THE CECIL BEATON DIARIES

SIR CECIL BEATON, photograph, designer for the stage and films, and friend of the famous, has added a fifth volume to his Diaries, covering the period 1955 to 1963 and entitled “The Restless Years”. In this the fret of two extracts he writes of three famous artists, the painters Augustus John and Francis Bacon and the sculptor Henry Moore, and tells the stories, at once sad and uproarious, of two portraits of the author which promised everything and came in the end to nothing.

February, 1960

Bébé Bérard did a remarkably fine portrait of me and I think of it as my definitive likeness. It is as I would like always to be. Alas, 20 years have passed since then.

It would be pointless to sit to the usual portrait-painter. But I did like the idea of Francis Bacon trying his hand at me. He had recently done an interesting “portrait” of Sainsbury, the art collector. The sittings would doubtless be highly enjoyable, for Francis is one of the most interesting, refreshing and utterly beguiling people. He is wise and effervescent and an inspired conversationalist.

Francis began the painting of me two years ago. He had just returned from a winter in Tangier where he had been too harassed and ill to paint. But he was then recovered and full of the joy of London life. Be was bursting with health and vitality, in his extraordinarily messy, modest drawing room studio in a most unlikely block of scarlet brick flats in Overstrand Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea. He showed me an enormous black paint covered canvas, and said he hoped I wouldn’t be alarmed by the size of it but that the portrait would be cut down, if necessary, when he had finished it. Francis started to work with great zest, excitedly running backwards and forwards to the canvas with gazelle springing leaps — much toe-bouncing. He said how enthusiastic he was at the prospect of the portrait, which he said would show me with my face in tones of pink and white. He did not seem interested in my keeping still . . .

 I went to America, came back, saw Francis once or twice, and he came to dinner, but no mention of the picture from me or from him. Eventually, an opportunity presented itself and I asked Francis if he’d hate to go on with the painting of me. 

Francis, bubbling with amusement, smiled and with his usual marvellous manners said nothing would give him greater pleasure than to finish the picture that he’d long had of me in his mind. An enormous black canvas, the only one with its face not turned to the wall, depicted a monster cripple—a nude figure, with no apparent head, but with four legs. It was painted with brushes that had been of allowed to slide around in the manner children are taught not to employ. 

The forms were so gauche that when Francis pointed to the picture and said it was a failure, I was somewhat in agreement. But Francis explained that he wanted more than anything else to be able to do something of that same cripple who had inspired Muybridge, that great photographer at the end of the last century. 

Francis showed me a huge canvas covered with emerald green dye-paint. Again he said my picture wouldn’t be as large as that when finished, but that all the works for his next exhibition were going to be on these green backgrounds. I had imagined myself as a sort of Sainsbury floating in, stygian gloom and wondered what an emerald green picture would look like in any of my existing rooms.

I sat on a kitchen chair placed so, and according to instructions turned my head a bit this way. “No—further! That’s it.” Francis started to work with energy, but he seemed to took harassed, not; at all happy . . .

Occasionally Francis would sit down on an old chair from which the entrails were hanging and which had been temporarily covered with a few French magazines and newspapers. His pose reminded me of a portrait of Degas. He curved his head sideways and looked at his canvas with a beautiful expression in his eyes. His plump, marble-like hands were covered with blue-green paint. He said he thought that painting portraits was the most interesting thing he could ever hope to do: “If only I can do them! The important thing is to put a person down as he appears to your mind’s eye. The person must be there so that you can check up on reality — but not be led by it, not be its slave. To get the essence without being positive about the factual shapes — that’s the difficulty. It’s so difficult that it’s almost impossible! But that’s what I’m trying to do. I think I’m closer to it than I ever have been before.”

With Francis the air is mountain fresh: one feels invigorated. I used to go to his studio before taking the train for Salisbury. As the weather was particularly cold, dark and foul, I would be dressed for the country in a very warm, brown suit. Francis was all radiance, even if he said he had been appallingly drunk on vodka the night before. He would expatiate on those evenings: though he didn’t really remember much about them, but he’d left an American who had ‘passed out’ before dinner, gone on to Soho, turned up at his usual ‘Club’ and didn’t know where the rest of the night had gone.

One morning I asked Francis: “Does it matter my being in a different suit?”

“No — that’s a lovely colour. But I want you to put your hands up on this extra chair like this. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter.”

During the morning I purposely moved the position of my hands several times to see if Francis would ask me not to change their position. Once he said: “The hands are splendid like that.’ But never again did he ask me to go back to the same pose. Neither did he seem to mind if I moved my head. “But that’s what’s so awful about having to sit to Lucian,’ said Francis. “He makes you sit by the hour without moving an eyelash, and I find sitting very unnerving, exhausting work.”

Francis had, during his drunken haze last night, caught a glimpse of Lucian Freud. Lucian had returned from Sweden where he had gone to paint Ingmar Bergman for a cover of Time, but there had been too many interruptions for Lucian to produce any result, and he now hated Time magazine, Bergman and Sweden. We then talked of Lucian’s latest painting — how he seemed, in an effort to paint quicker, to have lost some of his intensity. Lucian was intelligent enough to know that his painting up to now was not a complete expression of himself. He now found himself in the awful predicament of having to try and discover himself again. That, for someone of Lucian’s vanity, was a difficult thing to do.

We discussed Lucian’s intellectual brilliance, his complete independence and strength as a man who knew exactly what he wanted out of life. But we admitted that Lucian was no angel. After a row, his wife Caroline had said: “If you want to know what Lucian is like, just see him drive.” Mercifully, Lucian has now been forbidden to drive, for he is reckless at the wheel.

I admitted I found it difficult to be loyal to Lucian all the time. I could not understand the mentality of gamblers, and it worried me that Lucien should lose so much so readily.

Francis said the Bérard portrait of me was a great likeness. (In many ways the two painters resemble one another: both ignoring convention, and living in their own purity — uncontaminated by the asphyxiating cocoon of respectability.) He considered people didn’t appreciate Bérard nearly highly enough as a painter at this time. One day they would, since he was definitely one of the great. His use of paint was never thin in quality even if it was spread lightly over the canvas: maybe he had learnt that from Vuillard. How lovely some of the late Vuillards were! And painted with quite a lot of oil. At one time Vuillard and Bonnard were almost indistinguishable, but they went on in their separate ways getting better and better. From the piles of rubbish on the floor Francis extracted a colour reproduction of a Bonnard he had cut out of Paris Match and stuck onto a piece of cardboard. The colours were vivid: oranges, reds, red-browns, brilliant blues, enough colours for three pictures. “I don’t know what time of day it represents, or is it night?” With outstretched arms, Francis enjoyed the picture to its fullest. “You see, people don’t appreciate paint today; that’s why nobody sees how absolutely marvellous Rembrandt is.”

Suddenly he said: “I’m very pleased with this portrait. I think it’s going to be all right: one of the best things I’ve done. Next time you’re here, I’ll show it to you because it doesn’t need much more work on it. When they go well, they go very quickly. ... ”

Francis opened the door, smiled and said: “The portrait’s finished! I want you to sit in that chair over there and look at it.’ I walked towards Francis’s degutted chair in the corner, not glancing at the canvas on the way. I turned round square and sat to get the full effect. It was as well that I was sitting, otherwise I might have fallen backwards. In front of me was an enormous, coloured strip-cartoon of a completely bald, dreadfully aged — nay senile — businessman. The face was hardly recognisable as a face for it was disintegrating before your eyes, suffering from a severe case of elephantiasis: a swollen mass of raw meat and fatty tissues. The nose spread in many directions like a polyps but sagged finally over one cheek. The mouth looked like a painful boil about to burst.

He wore a very sketchily dabbed-in suit of lavender blue. The hands were clasped and consisted of emerald green scratches that resembled claws. The dry painting of the body and hands was completely different from that of the wet, soggy head. The white background was thickly painted with a house painter’s brush. It was dragged round the outer surfaces without any intention of cleaning up the shapes. The head and shoulders were outlined in a streaky wet slime.

Francis expected that I would be shocked. He was a little disconcerted. He said it gave him a certain pain to show it to me, but if I didn’t like it I needn’t buy it. The Marlborough Gallery would want it. I stammered: “Well — I can’t say what I think of it. It’s so utterly different from anything of yours I’ve ever seen!” To me the picture was of an unusual violence. The brushwork, the textures, the draughtsmanship were against all the known rules. Francis suddenly exclaimed: “Oh, I unearthed these beautiful Egyptian figures for you to see. Look, here they are! How beautiful they are! They’re only three feet tall, but the way the faces are painted ...” But what did that signify now to me?

Francis could not have behaved more typically gallantly and charmingly about the fee d’amis for the painting. “Take the picture, and if you don’t like it, or your friends object, send it back in time for it to be sold in the Marlborough show.”

I was baffled. Could I ever hang the canvas in any place that I live in? The harshness and ugliness would surely give me a ‘turn for the worse’ each time I saw it. But I’d gone to Francis for a painting because I genuinely considered him a unique painter. If this was what he felt like doing at this particular moment I must respect it, even if I could not understand or appreciate it.

If the Marlborough Gallery would give him so much more for it than he had asked me, then perhaps it would be an investment. I asked him if he’d mind if after I bought it and found I didn’t want to keep it, I could sell it again? “Of course! It’s yours to do what you want with.”  I took a gulp and said I would like to have it.

I came away crushed, staggered, and feeling quite a great sense of loss. The sittings had been so harmonious; we had seemed to see eye to eye. I had hoped that many of Francis’ theories about life, art and beauty were going to be incorporated in the portrait.

No sooner had I written the above than the telephone bell rang from London. It was Francis. In an ecstatic voice he said: “This is Francis, and I’ve just destroyed your portrait.” “But why? You said you liked it? You thought it such a good work, and that’s all that matters!”

“No — I don’t like my friends to have something of mine they don’t like. And I often destroy my work in any case; in fact, I’ve destroyed most of the pictures for the Marlborough. Only I just wanted to let you know so that you needn’t pay me.”

It seemed little to Francis to waste all that work. He seemed jubilant at not getting paid, at not finishing a picture. He said that perhaps one day he’d start again, or do one from memory: “They often turn out best,” he said.

I don’t really know what is at the back of Francis’ mind. I am sorry that the canvas is destroyed and that there is no visible result from all those delightful, interesting and rare mornings.

I bold Augustus John that Francis Bacon hard painted me looking like a piece of raw offal against an emerald green background. “You deserve it for sitting to him.” Augustus said; and, then, with infinite sarcasm: “These idiosyncrasies are the prerogative of genius.”

                    The young Francis Bacon by Beaton:  “Wise . . . inspired conversationalist. ”

The Velazquez Hippopotamus

FRANCIS BACON. By Lorenzo Trucchi.

Translated from the Italian by John Shepley.

280 pages. Illustrated. Harry N. Abrams. $37.50.

By ANATOLE BROYARD  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  THURSDAY, AUGUST 26, 1976

“… the only possibility of renewal lies in opening your eyes and seeing the present-day disaster, a disaster which can’t be understood but which must be permitted to come in because it is the truth.” The quotation is from Samuel Beckett, but it is used by Lorenza Trucchi to characterize the painter Francis Bacon, Like so many of Miss Trucchi’s remarks in “Francis Bacon,” it is both melodramatic and apt. As she observes of Mr. Bacon in another place, “the human body has perhaps never said more, never expressed events more bleak, more tragic or pathetic, by its mere but violent presence.”

While many classical paintings distorted the human body in the pursuit of grace and beauty, just as many modern painters seem to distort it in the pursuit of anguish and ugliness. Anguish and ugliness are the “honesty” of modern art, an image of man in which his “authenticity” is valued above his vanity. One suspects that the truth—the psychological as well as the physical truth—lies somewhere between. Just as there are people whose ugliness might furnish Ivan Albright or George Grosz with the particular sort of inspiration they need, or those who could model for the anguish of Egon Schiele or some of Picasso’s figures, there are also those who might have stepped out of the idealized canvases of Raphael, Ingres, Pontormo or El Greco.

‘Animal Primitiveness’

Miss Trucchi, who is a professor of art history, will not concede, however, that Mr. Bacon has renounced all hope of human beauty in his portraits. She speaks of the “ravaged” or “regenerated” beauty of his people. Quoting Edmund Husserl, she claims that they express “knowledge diverted from consciousness.” “It sometimes seems,” she rationalizes, “that Bacon’s man reverts readily to a sort of animal primitiveness in revenge, so to speak, for millennia of metaphysical experiences that have often been incapable of allaying his gnostic and ontological fears.” “For Bacon,” she argues, “beauty is the expression of life in progress, formed by life, itself and carried to the highest pitch of enhancement when life bears down most intensely.” As she says of the painter himself, she too is more than willing to reach, in her word-painting, toward “discovery and risk.”

“Truth almost always leads to scandal, knowledge to wisdom. It is in man, within his instincts, within his flesh; that Bacon creates his own scandal of truth.” Scandal is a good word for Mr. Bacon’s figures. Never has humanity been so wrung out like a dishcloth, caught so flagrantly in making faces at itself. The bodies of many of Mr. Bacon’s people look as if they were the victims of a violent sexual crime—but then that is not a bad description of the human predicament.

Mr. Bacon declared that he wanted “to paint like Velazquez but with the texture of a hippopotamus skin.” Our skins have thickened since Velazquez’s time. One of Mr. Bacon’s favorite subjects is crucifixion. “I haven’t found another subject so far,” he explains, “that has been as satisfactory for covering certain areas of certain feeling and behavior.” “If I go into a butcher’s shop,” he adds, “I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.” This quality of surprise appears in his portraits, and helps to make them some of the most remarkable images in modern art. In an old French film whose title does not come to mind, a young man debates whether his personal style expresses a “poetic brutality” or a “brutal poetry.” One might ask the same question of the works in “Francis Bacon.”

Mechanism vs. Vitalism

Sometimes Miss Trucchi allows herself such flights that the reader feels that he has only an insecure grasp on a hangglider. Here is an example: “moving beyond the élan vital of Bergson, Bacon eliminates the contradiction between mechanism and vitalism by opting for a total psychophysical unity.” Here is another: “It follows that now the diagnosis is more categorical, ruthlessly applied to figures and the few objects and creating the feeling of a gelid and spectacular imperiousness. Bacon indeed achieves in his recent works a kind of epic, inverted but liberating. The era of great events and great figures is over, but at the center of his pictures man yet remains—nonhistorical and instinctive.”

It is not necessary, however, to take Miss Trucchi’s word for Bacon, for the book is particularly rich in large reproductions, many of them in colour and some in three-page foldouts. Here is Mr. Bacon for all to see, and while some of his heads resemble, with an uncomfortably literal closeness, people with glandular diseases, there are others that seem to go beyond Picasso’s “Guernica” or any other modern painting, for that matter, in capturing the dishevelment of the human condition as it is fashionable to see it now. Miss Trucchi speaks of Husserl’s “being there” as the essence of the human situation, and nobody is so drastically “there” as one of Mr. Bacon’s men or women in a bed. His beds are slaughterhouses, or crucifixions, or both. The body’s stark capacity, for exposing our vulnerability has never before with such force.

It is difficult to say what Mr. Bacon’s people are suffering. Miss Trucchi has some enlightening and some inscrutable theories about this, but then, as Beckett suggested, human suffering may be inscrutable. After the philosophizing, there is still the fact of it. If you want to see this fact, if you dare, here it is, in all its rainbow colours in “Francis Bacon.”

 Bacon makes a modest move

THE ART OF PESSIMISM

FRANCIS BACON    Lorenza Trucchi (Thames & Hudson, £16)

DAVID HOCKNEY  |  BOOKS  |  GAY NEWS  |  NUMBER 101  |  30 OCTOBER 18 — NOVEMBER 1976  

ART

Agony and the Artist

EDWARD BEHR | CARTER S. WISEMAN | PATRICIA W. MOONEY | NEWSWEEK | 24 JANUARY 1977

For weeks the Parisian art world has been gearing up for the great day. French Minister of Culture Francoise Giroud will be there in company with other prominent government officials. So will the cream of le tout Paris and a legion of Europe’s top art critics. (One group of Italian critics and gallery owners plans to arrive in ii chartered jet.) To make sure things don’t get out of hand, the section of the narrow rue. des Beaux . Arts that runs in front of the Galerie Claude Bernard may well have to be closed to traffic an understandable precaution in view of the fact that the staff of the fashionable gallery is braced for, an onslaught of as many as 5,000 people within a matter of a few hours.

For any living painter to be the object of this kind of hub-bub is unusual. What will make this particular hubbub all the more remarkable is the fact that the occasion for it will be the opening this week of a six week showing of a selection of recent works by English artist Francis Bacon a man whose painting critics have variously described as “ nightmarish,” “grotesque” and “sadistic.”

And not without reason. One of Francis Bacon’s favorite themes is a human face – often his own caught as if at the instant of a nuclear holocaust. Another is a disembodied mouth, teeth bared in a scream. A third recurrent subject is a contorted nude figure retching into a bathroom sink in one version, nailed to a cot by a hypodermic syringe in another. Whatever the theme, the mood is one of stark isolation and the impact is always disturbing.

HIGH PRICED. Bacon’s grisly visions have outraged scores of critics and made devoted disciples of many others. And the furious controversy that has swirled around him and his paintings has helped make Bacon one of the world’s highest priced and most courted artists. One work by Bacon that sold in 1953 for a mere $85 is now valued at $171,000, and among the paintings on display in the Claude Bernard show will be a massive three panel work priced at $500,000. (A painting by jasper Johns that sold for $240,000 in 1973 holds the price record at Sotheby Parke Bernet for a living American artist.) When New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a three month show of Bacon’s work two years ago, nearly 200,000 people flocked to see it.

Bacon’s road to such international renown and financial success has been neither short nor straight. Although his appearance is that of a man in his early 50s, he was born 67 years ago, the son of an English trainer of race horses in Dublin. (Some biographers have said that Bacon is a collateral relative of the Elizabethan philosopher Sir Francis, but the painter himself has never bothered to verify the claim.) By the age of 16, Bacon had become a wanderer: he spent most of his youth in Paris and Berlin, dabbling in the seamier sides of life and working intermittently as an interior decorator and furniture designer. Despite the fact that both the French and German capitals were humming with artistic experimentation at the time, Bacon recalls that he had little real interest in becoming an artist. “I regret not starting to paint earlier,” he says now. “It is one of the few things I do regret.”

It was not until World War II that Bacon, who by then had returned to Britain, got down to painting in earnest. Excused from his duties on a civil defense team because of asthma, he found himself with little to do and turned increasingly to art. Characteristically, he shunned any form of professional instruction and his early, work showed it. He managed to get individual pictures into group shows off and on for a number of years, but none attracted much serious attention. Only with his first, major one man show in 1949, when he was 40, did Bacon’s name begin to come up regularly in critical circles.

DEFIANT PURSUIT. What drew attention to Bacon then was his striking use of diverse, visual references to produce a style that resembled virtually nothing else that was happening in the art world at the time. While most mainstream artists in Europe and America plunged eagerly into abstraction and then pop, Bacon defiantly pursued his own brand of allusive realism. One reference that appears repeatedly in Bacon’s paintings of the 1950s is, the portrait of Pope Innocent X by the seventeenth century Spanish master Velázquez; in Bacon’s hands, Innocent frequently becomes a shrieking demon strapped to his throne.

Another of Bacon’s favorite references. during this period was the bloody face of the wounded governess who appears in Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film, “Battleship Potemkin.” A third source was a series of motion studies by English-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge,, whose nudes are transformed in Bacon’s early paintings into writhing, faceless victims of unknown agonies.

At first, many. critics condemned Ba¬con’s quasi realistic style as outdated and. his choice of subject matter was branded as sensational. (His reputation in the U.S. was not helped by his description of the work of pioneering abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock as “a lot of old lace.”) But despite all resistance, Bacon’s reputation continued to grow. In 1965, he was hailed by the influential English art critic John Richardson as “the first modem painter of international caliber that the British have produced.” A 1971 retrospective of 108 Bacon paintings at the Grand Palais in Paris was an overwhelming success. And the turnout for the 1975 show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum which seldom grants such an honor to a living artist constituted a triumph in a bastion of anti Bacon feeling.

EVEN MORE TORTURED. The show that opens in Paris this week includes 37 major works, many of which have never been shown publicly before. In addition to the $500,000 “Triptych” one of a series Bacon has done over the years in the traditional three panel form some of the most intriguing works on display are the portraits of George Dyer, a close friend of Bacon’s who died five years ago. Bacon insists that he dislikes using himself as a model, but there are also several self portraits in the show. “I have been reduced to doing a lot of them recently,” he says, “because all my friends are dead.”

In contrast to much of Bacon’s earlier work, many of the paintings at the Galerie Claude Bernard show a greater assurance in choice of color and line. The technique is no less striking, but it is subtler, even mellowed. What has not mellowed is Bacon’s choice of subject matter. His faces are less crude, but their expressions are no less agonized. The figures are more refined, but, if anything, they are even more tortured. There is no better illustration of this than the painting entitled “Three Figures and Portrait,” done in 1975. The left hand figure is bent double on his knees, his hands apparently tied behind his back as if to await execution. The neck is wrenched at an impossible angle and the vertebrae of his spine have been entirely stripped of flesh.

‘MAN IS AN ACCIDENT.’ If Bacon’s painted images leave any doubt about the persistence of his grim interpretation of human experience, his words do not. In an interview fourteen years ago with David Sylvester, a British art critic and personal friend, Bacon declared: “Man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason.” In a talk with Sylvester only last year, Bacon said: “I think of life as meaningless; we create certain attitudes which give it a meaning while we exist, though they in themselves are meaningless, really.”

It is Bacon’s refusal or inability to abandon this litany of despair that has provoked most of the criticism of his work in recent years. In a review of the Metropolitan show, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times asserted that, in the wide open world of contemporary art, “to traffic in images of sexual violence and personal sadism is a good deal less shocking than, say, to be avowedly Methodist.” Prof. Rainer Crone of Yale University’s Department of Art History faults Bacon for not participating in any of the new technical developments of contemporary art. Bacon, argues Crone, “is still dealing with the issues that were relevant before or during cubism.” Even more bitingly, André Fermigier, art critic of Le Monde and one of France’s most influential writers on art, has admitted: “Personally, I find Bacon’s obsessions somewhat monotonous.”

A renegade from the outset of his career, Bacon has never set much store by other people’s opinions about art, whether his own or anyone else’s. He dismisses ,that durable favorite of the critics Joan Miró as “pleasing and decorative, but definitely lightweight.” He finds the current school of hyper realism “boring.” And he has little patience with criticism of his own work. In response to attacks on his fascination with grim subject matter, Bacon recently declared: “I’ve always hoped to put over things as directly and rawly as I possibly can, and perhaps if a thing comes across directly, people feel that is horrific. People tend to be offended by facts or what used to be called the truth.” Curiously enough, while American scholars and critics have proved to be some of Bacon’s most energetic opponents, American artists have provided him with some of his strongest support. Pop master Larry Rivers, who concedes that Bacon does some “very peculiar work,” nevertheless considers the Englishman “one of the best” of living artists. Another American who has high praise for Bacon is Jim Dine, a leading figure of the New York school of pop art. “There are only a handful of painters in the world whom I respect,” says Dine, “and I consider Bacon a great, great painter.” Andy Warhol, the man who enshrined the Campbell’s soup can and is now virtually an institution in the U.S art world, admits to paying Bacon the sincerest form of flattery. “I copy his color,” says Warhol, “and his skulls.”

Despite his conspicuous success, Bacon pursues a private life little changed from that of his Wanderjahre before the war. He occasionally shares a fiat with a friend in Paris and he owns a small country house near Colchester in Essex. But he spends most of his time in the familiar clutter of his London studio. The furnishings of the living area there include two battered sofas, a broken mirror and naked lightbulbs. The workroom, also lit by a bare bulb, is piled literally knee deep in torn photographs, art books, medical texts and assorted other detritus of Bacon’s craft.

‘MEMORY TRACKS.’ Bacon once explained the semi squalor of his quarters to Henry Geldzahler, the organizer of the Metropolitan show in New York, by saying that “the places that I live in … are like an autobiography. I like the marks that have been made by myself, or by other people, to be left. They’re like memory tracks for me.” For all the grim themes of his paintings, Bacon revels in witty and amusing company. But he seldom goes out on the town and when he does, the destination is likely to be Muriel’s, a London watering hole frequented by a mixed crowd that includes a sprinkling of Fleet Street journalists. He drinks heavily (champagne bottles tend to pile up around his works in progress) and on those occasions when he indulges in luxury outings to London’s better restaurants he tips outrageously and refuses to let anyone else contribute to the bill. Although discreet about details of his social life, Bacon makes no secret of the fluet that he is homosexual and occasionally jokes about the turbulence of his emotional affairs.

Although the massive amounts of cash paid for his paintings have not tempted Bacon to put a fresh coat of paint on his studio walls or even to add much to his two suit wardrobe, they have given almost free rein to his long time passion for gambling. In his early years in London, Bacon used to convert his Cromwell Place studio into a night time casino hilly equipped with a roulette wheel and a chemin de fer table. The artist himself served as croupier, and to hear him tell it, he made a bundle. “But,” he recalls, “as soon as one could travel after the war, I went off to Monte Carlo and lost the lot in two weeks.” The experience did little to cool his preoccupation with gaming and he continues to bet with enthusiasm. But his luck has apparently not changed significantly since the early days. “As an ex croupier,” he says, ‘I know how to gamble, but that’s never helped me much.”

“INTUITION AND LUCK.’ Perhaps more than anything else, Bacon’s devotion to gambling offers a clue to his refusal to abandon his own visions and join the mainstreams of contemporary art. In 1953, in a tribute to the British painter Matthew Smith, Bacon wrote that “painting tends towards a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa. Here the brush stroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in. Consequently, every movement of the brush on the canvas alters the shape and implications of the image. That is why real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance” More recently, Bacon told David Sylvester that painting is “pure intuition and luck, and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the bits down.”

Bits of paint, chips, dice or cards. At the gaming table, ‘says Bacon, “I feel I want to wins but then I feel exactly the same thing in painting. I feel I want to win even if I always lose.” If the excitement surrounding the new show at the Galerie Claude Bernard is any indication, Bacon is riding a winning streak.

‘I Only Paint for Myself.’ On the eve of Francis Bacon’s major show at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris, European Regional Editor Edward Behr sat down with the artist for a wide ranging discussion of his life, his work, his critics and the contemporary art scene in general. Below, excerpts from their conversation:

BEHR: How do you account for the hostility your paintings arouse?

BACON: If I thought about what the critics said, I shouldn’t have gone on painting.

Q. But how do you feel about the critics who say you put too much emphasis on death and decay and angst? Self portrait, 1969: ‘Death is always with us’

A. To me that is so totally stupid. If one thinks of life, what is it? The inevitability of death is always with us, from birth onward. I don’t emphasize it. I accept it as part of one’s existence. One is always aware of mortality in life, even in a rose that blooms and then dies. I’ve never understood this aspect of criticism against me and I don’t, now, take any notice of it. It seems to me that the people who think in this way have never really thought about life. ‘One has only to turn to the great art of the past to Shakespeare, to the Greek tragedies to realize how much of it was concerned with mortality. I’m not interested in violence. During the Vietnam war there was more violence on American television every afternoon than there is in all of my work. I accept violence, yes, I accept it as part of one’s existence.

Q. What about the so called morbid aspect of your paintings? Some say that you have even used anatomical books for inspiration.

A. There was this book, which I picked up at a second-hand bookstore in Paris a long time ago before I really began painting at all, that was about skin diseases in the early nineteenth century. It was hand colored and very beautiful. I’m allergic to turpentine and wear gloves when I’m painting. But nevertheless, I occasionally get rashes on my hands and their color is tremendously suggestive to me, not necessarily horrific.

Q. There’s also the charge leveled against you that you are a loner who has failed to influence anyone else.

A. True, I don’t know of any painter whose work interests me and in whose work I see any [of my] influence.

Q. Are there any young painters whom you find to be interesting?

A. Not at the moment, and I consider that an unfortunate thing.

Q. What does interest you as you survey the current art scene?

A. I have the feeling that something very remarkable will come out of the United States. As I’ve repeatedly said, I also feel that someone like Jackson Pollock is the most overrated artist. Americans are determined to make an American art that hasn’t been influenced by anything else. I’m not sure this won’t limit them in some way. Communication being what it is, why not accept the whole thing? I’m not interested in the abstract artists. I understand that this type of painting was a logical course to embark on. But it seems to me the subject matter in abstract art, no matter how far you take it and how far you destroy it, instantly seems to degenerate into a form of decoration. And just now figurative art is the most difficult and problematic thing. Many people are trying to return to it, but what are they returning to? They’re returning to illustration and hyper realism and what’s the point of that? It’s of no interest at all. I must say that to me pop art is more interesting than abstract expressionism and hyper realism, which are ridiculous and boring.

Q. Is there anyone among recent contemporary painters you admire?

A. I admire Marcel Duchamp. He explored things within his lifetime in a remarkable way. Though he wanted art that wasn’t art, he was the, most aesthetic, probably, of all artists of the twentieth century.

Q. Were you influenced by Duchamp?

A. It’s difficult to say. I have been influenced by practically everything from prehistoric artifacts onward. I have looked at everything. I am rather like a grinding machine through which everything has gone. And what comes out is what comes out. All visual things have always been of immense interest and assistance to me. How are the influences felt? One would have to know how the unconscious works.

Q. Have you ever been tempted to undergo analysis to find out how your unconscious works?

A. I don’t feel it would help me in my work and it wouldn’t help me otherwise. I’ve never had those problems in my life because I accept my problems.

Q. You’ve repeatedly described how at a certain point in your work, accident and irrationality actually take over, that you are, in effect, a medium through which the paintings actually happen. Are you also a medium in other respects, are you interested in the occult?

A. It’s perfectly true that I work hoping that chance and accident will just run for me. But I’m not interested in the occult nor do I believe in it. I’m a very rational person. I use my sensibility in painting. I don’t think I’m one of those gifted people. But I’ve looked at everything, and I think that I am profoundly critical and that out of my critical sense I’m able to use the accident that comes to me.

Q. In the past you used a number of key paintings the Cimabue crucifixion, the Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X as keys which unlocked some of your own visual experiences. But you have not done so in the last ten years. Why not?

A. Maybe it’s because I’ve absorbed them all and they’re beginning to make their own compost within me.

Q. When you were in Rome, I understand. you, did not. bother to see the original of Pope Innocent X. Why not?

A. I’m a very lazy person. When I see pictures even that I like I can’t. look, at them for long because I find that it’s afterward that they begin to work on me, that they unlock valves of sensation within me. It’s what I receive from them that counts.

Q. To what do you attribute the development of the: idea for the $.500,000 “Triptych” that is included in the Paris. show?

A. The center panel came to, me after’ I’d looked at photos of some Australian cricketers. Suddenly this, image, which was nothing like cricket, began to form itself. The head in the left panel happens to be someone I know.

Q. Everyone who writes about you notes how ‘much younger you look than you really are. Do you do anything to keep that way?

A. It’s a family thing, I think. We tend to look younger than we are. But apart from my mother, who lived to be 87, we also tend to die young. Do I consciously keep in shape? No, I don’t. I do a lot of’ standing, especially with the big canvases, and I like that. There are certain days when you feel the muscles are not going to work for you. I like living in an overheated atmosphere because for me that’s when brain and muscle come together. I’ve always drunk too much. I’m not a person who can sit down and relax. I’m always active in a sense. And work breeds work.

Q. Do you have any interest in your paintings when they’re finished?

A. I can’t believe my paintings are for people. I can only paint for myself. I try to give myself a kick. But I don’t know where my paintings are.
It used to be a real production line. They used to go to the Marlborough Gallery in New York and then they just went. I didn’t want to see them again. The few I own are at the Paris showing; Living as I do, what am I going to do with them? I’m glad when they go.

Q. But don’t you care about people’s reactions to your work?

A. One’s always pleased when a few people one likes and whose opinions one respects happen to like one’s work or part of it. But otherwise I don’t really care, because I don’t think many people are interested in painting. Oh, yes, there’s a great interest in the financial side of it in painting as business, as a stock market, but very few people have any real, feelings about painting certainly not the critics.

Q. But surely you’re glad that your works is in the major museums around the world?

A. Except for a few people, it’s the only way the larger triptychs can be seen. Most people simply don’t have enough room for them.

Q. Would you like to see some kind of Bacon Foundation to house a permanent collection of Bacons after you’ve gone, as some other major painters have made provision for?

A. I don’t care. I find the profound vanity of these old men who try to immortalize themselves through foundations very boring. I hope there’ll be a foundation for the best of Picasso’s work, but they would have to be so carefully selected that I expect it’s out of the question. I’m lucky, since my work is not really liked and difficult to sell, to live my life by something that obsesses me to try and do. I paint to please myself. I suppose I could have done other things. But it’s real luck to be able to earn something by doing what you obsessively feel you have to do.

          A Bacon canvas on its way to the show: Bucking the mainstream

Isabel Lambert’s setting and costumes for Richard Strauss’s Elektra were designed in 1953 for the Royal Opera House; they are still in use and good condition, handsomely lit, at the current revival 24 years later. Then the conductor was Erich Kleiber, now it is his son Carlos who last night wheedled from the Covent Garden orchestra playing of a splendour the more extraordinary because so much of it was restrained, delicate, ravishingly lyrical and euphonious.

Our ancestors who heard Elektra when it was quite new would have found those last epithets incredible (some readers today may have attended the British premiere under Beecham in 1910): Elektra was regarded as the last word in noisy dissonance then, and for many years later. Carlos Kleiber gives full dignity to the opening Agamemnon theme, but plays the first scene modestly, the venom drawn from the maids’ cruel gossip; even Elektra’s first monologue sounds controlled in its grief and longing for revenge.

The music’s savage passion and moments of dynamism are not ignored: there are fewer of them than one remembers from Beecham in 1947, or Kleiler senior, or even Kempe, and when Carlos Kleiber unleashes them, in the Clytemnestra scene for instance (much cut, alas), they are all the more powerful and moving. Kleiber junior must want us to remember the composer’s advice, “Play it like Mendelssohn–fairy music!”, and to appreciate that there was truth as well as jocularity in the bon mot.

The two scenes for Elektra and Chrysothemis are full of lyrical, lovable music, worth singing beautifully above a discreet, appreciative orchestral background when the voices are as beautiful as those of Birgit Nilsson and Gwyneth Jones. So too the recognition scene where Nilsson and Kleiber together explored the bitter-sweet poignancy of Elektra’s grief over her supposedly dead brother. At the moment of recognition Kleiber allowed the music to explode, as if for the first time: it was like a cataclysm. There was another shattering climax for the murder of Clytemnestra, then a return to euphony, rich string music in E major and the solemn pulse of Elektra’s Totentanz.

Perhaps Kleiber’s concern for the beauty in Strauss’s score will disappoint those who demand to be exhaustively shaken and horrorstruck by Elektra.

Nilsson is a statuesque Elektra, more princess than maenad (even so, her sophisticated urban sandals look extravagantly inappropriate); her voice is voluminous in power, but even more eloquent when she can inflect it subtly at lower levels. Gwyneth Jones, a girlish, wide-eyed, admirably ardent Chrysothemis, is vocally steadier when not obliged to shout (she forced her tone sometimes, even with Kleiber to assist her). The new Clytemnestra, Márta Szirmay from Hungary, proved greatly impressive with her cavernous alto register, potent declamation, and sinister posturing.

John Copley had staged the revival with some new and intelligent touches: Elektra digs for the axe off-stage behaves most weirdly in the conspiratorial scene with hic sister, and several times pauses dementedly during her final dance.

He, and the opera, deserve a new production. It is a miracle that the old one can still make some effect.

Covent Garden

Elektra

by RONALD CRICHTON

Birgit Nilsson’s Elektra is still the tops in strength and brilliance. Her attack remains fearless. Certainty is total, if not always accuracy. No less impressive than the full-force high notes are the soft ones, found and placed with a skill which must reduce less naturally gifted dramatic sopranos to wondering envy. At this stage of her career Miss Nilsson is not likely to modify her idea of the role: her acting remains monumental in stillness and in economical movement. The finer shades, the feeling that for all her degradation and determination Elektra is a still vulnerable young woman, sister to the terrified Chrysothemis, are not much in evidence. Nor is the collapse at the end wholly convincing: more likely, one feels, that this Elektra would have hacked her way into the palace to help Orestes.

For this latest revival, rapturously received on Friday night, Miss Nilsson is starrily surrounded. Gwyneth Jones, singing her first Chrysothemis at Covent Garden, easily held her own with the central figure. The voice shone, even through one or two phrases too impetuously taken. Miss Jones looked superb, perhaps too superb for a girl condemned to such a wretched, frustrating existence. The Clytemnestra was a newcomer. Marta Szirmay, a contralto from Budapest, has a big voice with colour and character, rather overlaid on Friday by grotesque totterings half-Goya, half-Gingold. Much of what Miss Szirmay did was effective in a gory way, but Clytemnestra’s corruption is not only on the surface. A complete interpretation must come near to attracting sympathy, to making one feel that Elektra is unforgiving and unreasonable.

The evening’s main honours were shared with Miss Nilsson by the Covent Garden orchestra and the conductor, Carlos Kleiber. His reading is worth careful attention, not only for singing tone and the keen impact of the climaxes, but for the fiendish delicacy with which he fills in the nauseous nooks and crannies of the score, supplying what the singers fail to give, not by attracting undue attention to the pit but by scrupulously observing what Strauss wrote. Above everything, Mr. Kleiber has the rare but for an opera conductor invaluable gift of knowing how to let the voices tell through playing of full intensity at all levels.

Isabel Lambert’s set dates from the first post-war revival at Covent Garden, conducted by Mr. Kleiber’s father, at a time when Elektra was an uncertain draw. It has simplicity in its favour, but the single palace window at the back where more are needed prevents much effect being made with Clytemnestra’s procession. Perhaps that is why John Copley, responsible for the present revival, has concentrated on the Queen’s own antics. He has given sharp relief to the men – Donald Mclntyre’s suggestively quiet Orestes and Michael Langdon’s laconic Tutor.

Only Charles Craig’s Aegisthus (whom Elektra would not class among the men) was too dry in manner, not in voice. The serving-maids at the beginning of the opera are too firmly individualised. Only the overseer (Milla Andrew) and Fifth Maid (Teresa Cahill) need to stand out: the others are Hofmannsthal’s substitute for the Greek chorus.

Prince opens Bordeaux

show of British painting

From Charles Hargrove

Bordeaux May 9

WEST EUROPE  |  THE TIMES  |  TUESDAY MAY 10 1977 

One of the finest and most comprehensive exhibitions of three centuries of British painting, from Gainsborough to Francis Bacon, was opened today by the Prince of Wales at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts of Bordeaux. It is staged within the framework of the Queen’s silver jubilee celebrations. It is the result of the initiative of Madame Gilberte Martin-Méry, the curator of the Musées and Galerie des Beaux-Arts of Bordeaux.

In the words of the Prince, she “displayed treasures of tenacity and perseverance to convince the keepers of museums and galleries in France and in Britain, and even from as far afield as Budapest and Los Angeles, to part temporarily with 200 masterpieces”.

The exhibition will be open throughout the summer. It includes portraits and landscapes by Wright of Derby, Lambert, Girtin, Crome, Cotman and Cox. There is a striking portrait from Glasgow of Captain Sir Thomas Lindsav by Alan Ramsay, and another by Richard Wilson of Boulter Tomlinson. The National Gallery of Ireland has lent a fine landscape by Thomas Sautelle Roberts.

Modern art is well represented by the Camden Town group and the London group, the surrealism of Nash. abstract paintings by Ben Nicholson and Passmore and the symbolism of Piper, Sutherland and Francis Bacon.

At a luncheon in his honour the Prince drew laughter by remarking from the outset that he was aware of the speculation in France about his matrimonial future “I am also conscious that this has aroused some hopes among French ladies who hope to become Queen of England. But the last British sovereign to marry a French princess was executed. So I must be careful”, he said.

He recalled that the first Prince of Wales had ordered 1,000 pipes of “Gascon wine” as it was called at the time, for his coronation in 1907. His own visit to Gascony eight years ago, when he was a student at Cambridge, had left a lasting impression on his liver.

FRANCIS BACON, the painter, has declined a major award in the Birthday Honours list to be announced on Saturday.

He was invited to become a Companion of Honour in the list, but politely declined. Mr. Bacon, 67, said last night in Paris that this was the second honour he had rejected.

He added: “I always decline these honours. I  never want them. I have no opinions on the honours system. It might be fine for other people but I want to stress I don’t want anything for myself.”

A Downing Street spokesman refused to comment on the matter or to say why Mr. Bacon has been offered an honour when he had previously declined another. Mr. Bacon said: “I can’t remember what the other honour was or when it was offered. It must have been some years ago.”

Downing Street also refused to comment on a report that another artist had rejected a C.B.E. and had written a letter questioning the point of the decoration when the British Empire no longer existed.

Review ordered

The Prime Minister ordered a detailed review of all the names submitted to the Queen for inclusion in the Birthday Honours list.

This was to ensure that there would be no repetition of the controversy provoked by some of the names Sir Harold Wilson put forward in his resignation list last year.

Mr. Bacon’s name would not have gone before the new Political Honours Security Committee as the honour offered was not a political one.

He has lived for the past year in a terraced house in the Essex village of Wivenhow which now has a growing colony of artists. He moved there after selling his South Kensington studio.

The C.H. is traditionally awarded to those who have “rendered conspicuous service of national importance.”

Past recipients have included Graham Sutherland the artist, Henry Moore the sculptor, and Graham Greene the author.

Convulsive 

THE ART world failed to solve an intriguing internal mystery last week when one of that not always good-tempered artist Francis Bacon’s paintings came up for auction at Sotheby’s.

Prospective buyers were told tartly that the artist had ‘abandoned’ the work ‘Study for a Man on a Chaise Longue’. Indeed a note was specially placed beside it during the viewing.

No one at Sotheby’s was prepared to disclose why Bacon had abandoned the work, nor who would have received the £35,000—£40,000 it was worth, beyond admitting ‘the vendor had every right to sell the painting.’

Bacon himself is distinctly terse about his work, but the mystery remained unresolved because no one was prepared to offer the reserve price.

A COUNCIL may sell its art treasures to help prevent a 25 per cent, rates increase and a £500,000 public spending cut.

Kirklees council may auction some of its works of art, valued at more than £1 million. The Tory-controlled council has 181 art works, including a Henry Moore bronze, “Fallen Warriors,” thought to be worth more than £30,000. There is also a Francis Bacon painting valued at £100,000 and a Lawny painting thought to be worth £13,000.

Tory leader Councillor Tom Cliffe explained yesterday that the council was in a desperate financial position because of the Government’s £3-5 million cut in its rate support grant. Inflation and the prospect of pay awards to council workers and teachers aggravated the situation.

“We have already cut spending in the last 12 months by more than £750,000 and we are cutting back by a further £2 million in the coming year.”

“Many of our works of art are hidden away in vaults and are not even seen by the public.”

PAY increases for about 19,000 council employees is one main reason for the proposed sale of art treasures by Kirklees metropolitan district council, a council official said yesterday.

The council has faced a £4 million cut in its rate support grant for 1979-80. which would add at least 6p to a 51p rate, he said.

“Coupled with inflation, particularly in terms of pay increases for the council’s employees — manual and office workers, lecturers and teachers — this would be a rate increase of about 12p, about 25 per cent.”

The Tory-controlled council said on Wednesday that it was considering selling some of its 400 pictures and sculptures, worth £1¼-£1½ million to offset a rate rise of that order.

Pay increases for the council’s employees were expected to be live per cent, said the official. “But if as seems likely, they will be more in the order of 10 per cent, it will cost us about £2.4 million.”

Bacon painting

The art collection has been built up over a number of years by the three boroughs of Huddersfield, Dewsbury and Batley that became Kirklees with reorganisation in 1974. They are kept in the towns’ art galleries.

Among the works, mostly at Huddersfield Art Gallery, is a Francis Bacon painting, “Figure Study 2.” valued at £85,000, presented by the Contemporary Art Society to Batley; a Henry Moore bronze, “Falling Warriors.” valued at £30,000; and two Lowry paintings.

About 50 per cent. of the Works, largely 20th century, have come from bequests, or have been bought with substantial help from Government grants, and these will not be sold.

“But many of the works — perhaps half — are not on display at any one time, through lack of space, and so we have decided to think of disposing of assets that are not doing any work for us,” the official said. “If a few paintings made E?00,000, that is the cost of a school.” The planned sale was attacked yesterday as “the thin end of the wedge” by the leader of the Labour opposition, Mr Lawrence Conlon.

“Once the art works are gone, they are gone — you can only sell them once.”

A friend writes:

Muriel Belcher, who died recently after a prolonged illness, founded and presided for more than thirty years over the Colony Room in Soho. During these years the club became a haven all kinds of people, some of whom would certainly never come together in the same room under any other circumstances.

Born in Birmingham of Jewish-Portuguese parents, she started the Colony Room on her own at very small premises in Dean Street n 1948. Its membership gradually expanded into a unique cross-section of society, and included some notable painters, a few peers, at least one famous composer, many journalists, one or two stage hands and a wide selection of other gregarious people from both sexes and all classes. From her stool by the door Muriel ruled with unquestioned authority and a tongue sometimes wickedly funny. Francis Bacon, who loved her, has marvellously conveyed in several paintings her extraordinary looks; and Michael Andrews made two notable pictures of groups which included her in the club’s green interior. He also painted a mural after Bonnard on the wall.

OBITUARY  |  THE TIMES  |  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1980

A random view of London pleasures

JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR   |   THE ARTS   |   THE TIMES   |   TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1980

While the grand museums and galleries are casually bringing out some of their lesser known treasures in unexpected contexts to beguile away the summer, the less august are turning to — mostly — the twentieth century for their various mid-year miscellanies. I am not sure whether the Serpentine would qualify as “less august” — certainly as a rule the art it shows is more wayout than any of the other public galleries, even the Hayward, and at the m6ment it is falling in line with many of the commercial galleries int using this less-remarked time to give a showing to lesser-known artists of its acquaintance. The Summer Show here comes in three parts, ea0i with its own selector, and’ if you hurry along you have the rest of this week to catch up with Part One, selected by Alan Miller.

As it happens, a little haste might be worth it, since the show is particularly interesting and varied and on Saturdays and Sundays at 3 pm you get the extra bonus of one of the nine artists included talking about his work and answering questions. If the artists have anything else in common, it is in a distinct move away from the minimal. Even the artist whose work looks at a glance the least worked upon, Heinz-Dieter Pietsch, proves on closer examination to be not a random tearer of paper, but an intricately illusionist watercolourist whose works depict the rough, abraded, sometimes chipped or cracked surfaces of plaster and cement with uncanny fidelity. You might not be quite sure why he wanted to do it, but the skill brought to the task is phenomenal.

Otherwise, the collection consists of three sculptors, two painters, two print-makers, and one unclassifiable. Of the sculptors, Peter Grieve does spindly, geometrical constructions (outside), Ian Friend does odd, blobby, vaguely organic figures which look like Giacomettis left out in the sun to melt, and Neil Talbot does small, meticulous reliefs in white marble — of a cup, a chipped bowl, a chisel — which suggest rather a monumental stone-mason gone a bit funny. Chris Baker paints black-and-white abstracts, apparently on top of collage, which are some times provided with trompe-l’œil shadows just to throw the spectator off-balance a bit; David Wiseman paints feathery, highly coloured abstract-expressionist canvases which take their cue from landscape, however indistinguishable this may be in the finished work.

All these are talented and individual: no out-and-out duds in this show. But the three artists I liked best are the print-makers and the unclassifiable. Michael Heindorff quotes a critic on Piranesi to give us the feel of his large, dark dryp6ints (so rich and dark that they look like mezzo- tints) of Victorian workshop interiors, but the nightmarish atmosphere of these satanic mills comes across very well without that clue. Ian Granger, more jolly, does elaborate pastiches and send-ups of baroque and romantic engraving, to faintly surrealist ends. And Stephen Young paints on wood constructions these weird polymorphic figures in a state of tadapole-transformiation — menacing and haunting and rather like Francis Bacon in dimension. If Part. Two, which opens on August 16,lives up to Part One, we shall have amazingly little to complain of.

While we are on the subject of Bacon, there is a rare chance to see new works by the old master at Marlborough Fine Arts, where the. summer show includes, as well as a selection from gallery artists such as Schwitters and Feininger, the latest works of Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. The Auerbachs include a couple of his near-indecipherable portraits, in which the basic physical conformation has been so overlaid by paint built up almost sculpturally that the result is abstract all but the title, and a brand-new landscape, Primrose Hill, Autumn 1979-80, which is strengthened by its- more apparent vestiges of representation and is also rather less funereally coloured than ’the portrait heads. Of the Bacons, all of them large, the triptych Three Studies of the Male Back was painted in 1977, but has not been shown in London before; the male in question is shaving dangerously. Sphinx—Portrait of Muriel Belcher is, as the title suggests, a further exploration of his sphinx imagery. The newest painting, however, Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey, does share with last year’s water-splash paintings a new freshness and irectness’: the horror is not laid on so thick, and does not seem to come quite so easily. Instead, the design is more sparse and seems to be informed with a greater concern than for some years with the formal management of the composition. Who knows, maybe in his seventies Bacon is going to go through a neo-classical phase, or at any Francis Bacon: Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey rate a withdrawal from the extremes of expressionism. It certainly sparks a renewed interest in, because a new uncertainty about, whatever he may choose to do next.

Elsewhere there is at least one show which I have already mentioned in passing and promised myself I would come back to in more detail if I got the chance. This is Abstraction 1910-1940, at Annely Juda in Tottenham Mews. The gallery has of course had for some years a singular dedication to “the non-objective world”, and the present show constitutes a sort of summation: there are so many works in the catalogue (170, to be precise) that there is not room to get them all up on the walls, and just about every phase and facet of early twentieth-century abstractionism is represented by at least one piece. Among such riches it is hard to know even where to start. But the Russian contingent shows to particularly good effect, with a typical painting and three drawings by Malevich, an interesting selection of Alexandra Exter’s stage work, and a funny, not very typical. Tatlin in which he plays whimsically with Spanish motifs. There are also a Doesburg and one of van der Leck’s more abstracted man-and-woman pictures (where it has become a sort of join-up-the-dots game) which are as good as anything you would find outside a museum these days. And some of the less familiar artists, like Robert Michel, with. his intricate space-machines, are very intriguing and suggestive. Moreover, it is one of those shows where you can really fall in love with something: I would love, for instance, to carry off a small, mosaic-like gouache by Sophie Tauber-Arp, but I would guarantee that anyone with arsy taste at all for abstracts will find something here to lust after.

Finally, a few odes and ends from mixed shows. At the Redfern I was particularly struck by the work of Ian Pollack and David Evans. Both have probably been struck in their turn by the Neue Sachlichkeit show at the Hayward two years ago, or something similar. Ian Pollack draws drunks and tarts in Amsterdam or on the Bowery with biting wit but at the same time sufficient human respect. David Evans is more given to fantasizing on themes from bars and discos, and in one extraordinary large painting entitled Men’s Hairdressing, within its conventionalized infinity of mirror images, he suggests very clearly that he is the natural successor of Edward Burra, whom one would have thought a one-of-a-kind artist if ever there was one.

Up the road at the Mercury are holdovers from recent shows, including several, of Elizabeth Blackadder’s large watercolours, a vibrant still-life by Aine Redpath and an appealing Mary Fedden. But the real fascinations of the show date further back: a very fine early John Craxton, Greek Landscape, and a characteristic MacBryde, Woman by a Fireplace, are both intense reminders of Forties neo-romanticism; there are two excellent Lovat Frasers, and a really superb, large, theatrical Etude Ornamentale of 1915 by Gontcharova which fuses her Russian peasant style with Rayonnist sophistication to devastating effect.

And at the Maclean Gallery in George Street, if you are tempted in by the Malcolm Drummond in the window you will find much else to your taste, mostly from the first quarter of the Twentieth century, give or take a few years, and all British. Instantly recognizable Sickerts, a small James Pryde gouache, one of William Nicholson’s easy, liquid Downland scenes (and one of his very rare preparatory drawings, for the painting of the Plaza de Toros, Malaga, at present in the Nicholson show at the Fitzwilliam), and a couple of Steers, one of his rather silly (though beautifully painted) evocations of Boucher eroticism, The Pillow Fight, and a most surprising neo-Etty roundel Venus and Cupid Asleep, of 1904. Plus some later drawings, including a sinister Spencer, Carrying Girls (the girls being carried all trussed up and suspended like mutton) and a lovely louche Burra, showing the exit to -what looks like a rather rowdy theatre or dance-hall, labelled Backdrop (to what, I wonder ?). The summer may be a slack period, but with pleasures such as these it offers its own compensations.

John Russell Taylor