over the past two weeks.

The result was "about as expected going in," said Amy Cappellazzo, international co-head of contemporary and post-war art at Christie's, given the turmoil gripping world financial markets for the past two months.

Despite high points including a nearly $15 million Richter, a $13.5 million Basquiat and new records for Joseph Cornell and Yayoi Kusama, the evening's star lot failed to sell.

Francis Bacon's Study for Self-Portrait had been estimated to go for $40 million or more, but no bid approached even $30 million. Bacons have seen huge price spikes in recent seasons, including a record $86 million.

"The market is continuing, but clearly at a different price level," Christie's president Marc Porter said.

"There's no panic in the market, but there is an adjustment," he told Reuters, contrasting that to the volatility gripping other markets such as oil or real estate.

"While it had declined, you've seen it find a stable level, with a lot of support."

Baird Ryan, managing director of the art-related financial services firm Art Capital Group, agreed with auction officials' contention that the two weeks of sales, while falling about one-third shy of estimates set before the financial crisis, showed there continues to be demand for fine art.

'A CORRECTION'

But Ryan noted that other markets had seen a fall-off of about 20 to 40 percent, "and that's what you're seeing here. There is a correction going on." He said auction houses will have to edit sales to offer "a selected group of works with cautious estimates."

Still it was impressive that "in such a period of remarkable financial stress you can sell over $100 million worth of art in an evening," Ryan added. "People are focused, and active."

Art expert and author Sarah Thornton, who chronicled several years spent infiltrating the art world for the book Seven Days in the Art World, said the sales "could have gone much worse."

"Given the state of the financial world, it's remarkable to see a group of people spending money the way they are," she said. "There are obviously some people who still have a lot of money to spend." (Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Mixed Results for Contemporary Art Sale at Christie’s

By Carol Vogel, The New York Times, November 12, 2008

It all began with Freud and Bacon...

She's made a bestselling career examining the mores of suburbia, but as Shena Mackay admits, her literary life started in the fleshpots of Soho

Rachel Cooke, The Observer, Sunday November 9 2008

Mackay was born in 1944. Her father did a series of jobs, from miner to ship's purser, and was often away; his marriage to Mackay's mother was mostly unhappy. She wanted to be a writer early on, a poet preferably. 'It was through reading, and loving words. I could read when I was three.'

Shortly before she left school - the family was living in Blackheath by this time and Mackay was attending Kidbrooke comprehensive, which she hated - she won a Daily Mirror poetry competition, judged by the likes of Kathleen Raine. The prize was £25. 'It was a huge amount of money, but because I was leaving school [she left with two O-levels], I had to buy these boring clothes for my job as an office junior; it had to be squandered on pleated skirts and cardigans.'

The job didn't work out but, soon after, she got another one, working in an antique shop in Chancery Lane. This turned out to be life-changing, in its way. The shop was owned by the parents of David Sylvester, the art critic, with whom she later had an affair (he was the father of her daughter, Cecily Brown, the artist). The Sylvesters' son-in-law, playwright Frank Marcus, who is probably best known for The Killing of Sister George, worked there with her. It was Marcus who encouraged her to keep at the novel she had begun writing. 'He found me an agent. He had it typed out for me.'

David Sylvester, meanwhile, introduced her to every painter you care to think of, from Frank Auerbach to Jasper Johns. She would visit the Colony Room Club in Soho with him, for nights out with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. 'Yes, I did meet them, but I was a young girl and they were middle-aged.' But she realised how famous they were? 'Oh, yeah. I mean, I met Giacometti. I certainly realised who he was. Sometimes, the impression is given that I used to hang out in the Colony Room. But I didn't really. They were David's friends, not mine.

'Francis could be scary. He could either be lovely or spiteful - though he was never spiteful to me. He liked me, so that was all right. It was a great time and I loved it, but at a certain point, that kind of life becomes quite sad. I realised it was much more glamorous actually to have a real life.'

Art world's after-hours haunt, the Colony Room, may be saved from closure

The impending closure of the Colony Room, the Soho drinking den patronised by louche figures from the art world including Francis Bacon and Tracey Emin, may be averted after an intervention by English Heritage.

The advisory body is rushing through an inspection to determine whether the club, which has witnessed 60 years of booze-soaked misbehaviour by some of Britain's most creative drunks, merits listed status.

The club is under threat after Michael Wojas, its secretary and chief barman, said that he would close it when he retires in March. He claims that the lease is up, but members who wish to preserve the club are concerned that he may have surrendered the lease without consulting them.

If English Heritage is impressed, it will recommend to the Government that the club be listed as culturally important. The final decision rests with Barbara Follett, the Culture Minister.

Artists who are campaigning to keep the Colony Room open believe that listed status will help them to come to an arrangement with the landlord because it would be harder to redevelop the premises.

The club, a single-room venue founded to provide a refuge for members when the pubs closed, has also received the support of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who wrote an open letter this week to Simon Thurley, the head of English Heritage. “I hope that you would agree that it is important for London to preserve venues and collections that bring inspiration and artistic pleasure to local, national and international visitors,” he wrote.

English Heritage told The Times that the building must have architectural and historical merit on a national scale. “We are aware that there are development pressures on the building,” a spokeswoman said. “The application has been pushed towards the top of the pile to be considered. We are aware of the enthusiasm about the cultural relevance of the building, and the people who are associated with it.”

She said that an inspection would take place within a fortnight.

Rosemarie MacQueen, head of planning for Westminster City Council, said that if listed status were granted it would be an important consideration if the landlord attempted to change the building. “The Colony Room is basically a room with a staircase,” she said. “The real interest is 20th-century culture. If it is listed, that is the thing you're trying to protect. Any application for change of use would have to take that into consideration.”

The club has been a regular haunt for artists and musicians including Lucian Freud, Peter O'Toole, John Hurt, Sir Peter Blake, George Melly and Damien Hirst.

Mr Wojas did not respond to inquiries yesterday.

Boris Johnson moves to save the Colony

The FIRST POST, Wednesday November 5, 2008

London mayor Boris Johnson is attempting to save one of the city's seediest cultural landmarks, the Colony Room Club in Soho, which is currently under threat of closure. In a letter to the chairman of English Heritage, Simon Thurley, Johnson pledges his unequivocal support for the preservation of the drinking dive, once the haunt of the painter Francis Bacon and in more recent times Damien Hirst and his YBA (Young British Artists) cronies, and calls for it to be listed.

"I write to you in support of the campaign to prevent the iconic Colony Room Club from possible closure," writes Boris. "The Colony is a unique and important place for the capital both in terms of cultural and architectural significance. It represents an important part of part of London's post-war cultural heritage... I hope that you would agree that it is important for London to preserve venues and collections that bring inspiration and artistic pleasure to local, national and international visitors."

So why does it need saving? As reported here, the club's secretary and head barman, Michael Wojas, announced he was closing the club in March. It later transpired that Wojas had neglected to pay the rent on the premises for several months and recently, to the astonishment of everyone trying to save the place, he surrendered the lease to the landlord, an act which effectively signed the 60-year-old club’s death warrant.

In reaction to this, the members who want the club to survive - the Save The Colony Room Campaign - are attempting to oust Wojas and the committee that supports him at an annual general meeting today, a move they see as regrettable but essential if they are to have any chance of saving their beloved club from extinction.

"It's a desperate situation," says a member of the campaign team. "Michael Wojas will probably win the vote at the AGM because he has been ringing old members who know nothing about what he's been up to.

"What's unbelievable is that he maintains he's representing the interests of the members. By closing the club? By handing over the lease? By not paying the rent and flogging off the art works? I don't think so."

Ah, the art works. In September, Wojas put up for sale many of the Colony's artworks, raising some £40,000. This was allegedly to be his "pension pot". But the Save the Colony Room Campaign said that many of these were gifts to the club and so not Wojas's to sell, a claim supported by many of the donors. As a result of intense legal activity, the campaign managed to have the proceeds from the auction, held by the London firm Lyon and Turnbull, placed in an escrow account until true title of ownership had been established.

Lucian Freud (b. 1922)
Head of a Man
signed and dated 'Lucian F 1966' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
18¼ x 15 3/8 in. (46.4 x 39.1 cm.)
Painted in 1966

$1,800,000 - $2,500,000

Price Realized

$1,800,000 - $2,500,000

The Collection of Alice Lawrence

Marlborough Gallery, London.
Mr. H. J. Renton, London
His sale; Sotheby's, London, 30 June 1988, lot 643.
Acquired at the above sale by the late owner.

London, Marlborough Gallery, Lucian Freud: Recent Work, 1968, no. 12 (titled George Dyer II).

Painted in 1966, Head of a Man is one of only two oil portraits by Lucian Freud of George Dyer, the lover and companion of his friend and fellow artist Francis Bacon. The picture dates from a period when Freud and Bacon were seeing each other on an almost daily basis. Their friendship, which had been struck up during the 1940s following their introduction to each other by Graham Sutherland, was important to both men on a personal and an artistic level. Freud and Dyer featured in a great number of Bacon's paintings. However, Bacon and Dyer each appeared only in two of Freud's oils (his 1952 portrait of Bacon, formerly in the collection of the Tate, was stolen when on exhibition in London), making Head of a Man an extremely rare insight into their friendship.

Dyer has become one of the most legendary of Bacon's friends and companions; their relationship even inspired the 1998 film Love Is the Devil, starring Daniel Craig and Derek Jacobi. Bacon, himself an incorrigible spinner of exaggerated tales, claimed he had caught Dyer, a petty criminal, in the act when he attempted to break into the artist's home, and that this marked the beginning of their relationship. However, a more prosaic and more indicative explanation of their first meeting was included in Michael Peppiatt's biography of Bacon, who explained that in 1964:

I was drinking with John Deakin, who had just done some photographs for me, and lots of others. George was down the far end of the bar and he came over and said, You all seem to be having a good time. Can I buy you a drink?' And that's how I met him. I might never have noticed him otherwise (Bacon, quoted in M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 1999, p. 211).

Dyer had been brought up in a family that had a history of petty crime, and it was in this vocation that he attempted to make his way. He was caught often enough that he spent time first in borstals as a young offender and then in prison. There was a physical presence to the man that implied strength and violence, and this, along with his crooked nose, has been captured in Freud's Head of a Man, where the sheer bulk of head and shoulders are emphasised. This serves to highlight the sensitivity of the eyes and facial expression which, according to memoirs, were often in stark contrast to the gangster image that he tried to project, mimicking the style of figures such as the Kray twins in his sharp suits and thin ties.

From the point of Dyer's first acquaintance with Bacon, he was seldom out of his company, and came to figure in many of his paintings too. Now Dyer, no longer actively embroiled in the criminal fraternity that had formerly provided his milieu, was in the company of a celebrated artist and bon vivant, a situation that meant that he and his friends seldom lacked for alcohol or company. Bacon's own recollections about Dyer provide some insight into the paradoxes and complexities of the man who tragically took his own life on the eve of the painter's 1971 retrospective in Paris:

His stealing at least gave him a raison d'être, even though he wasn't very successful at it and was always in and out of prison. But it gave him something to think about. When George was inside, he'd spend all his time planning what he would do when he came out. And so on. I thought I was helping him when I took him out of that life. I knew the next time he was caught he'd get a heavy sentence. And I thought, well, life's too short to spend half of it in prison. But I was wrong, of course. He'd have been in and out of prison, but at least he'd have been alive. He became totally impossible with drink. The rest of the time, when he was sober, he could be terribly engaging and gentle. He used to love being with children and animals. I think he was a nicer person than me. He was more compassionate. He was much too nice to be a crook. That was the trouble. He only went in for stealing because he had been born into it (Bacon, quoted in David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 135).

The strange tension between Dyer's criminality and his gentle, tender side is in evidence in Head of a Man.

In Head of a Man, even the brushwork owed its existence in part to the artistic relationship between Bacon and Freud. When they had first met, and indeed into the 1950s, Freud had painted in a meticulous style, usually seated at his easel, using extremely fine sable-hair brushes. It was with some justification that Herbert Read had referred to him as the "Ingres of Existentialism." However, in the early 1950s, in part through a feeling of the constraints of that style and influenced by Bacon's own handling of paint, Freud began to use larger brushes, standing behind his easel, allowing him more movement, more gesture, and therefore resulting in pictures that were more painterly, as is the case in Head of a Man. "His work impressed me but his personality affected me," Freud has explained of his relationship to Bacon.

It was through that and through talking to him a lot. He talked a great deal about the paint itself carrying the form, and imbuing the paint with a sort of life. He talked about packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me and I realized it was a million miles from anything I could ever do (Freud, quoted in W. Feaver, Lucian Freud, New York, 2007, p. 321).

Within a short time, Freud had developed the virtuoso painterly style for which he is so famed, and which is clear in the almost organic way that he has built up the sense of flesh in Dyer's features in Head of a Man. There is a pulsing impression of life, of vitality in the oils in this picture, that demonstrates his insistence that, "I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them. I didn't want to get just a likeness like a mimic, but to portray them, like an actor. As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as flesh does" (Freud, quoted in L. Gowing, Lucian Freud, London, 1982, pp. 190-91). It is for this reason that Freud continues to focus, in his portraiture, on those people who form a part of his family or his circle, people whom he knows and who can relax in front of him, while being scrutinized by him, for long enough for the painting to be complete.

This sense of life, captured in oils, perhaps reveals some artistic cousinship between Freud and the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Frans Hals. Discussing Hals, Freud celebrated that vivid sense of life that he managed to capture in his laughing cavaliers, banqueters and revelers:

They still shock people very much. I remember Francis had a friend called George (Dyer) who had never looked at any painting in his life. He'd been a sort of lookout man, a very bad one, and he saw a book of Hals, he looked at it and his face absolutely lit up. He said what a marvelous idea making people look like that. He thought they were modern. That's right really. I mean they are all talking, eating, grinning - I think of Shakespeare a bit - done from a kind of detached (and not all that detached) wit and observation" (Freud, quoted in Feaver, op.cit., 2007, p. 322).

In Head of a Man, while Dyer may not be talking, eating or grinning, Freud has nonetheless captured a similarly vivid sense of his subject's life and character.

Top 100 Treasures

Roberta Maneker, Art & Antiques, November 2008

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then where does value lie? Ask the child who tucks away a seashell as a souvenir of summer; or the flea market hunter-gatherer who pays a pittance for antique pottery others are ignoring; or the mutual fund manager who knows a stock’s worth can change by the hour; or the Russian billionaire who has just plunked down more than $80 million for a must-have trio of Francis Bacon’s exquisite, anguished-expressionist canvases. Value is in the eyes, hearts and minds of those who recognize and create it. While often measured in dollars or rubles or euro or yen, in the art market, at least, it’s this ineffable sense of the kind of appreciation certain objects deserve that helps transform price-tagged objects into inestimable, ever-more-desirable treasures.

The Francis Bacon market is exploding. In 2007 alone, Bacon works at auction brought more than $250 million. In May his monumental Triptych, 1976, painted in muted, if not lugubrious tones, became the most expensive work of contemporary art sold publicly, bringing $86.3 million. It might, however, be a bargain per square inch: Each panel measures approximately a staggering 6 by 5 feet. Sotheby’s announced a European private buyer, but other sources named London-based Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. — R.M.

FRANCIS BACON

Les sublimes tortures de Bacon

Les Échos, France, Lundi 3 Novembre 2008

Rendez-vous à Londres pour découvrir les aspects méconnus d'un peintre de génie et de tourments.

A la Tate Britain,

jusqu'au 4 janvier.

tél. : 00.44.207.887.88.88.

Faire sienne l'histoire de l'art pour être capable de créer une nouvelle peinture... Tout comme Picasso, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) puisa dans le répertoire classique de la peinture. Mais, contrairement à son aîné espagnol, l'Irlandais de Londres s'intéressait plutôt aux reproductions des oeuvres, comme s'il redoutait la puissance du contact avec la toile. Jusqu'au 4 janvier, la Tate Britain le montre sous un jour inédit. Une rétrospective magistrale qui met en exergue des toiles moins connues et les dernières recherches issues de l'étude de son lieu de travail.

Une des grandes obsessions de Bacon est une reproduction qu'il possédait en plusieurs exemplaires du pape Innocent X, peint par Vélasquez en 1650, aujourd'hui conservé à la galerie Doria Pamphilij de Rome. Selon l'ami du peintre et historien Michael Peppiatt, Bacon a peint pas moins de 45 Papes entre 1949 et 1971. Mais il n'a jamais cherché à voir la toile de Vélasquez, même lors de son passage à Rome.

Dévoreur de photographies

En homme du XXe siècle, il était un dévoreur de photographies. Les images jonchaient le sol de son atelier de Londres. C'est cette matière première assemblée par une sensibilité tourmentée, agrémentée d'un sens des couleurs hors du commun - il avait exercé dans sa jeunesse le métier de décorateur -, qui donne corps à l'oeuvre de Francis Bacon.

A la Tate Britain, l'espace a été divisé en thématiques pour ouvrir les yeux du spectateur sur des points clefs de son langage. La première abordée, celle de l'animal, est un leitmotiv dans sa création. Montrer l'aspect le plus sauvage de l'être humain, c'est produire des corps torturés et tordus, des visages déformés par des cris infinis. En 1944, il crée Trois études pour personnages de la crucifixion reconnues comme son premier chef-d'oeuvre. Sur un fond orange, un être surréaliste en gris dont émerge un cou tendu et une énorme bouche. Le catalogue de l'exposition explique que cette imagerie de l'homme bestial est puisée dans un fonds de photos qui est disposé dans le studio de l'artiste et qui mélange des reproductions de Vélasquez, Grünewald, Rodin et aussi des photos de leaders nazis comme Joseph Goebbels en train de discourir.

Une des caractéristiques fortes de la peinture de Bacon consiste aussi à circonscrire un champ de vision au sein de la toile. C'est au sujet de cette « zone » qu'est consacrée une partie de l'exposition. Etude de chien  de 1952 est une toile dépouillée au centre de laquelle figure l'animal. Il est dans un cercle délimité par une ligne verte, lui-même situé dans un polygone bordé de orange. Bacon explique qu'il a puisé l'idée de zone dans son expérience de décorateur et qu'elle permet d'extraire le sujet de son environnement naturel.

Etudes et soirs d'ivresse

Crucifixion : voilà un thème prisé par le peintre masochiste. De la viande, du sang, de la douleur... une véritable boucherie, comme dans les « Trois études pour une crucifixion » de 1962. L'ensemble est saturé de teintes fortes mises au service du drame. Le sol est orange, les murs rouges en contraste avec des formes géométriques noires. Les études faites autour de cette peinture, réalisée un soir de désespoir et d'ivresse, montrent l'influence des  Demoiselles d'Avignon, de Picasso, du crucifix de Cimabue à l'église Santa Croce de Florence, mais aussi d'une photo de Mussolini pendu par les pieds, prise après sa mort.

Une salle entière de la Tate Britain explique comment le peintre fait usage des images. L'étude du mouvement en photographie par Muybridge à la fin du XIXe siècle se retrouve dans sa peinture, tout comme un portrait photo d'Isabel Rawsthorne debout dans une rue de Soho dont le visage va être consciencieusement déformé et replacé au sein d'une sorte d'arène cerclée de bleu roi. En 1981, Bacon écrivait à l'écrivain français Michel Leiris : « Nous sommes forcés d'inventer des méthodes par lesquelles la réalité peut prendre le dessus sur notre système nerveux d'une manière nouvelle qui permette néanmoins de ne pas perdre la vision objective du modèle. »

JUDITH BENHAMOU-HUET

Own a Francis Bacon? We’ll Pay You $$!

Sotheby’s, lender of last resort.

Alexandra Peers, New York Magazine, November 2, 2008

Tobias Meyer, who runs the contemporary-art department, says he’s also seeing more “consignment advances”—sellers agreeing to put their art on the block and getting some money up front. But he’s also finding owners disappointed by their holdings’ worth. “Just because we sold a great, rare $80 million Francis Bacon, everyone with a Bacon thinks theirs is worth $40 million,” he says. “It doesn’t work that way.”

Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, London

JOHN McAULIFFE | EXHIBITIONS | REVIEWS | THE MANCHESTER REVIEW | NOVEMBER 2008

Francis Bacon is presented, in his third Tate Britain retrospective, as a straightforwardly thematic painter: the exhibition’s ten chronologically-arranged rooms consistently refer the viewer to the Cold War, World War 2, the illegality of homosexuality, the decline of organised religion.  Although Bacon regularly objected to any narrative readings of individual paintings, he becomes here the story of the twentieth century.  It is a stultifying narrative and it represses the strangeness of the paintings, replacing them with a story which could be applied to many of his contemporaries.

The most shocking painting in the exhibition, and one which confounds its narrative, is his wild, luridly expressionist study of Van Gogh, who appears as a conventional figure in a landscape in a painting based on Van Gogh’s ‘The Painter on the Road to Tarascon’ (a painting destroyed in the bombing of Dresden).  Its meshing of colours, its absence of a contrasted overlaid commentary or of cut-up, delineated spaces make it seem more like the work of a contemporary like Sydney Nolan. It is also the show’s one variation on Bacon’s basic, aggressive and confrontational style.

Elsewhere the exhibition covers familiar ground: the brilliant glaring orange spaces in which his triptychs play out, the way he consistently isolates his ‘sitters’ on a chair or stool or toilet bowl. Lenin wrote that ‘the future of aesthetics will be ethics’, but Bacon refuses this dictum, taking the abstract aesthetic patterns of arcs and circles from Kandinsky and Matisse and plastering them with fleshy wounds: the symmetries remain but Bacon’s flashy colours make it hard to look away from his often grotesque subjects. Sometimes Bacon rubs our noses in his aestheticism, but there is sentiment and even pathos in some of the paintings of George Dyer. In one, he cycles a bike, his face a mask as the wheel wobbles away from its skeletal frame. But Bacon explodes this mildly comical scene by  sprouting from his head, in a whirl of pinks, a calm all-seeing eye, granting his subject a vantage point for once.

Bacon’s interest in TS Eliot’s early satires and in Aeschylus’s Furies is documented in the notes to the paintings, but their regular focus on a single orifice may have another, more contemporary literary source. The early work’s insistence on the mouth as its central still and clarifying image responds to WH Auden’s definition of his art as ‘a way of happening, a mouth’. In the later work, the mouth is displaced by meaty, bacony twists of flesh and by the bright red arrows he aimed at his subjects. The most impressive of these familiar paintings are the triptychs for, again, George Dyer whose crude shadows and spilled flesh act as a powerful elegy for Bacon’s partner.

The show has its moments but does not add much, or detract from, Bacon’s reputation. It is also disappointingly silent on Bacon’s artistic context and future. It does include a room devoted to Eadweard Muybridge’s early photographs, but Bacon’s kinetic manipulation and juxtaposition of these sequential frames is a well-known story.  Maybe Bacon’s work is too narrow and limited, but there are signs here that he could be usefully seen in the swim of the art of his time, in relation to the abstract painters whose work he professed to loathe, to David Hockney’s post-photographic work, or to the collage which his Britart successors use to follow his example in shocking their public.

Bacon in close focus

Rebecca Daniels praises the curators' discriminating selection of works in Tate's impressive Bacon exhibition.

REBECCA DANIELS  |  APOLLO  |  1 NOVEMBER 2008

Despite claims that the Tate's Francis Bacon exhibition is the biggest retrospective of him ever staged, it is, in fact, substantially smaller than the gallery's 1985 show. However, the decision to be more selective has resulted in a very high-quality exhibition. It is really a celebration of Bacon's larger paintings and the few smaller works included, such as Study for Head of George Dyer (1967; private collection), tend to be over-shadowed. The focus on large-scale works is justified given the crowds likely to flock to this show and the paintings have been generously spaced, maximising the chances for an unimpaired view of them.

This is particularly apparent in the opening room, which is hung with only seven works, introducing the paintings that Bacon completed after Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (around 1944; Tate). The absence of that seminal work from Room 1 (it is included in a later room devoted to the Crucifixion) prevents the viewer from appreciating it as Bacon subsequently intended: he made clear that it was the painting that launched his career and anything he completed prior to it should be destroyed. Also missing, undoubtedly due to its fragile condition, is Painting 1946 (1946; Museum of Modern Art, New York), a work that held a lifelong importance for Bacon. These exclusions from Room I highlight the fact that this is the first exhibition held here since Bacon died and, without the control he exercised over the previous Tate show, the curators have had a new freedom in the presentation and reassessment of his art.

There are two principal thematic detours from what is a loosely chronological hang, and these provide the most dramatic and visually powerful displays in the exhibition. The first features Bacon's recurring preoccupation with the theme of the Crucifixion, the earliest version being the haunting Crucifixion (1933, Murderme, London), which Herbert Read illustrated in Art Now (1933), when Bacon was unknown. Bacon's art is often characterised as violent and brutal but, with a few exceptions, this does not hold up under analysis. However, the Crucifixion triptychs are indeed violent, as the exhibition's curator Chris Stephens noted in a BBC interview, and the decision by him and his co-curator, Matthew Gale, to hang Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York) and Crucifixion (1965; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Fig. 2) facing each other, as if in gladiatorial combat, is inspired.

A source for the mutilated bodies that appear in both the 1962 and the 1965 Crucifixion paintings is probably, as Martin Harrison has observed in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, an illustration in a book Bacon owned, The True Aspects of the Algerian Revolution (1957). The prominence of carcasses in both triptychs was prompted by a feature on abattoirs in Paris Match in November 1961 (which was found in Bacon's studio). Furthermore, the controversial inclusion of a swastika in the 1965 Crucifixion was influenced by photographs of Hitler and his entourage. Therefore, the inspiration for the motifs in these important triptychs is drawn, as in so much of Bacon's art, from magazines, newspapers and books. Yet, despite the importance of this material, several reviewers have denounced the exhibitions inclusion of a room devoted to archival material as a distraction from the paintings. To me, the archive room enhances the experience of Bacon's work, as it adds to an understanding of Bacon's preparatory methods in the same way that Michelangelo's preliminary studies (incidentally a major source of inspiration to Bacon) enhance an understanding of his finished frescoes.

The second thematic room, 'Memorial', is devoted to triptychs of George Dyer, Bacon's lover and muse. The three large triptychs were all completed in the years following Dyer's death in October 1971. The first, Triptych - In memory of George Dyer (1971; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; Fig. 1) is unusual in Bacon's oeuvre as it appears to illustrate episodes in Dyer's life, while Triptych, May-June 1973 (1973; private collection, Switzerland) recalls events of his lonely suicide by graphically showing him vomiting in a sink in one panel and in another slumped on a toilet (where he was found dead). Despite Bacon's dislike of narrative interpretation, these triptychs seem to encourage a biographical reading, an approach that the curators have invited by collecting these works under the heading 'Memorial'.

While it is tempting to analyse these works solely as a sentimental and nostalgic pining for lost love - and there is undoubtedly an element of that poignantly expressed in Bacon's diary on 24 October 1972 ('George died a year today') - it must also be remembered that shortly before his death Dyer had planted drugs in Bacon's studio, leading to Bacon's arrest and trial only four months before Dyer's suicide. It is perhaps because such complex personal emotions underlie these works that Bacon, unusually, has been unable to frustrate a narrative reading of his works.

Bacon's penchant for painting in themes is well represented and there is a good selection of popes, businessmen, crouching figures and animal paintings. The decision to hang the paintings at an extremely low level (often just above the skirting boards) enables the viewer to examine the variations in Bacon's application of paint. Nowhere is this more marked than in Head II (1949; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Fig. 3), where the top half of the canvas has paint so thick that it seems impenetrable (Bacon was trying to capture the effect of rhinoceros skin) but the lower left is just raw canvas (revealing also that Bacon painted on the unprimed side of the canvas). Subtle nuances in technique and colour can be appreciated with the low hang of the series works, particularly of the Popes, where the marked differences in such compositional elements as the 'space frames', curtains or 'shuttering' and the depiction of the throne are worthy of close attention.

The one problematic aspect of the hang is the decision to break up the series paintings, particularly the crouching figures, which are displayed over several different rooms and therefore offer no chance to view them comparatively. Nevertheless, in the case of the businessmen - which are all hung in one room - interspersing them with animal paintings forces one to view them independently of each other, and subtle differences appeared that I had not noticed before. The exhibition also has a wonderful range of Bacon's important late works, particularly a room filled predominantly with triptychs from the 1960s to 1980s, including Triptych (1976; private collection), which was recently sold in London for the highest price ever paid for a post-war work of art.

The quality and range of the works on display provide an opportunity to show Bacon at his best to a new generation too young to have seen the 1985 show. I left the exhibition feeling, as one should, visually exhausted but exhilarated.

Rebecca Daniels is a researcher on Francis Bacon: The Catalogue Raisonne.  

Francis Bacon, Urbanist, at Tate Britain

Ken Livingstone, Joseph Rykwert and others discuss art and architecture.

Text by Ned Beauman | Dazed Digital | 31 October 2008

Would Francis Bacon prefer the London of today to the London he actually grew up in? That was the question posed last week at the second of two Architecture Foundation panels at Tate Britain, this time featuring architects Nigel Coates and Denise Scott Brown, critics Joe Kerr and Joseph Rykwert, and former mayor Ken Livingstone.

Londoners, argued Coates in his opening keynote, often feel a great excitement about the fact that the city decays faster than it can be rebuilt, and Bacon’s attraction to the “entropic aspects” of cities comes through clearly in his paintings. So does his attraction to cramped, crowded places – pubs, butcher shops, boxing matches and back alleys – all of which anticipate the claustrophobic spaces he put down on canvas. Also influential were the possibility of impending doom that characterised much of the 1950s, and a certain disillusionment about the concrete sterility of what was being thrown up to repair the destruction of the Blitz.

In the clean, safe, prosperous modern London, of course, all that darkness is mostly gone, but the sterility is still here, simply transfigured from concrete into glass and steel. Kerr drew a parallel between the way that, in the Thatcher era, the city became predictable and therefore lost a certain complex, inscrutable eroticism, and the way that, after the passage of the Wolfenden Act that liberalised homosexuality, gay people were no longer driven into the small, dark, weird spaces that many of them came to relish. But is it dangerous to be nostalgic about a vanished London? Yes, said Rykwert: every generation thinks that London isn’t as good as it was.

Ken Livingstone, addressing this issue, described himself as an ‘urban chauvinist’, for whom cities are all that really matter. He argued that the post-war Abercrombie plan to reduce the population of London to five and a half million would have led to a horribly dull capital, and that, although today’s London may have lost some of its looseness, it is at least full of human diversity, which Bacon would have appreciated; and the real challenge for cities like Shanghai and Mumbai is to be open to population change, as well as population growth. Livingstone admitted, however, that there is one aspect of modern London that he’s glad he didn’t grow up with: “None of us had our own flat or our own car, so thank god there was no CCTV in alleys back then or we all would have been 25-year-old virgins.”  

Bacon har en stillhet mitt i fasan

FRUSEN OBJEKTIVITET Trots skräcken och plågan hos figurerna är Francis Bacons penselskrift ömsint, delikat. Carl-Johan Malmberg har sett Tates tredje retrospektiv med den irländsk-brittiske målaren, och läst en bok som belyser det sakrala hos Bacon.

SVD Sweden, 31 Oktober 2008

Det sägs ibland att England bara haft två och en halv verkligt betydande målare: William Blake, William Turner – och så Francis Bacon (1909–1992); han räknas bara som en halv eftersom han var född på Irland.

Av 1900-talets engelska målare är Bacon hur som helst den enda som under seklet nådde utanför England, och det trots – eller kanske tack vare – att hans måleri ­redan vid debuten 1945 med triptyken Three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion, ett måleriskt bombnedslag, gick stick i stäv med de rådande abstrakta strömningarna.

Vid den tiden förstod bara några få Bacons betydelse, bland dem de tongivande kritikerna Herbert Read och Kenneth Clark, liksom ledningen för Tate Gallery. Där tog man något motvilligt emot den skräckinjagande triptyken några år efter tillkomsten, som gåva av konstnärens dåvarande älskare, en förmögen affärsman.

I höst är Bacon aktuell med sin tredje retrospektiv på Tate (de tidigare var 1962 och 1985). Det är en storslagen utställning som ger en enastående överblick över livsverket. Triptyken är givetvis central, inte bara som startpunkten för konstnärskapet. Här finns mycket av det som under de kommande ­decennierna skulle komma att känneteckna Bacon, denne envist borrande mullvad: figurernas monstrositet, det klaustrofobiska och samtidigt gränslösa rummet, den kliniska ljussättningen, den relativt tunt pålagda, glanslösa färgen, och en underligt frusen objektivitet, en stillhet mitt i fasan – kanske det som Bacon själv, apropå Picasso, skulle kalla ”the brutality of fact”.

Bacon tillhör de konstnärer som kombinerar det radikalt främmande med något man ändå tycker sig känna igen; Freud döpte denna egenskap hos så mycket stor konst till das Unheimliche, det kusliga. En av hemligheterna med Bacon är legeringen av det gengångaraktiga med det aldrig tidigare skådade. Vi har varit här förr – och vi är här för första gången.

Han sökte aldrig sin stil, han fann den tidigt, eller rättare sagt, han trädde fram som målare först när han funnit den. När han gjorde triptyken var han 35 år. I Tate-retrospektiven samsas den med ett drygt sjuttiotal andra verk, flera av dem triptyker, men denna första ter sig nu nästan intim. Bacons favoritstorlek kom senare att bli betydligt större dukar som rymde människan i helformat, dukar om 2x1,5 meter, och utställningen visar hans besatthet av det formatet.

En viss monotoni står på spel; målningarna är vid första påseende mycket lika varandra: en enstaka eller ett par figurer, manieristiskt vridna, i ett rum med gåtfulla, liksom provisoriska, kanske mer för kroppen än för ögat förnimbara avspjälkningar.

Det likartade förstärks av att samtliga målningar är glasade och de flesta dessutom i tunga guldramar. Jag har alltid trott att detta var galleriernas och samlarnas påhitt, det gör Bacons säregna, spindelvävstunna måleriska textur svår att uppfatta med mindre än att man trycker näsan mot glaset.

Men Michael Peppiatt, den främste kännaren av Bacons person och konst sedan David Sylvester dog, skriver i sin nyutkomna essäsamling Francis Bacon. Studies for a Portrait: ”Bacon ville att hans bilder skulle bestå; och det var säkert det underliggande skälet till att han lät glasa dem i allt deras överdåd och förse dem med massiva guldramar, med den råa paradoxen och gåtfullheten intakt, precis som de inneslutna mästerverken runt om i världens kyrkor och museer.”

Peppiatt skriver detta i The Sacred and the Profane, bokens viktigaste essä och tveklöst bland det bästa som skrivits om honom. Han visar hur Bacon i sin våldsamma uppfattning av det sakrala går vid sidan av den kristna mytologi han hämtat så mycket visuell inspiration från (alla dessa korsfästelser), och liksom lösgör element, smärtan, det plågade skriket, offrandet av människo­kroppen, ur berättelserna till ett slags slagkraftiga punktfenomen. Den plågade, sargade kroppen blir vardagsmänniskans. Skriet, som finns redan i triptyken från 1945, blir till existentiell urbild. Vi är födda att dö och däremellan finns skriet.

Jag vet inte om någon har kopplat ihop Bacons återkommande skri – inte minst de skrikande påvarna, hans mest kända bilder – med Jesajas 40:e kapitel där det, i den engelska bibelöversättning som Bacon läste, heter: ”The voice said, Cry… All flesh is grass.” Här finns inte bara urskriket – Gud uppmanar Jesaja att skrika ut kroppens dödlighet. Här finns också en möjlig urcell för Bacons besatthet av kroppen, köttet.

I vår gamla bibelöversättning heter det ”Allt kött är hö.”

De orden är en god sammanfattning av Bacons måleri. Han förvandlar det av våld, av lust, av båda tillsammans, eller bara av att finnas till plågade mänskliga köttet till gräsliknande penselstråk. Hans penselskrift är trots skräcken och skriken hos figurerna ömsint, delikat. Det ser man vid närgranskning.

En vakt ber mig att inte gå så nära målningarna. Jag förklarar att jag gärna skulle gå in i dem helt och hållet. Men inte i deras händelser utan i deras stoff.

Carl-Johan Malmberg

Tapped Out?

By CAROL VOGEL | THE NEW YORK TIMES | OCTOBER 29, 2008

A $60 million painting by Kazimir Malevich. A $40 million self-portrait by Francis Bacon. It hardly seems the ideal moment to be selling such pricey art. As Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury brace for their big fall auctions in New York, starting with a sale of 71 Impressionist and Modern paintings, drawings and sculptures at Sotheby’s on Monday night, anxiety is the dominant mood.

Only 10 days ago, Sotheby’s reported a loss of $15 million in guarantees — the undisclosed amount that the houses promise to sellers regardless of the outcome of a sale — from recent auctions in Hong Kong and London.

Millions of dollars of art went unsold at those September and October sales, with many works going for well below their estimates. Since then auction house officials have been busy trying to get sellers to lower their expectations. Much of the art up for auction this week and next was secured early in the summer, when the world seemed a far different place. Now, with the net worth of so many buyers plummeting, auction houses have been trying to persuade sellers to lower their reserves, that is, the undisclosed minimum price that a bidder must meet for the art to be sold.

“Prices of all assets have fallen — stocks, gold, oil, real estate — and it would be unrealistic to expect works of art to be immune to the market’s pressures,” said Marc Porter, president of Christie’s in America. “We are actively encouraging consignors to set reasonable reserves.”

Minimizing risk is the message of the moment. While Sotheby’s has said that it has provided only half the number of guarantees it did a year ago, the company still has outstanding guarantees of $285.5 million.

Unlike Sotheby’s, Christie’s is not a public company, and is not obligated to release figures, but officials there acknowledge having a similar level of risk. As for buyers, the message is a little trickier. With them, Mr. Porter said, Christie’s is making the argument that the objects they desire “might not reappear on the market next season at an even lower price.”

The big question is who will be buying this expensive art. With hedge-fund traders, Russian oligarchs and wealthy Middle Easterners having taken a hit in the financial markets, the auction houses, whistling in the dark, are hoping for a return of old money.

“Americans who fled when prices began soaring will jump back into the market but at a different price level,” said Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art. Among the standouts in the fall lineup at Sotheby’s are paintings like Edvard Munch’s Vampire (1894), priced to bring more than $35 million, and an Yves Klein wall relief estimated at more than $25 million. Christie’s is offering a 1934 portrait of Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter estimated at $18 million to $25 million and a Basquiat painting at $12 million and $16 million. “I still hold the belief that the great works will find buyers,” said Guy Bennett, of Christie’s. But at what price remains to be seen.  

No Guarantee for This One

EARLY last summer a New York collector negotiated a hefty guarantee from Christie’s in consigning his 1964 Study for Self-Portrait  by Francis Bacon for the fall auctions. In the months it took to hammer out details of the contract, economic turmoil grew so worrisome that Christie’s got cold feet and withdrew the guarantee.

The auction house persuaded the seller to offer the Bacon anyway, and it is one of the highlights of Christie’s Nov. 12 sale. Experts say that the full-length portrait, in which the artist is shown sitting on a bed, his body twisted from head to toe, should sell for around $40 million.

Christie’s is obviously hoping to capitalize on the record prices paid for Bacon’s works recently. A 1976 Bacon triptych went for $86.3 million in May at Sotheby’s in New York, and a 1975 self-portrait brought $34.4 million at Christie’s in London in June. Those were among the highest prices ever paid for the British artist, who is the subject of a current exhibition at the Tate in London that travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art  in New York in May.

Still, there is no getting around the fact that “the market has changed,” said Brett Gorvy, co-head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department.

   Architecture and Design in the Bacon Era: Texture

    Mark Cousins

     The Architecture Foundation, Tate Britain Auditorium, Wednesday 1 October 2008

I can’t remember now whether it was in the catalogue of the current exhibition of Bacon or whether on it was on one of those panels but at some point there was a quotation from Bacon saying “I suppose in the end we’re just meat” and I wanted to try and start off, as it were, some thoughts about both texture and also materiality by considering some of the problems, what we might call the aesthetic problems, of meat especially in that difficult area that we call ugliness or which other people call ugliness, I want to try and suggest this evening this is not how it’s normally portrayed and if properly handled is an extremely powerful and valuable artistic and architectural instrument.

Let me invite you first to engage in a thought experiment. You look at some ones face as we scan some ones face we look, as it were, for signs of expression, in some sense for the way in which the face is thought to be able to represent emotions or states of mind or whatever. As we do it invariably we have a fantasy that this expression does not simply belong to the surface but it has a depth and we frequently actually experience that as a depth but of course it has this peculiarity because the depth is not remotely localised.

If we say he looked sad we don’t say it looked about two centimetres deep in the sadness of it. Now nowhere I think is it more remarkable than if you add in to this picture of a face which you experience partly through the dimension of the depth of its expression then imagine suddenly in some process, the face suddenly manifests a wound and you suddenly see that underneath the infinitesimally thin layer of skin there’s blood and there’s flesh and there’s bone; normally people have a kind of visceral turning away from this experience. Now if you try to follow through this action of turning away, we might wonder: what is it that we’re turning away from?...

The appearance of the wound indicates suddenly the collapse – a collapse of what; I mean, I’m going to say representation but I don’t mean it in a representational way. It’s as if I can’t continue having a fantasy about the depth of your sadness or the extent of your pleasure; I can’t do it any longer because, as it were, it is disrupted by the appearance of a wound. Essentially unless your medically knowledgeable, what you’re seeing, and I think Bacon was correct to use it in a general sense, is what he calls meat. Let’s kind of make a formula in some sense as saying: what meat is at a kind of level of experience, is almost the collapse of representation or of signification…

This collapse of representation is I think part of what we might call the experience of ugliness, the turning away, at which point we might begin to hypothesise that this is not what I think it is, it is what I think people experience it as; an experience of the ugly in that sense is this: it is without signification it is without being a part of the a space of representation, it is stuff, it is meat… People’s experience of the ugly - again I’m not saying that’s what it is - is a defence against this moment - a moment which is too raw and is too, almost, unnerving; we might say that the popular experience of the ugly is: it’s that which is there but at the same time, is perceived as it shouldn’t be there - or sometimes it’s the same but the other way round: it’s that which is not there but should be.

In Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera there’s a wonderful moment when the scene shifter describes to the girls of the corps de ballet that he has seen the ghost in box five; he describes the ghost to the girls and he says, in a way in which logic itself can’t tolerate, but clearly we know exactly what he means, he says: and the ghost has no nose and that no nose is a horrible thing to look at. It’s something that isn’t there but should be… I want to suggest that one dimension of the achievement of Bacon is in a sense to take this problem on board directly and, in a way that it is very difficult to describe in his achievement, but has the achievement of as it were, bringing back meat into our understanding, bringing back meat into a kind of poetics, that which is always, as it were, normally excluded; I was at the exhibition on Sunday and it’s not just a question obviously of meat, it is those strange puddles of existence which you see so clearly in the three triptychs in homage to George Dyer - it is, indeed, a sublime moment…

Now in a sense all I’ve said is an attempt to say that what people describe as being ugly we should consider it a defence and if you can undo this defence, if, like Bacon, you can propel the spectator into the midst of meat and find it not only human but essentially human, then, as it were, you remove some of the defences which so often kind of disable, I don’t mind putting it bluntly, disable public taste. It is a struggle. Now if something like this is the case, that I’m more than aware that I haven’t said directly anything about architecture and texture, then one of the ways we might consider the issues this evening is to think within the scope of Bacon’s adult career what also happens within architecture to be able to do that: at the level of a certain materiality and at the level of texture, that is to say, to undermine the public defence against the ugly and actually to propel it towards something new and powerful and human not in a humanistic way but human almost in a somewhat unnerving way. Thank you very much. 

   Art in the flesh

      The Daily’s Whitney Mallett gets a taste for meat as medium and muse  

        The McGill Daily | Monday, Oct 27 | Volume 98, Issue 16

                       Francis Bacon & Meat by Francis Giacobetti 1991

                                      Francis Bacon

  CHRISTIE’S

   Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

    New York, Rockefeller Plaza  12 November 2008

     Lot 27/Sale 2048  Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992) Study for Self-Portrait  

                                            Study for Self-Portrait  1964  Francis Bacon  

Lot Description

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)
Study for Self-Portrait
titled and dated 'SELF PORTRAIT NO 1 1964' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
60 x 55 in. (152.4 x 140 cm.)
Painted in 1964.  

Estimate on request ($40 million to $60 million)  Unsold

Provenance

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, Amsterdam, 1965
Waddington Galleries, London, 1976
Mark Goodson, New York
Richard Nagy Ltd., London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Literature

L. Ficacci, Francis Bacon: 1909-1992, New York, 2003, p. 95 (illustrated in color).

Exhibited

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, July-August 1965, no. 3 (illustrated).
Hamburg, Kunsthalle; Stockholm, Moderna Museet and Dublin, Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon: Gemälde 1945-1964, January 1965-1966, n.p., no. 61 (illustrated).
Manchester, City Art Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1966-1967.
London, The Tate Gallery, Recent British Painting: Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Collection, November-December 1967, p. 48, no. 13 (illustrated in colour).
Adelaide, The Art Gallery of South Australia and Auckland City Art Gallery, Recent British Painting: Peter Stuyvesant Collection Foundation, 1970-1971, n.p., no. 11 (illustrated).
Tokyo, Le Musée National d'Art Occidental, English Portraits, October-December 1975, no. 72 (illustrated in colour; also illustrated on the cover).
Paris, Galerie de France, Peintres Anglais 1960-1980, December 1980.
New York, Pace Wildenstein, The Mark Goodson Collection: Modern Masters from the Collection of Mark Goodson, 1995.
New Haven, The Yale Center for British Art; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, January-October 1999, pp. 132-133, no. 41 (illustrated in colour).

Lot Notes

Francis Bacon's intense and probing self-portraits are among his most important works, and are without a doubt part of the canon of great self-portraits in the history of art. A modern master of the human figure, Bacon naturally chose to paint his own image; as he explained, "after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves" (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1987, p. 116). A rare example of a full-length self-portrait, Study for Self-Portrait of 1964 emblematically represents the painter's complex character painter, a tour-de-force of his indelibly original style.

When Bacon executed Study for Self-Portrait, his public recognition had recently and dramatically shifted - metamorphosing from maverick to master in the worldwide audience's eyes. Just two years prior, he reached a new zenith in his career, receiving accolades for his monumental first retrospective at the Tate in London, followed by another triumphant exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1963. A few years later, shows such as Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Masters celebrated him as one of the greatest British painters in history. The year he painted the present work, both a catalogue raisonné and a monograph by the esteemed historian John Russell critically praised his career. Such accolades seem to have fuelled deep introspection, as Bacon took stock of his relationship to painting - as a friend recalled, "I sensed that for once Francis was deeply content, possibly as satisfied with his work as he had ever been - yet overwhelmed, too, and possibly frightened" (D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, New York, 1993, p. 158). Devastating news accompanied his success at the Tate: his lover Peter Lacy, with whom he had a tortured affair, had died in Tangiers. Nevertheless, Bacon continued experimenting and pushing his painterly powers further than ever before in the wake of this mixture of professional success and personal tragedy.

Bacon depicts himself unsparingly, offering an intimate view in the vulnerable position of sitting on a bed. Bacon grasps his hands together tightly on his lap, making palpable the tension simmering within. Swirling rhythms of paint move from his head to the tip of his toe suggesting the storm of his inner psyche. His startling facial convolutions – one of his most important signatures – only amplify the painting's powerfully expressive effect. This paradox, that distorting one's physiognomy could yield deeper insight and truth, is central to Bacon's artistic enterprise. As he described in an interview published the year he painted Study for Self-Portrait, "I have deliberately tried to twist myself, but I have not gone far enough. My paintings are, if you like, a record of this distortion. Photography has covered so much: in a painting that's even worth looking at, the image must be twisted if it is to make a renewed assault upon the nervous system. That is the peculiar difficulty of figurative painting now. I attempt to re-create a particular experience with greater poignancy in the desire to live through it again with a different kind of intensity" (F. Bacon, quoted in Cambridge Opinion, 1964). Despite his customary deformations, Bacon's subjects are always surprisingly recognizable - as in his self-portrait, where his distinctive forelock of dark hair emerges in the paint's twisting complexities. Bacon scrutinized himself not only in the mirror, but also in photographs of himself. He worked from memories of these sources, building up a complex matrix of shifting perspectives.

Bacon cast himself as heir to two of the greatest painters in the history of Western art, both famed for their self-portrait series, Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Bacon admired Rembrandt's haunting self-portraits, in which the play of light across his visage offers a poignant mediation on the painter's own mortality. Bacon claimed that, "I think the self-portraits are the greatest thing Rembrandt ever did because they were formally the most extraordinary paintings. He altered painting in a way by the method by which he dealt with himself, and perhaps he felt freer to deal with himself in this totally liberal way" (F. Bacon quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, London, 2000, p. 241). By extension, one can understand how Bacon must have keenly felt free to experiment in rendering his own image. His swirls of thick impasto recall not only the heavily encrusted surface of Rembrandt's portraits, but also the canvases of Van Gogh. Like Van Gogh's obsessive return to his own image in his wide-ranging series of self-portraits, Bacon used this format to come to terms with himself throughout his career. Bacon made a number of copies after self-portraits by Van Gogh in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Self-portrait with Pipe in 1960. Indeed, Bacon's palette of high-keyed blue and green tones echoes Van Gogh's legendary coloration, just as Bacon's passages of juicy impasto share the acute expressiveness of Van Gogh's brushwork, where certain dabs of paint seem so alive as to be almost sensate. Another great master on whose legacy Bacon builds is of course Picasso. Indeed it was in 1927 at an exhibition of Picasso's work at Pierre Rosenberg's gallery in Paris that first inspired Bacon to become a painter. Picasso's biomorphic contortions of figures, especially in works from the late 1920s and early 1930s, particularly influenced Bacon. Yet Picasso never submitted his own image to such radical pictorial convolutions as Bacon, preferring instead to experiment upon his models.

Bacon's trenchant dedication to figural painting, and especially to portraiture, went against the grain of the avant-garde art world in the post-war era. Bacon continued to be fascinated by the endless expressive possibilities in depicting spatially isolated figures over the span of five decades. By the time he painted the present work in 1964, Pop art was at its apogee. Yet Bacon eschewed such meditations on the world of popular culture and mass reproduction in favour of his universe of intimate portraits, a world behind closed doors, populated for the most part with images of himself and his closest friends. Likewise, he repudiated the ability of the dominant modern form of painting, abstraction, to delve into the human condition – which he saw as his artistic goal – stating that "Man is haunted by the mystery of his existence and is therefore much more obsessed with the remaking and recording of his own image of his world than with the beautiful fun of even the best abstract art. Pop art is made for kicks. Great art gives kicks, too, but it also unlocks the valves of intuition and perception about the human situation at a deeper level" (F. Bacon, quoted in Cambridge Opinion, 1964).

Yet while Bacon's squarely emphasizes the figure, he nevertheless mastered the language of abstraction, from the virtual colour field painting that comprises the spare architectural setting for the figure, to the emphatic gestural splashes and slashes of his paint. This stems, at least in part, from the impact of a 1959 exhibition at the Tate called New American Painting, which featured the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko among others. Yet his empathetic extemporaneous brushwork – only heightened in contrast to the background's smooth passages of flat fields of paint, and raw exposed canvas that peeks out intermittently - also reveals Bacon embracing of the seductive thrills of chance. Famously, he had long greatly loved gambling (even hosting an illegal gambling parlour in his own home), particularly roulette. By the time he painted the present work in 1964, he embraced in his paintings both elements of chance and an almost violent abandon to the action of painting. "I do," Bacon explained, "work very much more by chance now than I did when I was young. For instance, I throw an awful lot of paint onto things, and I don't know what is going to happen to it. I throw it with my hand. I just squeeze it into my hand and throw it on. I can't by my will push it further. I can only hope that the throwing of paint onto the already-made or half-made image will either re-form the image or that I will be able to manipulate this further into – anyway, for me – a greater intensity" (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, Brutality of Fact, p. 90). The spray of black paint behind his head combines painterly abandon and aggression, made all the more potent as it radiates from the head, suggesting either psychic implosion or outright violence. In the present work the dark, ambiguous geometric form that frames the painter's head. As Bacon often favored painting smaller-scale self-portraits that featured his face isolated against a dark background, this passage of the painting can be seen as a mise-en-scène of one such work.

The present work was the sole self-portrait in Bacon's 1965 solo exhibition in London at the Marlborough gallery, part of a group of nine exceptionally strong works, including Crucifixion of 1965 (now in the collection of Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Munich). The exhibition was timed to coincide with the Giacometti retrospective at the Tate. Giacometti and Bacon had struck up a friendship, and Giacometti even left an opening reception for his own show to visit Bacon's exhibition. Bacon and Giacometti were firmly established as two of the era's most important artists, capturing the despair of postwar existence by depicting isolated humanity. Bacon above all admired Giacometti's drawings, yet he was also prompted to consider creating sculpture due to his impact, an idea that, although soon abandoned, finds resonance in the emphatically sculptural quality of his head in the present self-portrait as well as other works.

Bacon titled this, and other finished works, "studies," to emphasize the fact that although the works were complete in themselves, they are part of an open-ended and ceaseless meditation on his subjects, and existence itself. Study for Self-portrait conveys in the most visceral way the artist's own subjectivity, and manages to be both sensual and terrifying, lushly painted but also underscored by a sense of violence. Above all, it truly succeeds in Bacon's avowed goal in portraiture: "The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person" (F. Bacon, quoted in D. Sylvester, Looking Back, p. 98).  

Exceptional Work by Francis Bacon Leads Christie's New York Post-War & Contemporary Art Sale

Art Daily - The First Art Newspaper on the Net, Sunday, October 26, 2008

                                               Detail from Francis Bacon’s Study for Self-Portrait, 1964

NEW YORK, NY.– Christie's is pleased to announce the sale of the Francis Bacon’s Study for Self Portrait, 1964, (estimate on request) in the New York Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 12 November 2008. A rare example of a full length self-portrait, this work is truly a consummate representation of the artist’s complex character, as well as a tour-de-force of his indelibly original style of painting.

According to Christie’s International Co-Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Brett Gorvy, “This crucial work by Francis Bacon is bound to attract international interest in the November Evening Sale. Study for Self-Portrait, is a rare and outstanding apogee in Bacon’s creative output.”

Study for Self Portrait is triumph of Bacon’s unapologetic metamorphosing of the human form. Grasping his hands while sitting on a bed, the subject is twisted from head to toe. The work affords the viewer a visceral awareness of the subjectivity within the artist, managing to achieve a sentiment that is both sensual and unsettling, lushly painted but underscored with a sense of violence. Study for Self-Portrait draws upon Rembrandt’s renowned self-portraits in its introspective depiction of Bacon’s inner struggle. Bacon depicts himself with a distorted twisting face so as to illustrate the complex matrix of perspectives that lie within, achieving a haunting effect that not only presents his physical person, but in fact reveals every pulsation existing within his being.

Bacon executed the present work in one of the most significant years of his career and life, experiencing the enormous satisfaction of critical acclamation in both a catalogue raisonné and a monograph by John Russell, and the unbearable anguish of the death of his lover, Peter Lacy. However, it was in this wake of professional success and personal tragedy that Bacon transitioned from a maverick to a master, a triumph which is evident within Study for Self-Portrait.

Today, Bacon’s self portraits are widely regarded as one of his most important bodies of work, and unquestionably part of the canon of great self-portraits in the history of art. This assessment became apparent last spring based on the tremendous demand for such works at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sales when the intimate-scaled works Three Studies for Self-Portrait, 1976 realized $28,041,000/£14,380,000/€18,090,968 in New York, and Three Studies for Self-Portrait, 1975 led the June sale in London with £17,289,250/$34,457,475/€21,767,166.

ISABEL AND OTHER INTIMATE STRANGERS

Portraits by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon

Gagosian Gallery, November 4 - December 13, 200

980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10075 USA

Tel 212.744.2313 Fax 212.710.3825  Tue-Sat 10-6

                                              Francis Bacon by Jorge Lewinsk                                                                           Giacometti by Ernst Scheidegger

"To make a head really lifelike is impossible, and the more you struggle to make it lifelike the less like life it becomes."
 – Alberto Giacometti

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. This exhibition brings together important loans and rarely seen works from international museums and private collections, including the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, The Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Nasher Collection, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Sainsbury Collection. It explores the enduring fascination of Giacometti and Bacon with the existential challenges and ineffable mysteries of the human figure and psyche, explored throughout their careers in the portraits, or likenesses, that they produced of close friends and family.

One such subject was the model and muse Isabel Rawsthorne, a compelling figure of consuming vitality and recklessness. While Rawsthorne generally made an instant and overwhelming physical impression on people, over time her effect on Giacometti produced profound conflictual responses in him. Beyond the clearly identified bronze busts of her such as Tete d'Isabel I and II (1936 and 1937-38 respectively), his female standing figures, from Femme qui marche (1932-36) to the diminutive pedestal sculptures and the Amazonian Grandes Figures, are said to have been inspired by his vision of her standing some distance away from him on a street one night, distant and imperious. Isabel's relationship with Francis Bacon was quite different, that of kindred spirit and drinking companion rather than muse, yet her distinctive presence is one that haunts his work, like Giacometti before him. One of Bacon's finest pictures, Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967), is based on a fleeting memory of her, while in the high-keyed, viscerally rendered triptychs Three Studies for a head of Isabel Rawsthorne (1965 and 1965), Bacon's perennial struggle with experience and its depiction plays itself out in what he described as "shifting sequences where one picture reflects on the other continuously."

              Bacon's 1954 David Sylvester Walking flanked by Giocametti's Striding Man and a Head

Giacometti's most enduring and remarkable relationship was with his younger brother Diego, the subject of his first sculpture, Testa di Diego, completed when he was just thirteen years old. Companion, consultant, and studio assistant, Diego became his brother's favourite model and male archetype. Giacometti's wife Annette, the subject of hundreds of paintings and sculptures, and his professional model and mistress Caroline would become similarly pervasive referents, inspiring more subjective variations on the feminine form, from the tiny yet shapely bronze Figurines (c. 1954-56) and seated sculptures (Femme Assise, 1956) to paintings such as Annette (1952) and Caroline dans sa robe rouge, 1965.

During the 1960s, Bacon, who had made very few named portraits in the first half of his career, concentrated increasingly on himself and a handful of close friends as his subjects - from his boyfriend, George Dyer, to Lucien Freud, Muriel Belcher (who ran The Colony Room, Bacon's favourite drinking club), and Henrietta Moraes. Bacon said that he thought of friendship as "two people pulling each other to bits" and, in his unsettling portraits, he vivisected his friends in no uncertain manner.

Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers will be accompanied by a full colour publication with essays by Véronique Wiesinger, director of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris who is also responsible for the catalogue raisonné of Alberto Giacometti; and Martin Harrison, director of the project for the catalogue raisonné of the work of Francis Bacon. The Fondation Alberto and Annette Giacometti has overseen the selection of Giacometti works for this exhibition.

The exhibition inaugurates Gagosian's fourth floor galleries at 980 Madison Avenue. It also coincides with the first major survey of Alberto Giacometti's work in Russia, opening at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow on September 16, and Tate Britain's historic exhibition marking Francis Bacon's centenary (September 8, 2008 – January 4, 2009)

Art market boom slows, but Lucian Freud's Francis Bacon makes 'astronomical' £5.4m

Only 58% of lots were sold at Sotheby's, and it's a similar story at Christie's

CHARLOTTE HIGGINS | CHIEF ARTS WRITER | THE GUARDIAN | TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2008

The contemporary art-market boom, which has brought wealth to auction houses and some artists over the past five years, is coming gently and quietly to an end.

Observers have been waiting for these few days where auction houses hold their high-profile contemporary art sales to take the temperature of the market. And, if it has not plummeted, then it is, finally, showing a dip.

Yesterday the day sale of contemporary art at Sotheby's saw only 58.6% of its lots sold. The auction raised £7.1m, well short of its pre-sale estimate of £10.9m to £15.3m. The day sales tend to auction work by younger, less established artists - it is the evening sales where the big guns come out, and the well-groomed clientele, not to mention the staff, are dressed as if for a night at the opera. But even there, while the numbers are big, they are on the slide. Sotheby's big contemporary and modern art evening sale made £22.8m – well short of its estimate of £30.6m. Fifteen of the 62 lots failed to sell. Two had been withdrawn from the auction before it began. It was a far cry from the feeding frenzy of 2007, when record after record came crashing down in the salerooms.

The auctioneer, the suave, assured Oliver Barker, conducted the sale as if there was nothing wrong: but when the star lot of the evening came up – a set of 10 skull paintings by Andy Warhol – a frisson went through the room as the bidding paused, stagnated and finally stuck altogether at £3.5m.

The final price, once the so-called buyer's premium was added, was £4.35m; the estimate had been £5m to £7m. The work sold, none the less – Sotheby's admitted having renegotiated lower reserve prices with the sellers (known as consigners). "We did it on a lot-by-lot basis," said Barker after the sale. "Most people gave us flexibility." He called the bidding on the sale "very rational and very considered".

Christie's Sunday evening sale told a similar story. The auction made a total of £31.97m, but of the 47 lots only 26 sold. Serious works of art – such as a Francis Bacon portrait of Henrietta Moraes, and Jean-Michel Basquiat's Desmond – failed to reach their reserves.

The star work of the night was Lucian Freud's portrait of Francis Bacon. It sold for £5.4m – inside its estimate of £5m to £7m – though "still astronomical money", according to Sarah Thornton, an art market observer.

After the sale the Christie's bosses put on a brave face. Chief executive Ed Dolman said: "The sale wasn't as successful as last season's [2007's equivalent made a record-breaking £33.9m] and we are perhaps seeing a correction from the past few seasons. But there is significant liquidity and a surprising amount of activity when a lot of people thought there would be no activity at all. The real message is one of cautious optimism. The turbulence hasn't hit our market as much as it has in other areas. There has been a surprising amount of cash moving round the market in the past few days, especially in terms of Chinese and Middle Eastern art. This gives us a belief that the new buyers who have emerged are here, and here to stay."

The new buyers propping up the market include super-wealthy Russian and Qatari collectors, relatively insulated from the turbulence caused by the banking crisis. "When the sub-prime problems kicked in last summer I noticed fewer bidders at auctions – but the Qataris and people like Roman Abramovich had joined the game," said Thornton, who believes that the art market peaked in the summer of last year. "People were shocked when it was revealed that Abramovich had bought the Bacons [two works, a portrait and a triptych, collectively worth £60m] earlier this year. But I do feel that May 2007 was the last time that eyes were really popping at prices."

Amy Cappellazzo, of Christie's, was upbeat. "I think this was a staggering result given the other financial markets. It's pretty amazing that people still want to turn up on a Sunday and kick out a million bucks." The key, she said, was that art gives the investor a tangible object. "If you bought something, you bought something real."

Portrait of Bacon sells for £5.4m but painting by Bacon fails to sell

CONOR LALLY  |THE IRISH TIMES | MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2008

                   Lucien Freud's unfinished portrait of Francis Bacon

AN UNFINISHED portrait of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud, one of only two he ever painted of his friend and the only one whose whereabouts is known, sold for £5.4 million pounds (€6.96 million) in London yesterday.

However, a Francis Bacon painting which was expected to fetch up €10 million at Christie's in London was one of a number of works which failed to sell.

The Portrait of Henrietta Moraes had a presale low estimate of £5.5 million (€7.08 million).

Christie's International failed to sell 45 per cent of works on sale because of the depressed international art market. "Obviously we need to adjust our prices," said Ed Dolman, Christie's chief executive officer. "There isn't too much confidence out there."

The unsold Bacon work was bought by Guinness heir Garech Browne for his home at Luggala, Co Wicklow in 1970. At one stage it was the only Bacon painting in Ireland, despite the artist being born in Dublin. Browne, a 69-year-old who founded Claddagh Records, was a friend of Bacon and Moraes. He has long been a patron of the arts.

Moraes was a famous 1960s model and socialite who was one of Bacon's favourite subjects. The painting is one of his first portraits of her. It is signed on the back by Moraes: "For the first time a vision of me by my friend Francis Bacon, Henrietta Moraes. "Mr Browne decided to sell the painting because it was too valuable to insure and keep at his estate.

He lent the painting to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin. He also secured the Francis Bacon studio for the gallery through his friendship with Bacon's former lover John Edwards.

© 2008 The Irish Times

Freud's intimate portrait of his friend Bacon sold for £5.4m

By ARIFA AKBAR  |  ARTS CORRESPONDENT  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  MONDAY, 20 OCTOBER, 2008

                Lucian Freud's portrait of Bacon

A rarely seen oil portrait of the artist Francis Bacon, painted by his friend Lucian Freud, has been sold for £5.4m. The work, which offers an intimate glimpse into the collaborative friendship of two giants of post-war art, is one of only two oil portraits of Bacon painted by Freud and the last remaining: the second was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin in 1988.

The portrait, estimated to sell for between £5m to £7m at Christie's auction house in London, was painted in 1956 and shows the artist with a downward gaze. Bacon, who sat knee-to-knee with Freud while he worked on the painting, is said to have "grumbled but sat consistently" during the first six months of sitting, according to Christie's. It is thought Bacon left suddenly, most likely to pursue his lover, Peter Lacy, in Tangiers.

Although it remained unfinished, art critics agree it offers a snapshot into the working methods of the younger artist at a critical point of his development; Freud had begun to work in a more expansive way, using thicker brushstrokes, liberating the paint and creating a more worked complexion, more seasoned and full of life.

The portrait was part of Christie's sale of post-war and contemporary art. The auction may come to mark a turning point in the fortunes of the art market, which has until now defied the economic downturn. Of 47 lots, only 26 were sold and the sale made £32m, against pre-auction estimates of £57m to £75m.

By contrast, the record for a painting by Freud was set at Christie's in May, with his naked, large-scale work, Benefit Supervisor Sleeping, selling for £17.3m. The record for a Bacon work stands at £43m, for Triptych, created in 1976.

The Bacon portrait sold yesterday was acquired in 1972 by a private collector from a London gallery and had remained in the same hands since.

Graham Sutherland, a mutual friend and artist, introduced Freud to Bacon in 1945, inviting them to his house. They formed a close friendship and saw much of one another in the following years.

Bacon had a great influence on the younger Freud and is often credited with liberating his style and fuelling his desire to depict human life.

In the early 1950s, the artists sat for each other; Bacon's first portrait of Freud came in 1951, and many others followed. Freud painted Bacon just twice.

Growing signs of art slump as Freud's portrait of Bacon makes only £5.4m

Munch, Bacon and Warhol at Sotheby's Show

Marina Kamenev, The Moscow Times, Issue 4011, 16 October 2008

There was little evidence of the financial crisis inside the new branch of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, at Gogolevsky Bulvar, where Sotheby's preview of its upcoming November auctions is exhibited.

"Some of you may have seen or read that we have economic trouble in the world. But I can assure that we are here to stay. We love Russia, and we will come here in good times and not so good times," said Lord Mark Poltimore, chairman of Sotheby's Russia. "One thing I can assure you is that good art correctly priced will always make good prices."

Inside are 50 works, most from the 20th century, from artists including Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, altogether valued at $200 to $300 million. The works will be sold at auctions in New York in November.

In the last two years, Russia's buyers have helped Sotheby's break world records for art sold at auction. Earlier this year, Francis Bacon's painting Triptych, 1976 was bought by Roman Abramovich for $86 million. Sotheby's is predicting that Russia's art market will continue to blossom. "We are not just being optimistic, we are certain of our success," said Mikhail Kamensky, the general director of Sotheby's in Russia and the C.I.S.

Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch's painting Love and Pain is a rare find, as most of Munch's works are already housed in museums in Scandinavia. The painting of a pale red-headed woman leaning over and passionately clutching a man on her lap is expected to sell for $30 to $40 million.

The auction will also offer documents belonging to the first cosmonaut, Yury Gagarin. One of them is the account of a manned space flight performed by the Soviet spaceship Vostok on April 12, 1961. The documents were previously owned by businessman Ross Perot, but he is selling the letters and diaries to support a fund for space research.

Kamensky said Gagarin's words before his space mission encapsulated the feeling at Sotheby's. "I feel completely ready for the upcoming flight, my health is good, and I don't doubt the success of this flight."

Sotheby's top lots from the main New York autumn auctions runs to Sun. at The State Museum of Modern Art of Russian Academy of Arts, located at 10 Gogolevsky Bulvar, M. Kropotkinskaya.

Francis Bacon painting by Lucian Freud expected to fetch £7m at Christie's auction

By Stephen Adams, Arts Correspondent, The Daily Telegraph, Tuesday 14, October, 2008

Francis Bacon by Lucien Freud. The painting is expected to raise £7 million at auction

A portrait of the painter Francis Bacon by his friend and colleague Lucian Freud is expected to sell for up to £7 million at auction this week even though it was never finished.

Bacon abandoned sitting for Freud before he could complete the study, which was undertaken over three months in 1956-7. Bacon, who died in 1992, is said to have "grumbled but sat consistently".

It is only one of two oil paintings that Freud ever undertook of Bacon, despite a friendship that lasted for decades.

The other, which Freud painted in 1952, was stolen from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1988 while on loan from the Tate. It has never been found.

Christie's put the picture on display on Tuesday, ahead of its auction on Sunday evening.

Pilar Ordovas, head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie's London, said: "This incredibly rare painting is one of the highlights of a week in which the international art world will turn their attention to London, and in which we will offer an exciting selection of post-war and contemporary art at Christie's."

The Frieze Art Fair starts on Thursday, while Christie's rival Sotheby's is also holding two major auctions over the next week.

Works by both Freud and Bacon, both British artists, have broken auction records this year. Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, of an overweight JobCentre worker asleep on a sofa, sold for $33.6 million (£19.1 million) in New York in May, a record for a living artist.

Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich bought a triptych by Bacon the same month for $86 million (£48.9 million), a record for a piece of contemporary art at auction.