Francis Bacon News 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                      2008—2011
 

 

 

                                                                

 

THE ART OF CONVERSATION

 

 

 

Freud admired Bacon’s attitude, Uglow and Kossoff were friends. Catherine Lampert, the curator of

a new London exhibition of Britain’s most celebrated postwar artists, explores the often surprising

dialogue between these painters – and what it reveals about their work

 

 

 

CATHERINE LAMPERT   |   FINANCIAL TIMES WEEKEND MAGAZINE   |  SATURDAY NOVEMBER 26/ SUNDAY NOVEMBER 27 2011

 

Sixty years ago, Francis Bacon’s “Pope I” shocked visitors at his first “exclusive” exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in Mayfair; words such as “ectoplasmic” and “a texture like cigarette ash” were used to describe it. It hung near a full-length portrait of Lucian Freud.

After they had met on the way to Graham Sutherland’s house in Wales in 1944, Freud had begun going to Bacon’s studio in Cromwell Place in the afternoons. Freud said later about Bacon: “It was his attitude that 1 admired. The way he was completely ruthless about his own work. He talked about packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke which amused and excited me, and I realised that it was a million miles from anything I could ever do”.

In 1951, Freud was one of a number of artists who came together at the Slade, where William Coldstream had just arrived as professor of fine art. Among them were Richard Hamilton, Freud’s exact contemporary (both were born in 1922; both died in 2011), Euan Uglow and Michael Andrews. As Hamilton remembered, “the atmosphere was marvellous at that time”.

The deliberately unorthodox assembly of paintings and drawings that opens at London’s Haunch of Venison gallery next month is intended to parallel similarly surprising conversations between these 10 artists and friends who wrote about art. Ostensibly a historical exhibition, with the earliest works dating from more than half a century ago, it is also contemporary in that three of the artists – Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney – are still working; indeed, their images are “alive” in a seasonal sense, literally so, as all three have been concerned year-round with depicting trees, a difficult subject but one, as Hockney says, with “deep appeal, and... partly a spatial thrill”.

The exhibition has the additional ambition that viewers might forget the clichéd conventions that define generations and styles such as “School of London” or “Pop Art”, or a tendency to see the 1950s and 1960s by way of exaggerated attention to Soho or the ICA on Dover Street. In the small art world of postwar London, it becomes clear the ambitious, talented young artists watched each other and were hardly cast down by the nuclear threats that defined the cold war. Auerbach recalls the atmosphere as invigorating: “There was a curious feeling of liberty about because everybody who was living there had escaped death in some way. It was sexy in a way, this semi-destroyed London.”

Underlying the selection for the show was the question as to why the best British art of the mid-1950s to the late 1970s was always about “something”, about facts, sometimes from direct observation of people the artist knew intimately, or, in Bacon’s case, also mined from tables piled high with photographs, mainly of violent scenes. The American abstract expressionist painters of the same period were looking for a more all-over wholeness, a non-referential, mainly gestural way of describing the world, although De Kooning, closest in spirit, remained obsessed with depicting women. Coldstream had thought about these questions in the 1930s, writing to a friend, John Rake: “All the time I have in the back of my mind the feeling that painting must rise above purism and take back humanity if it is to be really vital again”.

Lucian Freud and Richard Hamilton were neighbours in St John’s Wood in the early 1950s. Their recent recollections contain embers of lively exchanges. They discussed girls, and whether artists need strategies, such as Hamilton’s plotting of movement and perspective in his life drawings or studies of organisms, or whether they must instead be attuned to private compulsions, as Freud’s scrutiny of a friend, Lady Anne Tree (“Portrait of a Woman, Portrait of Lady Anne Tree”, 01950), makes evident. Both artists were highly articulate. In 2000 the critic David Sylvester explained that when their now-famous series of interviews began in 1962, Bacon had already learned to talk about art from Freud not him, although he looked to Hamilton and Auerbach for feedback on his painting.

Hamilton was one of the consummate inventors of new production techniques and processes for subverting the ordinary “retinal”, empirical side of painting. He remembered: “There was a turning point in my life, in 1956, where I thought that art doesn’t need to come out of looking at reality... all I needed for stimulation was second-hand pictures in film and TV magazines, newspapers... things that had been pre-digested and ‘two-dimensionalised’”. The image for “Whitley Bay” came from a photograph turned into a postcard: “I find it astonishing,” he said, “that a flick of a shutter over a coating of silver emulsion can snatch so much information about that millisecond of activity over half a mile of beach at Whitley Bay one summer’s day... I marvel that marks and shapes, simple or complex, have the capacity to enlarge consciousness.”

During the same years, Michael Andrews was absorbed with a series of paintings about social behaviour and parties that came to a head in a commission for a large painting depicting the reception for the first chancellor of the University of East Anglia at Norwich Castle museum. The raw material was sourced from snapshots taken by a photographer who posed the guests in little groups as if at a wedding, supplemented by images of friends and celebrities, the complex panorama collaged on to canvas by a novel method of silk-screening with help from the artist Nigel Henderson.

Something of Hamilton’s aesthetic occurs in Patrick Caulfield’s combination of precision drawing and fascination with design; using flat house paint and black contour lines he transformed commonplace objects and postcard images into enigmatic interiors and still lifes. David Hockney, a fellow student at the Royal College, painted in California in the 1960s, and his sense of light and stillness compares to Euan Uglow’s paintings with their often-blue backgrounds, whether the Reckitt’s blue colouring applied to the studio wall behind the model or the Mediterranean sky. Uglow insisted his goal wasn’t representational painting or to be true to life; something marvellous had to be translated to another world, although he couldn’t begin with photographs: “I’m not interested in that because I like the poignancy of the right light at the right time hitting a bit of colour. Everybody’s trying to make an image, but we have different ways of getting at it”.

Uglow and Kossoff were friends, and both were reticent to describe emotions; their paintings after the Old Masters, like Kossoff’s “A Woman Bathing (Study After Rembrandt)”, share a direct appreciation of the beauty and contained sensuality of the originals. Hamilton and his wife, the artist Rita Donagh, recalled Bacon praising Manet for his sheer painterly skill. He “would talk at great length about a rose on a Manet painting: the fact that the brush marks didn’t describe the structure of a rose they created a rose.” Auerbach’s small figure lying on a bed conveys something of what it would be like to touch her back, an unrepeatable experience translated to wavy, sensual strips of paint. John Berger suggested to Kossoff that while painting from life something else crept in – “the self-effacement of the good host?” – and the artist agreed: “It is to do with the collaboration of the sitter, as you say, but also to do with the disappearance of the sitter the moment the image emerges”.

The reconsideration of British painting in this period will flourish with more exposure of the artists’ lesser-known works, the publication of additional memories and facts related to a wider net of their contemporaries, as well as comparison to some of the equally strong British painters from younger generations. For certain, the things that draw these 10 artists together are not an advocacy of any one idiom or figurative art ideology. The commonality is the always renewable thrill, or obsession, with the living world and the practice of painting and drawing giving rise to different sensations day by day; the goal an absolutely unprecedented image that is utterly personal. FT

“The Mystery of Appearance: British Painting 1955-1985” is at the Haunch of Venison, London W1 from December 7 to February 18 2012

 

 

 

 

       Francis Bacon: Back to Degas

 

 

                           Rothenstein Lecture 2011

 

 

Providing the first focused account of Francis Bacon’s artistic dialogue with Edgar Degas, Martin Hammer

argues that the French painter was a consistent source of inspiration to Bacon throughout his career,

informing his decisions about subject matter, style and medium

 

 

MARTIN HAMMER   |   ROTHENSTEIN LECTURE   |   TATE PAPERS   |  NUMBER 17   |  24 NOVEMBER 2011

 

Bacon once observed that ‘to create something … is a sort of echo from one artist to another’.2  The mainstream texts on his work tend to emphasise the places Bacon encountered, the people he knew, and the terrible times he lived through, as though his work adds up to a kind of psychological autobiography. This is overstated and simplistic, even if Bacon in other moods encouraged such readings. Art does come out of life, but in an indirect and more complicated fashion than this type of commentary implies. What is more demonstrable is that major artists engage with past and present art as a resource in itself, in developing the aesthetic means to embody whatever content they have in mind. This was certainly true of Bacon, who insisted that he looked at everything. Quite a lot is now known about his visual and imaginative reactions to photographs, which he worked from more consistently than almost any other modern painter. But we are at a rudimentary stage in grasping how Bacon responded to the work of other artists. The theme encompasses his quotations from Old Masters such as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Grünewald and Ingres; and his appropriations from such immediate predecessors as Picasso, Sickert and Soutine; as well as his interchange with contemporaries such as Sutherland and Giacometti.3

Bacon also declared great admiration for several late nineteenth-century artists such as Monet, Gauguin, Rodin, Seurat, and, above all, van Gogh. But this essay focuses on Degas, and can only hint that Bacon’s interest in the work of these artists is much more jumbled up than a crude listing makes out.4

Artists scrutinise other artists in distinctive and idiosyncratic ways, through the filter of their own preoccupations. 5 But Bacon’s take on Degas was also shaped by the works he happened to confront, and whose availability reflected decisions made by other people about acquiring works for museums, selling them in galleries, and displaying them in exhibitions. In that sense, Bacon’s artistic assimilation is one component within the larger story of the British response to Degas, which began as early as the 1870s, and is of course still alive and well.6  In between, we might note the commercial Degas show at Agnew’s, London, in 1936, the year before a group show in the same gallery in which Bacon participated; and further exhibitions in 1950 and 1958 at the Lefevre Gallery, which had also staged Bacon’s emergence in another series of group displays in 1945 and 1946.77 Many of the best works by Degas in British public and private collections were brought together in a major exhibition in Edinburgh and then at the Tate Gallery in 1952. Then there were the works and exhibitions Bacon could have seen on trips to Paris, which may well have been more frequent than is currently known. At any rate, Bacon had ample opportunity to engage with Degas in the original – over and above the increasingly vivid reproductions that were becoming available – and this essay will try to pin down what he gleaned from such specific encounters.

In Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c.1944 (Tate No6171), the work in which Bacon came to believe he had discovered his artistic identity, the disquieting hybrid creatures pay homage to the grotesque anatomical distortions and sculptural presence of a particular phase in Picasso’s art around 1930, focused upon bather imagery.8  Bacon’s three images almost certainly started life as separate pictures, and the decision to bind them together visually into a triptych was realised in part by superimposing around the figures’ contours a consistent backdrop of unmodulated orange, with minimal perspective indications. One critic has drawn a visual parallel with Degas’s Combing the Hair c.1896 (National Gallery, London), which had been acquired for the national collection in 1937.9 In the wake of Degas’s death in 1917 and the sales of his studio contents, the interwar years were a key moment for the acquisition of works by British institutions, works that tended to be shown initially at the Tate Gallery and were only later sent to their present home in Trafalgar Square. Another work already in public public hands, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando 1897 (National Gallery London), was an even more telling model to Bacon for the floating three-dimensional form set against a backdrop of strong, flat orange, which Degas also superimposed later on, to offset the figure and perspective construction (fig.3)10

The triptych also indicates Bacon’s interest in a third Degas that had entered the national collection as early as 1926, namely the the late Ballet Dancers c. 1890–1900 (National Gallery, London; fig.4). Discussing the left-hand picture of the triptych (fig.5), Martin Harrison has noted that Bacon appropriated the head in profile from one of the photographs in an old book he owned about ectoplasms and mediums. 11 But it is almost as though Bacon homed in on the particular illustration that reminded him of the treatment of the head in the nearmost dancer in the Degas. That figure certainly seems to be the springboard for the configuration of the upper body, where Bacon exaggerates the indentation between the two rounded shoulder blades, and the extension of the spine into the neck, which in his hands becomes elongated and downwards inclined. The slender white straps and emphatically curved forms seem to secure the connection with Ballet Dancers, as do the the placement of his creature’s knee and the angle of the stool on which it rests. In sum, the Bacon figure starts to look like an unlikely composite of the photograph, the Degas, and Picasso bather imagery. Such things appear ‘mixed up’ in his mind in much the same way that Michelangelo and Eadweard Muybridge converged, Bacon famously remarked, in his imaginative projections of the male body.12  Moreover, it is likely that Bacon was excited by the painterly freedom of Ballet Dancers, the bold and diverse marks, made with the artist’s fingers perhaps in places, applied onto coarse unprimed canvas which is left substantially exposed, especially to the right of the picture. 13  Bacon, too, often left canvas bare, as in the central panel of the 1944 triptych. He subsequently took to painting on the rear, rougher side of his supports, to heighten the contrast between the visual textures of granular canvas and smeared, scumbled paint marks. It is even possible to speculate that Degas’s necessary recourse to glazing large pastels might have reinforced Bacon’s impulse to use glass in framing his paintings, for practical reasons initially, perhaps, but thereafter on aesthetic grounds. At any rate rate, Ballet Dancers suggests  that late Degas was a key point of departure for the sense of layering and variable degrees of sharpness and blur, the sense of an image suspended in the course of its improvisation into being, that remained fundamental to Bacon’s art.

A process of compacting visual sources  maybe evident again in Study from the Human Body 1949 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), which was executed shortly before being included in Bacon’s one-man show at the Hanover Gallery in late 1949. A fascination with the image of the human back is one of the more obvious common denominators between Bacon and Degas. After Bacon’s death, Sylvester remarked of Study from the Human Body: ‘The figure is the first of many which show an undying love for the Degas pastel in the National Gallery, London, of a woman drying herself.’16  For Bacon, After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself c.1890–5 (National Gallery, London) was indeed something of a talisman (fig.6). It epitomised Degas’s approach to a larger obsession the two artists shared with the plasticity of the body, its potential for the most varied forms of articulation, in movement and repose. But when did Bacon encounter After the Bath? Sylvester’s authoritative tone suggests that he was remembering its discovery around the time that he and the artist first got to know one another. This particular Degas was not in fact acquired by the National Gallery until 1959. However, it was shown in the Lefevre Gallery’s Degas show in 1950, and there is no record of a previous public showing.17 After the Bath was then purchased by the collector Harry Walston from the exhibition (though it was twice lent to the Tate Gallery for a few months before finally being acquired for the nation).18 It is possible that Sylvester was conflating the work with the equally remarkable Degas bather pastel in the Courtauld collection, shown in a memorial display at the Tate Gallery in summer 1948; equally, before its exhibition, Bacon may have encountered After the Bath informally at the Lefevre Gallery, where he had exhibited and was well known.19 At any rate, such quintessential Degas imagery seems to have fed into Bacon’s first variant on the toilette theme, the Painting 1950 (Leeds Art Gallery), fusing with impressions derived from a Sickert drawing identified by the art historian Rebecca Daniels.20

From a different perspective, Degas’s After the Bath  was again in Sylvester’s thoughts when discussing the remarkable Study after Velázquez 1950 (private collection), one of Bacon’s very first pope pictures. The critic evoked Bacon’s reinvention of the curtain motif here in less literal terms:

The short folds in the purple cape and the long folds in the grey background curtain together create a wonderful counterpoint … He had observed in certain late Degas pastels the use of sets of close parallel lines that seemed to be passing through a semi-transparent body. Bacon’s development of this usage, which he called ‘shuttering’, was to formalize the folds in background curtains into stripes that passed very emphatically through a figure. I asked him once if he could explain why Degas’s shuttering could be so poignant. ‘Well, it means that the sensation doesn’t come straight out at you but slides slowly and gently through the gaps.’21

Degas himself would not perhaps have put it like that. Rather, the remark captures Bacon’s own, highly metaphorical sense of pictorial devices. In a later interview, the artist remarked of Degas’s pastels: ‘he shuttered the body, in a way, shuttered the image and then he put an enormous amount of colour through these lines.’ For Bacon, this device ‘created intensity’.22  In Study after Velázquez, any such impressions from Degas fuse with more direct derivations from black and white photography. Bacon would, for example, have known Erich Salomon’s photograph, reproduced in Picture Post magazine in 1947, where the great and the good are captured, unaware and unposed, through a diaphanous curtain.23 

Another possible model is pre-war Nazi propaganda imagery, specifically the spectacle of the ‘cathedral of light’ that Albert Speer devised for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games and the culminating ceremony at the Nuremberg rallies, in which parallel beams of light directed into the night sky register as densely packed stripes of light and dark.24  Bacon was fascinated by the gulf between the Nazi propagandist façade and the ruthless will to power that it veiled. A terminology akin to shuttering came to mind when he talked, in a somewhat Nietzschean vein, about his aims: ‘We nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.’25  Bacon surely saw Degas, Nietzsche’s near contemporary after all, as the exemplary artist who cut through to raw human realities. 

The light and dark striations generally recede into the background in Bacon’s work from the first half of the 1950s. In the foreground, the Degas-like motif of the naked figure viewed from the back is restated in a sequence of pictures from 1952, including Untitled (Crouching Figures) and, above all, Study for Crouching Nude (Detroit Institute of Arts) that was one of Bacon’s favourite works.26  The theme allowed him to channel visual suggestions from such varied sources as Muybridge’s photography, Michelangelo drawings, Rodin sculptures and from classical antiquity, which have all been seen as catalysts.27  Or Degas may again be cited, such as the nude drying herself, unusually oriented to the right, which had been shown at the Lefevre Gallery show two years earlier.28  But such points of reference interacted with an even more direct springboard in photojournalism for Bacon’s conception of the figure. For Bacon, the image of the back edited out the individuality implicit in facial features and so projected an animalistic sense of humanity. The association is reinforced here by the squatting or crouching posture that recalls the body language of apes, complementing the cage-like setting. For his part, Degas famously remarked that women at their toilette were like cats washing themselves, and the application to his work of the term ‘human animal’ goes all the way back to the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans.29  In 1952 Bacon was actually working from an illustrated feature article that had appeared in the same 1947 issue of Picture Post magazine about a lioness attacking a photographer in the wild.30 Bacon was clearly mesmerised by the largest image, in which the seated lioness seems to take on an incongruously gentle and protective attitude towards the recumbent figure, and to take on a decidedly anthropomorphic appearance. In Study for Crouching Nude the image of an animal with human attributes is metamorphosed by Bacon into a figure with animal undertones. Aside from the articulation of the body, the relationship with the photograph is implicit in the pool of shadow to the right of the figure, and in Untitled (Crouching Figures) and several related pictures by the inclusion of elements of the lying figure with bent legs. Here the imagery takes on unmistakable homoerotic overtones, almost as if the instinctive violence of the kill is converted in Bacon’s imagination into some sadomasochistic fantasy. The photograph was Bacon’s immediate source, but Degas remains in play if we concur with the art historian John Rothenstein’s description in 1964 of a typical mechanism in Bacon’s creativity: ‘his images often derive from a variety of photographs of different subjects and these may be fixed or coloured by his memory of still some other thing seen or remembered.’31  This remark captures a very visual process of transformation and synthesis that is bound to be travestied in any verbal description.

Several new departures are evident in Bacon’s art of the late 1950s and into the 1960s, in the aftermath of the variations on a van Gogh self-portrait that Bacon hurriedly executed in 1957. These developments include, first, a proliferation of naked figures, and in particular of female bodies, hitherto a rarity in Bacon’s work; secondly, an emphasis on the overall articulation of the body, which is sometimes more dynamically charged, but in general becomes more sculpturally defined, against simpler and increasingly colourful backdrops; thirdly, a move away from the photographic effects of grisaille, blur and inconsistent focus that had been dominant a few years earlier; and, fourthly, an espousal of working on paper.32  Although Bacon always denied that he drew, a significant cluster of cursory sketches have since come to light, with provenances among Bacon’s circle, but without any signatures or dates. The bulk were acquired by Tate and exhibited in 2003. Curator Matthew Gale convincingly ascribed the bulk of the drawings to around 1957 to 1961, on the basis of documentary evidence as well as visual correspondences with paintings dated from 1959 to the early 1960s.33  It is the hypothesis of this essay that these various new directions register in part Bacon’s assimilation of a fresh aspect of Degas.

Bacon is very likely to have seen the Lefevre Gallery exhibition Degas. Montotypes, Drawings, Pastels, Bronzes, staged between April and May 1958. It was accompanied by a bigger catalogue than usual, with all works illustrated and with an essay by Bacon’s long-time acquaintance Douglas Cooper, setting Degas within the wider history of the monotype (fig.7).34  Indeed, although there was a handful of works in the other media, the undoubted revelation of the show was the thirty-six monotypes, one-off images pulled from a sheet of metal on which the artist had improvised the image in printers’ ink, with radical freedom of touch and economy of means (at times working with his fingers and with rags). This was a strand in Degas’s work that had hitherto been relatively unknown in Britain compared with the paintings, pastels and sculpture. No monotypes, for instance, had been shown at the Tate Gallery six years earlier. Their impact would only have been enhanced for Bacon by the well-founded rumours that Picasso was keen to purchase several brothel monotypes from the London exhibition.35 

The works on show in 1958 are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Degas’s elegant ballet and race track pictures. Their earthy sensuality and bleak atmosphere were evoked at the time in the pages of the Burlington Magazine:

... nothing can mitigate the wretchedness of their [the prostitutes’] existence. Degas is prepared with Goya-like mercilessness to drain away all vestige of lying glamour in order to distil this disagreeable truth. The women are hideous, fat, no longer young; their clients shifty, and horribly respectable with their umbrellas and bowler hats … his attitude towards all such sad exploits of human beings was never compassionate. Rather he was deeply concerned with truth for its own sake, in probing life beneath the crust of good manners … He knew just how thin this crust was, and took a defiant delight in exposing the squalor that lay below it. We who still like for the sake of a little piece of mind to pretend that the crust still holds, are put in our place by the spectacle of all grace, all varnish, being ripped away with so much genius to reveal the raw facts.36

While the words of this review may echo any number of contemporary reactions to Bacon’s paintings, what is the visual evidence that these works by Degas struck a chord with Bacon? The abject, contorted naked women, in minimal interiors, who feature in Bacon’s art over the next two or three years suggest a general continuity with the Degas monotypes. More specific affinities exist between the drawn Figure in a Corner and one such Degas: in both, the figures’ arms are stretched out, and one leg is extended and the other bent, with the genitals prominently displayed, while the bed or sofa on which they disport themselves recedes diagonally into a shallow space.37  In several of the monotypes Degas’s women recline and doze, perhaps in a state of post-coital stupor (fig.8). Likewise recumbent figures abound in Bacon drawings, as in Figure Lying No.2 (Tate T07375), and related paintings such as Sleeping Figure, 1959, a tender depiction of his lover Peter Lacy.38  In its unselfconscious body language, remote from the posing of the traditional nude, the latter may incorporate Bacon’s recent memories of the girl conceived by Degas for Rest c.1879 (Musée Picasso, Paris), one of Picasso’s acquisitions. The same monotype includes a fragmentary glimpse of a male customer entering the space which may have been a point of reference at some level for Bacon’s enigmatic Walking Figure, 1960 (Dallas Museum of Art). Bacon’s nudes lying upside down on sofas, in works on paper (such as Reclining Figure No.1 and Reclining Figure No.2; Tate T07353-4) and on canvas – as in Reclining Woman 1961 (Tate T00453; fig.9) – recall the postures in several monotypes, which show prostitutes relaxing on upholstered couches (fig.8).39  Figures viewed from the back occur in several of Degas’s prints and drawings in the Lefevre Gallery exhibition, as they do in Bacon sketches like Standing Figure (Tate T07367), an especially economical image that possibly incorporates a recollection of one of Degas’s naked girls.40  Finally, Figure Bending Forwards (Tate T07358) and Bending Figure No.2 by Bacon (Tate T07379; fig.10) bring to mind the more contorted bodies in Degas’s imagery of girls at their toilette (fig.11), although Muybridge’s photographs are also relevant here.41  Generally, Degas and Muybridge seem to have coalesced for Bacon within this body of work.42 It is not possible to say for sure that Bacon saw these works by Degas. But the cursory discussion above indicates that there are sufficient visual and thematic parallels, across a fair proportion of Bacon’s work known or thought to date from the subsequent period, to support the proposition that the Lefevre Degas show in spring 1958 was a significant catalyst.

Its fascination for Bacon may have gone beyond iconography. The exhibition might also have prompted him to explore the possibilities of drawing. The current view is that Bacon turned to working on paper in the late 1950s as something of a temporary expedient, in order to help him resolve his current pictorial problems.43  If that is correct, which is impossible to prove since earlier and later graphic production could be lost, then Bacon might well have derived sustenance from Degas’s monotypes. Their extraordinary daring and lack of inhibition, in relation to both imagery and technique, would surely have resonated with Bacon. At the same time, they demonstrated how an artist might choose working on paper, on an intimate scale, as a vehicle for private studio experimentation and perhaps for erotic reverie, producing images that only became public after the artist’s death. In other words, they showed how drawing could be something other than a practical instrument for developing ideas for paintings, which was anathema to Bacon given his commitment to improvisation on the canvas.   

The argument about the Degas monotypes makes sense in relation to Bacon’s wider evolution. The period around 1960 tends to be rather glossed over, even by the Tate’s 2008 retrospective, reflecting its problematic aesthetic status. The one point that is regularly made is that Bacon’s simpler, colourful backdrops reflect his new awareness of American abstract expressionism and its St Ives equivalent in current British art, reinforced by his three-month stay in Cornwall in 1959.44  Yet, paradoxically, Bacon’s move towards a more animated treatment of the human body may in part have represented a reaction against abstraction, a type of art which lacked meaningful content in Bacon’s view. He may have been appropriating abstract devices for his backdrops in a spirit more of parody than emulation. An intensified interest in Degas, on the other hand, would be entirely compatible with the broader engagement with late nineteenth-century French art that informed Bacon’s art at this point. This extended notably to Rodin’s sculpture, analogous of course to Degas in its brutal realism and bodily contortions. Rodin was mentioned admiringly by Bacon in his lists of possible new pictures, and was proposed by Matthew Gale as a springboard for Bacon’s ‘distortion and idiosyncratic articulation of the human figure’ at this juncture.45 

By general consent, Bacon hit his artistic stride again in the early 1960s, a moment which roughly correlates, coincidentally or otherwise, with the new contentment in his personal life associated with meeting George Dyer. The period from then until the mid-1970s was one of the undoubted peaks in Bacon’s art. His sense of himself as a latter-day realist comes through strongly in the concurrent interviews with David Sylvester. Correspondingly, Bacon’s engagement with Degas becomes more overt, one element in a Francophilia that was apparent in the satisfaction he derived from being invited to stage a big retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris in 1971, in his acquisition of a flat in Paris, and in his several friendships at this time with French artists and writers, notably Michel Leiris. It is plausible that Bacon identified with Degas as a fellow spirit, a model for his own devotion to ‘the human clay’, in W.H. Auden’s resonant phrase, and thus as the antidote to a contemporary scene dominated by abstraction and pop art, from which Bacon felt increasingly isolated.

His new immersion in portraiture, for instance, was bound up with his admiration for Degas, as has already been indicated. Bacon no doubt perceived that, in works like Diego Martelli, shown in London in 1952, Degas had taken portraiture off its pedestal in much the same way that the women at their toilette pictures brought the image of the nude down to earth, locating it within contemporary everyday experience and the private sphere. In the Martelli portrait, the pose served to convey the singular physical and psychological presence of Degas’s sitter, and to evoke a fictive obliviousness to the observing artist, rather than the social front that is normally encountered in portraits. Its enduring impact is evident in the more exaggerated body language of Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud 1969 (private collection), ‘awkward in his squirming pose’ in Chris Stephens’s words, as well in certain late self-portraits such as Self-Portrait with a Watch 1973 (private collection).46  Bacon’s immediate points of reference were often photographs by John Deakin, but in directing the conception and making of these, Bacon may well have had Degas at the back of his mind. The George Dyer images from the 1960s, such as Study of George Dyer in a Mirror 1968 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), raise the further point that including paintings within paintings is an interesting sub-theme in both artists’ approaches to portraiture.47  At the other end of the scale spectrum, the robust physicality and rich tonality of Degas’s Head of a Woman c.1874 (Tate N03390; fig.12), another early acquisition for the national collection, may have been an example for Bacon’s head and shoulder portraits form the early 1960s onwards, especially in the many, robustly sensual depictions of the artist and model Isabel Rawsthorne.

Dyer inspired other works that went beyond straightforward portraiture. In the 1964 triptych Three Figures in a Room 1964 (Centre Pompidou, Paris), a playful and erotically charged love letter, Bacon’s apparent feminisation of the naked figure is accentuated by his allusions to Degas. The centrepiece of Dyer in repose on a couch recalls Degas’s imagery of the boudoir interior as a place of serenity and bodily pleasure while the right-hand depiction of his lover swivelling on a barstool evokes the ungainly poise of Degas’s sculpted ballet dancers, exemplified by the two bronzes acquired by Tate in 1949 and 1951.48  At the same time, the dance studio interiors could have encouraged Bacon to distil the luminous, simplified spaces that offset his increasingly plastic figures. Most obviously, Degas’s imagery of women at their toilette is transposed in the left-hand panel of the triptych into Bacon’s depiction of a man literally sat on the toilet, which it is hard not to see as light-hearted, even an in-joke, if Bacon is permitted to depart from tragic mode. The visceral physicality that he saw in Degas turns into a projection of Bacon’s own muscular ideal. Here, and above all in the depictions of the male toilette in Three Studies of the Male Back 1970, Bacon paid his most explicit homages to Degas’s After the Bath, by then on permanent display in the National Gallery. In between making the two triptychs, Bacon explained to Sylvester in their 1966 conversation what it was that he found so riveting about that particular Degas: ‘You will find at the very top of the spine that the spine almost comes out of the skin altogether. And this gives it such a grip and a twist that you’re more conscious of the vulnerability of the rest of the body than if he had drawn the spine naturally up to the neck. He breaks it so that this thing seems to protrude from the flesh.’49 The most literal elaboration of this idea in his own work occurs in Three Figures and Portrait 1975 (Tate T02112), though here virtuosity comes perhaps at the expense of vulnerability.

The first half of the 1970s may well have been the period in which Degas meant most to Bacon. Sylvester shrewdly noted that Triptych 1974–7 (private collection) ‘surely contains Bacon’s most complex homage to Degas’:

The two male backs are among the many in his work which are indebted to the Degas pastel in the National Gallery of a woman sponging her back; the horses with rider also recall Degas; and the whole atmosphere must be indebted … to a further Degas in the National Gallery, the Beach Scene: the panorama of sands and sea and sky, the contrast between figures near and far, the umbrellas, the way that shadows and pieces of fabric are silhouetted against the sky.50

Bacon proceeded to include After the Bath in his The Artist’s Choice exhibition, staged in 1985 at the National Gallery, London, with the Degas on the cover of the accompanying pamphlet. The actual picture was hung in the middle of three nudes occupying what Sylvester recalled as ‘the best wall’, flanked by Velzáquez’s Rokeby Venus 1647–51 and Michelangelo’s Entombment c.1500: ‘Degas was seen as the progeny of the masters on either side, and thus as Bacon’s key painter.’51

Others who knew Bacon well picked up on this reverence for Degas. In the first, but still the most suggestive monograph, the art critic John Russell lingered over the importance of After the Bath but observed too: ‘since Degas was a great student of people in rooms, it is natural that Bacon should often have studied the paintings in which Degas brought off just that element of psychological ambiguity which Bacon himself often strives for’ – a point Russell illustrated with Degas’s early Interior c.1868–9 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), a picture which does indeed presage the air of indeterminate menace in, for instance, the central panel of Bacon’s Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer 1971 (Fondation Beyeler, Basel).52  Subsequently, the biographer Michael Peppiatt quoted Bacon thus: ‘I love Degas. I think his pastels are among the greatest things ever made. I think they’re far greater than his paintings.’53 And from Peppiatt himself: ‘Bacon had obtained a copy of the rare Lemoisne catalogue raisonné of Degas’s work and he kept it in the studio during this period, frequently leafing through the hundreds of images that Degas, whom he admired more than any other nineteenth-century artist save van Gogh, had created.’54

Visual parallels with Degas occasionally make themselves felt in Bacon’s work from his final decade or so. It is interesting to note that both of these committed recorders of the human form were unusually drawn in their later careers to imagery of landscape, although the knobbly, rounded forms that both of them explored in the natural world were redolent of bodily associations. Compare, for instance, Bacon’s Sand Dune 1983 (Fondation Beyeler, Basel; fig.13) with Degas’s late coastal scenes, for example Le Cap Hornu near St Valery-sur-Somme c.1890–3 (British Museum; fig.14). One of Bacon’s very last pictures, Study for the Human Body 1991, presents striking parallels of scale, imagery and palette to Degas’s Dancers at the Bar c.1900 (Philips Collection, Washington), notwithstanding the gulf between Degas’s slender, immaterial females and Bacon’s body-building beefcake.55

A feature of Degas’s later art that Bacon is likely to have found exciting was its combination of taut, analytical drawing of the structure of the body, in defined spatial settings, with sparse expanses of painterly texture and increasingly arbitrary flat colour, including the bright oranges to which Bacon was especially devoted. Equally, the acidic greens encountered in late Degas, such as A Group of Dancers c.1890 (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh), are the most striking precedent for Bacon’s audacious viridians, epitomised by Crouching Nude 1961.56

In general, what Bacon admired in Degas was the sensation of visceral reality, created not merely through description but also by the knowing manipulation of paint marks on a flat surface, beneath the effect of spontaneity that both cultivated. An underlying affinity of attitude is evident by juxtaposing a typical comment made late in life by Bacon – ‘The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you’ve got of its looking real’57  – with remarks attributed to Degas such as: ‘One gives the idea of truth by means of the false’ and ‘”Art” is the same word as “artifice”, that is to say, something deceitful. It must succeed in giving the impression of nature by false means’.58 Moreover both artists were neurotic perfectionists, prone to asking if they could take back for revision works they had completed and even sold. Each went so far on occasion as to destroy the work in question, and unsurprisingly both had such requests turned down by wary owners, by the Tate in fact in Bacon’s case, when in 1966 he asked to add a green carpet to Study for Portrait on Folding Bed 1963 (Tate T00604), acquired three years earlier;59  and by the owner and friend of the artist Henri Rouart, when Degas asked if he could modify Dancers Practicing at the Barre 1877 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), having come to regret the visual analogy between the watering can, commonly used to sprinkle the floor to suppress dust, and the pose of the rightmost dancer.60

It is tempting as well to see Bacon’s attitude to artistic media as reflecting his awareness of Degas. His mixing of pastel and paint, especially in the 1940s, may reflect a fascination with the French artist’s technical experimentalism. Bacon, too, felt the lure of working in three dimensions, judging from the Sylvester interviews, though unlike Degas he remained a sculptor manqué.61  Even taking into account the posthumously revealed sketches discussed earlier, Bacon barely drew and, according to Sylvester, was ‘forever asserting that he couldn’t draw’, but, interestingly, he was drawn to several artists renowned for their virtuoso draughtsmanship, Degas and Michelangelo as well as Giacometti and Seurat.62  Discernable here is an element of compensation or wish fulfilment in an artist who had never learnt to draw in the traditional sense, and who relied on inventive manipulations of paint to evoke the presence of forms in space. In other words, within the identification, there was also an attraction of opposites in Bacon’s response to Degas.

This essay assembles some evidence – and quite a lot of speculation – regarding what Bacon might have derived, throughout his career, from looking hard at works by Degas. Some of its juxtapositions of particular works may seem more persuasive than others, but it is hoped that the overall argument has demonstrated that there is a real continuity of sensibility between the two artists, and that Bacon’s documented admiration for Degas had profound, wide-ranging consequences for his art – on a par with his immersion in Picasso or Soutine. There is doubtless much more to be said about what he saw and valued in Degas, such as sexual connotations, or a darker side of the French artist implicit, too, in John Berger’s comments about his fascination with ‘the human capacity for martyrdom … The human quality Degas most admired was endurance’.63 On a broader front, finally, this essay has sought to indicate the benefits of treating Bacon as a singular but also regular artist, rather than as a kind of shaman or a charismatic bohemian who happened to paint. Regular artists, especially those of the highest distinction, find compelling provocation in other works of art, and Bacon was no exception: ‘to create something … is a sort of echo from one artist to another’. He may have been personally committed to alcohol, gambling and picking up teddy boys, but bouncing off great artists like Degas was ultimately far more significant for Bacon’s painting.

 

 

Notes

1. See Martin Hammer, ‘Clearing away the Screens’, in Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads, exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2005, pp.21 and 27 note 17. Perhaps Bacon’s interest in Degas revived at this point as a result of encountering Jean Sutherland Bogg’s pioneering and monumental study Portraits by Degas, Berkeley 1962.

2. Francis Bacon, cited in Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud, London 1993, p.126.

3. Some of these relationships are addressed in Wilfried Seipel, Barbara Steffen and Christoph Vitali (eds.), Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, Milan 2003; Anne Baldassari, Bacon Picasso, Paris 2005; Rebecca Daniels, ‘Francis Bacon and Walter Sickert: “Images which unlock other images”’, in Martin Harrison (ed.), Francis Bacon: New Studies. Centenary Essays, Göttingen 2010, pp.57–87; Soutine/Bacon, exhibition catalogue, Helly Nahmad Gallery, New York 2011; Martin Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, New Haven and London 2005.

4. The legacy of Degas, for instance, was transmitted to Bacon in part through Sickert and Bonnard, as well as through Picasso, who studied Degas’s work intensely. See Elizabeth Cowling and Richard Kendall, Picasso Looks at Degas, New Haven and London 2010.

5.The classic discussion of ‘influence’ remains Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, New Haven and London 1991, pp.58–62.

6. See Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson, Degas, Sickert, Toulouse-Lautrec, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2005; Frances Fowle, Impressionism and Scotland, exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2008; Douglas Cooper, ‘A Franco-Scottish Link with the Past’, in Alex Reid & Lefevre, London 1976; Richard Kendall and Jill Devonyar, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2011

7. Martin Hammer, ‘Francis Bacon and the Lefevre Gallery’, Burlington Magazine, May 2010, pp.307–12.

8. See Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, pp.203–4. It is worth noting that Picasso’s Nude Standing by the Sea 1929 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) was with the Lefevre Gallery from 1929 until at least 1936; see Gary Tinterow and Susan Alyson Stein (eds.), Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum, New Haven and London 2010, p.212.

9. Martin Harrison, In Camera. Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p.41.

10. David Bomford, Sarah Herring, Jo Kirby and others, Art in the Making: Degas, London 2004, pp.90–1.

11.  Harrison 2005, pp.41–3.

12. David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 1993, p.114.

13. On the innovative technique used in this work, see Bomford 2004, pp.136–41.

14. See Kendall and Devonyar 2011.

15. David Sylvester, ‘Francis Bacon’ (1954), partially reprinted in David Sylvester, About Modern Art, London 2002, p.57.

16. David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2001, p.54.

17. Edgar Degas 1834–1917, exhibition catalogue, Lefevre Gallery, London, May–June 1950, no.9, reproduced p.7. The provenance is given as the studio sale and another Paris sale in 1942, from which the gallery or their French partner had presumably acquired the work.

18. Loaned to the Tate Gallery in December 1951–May 1952 and February–April 1958; details of the picture’s history are derived from the file on the work in the National Gallery Archives.

19. By contrast, Degas’s study of Hélène Rouart (Lefevre Gallery 1950, no.8) is listed as having been shown in the gallery’s XIX Century French Masters exhibition the previous year.

20. Daniels 2010, pp.57–87.

21. Sylvester 1993, pp.49–50.

22. Ibid., p.176.

23. ‘He Photographed Europe in Decay’, Picture Post, 9 August 1947, p.8.

24. Martin Hammer and Chris Stephens, ‘“Seeing the Story of One’s Time”: Appropriations from Nazi Photography in the Work of Francis Bacon’, Visual Culture in Britain, November 2009, pp.340–3. See also Martin Hammer, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda, London 2012.

25. Sylvester 1993, p.82.

26. Study for Crouching Nude was exhibited finished in the summer of 1952, which negates the possibility that Bacon was prompted by works such as Woman Drying Herself c.1890–5 (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh) exhibited in the Degas show at the Tate Gallery that autumn.

27. Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens (eds.), Francis Bacon, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2008, p.110.

28. The work is visible in the installation shot in Alex Reid & Lefevre, London 1976, and reproduced in Degas. Monotypes, Drawings, Pastels, Bronzes, exhibition catalogue, Lefevre Gallery, London, April–May 1958, p.22 no.31. At the time of publication, the whereabouts of the work are unknown to the author

29. Kendall and Devonyar 2011, p. 130

30.See Martin Hammer, ‘Francis Bacon: Painting after Photography’, Art History, April 2012, pp.369–70

31,John Rothenstein, ‘Introduction’, in Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, London 1964, pp.17–8

32. There is a useful discussion of this period in Martin Harrison’s ‘Catalogue Note’ on Francis Bacon, Crouching Nude 1961, in Sothebys, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 29 June 2011, lot 49.

33.Matthew Gale, Francis Bacon: Working on Paper, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1999

34.Douglas Cooper, ‘The Monotypes of Degas’, in Degas. Monotypes, Drawings, Pastels, Bronzes, pp.3–5. The images are arranged visually rather than by numerical sequence. It was the art historian Richard Thomson who initially drew my attention to the possible significance of this show for Bacon. In the discussion after the first presentation of this paper Anthony Diamond recalled that the Lefevre show had had a powerful impact on artists more widely.

35.See Cowling and Kendall 2010, pp.223–36. This study demonstrates that the monotypes had been known for decades in advanced artistic circles in Paris.

36.Benedict Nicolson, ‘Degas Monotypes’, Burlington Magazine, May 1958, pp.172–5.

37.Bacon reproduced in Gale 1999, fig.22; Degas reproduced in Lefevre Gallery 1958, no.16

 Bacon reproduced in Gale 1999, fig.31; Degas reproduced in Lefevre Gallery 1958, no.2338.

39. Bacon reproduced in Gale 1999, nos.3 and 4; Degas reproduced in Lefevre Gallery 1958, nos.20 and 26.

40. Bacon reproduced in Gale 1999, no.17; Degas reproduced in Lefevre Gallery 1958, nos.5 and 18.

41. Bacon reproduced in Gale 1999, nos.8 and 29; Degas reproduced in Lefevre Gallery 1958, no.33.

42.On the Muybridge sources for several drawings, see Gale 1999, pp.25–9.

43. See Rachel Tait, ‘Archive’, in Gale and Stephens 2008, pp.186–7.

44.Harrison 2005, pp.136–41; Ben Tufnell, Francis Bacon in St Ives: Experiment and Transition 1957–62, exhibition catalogue, Tate St Ives 2007.

45. Harrison 2005, pp.141–7; Gale 1999, p.78.

46.Chris Stephens,‘“Like a Shadow”: Darkness, Life and Death in the Art of Francis Bacon’, in Anna Coliva and Michael Peppiatt (eds.), Caravaggio Bacon, Rome 2009, p.70.

47. Compare, for example, Degas’s portrait of James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot c.1866–8 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

48. Degas’s Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot c.1910–11 (Tate N05919) and Dancer Putting on her Stockingc.1900 (Tate No5918) were acquired for the Tate collection in 1949 and 1951 respectively.

49. Sylvester 1993, pp.46–7.

50. Sylvester 2001, pp.151-2. I am happy to echo Sylvester’s acknowledgement to Sarah Whitfield for the point about the National Gallery’s Beach Scene c.1869–70.

51. Ibid., p.210.

52. John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1979, pp.39–40 (also pp.116–8).

53. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait, New Haven and London 1996, p.144.

54. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London 1996, pp.267–8. Further confirmation of Bacon’s admiration for Degas was also given by Angus Stewart, who knew Bacon as a Chelsea neighbour, in the discussion that followed the first presentation of this paper.

55. Bacon 7 Degas reproduced online at Francis Bacon.

56. For Crouching Nude 1961, see Sothebys, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 29 June 2011, lot 49.

57. Sylvester 1993, p.148.

58. Kendall and Devonyar 2011, p.192.

59. See Matthew Gale, ‘Study for Portrait on Folding Bed 1963 by Francis Bacon’, catalogue entry, February 1999.

60. Jean Sutherland Boggs, Henri Loyrette, Michael Pantazi and others, Degas, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1988, p.278

61. Sylvester 1993, p.108.

62.David Sylvester, ‘Bacon’s Secret Vice’, in Gale 1999, p.10.

63. John Berger, ‘The Dark Side of Degas’s Ballet Dancers’, Guardian, 15 November 2011.

 

Acknowledgements

This paper was originally presented as the Rothenstein Lecture at Tate Britain on 24 November 2011. My thanks go to Jennifer Mundy in Tate’s Research Department for the invitation to speak, and to Lucy Carter, John Rothenstein’s daughter, for sponsoring the event. I am also grateful to members of the audience for their illuminating feedback on the lecture, and to my wife Christina Lodder and my friend and colleague Richard Thomson, noted Degas specialist, for commenting on preliminary drafts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stanley Spencer in Rotterdam/Francis Bacon in the Hague

 

 

 

ADRIAN CLARK   |   EXHIBITION REVIEWS   |   BRITISH AND IRISH ART   |  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2011

 

Went at the weekend to the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, where there is a splendid new Spencer show. There are a large number of Spencers on display and also an attempt to contextualise the work by including work by many other contemporary British artists. So it turns into a wider review of the British art scene of the period, particularly of his early years. I can recall seeing pictures by William Roberts, Paul Nash, Gilbert Spencer, Bomberg, Freud, David Jones, Eric Gill, Wyndham Lewis etc etc.

One swings around a bit on Spencer. At one moment he is a mad English individualist in all his unique brilliance and there seems little point trying to find any context for him. Then it seems possible to see similarities between some of his work at some points with some of other people’s works at particular points in their careers.

I am not a particular fan of the value of identifying influences in modern British art,but it must actually be quite unusual for artists to achieve genuine uniqueness. In Spencer’s case, of course, and probably in most cases, the influences may well be those of earlier artists and not contemporaries. So I suppose the possible value of setting the scene with the work of others is to show a whole generation of British artists responding to the same sort of shared inheritance that was art history when they started out, however divergent their careers became.

Anyway, worth a visit. I am not sure whether Rotterdam itself merits a long tourist stay, but we combined it with a stay in the Hague, from where we visited Delft on the tram and saw there the fascinating little Vermeer museum they have. At the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague there is currently a room full of Francis Bacon pictures, some on long term loan from the Estate. Unfortunately, they seem rather cramped in a small gallery with low ceilng and bright lights.

The inevitable glazing on the pictures means that it is very difficult to look at the pictures without irritating reflections of lights and some sort of construction in the middle of the room. It is impossible to photograph the Bacons from any angle. It’s been a bit of a Bacon fest recently, as we also came across the picture in the Thyssen in Madrid the week before.



 

 


 

Violence, loathing, beauty, pain:

 

How Rembrandt influenced Francis Bacon

 

He brutally mutilated the old master’s self-portraits – then endlessly echoed them.

But just how influenced was Francis Bacon by Rembrandt?

 

 

Charles Darwent explores a new exhibition that attempts to paint a clearer picture

 

 

 

CHARLES DARWENT  |  CULTURE  |  ART  |  THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY  |  SUNDAY 16 OCTOBER 2011

 

 

 

In June 1962, the American photographer Irving Penn shot a series of portraits of Francis Bacon at the latter’s studio in Reece Mews, London. One (previous page) sticks particularly in the mind. It is of Bacon standing in front of a wall which he has covered, typically, with pages torn from books and magazines. Peering down over the artist’s shoulder is one of these, the crumpled image of an old man. It is Rembrandt, painted by himself, in the famous Self-Portrait with Beret now at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence.

 

Us looking at Penn looking at Bacon looking at Rembrandt. Penn’s portrait is full of questions, prime among them the one of who chose its mise-en-scène. Did Bacon ask to be photographed in front of a dead Old Master, or was it Penn who saw a connection between the two men, and if so of what kind? Bacon was 52 when Penn’s picture was taken, although, with his cherub cheeks and boot-polish-blacked hair, he looks 20 years younger. Rembrandt was 51 when he painted the Aix self-portrait and seems 20 years older. Like Bacon, he had lived beyond his means; unlike Bacon, his luck had run out. In 1660, the year of the self-portrait, Rembrandt had been forced to sell his house and printing press and to go to work for his son, Titus. Etched into his face is the pauper’s grave that would wait for him a decade later. Did Penn see, in Bacon’s sybaritic life, a similar end? Or did Bacon choose to have Rembrandt look over his right shoulder – the angel’s side – as a token of admiration, or self-admiration?

 

Nothing in Bacon’s life or art is ever easy, his take on Rembrandt least of all. What we do know is that there was a take – that Bacon, a tireless gatherer of scraps, admired Rembrandt above all other artists. Again and again in his quarter-of-a-century of interviews with the critic David Sylvester, Bacon returns to the Dutchman, worrying away at him as if picking at a scab, or at Rembrandt’s scabrous paint. It is hard to believe that so deep a relationship between two such great artists had never been the subject of an exhibition – Bacon has been paired off with everyone from Van Gogh to Eadweard Muybridge – but this is the case. Which makes Irrational Marks, the opening show of the new Ordovas gallery in London, which looks at the work of two men side-by-side, both welcome and revealing.

 

Maybe acts of homage are always tinged with loathing; certainly, Bacon’s seems that way. Rembrandt painted or etched nearly 100 self-portraits over 40 years. Many – the Mauritshuis gallery’s Self-portrait with Gorget, say – show him as young and strong, high on the hog’s back. Bacon’s fascination, though, is with the man laid low, stripped bare. There are half-a-dozen of his torn-out pages in this show, all of them taken from Reece Mews and bearing reproductions of Rembrandt self-portraits post-1655, when the artist was in his fifties, widowed and broke. To the violence of the Dutchman’s own life, Bacon has added another: the pages are creased and spattered with paint. The housekeeping at Reece Mews was known to be slovenly, but the treatment to which the pages have been subjected seems harsh even so, less a lack of care than an outright attack. In one plate, torn from Claude Roger Marx’s monograph on Rembrandt, the old man’s throat has apparently been cut. His upper lip has been gouged out.

 

It may, of course, have been a kind of empathy. If you saw the film Love is the Devil, you’ll know Bacon’s taste for the lash. Pain was beauty for him; pain was truth. In a story he told, often and in several variants, Bacon’s fox-hunting father had had his 14-year-old son horsewhipped when he was caught being buggered by a stable-boy. The punishment had backfired: from then on, the artist-to-be added masochism to his repertoire of happily delinquent sexuality. To enjoy Rembrandt’s pain was to pay him an accolade, to enrol him in a club: not for nothing did Bacon refer to the Dutchman’s clotted brushwork as a "coagulation". But, as with his father’s horsewhipping, to feel Rembrandt’s pain was to turn the Oedipal tables.

 

If there is hate in Bacon’s love of Rembrandt, then it may have something to do with their differing views of age. The master of Reece Mews once disingenuously remarked to David Sylvester that he painted self-portraits, although he "loathed [his] own face", because he hadn’t "got anyone else to do". By absolute contrast, Rembrandt loves his own face, not because it is his but because it is a face.

 

In a sense, all of the Dutch Master’s self-portraits are double portraits. They depict a man who is getting older, but they also show an artist who is growing more mature. Every vicissitude that life can throw at Rembrandt – each pouch and jowl, every newly acquired line – calls for an artistic answer. There is a blessed equity to his self-depiction. It takes experience to paint an experienced face: Rembrandt had to be 51 to paint himself at 51. Old age, suffering, become cartes de visite, advertisements of his skill. The Aix self-portrait is like a fugue in which one voice is worn down by time, the other triumphant over it. Talking to Sylvester about the Aix image, Bacon praised Rembrandt’s abstraction, his capacity to make the "irrational marks" from which this show takes its title. The Aix self-portrait, he says, is "almost completely anti-illustrational". That both is and is not true Rembrandt, like any 17th-century painter, would have viewed the lack of resemblance as a failure – but it is certainly revealing about Bacon’s own view of himself. The point of a double portrait is to understand both sitters by reference to the other. This exhibition of the two men’s work does just that. Where Rembrandt’s images of himself are revealed as inescapably optimistic, Bacon’s are endlessly pessimistic.

.

nly when you see him next to Rembrandt do you realise that Bacon is all about self-effacement. In one study for a self-portrait, made in 1973 (above left), Bacon’s own face is eclipsed by another, the face of a watch. You sense an 11th hour: the artist, now 64, is reduced to two forms, a double-chin and the skull-like socket of an eye. There is no redemption in his self-image, none of Rembrandt’s saving virtuosity: there is only age, and time ticking away. With its grey brushwork and hazy surface, the watch-portrait feels like a picture torn from a newspaper or magazine. Its monochrome palette seems to echo the brown-on-brown self-portraits of the ageing Rembrandt, at least as shown in black-and-white reproduction. The watch-portrait is Rembrandt rubbed out and then rubbed out again, faded and re-faded. It is a self-portrait of Bacon as someone else, someone he wanted to be.

Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt is on show at Ordovas, 25 Savile Row, London W1 in London, until December 16th

 

 

 


 Ordovas Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt

 

 

 

 NAOMI RICHMOND-SWIFT  |  REVIEW  |  FAD  |  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 12 2011

 

Pilar Ordovas can rightly call herself something of a Francis Bacon expert, having been responsible for the auction in 2008 of Triptych (1974 – 1977), for a record-breaking £26million, the highest selling piece ever auctioned at the London branch of Christie’s. This forms part of an impressive thirteen years under her belt at the auction house, including another huge sale, Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, (£21 million). From Christie’s Pilar directed Gagosian London for two years, before leaving in March 2011 with the intention of starting her own gallery.

After seven months of building and preparation the gallery itself forms an impeccably chic addition to Savile Row, in keeping with its behemoth neighbour Hauser + Wirth, whose current Roni Horn exhibition seems a suitably introspective companion for Bacon’s self-portraits, Roni’s own face in You Are The Weather peering out of the window in duplicate as we cross the road.

 

It has been a while since I last attended an ‘inspiration’ exhibition – one which charts the influence of one artist over another. I always find them historically interesting, but great care must be taken curatorially to ensure nothing looks contrived. A very well-curated show can be satisfyingly enlightening. This isn’t a Tate-sized space but Ordovas makes the best use of her gallery to provide just enough bite-sized learning.

 

Bacon Rembrandt starts with two central images; the first is Irving Penn’s Francis Bacon, a photograph of Bacon in front of a poster of Rembrandt’s Self-portrait with Beret (Francis Bacon often talked about being influenced by Rembrandt and a number of source images like this were found in his studio), and the second, a coup for a commercial gallery and testament to Pilar’s art world connections; the original Rembrandt Self-portrait with Beretfrom the shot. Ordovas came across the first image in 2006 while handling the estate of Valerie Beeston, who managed Francis Bacon at Malborough Gallery, and a seed was planted.

 

It is a simple comparison but a very pleasing one; Ordovas surrounds Rembrandt’s face with six of Bacon’s Studies for Self-Portraits, symmetrically arranged either side instantly highlighting similarities of technique; the muted colours, the wide, sweeping brushstrokes, the darkness and shading. Rembrandt produced a huge number of self-portraits: at least thirty that are known about, the aim being a true likeness, which became a lifetime’s work. Bacon’s self-portraits manipulated the face to imply inner turmoil, so there are more jagged edges, unfinished shapes and dissolved portions.

 

Downstairs we are shown source documents from Bacon’s studio, and an interview with David Sylvester and Bacon from 1966, which plays on repeat but tonight is drowned by the chatter of the opening party. Ordovas herself warmly welcomes everyone and radiates a quiet pride at her inaugural (and non-commercial) exhibition here. Everything is well thought through and polished, whilst remaining open and accessible. I feel like I’ve come away with something – some of Ordovas’s knowledge happily shared, and I’m looking forward to what Pilar does next.

Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt 7th October – 16th December 2011

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon and Rembrandt: Dark moments of self-appraisal

 

 

 

A small show in London illustrates Bacon’s debt to Rembrandt’s self-portraits

 

 

 

BY S.W.  |  PROSPERO  |  NEWS  |  THE ECONOMIST  |  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2011

 

 IN 1962 Irving Penn, an American photographer, went to visit Francis Bacon at his studio in London to make a portrait of him. The photograph he took shows Bacon clasping the front of his dark shirt and gazing up and away. Hanging on the wall behind his right shoulder, bent and creased and covered in paint, is a reproduction of a sombre, unfinished painting by Rembrandt, Self-portrait with Beret (pictured), from about 1659. 
 
 Bacon’s debt to Rembrandt’s self-portraits is the subject of Irrational Marks, the first show at Ordovas, a new gallery on Savile Row in London. Pilar Ordovás, the gallery’s owner is something of an art-world wunderkind, responsible for the sale of Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping for £21m in 2008. She has also managed Gagosian in London, and handled the estate of Valerie Beeston, who worked with Francis Bacon at the Marlborough Gallery. This exhibition shows intent: to put on contemplative considered exhibitions, as well as to be an art boutique with commercial clout. 

The exhibition is tiny and tightly focused. On the ground floor there are just six works by Bacon, including two triptychs, along with the Rembrandt painting he liked so much and Penn’s photograph. Downstairs in the basement are three working documents from Bacon’s studio—all reproductions of Rembrandt self-portraits—and a short excerpt from Sunday Night Francis Bacon, a film from 1966 in which the painter speaks to David Sylvester, an art critic. 

Bacon revered Self-portrait with Beret. It is an exercise in shadow and texture. The rough ruddiness of Rembrandt’s ageing cheek is no more than a patch of vertical lines scratched into the paint; his coarsened and wrinkled forehead crafted from layers of thick impasto in pale yellow and mottled red. Sections are left unpainted, allowing the ground colour to contrast with the brown pigments in a play of light and dark. But it was the eyes that fascinated Bacon. In the interview with Sylvester he says "If you analyse it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational." 
    
Rembrandt made more than 90 pictures of himself during his life, from the early etchings of the 1630s, which show him gurning with laughter, anger and surprise, to the last self-portrait of 1669, the year he died. It is telling that Bacon fixated on an unfinished picture so spare in detail but so rich in character. What Bacon loved about Rembrandt’s self-portraits was what he called the "tightrope walk" between the abstract and figurative. The paint remains paint. It doesn’t disappear into what it depicts. Nevertheless, there is Rembrandt staring out implacably, sceptically. The feeling one has standing in front of the painting is that it is full of self-appraisal. This is a dialogue of a great painter with himself. If it could speak it would never use a long word, but each short one would go to the heart. 
    
Bacon was a slicer and a dicer. The portraits and self-portraits on show here are eruptions of violence and damage. In Study for Self-Portrait from 1964, the face is a mangle of red, white and black with dabs of green and yellow, thick swirls of impasto and striations made by pressing corduroy into the wet surface. On one side, the face has been carved away entirely. By the time he painted the triptych Three Studies for Self-Portrait in 1975, Bacon was depicting himself with great incisions in his cheeks and jaw, and with circular holes bored into his throat. These darkly beautiful paintings are dramas of flayed flesh and the frayed psyche, but he walks the same high-wire as Rembrandt, pushing appearance as far as it will go in pursuit of the inner life, but never beyond recognisability. 

The paintings by Bacon are all from private collections. The Rembrandt hangs in the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence in France—it was last seen in Britain 12 years ago at the National Gallery. This exhibition is a rare chance to see these paintings, all shockingly compulsive and rich in psychological flare. In fact, they are so good you’re left wanting more. It is a frustratingly narrow show, representing a 13-year slice of Bacon’s work as a portraitist. In Study for Self-Portrait from 1973, a watch face in the bottom left-hand corner reads 7.20. Both Bacon and Rembrandt were fascinated by ageing and mortality. This exhibition would have been bolstered by earlier and later work showing the span of Bacon’s changing conception of himself. 
    
But despite its limitations, this show is wonderfully suggestive of Bacon’s cannibalism as a painter. As Ms Ordovás says in her catalogue introduction, Bacon was a "magpie", pillaging from an astonishing array of sources. The most playful piece in the show is a document from Bacon’s studio, where he has pinned together a fragment of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at the Easel from 1660 which he’d torn from a book, with part of a photograph of "Papa" Jimmy Yancey, a jazz pianist. In the short film Bacon shows off a number of paint-spattered images-of Marilyn Monroe, of Hitler, of the gestures of chimpanzees and, lastly, of Self-portrait with Beret. Every object in his studio was there to be used, and every image there to be digested. Rembrandt may have been Bacon’s companion, but he had to elbow for room among many others. 

Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt is on show at Ordovas in London until December 16th

 

 

 

 

 

New show examines artist Bacon’s debt to Rembrandt

 

 

 

An exhibition at a new London gallery examines what its owner believes is a long overlooked subject

- 20th century painter Francis Bacon’s debt to 17th century Dutch artist Rembrandt.

 

 

 

 Mike Collett-White, Reuters, Friday October 7th, 2011

 

It was Rembrandt’s Spanish contemporary Diego Velazquez who is most closely associated with Bacon in the minds of most art lovers, due to the Irish-born painter’s famous series of interpretations of the 1650 portrait of Pope Innocent X.

While the relationship between Bacon and Rembrandt is less obvious, gallery owner Pilar Ordovas believes it was nonetheless crucial to the way the modern artist worked. "There have not been any exhibitions, any publications, nothing dedicated to the importance of Rembrandt in Bacon’s work," she told Reuters at her new Ordovas gallery in central London.

"I really felt that it had been overlooked," added the former Christie’s executive who helped negotiate some of the biggest art sales in recent years before leaving for a two-year stint at the Gagosian gallery in London.

"He (Bacon) really looked at Rembrandt, and what he loved about late Rembrandt was the use and the application of paint, how incredibly loose it is and how almost abstracted, but at the same time full of meaning." The exhibition, Irrational Marks: Bacon, Rembrandt opens on Friday at the new space in an exclusive area of the city.

It takes up two of the gallery’s white-walled rooms and features several Bacon self-portraits, photographs, a video of Bacon in which he discusses Rembrandt, and, perhaps most impressively, the Dutch master’s Self-Portrait with Beret from 1659.

The painting, on loan from the Musee Granet in Aix-en-Provence, France, was the same work Bacon returned to several times to admire, and also appears in the background of a photograph of Bacon taken by Irving Penn. That photograph, given by the artist to his influential friend, manager and confidante Valerie Beston, was what gave Ordovas the idea for the exhibition in the first place.

"If you wanted to do anything Bacon-related — write a book, do an exhibition or buy a painting — you needed to speak to Ms. Beston," Ordovas explained.

"She was a really, really crucial part of his life and he left her one of perhaps his most important self-portraits." Ordovas handled Beston’s estate in 2006, and at the subsequent auction at Christie’s a Bacon self-portrait went for 5.2 million pounds.

"Bacon ... made several trips to go and see this (Rembrandt) painting. He never admitted to having seen the Velazquez portrait ... he always said that he didn’t want to be disappointed by it." Although Bacon often worked from photographs, Ordovas added that she, like others, suspected he may have seen the original Pope Innocent work despite denying it.

"The influence of Rembrandt on Bacon’s painting is not a literal reference," she explained. "It’s not like with Velazquez ... to which he dedicates the series. The main influence from Rembrandt’s work is the way that he uses the paint, the looseness of the paint."

Ordovas said that despite her success in the auction world, she was ready to launch her own gallery and stage "museum-quality" exhibitions. The Bacon show is non-commercial and runs until December 16. The gallery will also allow her to offer a private space for selling 20th century and contemporary art in the secondary market.

 

 

 

 

 

Self-portraits shine spotlight on Bacon’s

debt to Rembrandt

 

 


A new exhibition explores the connection and influences of Rembrandt’s

late self-portraits on Francis Bacon’s work

 

 

 

BEN HOYLE  |  ARTS CORRESPONDENT  |  NEWS  | THE TIMES  |  SATURDAY 1 OCTOBER 2011

 

Born 300 years apart and sharing a self-destructive streak, Rembrandt van Rijn and Francis Bacon took self-portraiture to the brink, painting their own raddled, ageing faces with unflinching fascination and technical daring.

But, perhaps because Bacon never quoted obviously from Rembrandt’s work as he did from both Velázquez and Van Gogh, the debt that he owed to the Dutch master has never been properly appreciated — until now.

 

A new private art gallery opens in London next week with a free show that aims to redress that curiosity. Irrational Marks: Bacon and Rembrandt, which is at Ordovas, in Savile Row, from Friday, is the first exhibition devoted to exploring the connection and influences of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits on Bacon’s work.

 

it is a small show but will have cost a fortune o insure:  the star attractions are six Bacon paintings and the late Rembrandt self-portrait that he apparently loved above all others: Self-Portrait with Beret from Aix-en-Provence. It will also include all the material relating to Rembrandt from Bacon’s studio in South Kensington including a paint-splattered photograph of the Rembrandt self-portrait.

 

Bacon consciously measured himself against the greats of the past and once said that his pictures "were to deserve either the National gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between".

 

While other artists fascinated him for specific periods, Rembrandt exerted a powerful grip on bacon’s approach to painting throughout his career. Pilar Ordovas, the gallery’s founder, said "He was as absolutely important to him as Velázquez and Van Gogh, there’s no doubt of that," she added.

 

Bacon considered Rembrandt’s looser late self-portraits to be the artist’s greatest works. In London he often crossed Soho to view the late Rembrandts at the National Gallery and also made regular pilgrimages to Kenwood House, on Hampstead Heath, to see the self-portrait that Rembrandt made during his final years.

 

But it was with the Musée Granet self-portrait that he developed a particular "obsession", according to Ms Ordovas. he spoke about it to the critic David Sylvester, telling him that he loved the painting because of the way Rembrandt had composed "a very great image" from a "coagulation of  non-rational marks", creating a representational painting from apparently abstract blobs of paint.

 

"Abstract Expressionism has all been done in Rembrandt’s marks," he said. "But in Rembrandt it has been done with the added thing that is was an attempt to record a fact and to me therefore must be much more exciting and much more profound."

 

Ms Ordovas said that one of the Bacon paintings in the show, a self-portrait from 1972, shows this influence very clearly. Just as in the Rembrandt there are, in Bacon’s words, "hardly any sockets to the eyes, it is almost completely anti-illustrational".

 

Ms Ordovas had the idea for the exhibition in 2006 when she was head of the Contemporary Art for Christie’s in London and helped to sell the estate of Valerie Beston, Bacon’s gallerist.

 

 

 

 

         Bacon in his studio, said that his painting bore technical similarities to the Rembrandt

 

 

 

Assaying the Pope: Francis Bacon’s Interrogation of Religion

 

 

 

RINA ARYA   |    IMPLICIT RELIGION   |   EQUINOX   |   VOLUME XIV   |   NUMBER 3   |   SEPTEMBER 2011

 

There are a number of reasons that account for Bacon’s use of the Pope, but none of them are motivated by expressions of religiosity. Although Bacon spent his earlier years in Catholic Ireland and was exposed to the clash of religious and cultural tensions, it is tenuous to claim that his employment of the Pope stemmed from his memories of living in Ireland. One possible psychoanalytical explanation is that Bacon conflated his own father with the symbolic Father, and so the Pope becomes a reminder of the rejection that he suffered in his family life. Sylvester remarked to Bacon that “the Pope is il Papa” (Sylvester 1993, 71), and Bacon’s wilful attempts to undo the authority of the Pope are tantamount to him stripping away the authority of his own father. Bacon subjected the Pope to a brutal treatment of isolation and imprisonment in which the Pope was forced to contemplate his ignoble nature, thus reversing the punishment that Bacon suffered at the hands of a father who did not accept his sexuality or his desire to be a painter. In this psychodrama Bacon represented his father as a figure that is positively haunted, trapped, and confined within a claustro[1]phobic and airless prison akin to a decompression chamber. Bacon’s ongoing use of the symbol can be viewed as a need for ritualized action, a need to replay his tumultuous father-son relationship. Ironically, Bacon used the very medium that his father had denied him—paint—as the instrument with which to torture him. On a mythical level Bacon was playing out the death of the Father:

“The regime of masculinity is revealed as, in the end, a murderous violence ... the figure of the Father (everyone’s father, yours, mine—not the real father, but the image or force behind him) is contemplated in the form of a supreme power ... that is vanquished by the son in a drastic coup d’état.” (Bryson 2003 47)

The most compelling reason for Bacon’s use of the Pope is to demon[1]strate the sense of Godlessness in his vision. In a Godless world the Pope is not venerated but is denigrated, and Bacon’s papal images echo the demise of the symbol of the Pope. Bacon is not content to present this as an isolated statement: he needs repeatedly to conjure up the Pope, if only to satirize him.

 

The papal images

Bacon painted over twenty-five Popes that were inspired by Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650). The Popes originated in the Heads series, which were close-up studies of enclosed heads that Bacon painted in 1948-9. Peppiatt suggests that the success of the Heads “emboldened” Bacon both “aesthetically and emotionally” and prepared him to confront the subject of the Pope (Peppiatt 1996, 133). The figure in Head VI is particularly relevant to the Pope series, because of the combination of the screaming Pope and his enclosed space. The screaming and the confinement are two motifs that recur in the Popes. For this reason Head VI can be regarded as a proto-papal study. Gowing describes how the figure in Head VI doubles up as both a prisoner and a ruler (Gowing 1989,15).These roles are seen in the Pope paintings but are accentuated here by being brought together. The Pope as erstwhile ruler crumbles, to leave a trapped prisoner. The Heads gave way to single-figure studies in the 1950s and 1960s, and Bacon’s Popes can be situated within this phase. Bacon’s first studies after Velazquez’s portrait are two paintings that were both entitled Study after Velazquez and painted in 1950. These two paintings, both later destroyed by Bacon, were meant to be three variations on Velazquez’s portrait for his exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in September-October 1950. The third variation was never executed and the series was withheld (Alley and Rothstein 1964, appendix B). These two paintings, which show the Pope through striated curtains, herald Bacon’s celebrated Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953).

The first extant1 series of Popes was painted during 1951, and the colouration and monochromatic tonality anticipate the Man in Blue series. In this papal series Bacon was inspired by a photograph of Pope Pius XII where the Pope was seated atop a sedia gestatoria (portable papal throne), and he recreated this in his depictions of the Pope on a raised platform (Steffen 2003,115) in a dark fan-vaulted interior that evoked the numinous (Alley and Rothstein 1964,53). Bacon commented on the unique position of the Pope raised onto a dais, conveying the grandeur of his position (Sylvester 1993, 26). In typical depictions the unique position of being raised onto a dais confirmed the Pope’s status, but in Bacon’s series the raised platform moves the Pope towards the picture plane, thus reducing the distance between viewer and sitter and subjecting him to further scrutiny. There is a progression of motion from Pope I to Pope III, and the onset of discomfort from the first to the third figures, where the first is static and contemplative, the second is blurred, and the third charged with pain and agitation.

The next papal series was of eight portraits, painted during the summer of 1953.2 These studies are simplified heads of the Pope that display an array of emotions, especially from the first to the eighth study, in which the Pope becomes increasingly agitated and desperate to escape the scrutiny of the viewer. The schematic nature of this series, with the juxtaposition of the bluish garments against the harsh yellow of the fragmentary throne-like structures, is jarring. The Popes appear as apparitions from out of the dark recesses of their ecclesial spaces, each (except the first Pope) with a yellow cord with a tassel.

3 In this series Bacon wrenches the Pope from his lofty position in the art historical canon and inserts him into the mass culture of cinema where the series unfolds as a string of film stills. The last series of Popes were six “Studies” painted in April-May 1961. They consist of papal figures seated on thrones but less detail is given to the throne and backdrop and more attention is paid to the papal figure, who is rendered in more fleshy tones. In these studies, such as Study for Pope III (1961), Bacon uses a warmer palette to bring out the humanity of the Pope and in that respect it has a greater affinity with Velazquez’s painting. Bacon also deviates from the scream and explores instead the fleshy body of the Pope. By that stage Bacon had moved on from his obsession with the Pope and was developing his understanding of the figure, which is conveyed in his more expressive brushwork in a stand-alone work. Study of Red Pope (Study from Innocent X) (1962). He had moved on from the image of the Pope to his overriding interest in the articulation of the body, which would remain with him for the rest of his career.

Whether as isolated studies or in series, all Bacon’s Popes have shared features: the Pope is dressed in papal attire and seated on a throne. What vary considerably are the facial expressions exhibited by the Popes. At times he looks thoughtful and contemplative, such as in Study for Portrait I (1953), whilst at other times he grimaces, such as Study for Portrait VI (1953). However, all the facial expressions exhibit a lack of stolidity and resoluteness that is not normally seen in such a public and elevated figure. Bacon’s Popes do not command the authority that is seen in Titian’s Pope Paul III Farnese (1546) and Sebastiano del Piombo’s Pope Clement VII (c. 1531/32), for example. Yard describes the Popes as tracing “a sort of stopaction collapse of their enthroned protagonist” (Yard 1999, 8). We may not witness distress in all the expressions of the Pope, but they are all in various states of social collapse, when the public mask dissolves to show the private side of the figure.

Indeed, Bacon’s treatment of the Pope was more uniform than his interpretation of the Crucifixion, and for this reason I have chosen to focus on the archetypal image, Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, as being representative of the range.

 

Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X

The key reference point and trigger for Bacon’s Popes was the historic painting by Velazquez. Velazquez was an artist in the Court of King Philip IV, who painted portraits of the Spanish royal family. His painting of Pope Innocent X was carried out during his second visit to Rome in 1650, at the height of the Baroque period and in the Jubilee year. Velazquez conveys the religious authority of the Pope de rigueur. Bacon was transfixed by Velazquez’s painting, calling it “one of the greatest portraits that have ever been made” (Sylvester 1993,24). Bacon visited Rome in 1954 and yet, in spite of his fascination with the image, he declined seeing the Velazquez original, which was in the Galleria Doria Pamphili. He therefore knew it only in reproduction. Peppiatt (1997,139) remarks how Bacon “kept various reproductions of the painting to hand and pinned one in pride of place on his studio wall.”

The tradition of papal painting, and more specifically the enthroned Pope, was inaugurated by Raphael and inherited by Titian. Steffen documents the shift of portrayal from the Renaissance idealisation of the symbol of the Pope to the more majestic and formal state portraits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Pope was both active in state affairs (Steffen 2003,115) and “worldly” (Zweite 2006,69). Being a court painter Velazquez was accustomed to the social conventions and proprieties of painting noble figures. His portrait of the Pope is painted in the vigorous manner of Titian. Davies traces the roots of Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X back to Titian and draws parallels between the pose of Titian’s Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto (c. 1558) and Velazquez’s portrait of the Pope, observing how the pose of the Pope, especially the position of the left arm and the ringed left-hand of the sitter, anticipated the Velazquez portrait (Davies 1993,52). Majestically seated on the gilded papal throne, the Pope is depicted in full papal regalia, wearing a white cassock covered with a scarlet mozzetta (cape), a camauro (cap) and the traditional Fisherman’s Ring.4 The Pope’s majesty is enhanced by the sumptuous rendering of the fabrics of the clothing and other paraphernalia, such as the velvet curtain and the ornate throne, which all follow the fashion of the Baroque. These robes of office, linking him to St Peter, both acknowledge this human being, and yet dehumanize him in the sense that it is what he is, and not who he is, that grants him authority. The Pope de jure relinquishes all sense of self-identity, including his family name, and exists only as a public persona. Steffen argues that, although in one sense Velazquez’s portrayal is conventional, as it depicts the Pope in line with the dictates of official representation, he is also able to impart a sense of the individual characteristics of his sitters (Steffen 2003, 206). Indeed so incisive is the characterization that Innocent X declared that he felt that it was “troppo vero” (too truthful) (Chilvers, Osbourne and Farr, eds. 1994,515). It is this fine balance of adhering to conventional codes of acceptability, and being able to add the nuances of individuality, which distinguishes Velazquez from other Court Painters. He tactility renders the physiognomy, without revealing too much, namely about the mismatch between the Pope’s name, “Innocent,” and his unscrupulous character. Bryson argues that Velazquez withholds judgement about the Pope and this allows for contradictions and multiple assessments of his personality: he is “benign ... demonic ... intelligent and also unscrupulous, diplomatic, feral, pious, astute, veiled, transparent, opportunistic, rigid” (Bryson 2003,44).

The papal throne is shifted to the left hand side of the picture and Innocent X himself is looking off to his right. This placement, of being at an angle to the viewer, makes him occupy a larger portion of the viewer’s visual field than if he was confronting the viewer face on. This extended amount of space gives him an imposing presence, and his gaze to the side of the viewer conveys his detached and aloof stance; he is not deferring to the viewer but expects the viewer to defer to him. There are two other factors that increase the sense of detachment. Schmied observes how the gilded back of the throne in the painting operates as a frame: “it focuses attention on the head by demarcating it from the background, and thus suggests a picture within a picture, creating an auratic space within the profane space of the portrait” (Schmied 2006, 20). The doubling up of throne-as-frame is an effective device and accentuates the formality of the representation. Furthermore the Pope looks out with a stern authoritative expression which is unnerving for the viewer because the eyes do not innocently stare out at the viewer; they scrutinize. The sternness of his facial expression is balanced by his composed seated gesture. Collectively, his expression and the array of symbols in the painting convey Innocent’s temporal and spiritual authority. Bryson argues that the power of Velazquez’s Pope is conveyed by much more than the articles of his status, by something far more deep-rooted. Bryson claims that “power does not lie on the surface, it shapes flesh and bone,” and that “power is always incarnate and never abstract” (Bryson 2003,45-46).

 

Study after Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X

In Bacon’s Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, we are looking at a reinterpretation that appropriates the compositional layout. It contains echoes of the Grand Manner through, as Alloway points out, “the size of the canvas, the placing of the figures depicted” (Davies 1993, 58). However, in his reinterpretation Bacon negates the symbolism of the articles of the Pope, thereby wholly transforming the meaning of his painting. This results in a completely different ambience: Bacon’s depiction is starkly differentiated from Velazquez’s in the values and sentiments that it embodies. The difference in mood is embodied in the defining feature, the scream, which has the effect of polarizing the two paintings. In the Bacon example, the Pope emits a scream which shatters the surface of the painting and divests the papal image of its power and authority. In Velazquez’s depiction complex psychology is at work, and different critics foreground different qualities possessed by the Pope. However there is no room for reflection in Bacon’s painting, as “the scream leaves no space for other expressions” (Danto 1995, 99). The scream adequately reveals the horrified state of mind.

The history of papal painting has been a history of surpassing preceding examples. Determined to “vie with the state portraits” (Davies 1978, 98) of Titian, Velazquez aspired to capture the Pope for the people of his time. Similarly, Bacon wanted to update Velazquez for a contemporary audience, hence the qualification, Study after. This was problematic because of the redundancy of the symbol. In a Godless world the symbol of the Pope has no value. The shift in depiction, from Velazquez’s glorification to Bacon’s desecration, is paralleled with the shift from theism to Godlessness.

Davies encapsulates the differences between the two images: “while Velazquez portrayed the Pope ex cathedra Bacon captured him in camera” (Davies 1978, 98). It was customary for bishops to preach from the chair (the bishop’s throne), and the expression ex cathedra conveys the infallible authority of the pronouncement. Velazquez’s portrayal of the Pope ex cathedra means that he was depicted in all his uncompromising authority, in his public role as spiritual leader and as the successor to St Peter. This contrasts with Bacon’s portrayal in camera, which translates as “in the chamber” and refers to a court hearing where the public may be barred and which happens in the judge’s private room. It is typical for court hearings to be public and in “open court,” but in exceptional circumstances, for instance in the interests of national security or to protect the identity of a witness who is unwilling to give evidence in public hearings, can be carried out in camera (Martin and Law, ed. 2006,267). Bacon’s Pope does not issue commands ex cathedra but experiences the horror as his public persona dissolves whilst he is alone and in camera. Bryson describes how “in his violent disfiguration,” Bacon “presses on Velazquez’s equipoise, applying to it more and more pressure, until it breaks open: Velazquez’s Pope becomes a howl” (Bryson 2003,46-47).

Earlier I discussed how the Pope is first and foremost a symbol, known for what he represents and not who he is. Bacon reverses this process so that the Pope becomes human, and his scream “is a manifestation of vitality and humanity” (Schmied 2006,21). In effect Velazquez’s and other representations of the Pope articulate him as dehumanized, while Bacon does the opposite and rehumanizes him. The stark realization of his mortal identity is conveyed in the surrealist images Figure with Meat (1954) and Pope No. 2 (1960), which feature the screaming Pope flanked by sides of meat, in the former, and the placing of a carcass on a box, in the latter. The images are surreal because they involve the juxtaposition of two incongruous realities, namely the Pope and meat. Bacon bifurcates the Pope into “Pope” and “Pope-as-not-man.” The viewer is privy to this incompatibility of identities, which is reflected in the image of the screaming Pope. The bifurcated identities are irreconcilable: the Pope either is Pope or he is man, but cannot be both. In a discussion of Pope I, but widely applicable to other examples, Farr states that Bacon is “interested in the pope more as a man than as a spiritual leader; here he emphasizes less the pope’s authority than his human vulnerability and anxiety” (Farr 1999, 64). By emphasizing the human aspect of the Pope, Bacon exposes the collapse of the symbol, and we behold what Hammer and Stephens describe as “absolute power dissolving into despair and non-being” (Hammer and Stephens 2009, 340).

Steffen compares the two interpretations of the Pope and suggests that Bacon’s Pope takes Velazquez’s Pope a step further, by making “Velazquez’s introverted but dangerously restrained Pope positively explode. He [Bacon] brought out into the open everything that was hidden and suppressed in the figure” (Steffen 2003,117). Bryson’s interpretation is similar, but he downplays the tension in Velazquez’s image. Bryson discusses how Bacon performs a surgical operation on Velazquez’s portrait, to peel back the skin and reveal the innards. In doing this Bacon moves beyond neutrality and dismantles Velazquez’s ascesis (Bryson 2003, 46). I frame my discussion similarly in terms of both paintings lying on either side of the boundary. Steffen and Bryson discuss the boundary position with regard to the temperament of the Pope. I wish to take it further by suggesting that the boundary represents papal rule. On one side Velazquez portrays the Pope at the height of his papacy whilst Bacon is more intent on capturing the moment at which the papacy collapses and the Pope is exposed.

Bacon’s Pope appears as the very opposite of Innocent X in Velazquez’s portrayal. In Velazquez’s painting the Pope fulfils all the criteria of his office: from his attire to his facial expressions, the viewer is facing the archetypal image of the Pope. This is deconstructed in the Bacon example, where the Pope is satirised, from his appearance to his articulation. Velazquez’s Pope poses in role, that is, ex cathedra, imparting a sense of confidence and authority. He is formal and yet relaxed in his role. The Pope in Bacon, however, is vulnerable and under judgement. Sitting bolt upright with “balled fists” (Davies and Yard 1986, 26), he awaits his doomed fate, “trapped as if manacled to an electric chair” (Davies 2001, 12). The shift of optical perspective also contributes to the different interpretations. Velazquez’s Pope is depicted according to the rules of Renaissance perspective, which were based on a fixed central viewpoint. This fixes the sitter at a comfortable distance from the viewer. In the Bacon image, space does not conform to this model. Schmied describes Bacon’s version of pictorial space as a "nexus of interlocking spatial systems that are in continued conflict but also have a mutually reinforcing effect” (Schmied 2006, 20). These spatial systems are created by the architectonic frames (space-frames), which are continuous with the papal throne and create the sensation of incarceration and isolation.

Another significant difference between the two paintings is in the treatment of the trappings of papal power. In Velazquez’s image the robes are highly symbolic: the velvety-rich red cape symbolizes the colour of the martyrs and is coupled with the more lightweight but voluminous white cassock, which refers to Christ at the Transfiguration. The splendour of the materials and the colours conveys the authority and magnificence of the sitter. His throne is the supreme symbol of papal power. AH the features convey his position as set apart and as holy. In contrast, instead of endowing weight and substance to the Pope, in Bacon’s painting the translucent and blood-splattered garments makes the Pope seem ghostlike. Furthermore, the gilded and stately throne of the Velazquez’s image is transformed into a translucent bright yellow chair, which is cold, clinical and flimsy looking. The juxtaposition of the dark colours and the “glaring highlights” (Zweite 2006, 72), which flicker incandescently, is unsettling and visually disruptive. In his articulation of the Pope, Bacon turns a venerable symbol into what Davies refers to as “some form of ludicrous fancy dress in a Genet play” (Davies 1978,100).

The theatricality of Bacon’s painting is enhanced by the striated veil of the painting which slices through the image of the Pope. The motif of the veil is of vertical parallel striations that Bacon may have borrowed from Titian’s curtain in Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto (c. 1558).5 Titian’s portrait shows a transparent curtain hanging across the right half of the painting, which blurs the Cardinal’s face. Bacon takes the veil motif and applies it to the whole painting in a technique that is known as “shuttering,”6 which consists of the use of close parallel vertical lines of contrasting colours that pass through a semi-transparent body, and which has the effect of breaking up the visual field and confounding the viewer. It also affects the spatial dimensions of the interior thus impacting on the way we visually process the image. Bacon applies shuttering to the whole painting, so that the vertical strips run from the top to the end of the lower body and the cassock and then down to the abyss. The striations stretch and cut through the figure, exacerbating his claustrophobia. They also create a veil-like effect, which masks and distorts his identity, whilst paradoxically making it very immediate. Bacon is stripping away this veil to reveal the disintegration of the Pope. The scream also facilitates the unveiling as it takes us to the rawness and honesty of emotion. The viewer does not witness the Pope in power but in his symbolic demise. The striations of the veil can therefore be interpreted as attempts to rupture the identity of the Pope. Bacon also used the metaphor of screens or veils to indicate what he believed people hide behind, and argued that great art removes these veils:

Great art is always a way of ... tearing away the veils that fact acquires through time. Ideas always acquire appearance veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time, really good artists tear down those veils.7 The veiled curtain reveals the horror of the scream.

 

The source of the scream

The difference between the two paintings that sets them apart most acutely is the scream on the face of Bacon’s Pope. The scream has a shattering effect on the painting, on the identity of the Pope, and on the compositional framework. A question that has preoccupied critics is the reason for the Pope’s scream. The Pope looks as if he has seen some horrific sight that has induced paralysis, and we can only speculate what is causing him to scream. There are three possibilities that can account for the scream. It is possible that the scream was not about the scream as such, but was about the shape that a mouth adopts when it screams. The mouth in this articulation represented the point of overlap between a human and an animal, which Bacon exploited in his figures. He may have been interested in the mythological import of the symbol of the scream, which is a universal symbol and defines the primary experiences of humanity, from the first cry of a baby, to the cry of ecstasy in copulation, to the scream as a protest against death. It is the opening of the womb and the symbol of the abyss. And, from a biographical perspective, the gaping mouth could plausibly be a symbol of the claustrophobia that Bacon suffered from because of his asthma. In the wide-open gesture of the scream. Bacon was commenting on his lifelong battle to breathe, and encapsulated this in the image of someone gasping for air. Harrison remarked that although asthma was not an obvious focal point in his work, partly because of his own attitude—“he bore it with his habitual stoicism”—Bacon nevertheless was fully aware of the perpetuity of this condition, and stated that “it’s been with me longer than painting has and it’s a daily experience” (Hammer 2005,208).

So, from a formalistic perspective Bacon was interested in the appearance of open mouths: “I’ve always been very moved by the movements of the mouth and the shape of the mouth and the teeth” (Sylvester 1993, 48).8 He collected second-hand books on the mouth, and was interested in visual renditions of the open mouth in visual culture. He particularly admired the depiction of the open mouth in Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents (1630-1631?). Another source that influenced him was the still of the nurse from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925). The black and white still shows the shocked expression on the nurse’s face as she is shot in the face, which shatters her pince-nez and causes blood to drip down her face. The nurse’s mouth was a vivid example of the kind of deformation under stress that “Bacon was aiming to parallel in paint: the great soundless O of the mouth” (Russell 1993,56). Danto points out that in both these examples there is a narrative that explains the scream. In the Massacre of the Innocents the woman is screaming because of the horrific act that she is witnessing—innocent children are being butchered. The nurse in Battleship Potemkin screams as she is shot in the eye by Czarist troops, whilst running down the Odessa steps and the perambulator with an infant in it continues to hurtle down the stairs. However, Danto continues, in Bacon’s Popes “there is no available narrative” that immediately lends itself as an explanation for the scream (Danto 1995, 98).

The second possibility is that Bacon’s Pope is screaming at something that causes the horror. He is screaming at the death of God. The scream on the Pope is incongruous because of his position as spiritual guide and as religious spokesman for his people. The Pope is known for his composure and his wisdom, not his loss of control or will, which the scream indicates. With the death of God, he is rendered defunct. The scream is a response to this cognizance. The death of God removed the promise of eternal life. The Pope is not exempt from death, and, in Bacon’s interpretation, we witness the death of the symbol of the Pope who screams as his public persona falls apart and his corporeality is revealed. The revelation of the Pope beneath the flickering curtain conveys the Pope’s desperate fight. Like a candle guttering, he struggles to stay alive. Sylvester describes how the effect “doesn’t come straight out at you; it slides slowly and gently through the gaps” (Sylvester 2000,243). The screaming Pope can be grouped with the other screaming figures in Bacon’s paintings that collectively and individually share in the existentialist predicament of the death of the transcendental signified. And the scream of the figure, whether of the Pope, businessman, or anonymous figure, mirrors the scream of the viewer, who screams at the void.

Davies draws a parallel between Bacon’s papal images and Nietzsche’s death of God sentiments in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885): “Bacon’s papal images support the Nietzschean declaration and may be viewed as visual equivalents of the pathetic figure of ‘the last pope’ featured in the section entitled ‘Retired’ in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (Davies 1978, 100). In “Retired from Service” (in Part Four of  “Zarathustra’s Discourses”) the Pope approaches Zarathustra, and when he learns of the death of God he remarks: “I am retired from service, without master, and yet I am not free, neither am I merry even for an hour, except in memories ... I am the last pope!" (Nietzsche 1969, 271-272). The Pope needs (the belief in) God to validate his identity as Pope and, in the absence of God, seeks another master, which leads him to Zarathustra. Following the collapse of his position, the Pope screams, where "the scream was the moment of truth, the moment at which all pretence and false-seeming fall away” (Peppiatt 2006, 26). Bacon is staging the announcement of the death of God rather in the manner that Nietzsche undertook in the guise of the madman in The Gay Science, where the madman runs into the market place in the early hours of the morning and announces the demise of God. The effects of the "kinetic flickering”9 on the figure of the Pope, combined with his isolated placement on the throne, gives the impression that we are bearing witness to the spectacle of the death of the Pope.

The third possibility is that the Pope is screaming, but not at anything—there is nothing causing the scream. Deleuze (2003, x) states that what interests Bacon directly is “a violence that is involved only with line and colour: the violence of a sensation ... a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression. “The violence is caused through the movement and sensation of the body which causes it to overflow. The stimuli are not external but come from within, such as the spasm of a sneeze or the “violence of a hiccup, of the urge to vomit” (Deleuze 2003, x). He describes the violence that he is attempting to convey in the following  terms:

... the maximum violence will be found in the seated or crouching Figures, which are subjected to neither torture nor brutality, to which nothing visible happens, and yet which manifest the power of the paint all the more.  (Deleuze 2003,38-39).

The key phrase here is that “nothing visible happens.” Deleuze (2003, 38) notes that there is nothing that might cause horror. The Pope screams “before the invisible.” The transparent striated curtain reinforces the fact that there is nothing in front of the Pope that is causing him to scream. And since the scream is object-less, so to speak, it has the effect of heightening the level of horror. “The horror is multiplied because it is inferred from the scream, and not the reverse” (Deleuze 2003, 38). Bacon always stated that he wanted to be able to paint the scream more than the horror (Sylvester 1993, 48) and this example fulfils his aspirations, because the horror is experienced through the scream. We are not distracted by the horror, but it is incremental to the power of the scream.

 

The Pope as everyman

One reading of Bacon’s Popes is to show his denigration of religion. He took the head of the Catholic Church and placed him in situ and then ridiculed him in various ways. In the papal series the Pope becomes a puppet or actor who is placed in random poses pulling a variety of facial expressions, none of which support his authority as the Pope. He becomes a plaything for Bacon, and his robes and throne similarly lose their significance and become theatrical props. Being an atheist, the figure of the Pope was not revered by Bacon, and, in the death of God, the presence of the Pope parodies this situation. After the death of God, Nietzsche discussed the "religious hangover" (Peppiatt 1999,41) that would occur whilst people became accustomed to the news. Bacon depicts this situation. The Pope’s status is deeply significant and, instead of letting him slip away into oblivion. Bacon reinforces his purposelessness by continually putting him in the spotlight, in a scathing and sadistic way. The symbol of the Pope is empty and deserted, and all we see now is the shadow of the former Pope and the death of the symbol.

Another reading is to displace Bacon’s atheism in favour of his intrigue with Velazquez’s Popes, and then to interpret the multiple Popes in terms of Bacon’s desire to create the ultimate papal image. Indeed, in his oeuvre Bacon described it as his “first subject” (Sylvester 1993, 71). As a painter Bacon was motivated primarily by the visual, and pictures (irrespective of genre or subject) helped him formulate images. He isolated certain images as being inspiring, and Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X was one of his favourite paintings. Barbara Dawson notes that nine books on Velazquez were found in his studio (at Reece Mews), and out of these nine all but one had the illustration of Innocent X torn out. Dawson remarked that one of these images was particularly used by Bacon, as evidenced by the creases of the image and deposits of paint on the surface (Dawson 2009,50-69,54). His paintings of the Pope can be viewed as tributes to or developments of Velazquez’s painting, and the fact that they were executed in fairly rapid succession suggests the fascination that Velazquez’s painting held for him. Many paintings had the term “study” in their title, which conveys two features: that they were in a preparatory state and that the touchstone was Velazquez’s original. Bacon was trying to encapsulate the power of the Velazquez, and all his attempts were efforts towards this goal. But it needs to be stressed that in his papal paintings Bacon did consult other images of Popes. As mentioned earlier, he used a photograph of Pope Pius XII in inspiration for his early series. Dawson (2009, 54) also adds that two images of Pope John XXIII, one of Pope John Paul II and “another of a yet to be identified Pope were found.”

What is interesting is that although his use of the symbol of the Pope was prolonged he treated the Pope as he did any other figure—whether business man, anonymous figure or animal. There is nothing unique about his treatment of the Pope: he uses the scream, the striated veil, the space-frame and the notion of a figure in a series in other depictions. His indiscriminate application of conceits to other figures indicates that Bacon’s preoccupation was not with a particular figure but with the notion of psychological collapse, when the public face of the individual dissolves to reveal the terrified animal.10 Does this mean that there was nothing special about his use of the Pope? And that the Pope was a vehicle just like other figures to convey his attitude about the human condition? However, it can be argued that the reduction of the Pope to the level of the animal was more of a stark contrast than the other deflationary statements, because of the diminished status that this entailed:

Perhaps his idea was to test one of the greatest portraits ever painted, of a man set highest above his fellow men (the archetypal father, verging on the divine) in the grip of a feeling so intense that the only expression of it brought him close to the beasts. (Ades 1985,15) .

The revered symbol of the Pope is marked by his impermeability, but in Bacon’s hands he becomes cheapened, mass produced, and even commodi[1]fied. The Pope was subjugated because in Bacon’s universe he was like any other living creature. But the fall was greater, and hence the Pope stood out for this reason. Bacon is practising the via negativa; Bacon shows the Pope by what he is not. In his interpretation the Pope is anxious, inarticulate, fearful and intemperate. By showing the Pope as defying the expectations that viewers would have of his behaviour. Bacon is in fact ironically emphasizing the uniqueness and the holiness of the Pope.

 

References

Ades, Dawn. 1985. Web of Images. In Francis Bacon (exhibition catalogue), by Dawn Ades and Andrew Forge, 8-23. London: Tate Gallery and Thames and Hudson.

Alley, Ronald and John Rothstein. 1964. Francis Bacon. Introductory essay by John Rothstein, catalogue raisonné by Ronald AUey. London: Thames and Hudson.

Bryson, Norman. 2003. Bacon’s Dialogues with the Past. In Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, edited by Wilfried Seipel, Barbara Steffen and Christoph Vitali, 43-55. Milan: Kunsthistorisches, Skira Editore.

Chilvers, Ian, Harold Osbourne and Dennis Farr, ed. 1994. The Oxford Dictionary of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Danto, Arthur C. 1995. Embodied Meanings: critical essays & aesthetic meditation. New York: Noonday Press.

Davies, Hugh M. 1978. Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928-1958. New York: Garland Publishing

Davies, Hugh M. 1993. The Screaming Pope: Past Art and Present Reality. In Francis Bacon, edited by Rudy Chiappini. Milan: Electra. Museo d’Arte Moderna Citta di Lugano.

Davies, Hugh M. 2001. Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953. Exhibition catalogue. San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art.

Davies, Hugh M. and Sally Yard. 1986. Francis Bacon. New York: Abbeville Press.

Dawson, Barbara. 2009. Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty. In Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, edited by Barbara Dawson, Martin Harrison and Logan Sisley, 50-69. Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Steidl, Göttingen. Deleuze, Gules. 2003 [1981] Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation. Translated by Daniel W Smith. New York: Continuum.

Farr, Dennis, ed. 1999. Francis Bacon: a retrospective. Yale Center for British Art. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions.

Geldzahler, Henry, ed. 1975. Francis Bacon: Remarks from an interview with Peter Beard. Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings 1968-1974. March 20-june 29,1975. Exhibition catalogue. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gowing, Lawrence. 1989. Francis Bacon: The Human Presence. In Francis Bacon. Exhibition catalogue. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, in association with Thames and Hudson, 27-38,11-26.

Hammer, Martin. 2005. Bacon and Sutherland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. and Chris Stephens. 2009. Seeing the Story of One’s Time: Appropriation from Nazi Photography in the Work of Francis Bacon. Visual Culture in Britain 10(3): 315-351.

Harrison, Martin 2005. In Camera—Francis Bacon: Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting London: Thames and Hudson.

Martin, Elizabeth A. and Jonathan Law, ed. 2006. A Dictionary of Law. 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Peppiatt, Michael. 1997. Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. London: Phoenix. . 1999. Three Interviews with Francis Bacon. In Francis Bacon: a retrospective. Edited by Dennis Farr. New York: Yale Center for British Art. Exhibition catalogue. Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions. 2006. Francis Bacon in the 1950s. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Russell, John. 1993 Francis Bacon. 3rd ed. London. Thames and Hudson.

Schmied, Wieland. 2006. Francis Bacon: Conflict and Commitment. Translated by John Ormrod. Munich: Prestel.

Steffen, Barbara. 2003. The Papal Portraits. In Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, edited by Wilfried Seipel, Barbara Steffen and Christoph Vitali, 115-131. Exhibition catalogue. Milan: Kunsthistorisches, Skira Editore. . 2003. The Representation of the Body: Velazquez - Bacon. In Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, edited by Wilfried Seipel, Barbara Steffen and Christoph Vitali, 205-213. Exhibition catalogue. Milan: Kunsthistorisches, Skira Editore.

Sylvester, David. 1993. Interviews with Francis Bacon: the brutality of fact. 3rd ed. London: Thames and Hudson. 2000. Looking Back at Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson.

Yard, Sally. 1999. Francis Bacon. In Francis Bacon: a retrospective, edited by Dennis Farr, 8-17. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Yale Center for British Art, Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Trust for Museum Exhibitions.

Zweite, Armin. 2006. Bacon’s Scream: observations on some of the artist’s paint[1]ings. In Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, edited by Armin Zweite, 69-104. London: Thames and Hudson in collaboration with Maria Müller

 

 

 

 

 

 

Council scotches rumours that £5m painting

could be sold off to raise cash

 

 

 

NEWS   |   BATLEY & BIRSTALL NEWS   |   MONDAY 22 AUGUST 2011

 

Batley’s most influential piece of artwork, Figure Study II, has gone on display. Previously left in storage, the contemporary painting by Francis Bacon, thought to be worth £5m, is up at Huddersfield Art Gallery until the end of the month.

The painting is affectionately known as Batley’s Bacon, as the Contemporary Art Society gave it to Batley Council in 1952. It was the first piece of Bacon’s work to be hung outside of London.

Because of this, current owners Kirklees Council are prevented from selling it, despite it being one of their most valuable assets.

A spokeswoman said: “The Contemporary Art Society purchased the painting and it was accepted by Ronald Gelsthorpe, the curator of the Bagshaw Art Gallery, on behalf of Batley Council in 1952. Because of this, there are restrictions that prevent the council from selling it on.”

Due to its high value, Huddersfield Gallery is the only building in the borough with the right conditions and security to display the painting.

A campaign to have it displayed in Batley Art Gallery failed due to the high security costs, but last February a replica was unveiled to adorn the gallery’s walls. Figure Study II Figure Study II is an important piece in Bacon’s history as the artist destroyed much of his work from 1935 to 1944.

 

 

 

 
 

                              

                            

                                                                                                                                                               Figure Study II 1945-46  Francis Bacon   

 

 

 

 

Batley’s Bacon is saved for posterity

 

 

NEWS  |  THE PRESS NEWSPAPER  |  THE INTELLIGENT WEEKLY  |  FRIDAY 12 AUGUST 2011

 

A VALUABLE painting by Francis Bacon will not be sold off to ease the impact of budget cuts, council officials said.

It had been suggested Figure Study II, bought for the former Batley Council in 1952, would be sold to offset an £80m budget cut. The Government has told councils to sell assets first rather than slash public services and Kirklees is now reviewing an inventory of more than 2,000 items.

But council officials have rejected any suggestion the Francis Bacon work could be sold – as there is a covenant in place to protect it.

The 1946 work, which was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York two years ago, was bought by the Contemporary Art Society. It was then accepted by Bagshaw Art Gallery curator Ronald Gelsthorpe on behalf of Batley Council with restrictions to prevent its sale.

The painting is on show until the end of August at Huddersfield Art Gallery, which is the only one in Kirklees with the right conditions for displaying it.

Its companion piece, Figure Study I, is in a collection owned by the National Galleries of Scotland.  Both featured in the BBC series British Masters, which looked at the legacy of Bacon and other contemporary artists.

The works are considered important, rare and valuable as Bacon destroyed most of his work from the 1930s and 1940s. A Kirklees Council spokesman said: “Figure Study II was the first work by Bacon to enter a public collection outside London.

“It was accepted on behalf of Batley Council. Because of this there are restrictions that prevent the council from selling it on.”

 

 

 

 

Wayne McGregor on Francis Bacon:

Anatomy of a Failed Idea

 

 

 

 

By Patricia Boccadoro, Culture Kiosque, Tuesday, 2nd August, 2011

   

PARIS, 1 AUGUST 2011 — Wayne Mcgregor is currently the golden boy of British dance who made a name for himself with his physically exhausting movements and his collaborations across dance with film, computer technology and the sciences. Made a Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental psychology at Cambridge University in 2004, his 2006 creation, Chroma, opened doors for him and paved the way to his position of Resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet later the same year. He was the first contemporary choreographer to obtain this post. Since then he has been showered with awards, including the prestigious title of Commander of the British Empire for his contribution to dance, and he is much in demand from most of the major international companies throughout the world.

However, with L’Anatomie de la Sensation, his second work for the Paris Opera Ballet, he branched away from all his radical technological aids, concentrating on pure movement. The work is directly inspired, he says, by the paintings of the Irish artist, Francis Bacon (1909 -1992), but Bacon’s fascinating canvases in the Tate Gallery in London have a powerful, violent almost repulsive beauty. They disturb; bodies decompose and whole civilisations are stifled and suffocated. Moreover, there is the magnificence and brilliance of his palette, the vivid oranges he loved so well, the pungent blues and mauves, the shrieking pinks and yellows, the acidity of his greens. The work that McGregor created for the Paris Opera Ballet reflected none of this.   

The programme claims the British choreographer attempted to "shed light on the forces of life and death alike that run through Bacon’s paintings". And while this might be a laudable goal in itself, it failed. If one had not read about the piece beforehand, the work itself gives little indication of what it is about and neither is the audience helped along by the scenery. John Pawson’s minimalist and disappointing decor, giant- sized black and white panels dominating the Opera Bastille’s stage, bore no correlation to Bacon’s vision.

L’Anatomie de la Sensation, which is composed of eight movements, began with a duo between Mathias Heymann and Jerémie Belingard  set to a score by  Mark Anthony Turnage entitled, Blood on the Floor, after Bacon’s painting of the same name. This is the closest we get to Bacon, as the two brilliant interpreters, divesting themselves of their clothes, their young, muscled bodies clad in shorts, began a complex series of movements, rotating, gyrating, spinning and rolling around each other.

From time to time, Heymann, the more ‘classical’ of the two, was allowed a spectacular jump in the air. This promised well, but then went nowhere. What was Mcgregor saying? Where was he going?  The dancers’ arms shot out at jerky angles and their feet and legs slashed in the air, as bemused spectators admired the personal beauty of the dancers, but little else.

The solo which followed, interpreted by Marie-Agnès Gillot, one of the most impressive contemporary dancers today, took no account of either her dramatic capabilities or her technique. What was she supposed to be, slithering around on the floor, curling up and around herself, reminiscent of a small insect rather than illustrating an emotion from a painting? The uncomfortable positions imposed upon her, the back movements in a letter S were painful indeed to watch, and her duo with Audric Bézard, undistinguished.

The best part of the evening was the pas de deux interpreted by Alice Renavand and Josua Hoffalt, and it was no surprise that most of it was danced in silence; the hallmark of this creation being it’s unmusicality, whether intended or not. Renavand and Hoffalt possess expressive, supple bodies, and they and they alone, seemed to enjoy what they were dancing. They also benefitted from mauve and acid green lighting on the panels which contributed to the atmosphere.

There was also a certain atmosphere in the fifth movement, with three go-go dancers in a disco, but it was, to quote from French, "hair in the soup". Did Bacon like jazz clubs? Were spectators aware of this? Even the last movement with the whole cast, quasi-naked, on stage seemed bitty, confused, and disconnected from the rest. Possibly one of the criticisms of Mcgregor’s work is that, not having studied classical dance himself, he does not understand a dancer’s body or what to do with it. His famous sharp, speedy, disarticulated gesticulating is better suited to his own lean and lanky frame. His broken angles, jutting out chins and fractured movements totally lacking in grace need the rubber joints and boneless physiques of circus acrobats.

It is also the speed, not of his dance, but of the number of his creations that is becoming alarming. It is maybe the reason for the repetitive nature of this particular work, for, though many sequences began differently, in the end, they all seemed the same. The work, a mere one hour fifteen minutes, dragged even with the luminous presence of Aurélie Dupont, and the only sensation one felt was relief that it was all over.

 

 

 

 

Obituaries

 

Lucian Freud, OM

 

 

 

Realist painter whose fleshy, unflattering portraits

ranked him among the great artists of the age
 

 

 

 

 

OBITUARIES    |    THE DAILY TELEGRAPH    |    SATURDAY, JULY 23, 2011

 

 

 

LUCIAN FREUD, OM, who died on Wednesday aged 88, was the most celebrated British figurative painter of the late 20th century.

Freud was thought of primarily as a painter of portraits, but though his subjects were often wellknown people, he was no society portraitist in the manner of Sargent or Boldini. His purpose was not to flatter, and the starkness of his images, many of them highly detailed nudes, have few precedents in the art of the human form.

So early was Freud’s reputation established — while he was still a teenager — that for almost all of his career he was able to paint on his own terms, and only what he was interested in, “My work,” he said, in a remark at once typically truthful and egotistic, “is purely autobiographical. It’s about myself and my surroundings*

The results of this subjective outlook divided both the critics and the public. For many, Freud was a master of capturing the quintessence of a sitter, his paintings being, as he said, not like people but of people. Though his stature was perhaps increased by his having few great contemporaries, he was hailed as the heir of Rembrandt and Hals, both of whom he greatly admired.

Others found the stem intensity of Freud’s scrutiny unsettling and too uniform, thinking his paintings revealed not their subjects but his view of humanity. His pictures were said not to celebrate the differences between individuals, but their melancholy similarities — an opinion reinforced by the anonymous titles Freud gave many of his works, as if they were exercises rather than pictures of real people.

The counterpart to Freud’s determination to make use of his life in his work was that his life itself became something of an exhibition. There was a quasi-theatrical streak in his personality and, though it was exaggerated by speculation, he gained a reputation as a rake, a snob and a Lothario.

Freud consorted with both high and low society. He had many beautiful and wellborn lovers, some of whom sat for him, while perhaps his most celebrated model was a grossly fat homosexual nightclub dancer, Leigh Bowery; indeed, Freud painted few men who were not homosexual, saying that he admired their courage.

Entertaining though gossip about his fife was, it shed little light on Freud’s work, and detracted from the one constant in it, his ambition. Certainly, Freud told the critic David Sylvester, he needed models whose “aura was the starting point of his [Freud’sJ excitement”. But by the end, the picture was all he felt about, and each revealed to him “a great insufficiency that drives him on”.

Thus, after numerous sittings, the 11th Duke of Devonshire was summoned back to Freud’s studio because the artist had not got the silk of his subject’s shirt quite right. “Rembrandt would have done it, and I’m damn well going to do it too,” said Freud. The remark revealed not only the standards Freud hoped to emulate, but also the hunger of a great painter to inspire the sort of reaction to art experienced by Jose Ortega y Gasset on first seeing Velazquez’s Las Meninas: “This isn’t art, it’s life perpetuated.”

Lucian Freud was born in Berlin on December 8 1922, the middle brother of three. His father, an architect, was the youngest son of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.

Lucian’s mother was the daughter of a rich grain merchant, and he had a comfortable childhood, growing up in a house near the Tiergarten, being schooled at the Franzosisches Gymnasium and holidaying on his maternal grandfather’s estate.

It was an environment that, from an early age, he found overprotective, and even as a young boy he made regular forays into rougher neighbourhoods to escape the smothering attentions of his parents and nannies. Such expeditions were evidence of a nature that was both curious and wilful.

The rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany and the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor prompted the ’ to move to England in 1933. They settled in Mayfair, not far from Green Park, the setting of the earliest of the many stories that spattered Freud’s reputation with mud.

It was said that the origins of Lucian’s near lifelong estrangement from his younger brother Clemens, later me MP Sir Clement Freud, lay in an adolescent race around the park. When his brother threatened to win, Lucian called out “Stop thief!” and Clemens was promptly seized by passersby.

The story seemed improbable, but that it could sustain repetition at all was proof that many were willing to believe the worst of the adult Freud. Though capable of great charm, as his amorous conquests testified, in later years he became notorious for his temper, once punching Harold Macmillan’s son-in-law, Andrew Heath, after he had taken Freud to task over his treatment of his wife.

Freud was well-known for his bitter feuds. He eventually fell out with, among others, Francis Bacon, arguably his closest friend; Lord Glenconner, one of his earliest patrons; and his dealer, James Kirkman.

Lucian was sent to Dartington Hall, the progressive boarding school, from 1933 to 1937, and then for a year to Bryanston, from which he was expelled for disruptive behaviour, said to have culminated in his driving a pack of foxhounds into the school’s chapel during Matins.

He devoted most of his time at Bryanston to riding and to drawing, in which he was encouraged by Sigmund Freud’s gift of some prints of Brueghel’s paintings.

At 15 Lucian enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, but in 1939, dissatisfied with the school’s classically-oriented curriculum, he moved to the East Anglian School of Painting in Dedham. That same year he took British nationality.

The East Anglian School was run by the artist Cedric Morris, who was the first to persuade Freud to begin working with paint. He forgave his pupil when Freud left a cigarette alight and burned the school down.

By now Freud had been recognised as a prodigy and had a sketched self-portrait accepted by Horizon, for which he also drew portraits of its editors, Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. Freud took a studio in Maida Vale and cultivated a bohemian image, stalking through wartime London in a fez and fur coat, a bird of prey perched on his wrist.

 Among his other eccentricities was the refusal for many years to have a telephone in his studio; until the late 1980s, friends could contact him with any certainty only by telegram. Freud guarded his privacy jealously, and one potential biographer claimed that he had abandoned the project after receiving mysterious and threatening telephone calls.

In 1942 Freud enlisted in the Merchant Navy and served for three months on the convoy vessel Baltrover before being invalided out. But his brief service confirmed his instinct that he would find such raw milieux attractive and stimulating, and when he returned to London he rented a studio beside the Grand Union Canal, the border between workingclass Paddington and betterheeled Little Venice.

The divide mirrored that which Freud maintained in his social life. He moved easily and steadily between the two worlds, perhaps breakfasting at a workmen’s cafe before driving his Bentley rapidly (if erratically) to Soho for a day’s drinking and betting with Jeffrey Bernard or the photographer John Deakin. Freud was a notorious and reckless gambler, and in 1983 was warned off the Turf after reneging on debts to bookmakers of some £20,000.

At night he would return to the West End, a spare figure immaculately dressed, this time perhaps for a drink with the Duke of Devonshire before moving on to a nightclub in Berkeley Square.

It was a Pimpernel-like existence that amused some of his friends and infuriated others, notably Francis Bacon, with whom he finally fell out over what Bacon (who was of gentle birth himself) perceived as Freud’s snobbish cultivation of position. Certainly, Freud eventually forsook Paddington for the grander environs of Holland Park; but the view from his flat was of the tower blocks of Shepherd’s Bush.

Freud was given his first exhibition in 1944 by the Lefevre Gallery. By now he was concentrating on painting rather than on drawing, working in a style some thought influenced by Surrealism. Thus the subject of Quince On A Blue Table (1943-44) is somewhat overshadowed by the baleful zebra’s head that thrusts from the wall above the table. Freud, characteristically, denied having been influenced by another style.

From 1946 until 1948 Freud lived and painted in Greece and France, where he met Picasso, who responded to the tartan trousers Freud was wearing by singing It’s A Long Way To Tipperary. When Freud returned to England it was to begin teaching at the Slade, and to marry Kitty Garman, the daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein.

Freud’s wife became the subject of his first important series of portraits, notable for their flat contours, stylised line and stark lighting. The wide-eyed subject of Girl With Roses (1946-48) and Girl With Leaves (1945) is treated with an unsettling, detached sensuality reminiscent of 15th-century Flemish portraiture or, more recently, of Ingres — so much so that Herbert Read called Freud “the Ingres of existentialism”.

This period of Freud’s work culminated in portraits of two of his closest friends — Francis Bacon, whom he painted on copper, and the photographer Harry Diamond. The latter portrait is suffused with tension born of the unnatural lack of animation in Diamond’s face and posture, a calmness belied by his clenched fist and aggressive open stance.

In the painting, Freud hints at a barely suppressed violence beneath Diamond’s static exterior and externalises it in the shape of a man-sized and threateningly spiky potted plant, one of several to appear in his work. The portrait brought Freud the Arts Council prize at the Festival of Britain, for which he was the youngest artist given a commission.

Freud divorced his wife in 1952, prompting his father-in-law to remark: “That spiv Freud turned out anasly piece of work.” The next year he married Lady Caroline Blackwood, daughter of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. They were divorced in 1957, and she later married the poet Robert Lowell, who in 1977 was found dead in a New York taxi with his arms clasped around Freud’s portrait of the blonde-haired young Caroline. She died in 1996.

By the late 1950s Freud had begun to pull away from the neo-romanticist contemporaries such as Graham Sutherland and John Minton with whom he had been grouped, and he gradually evolved a style of work that was to sharply divide the critics.

His portraits began to become more tactile, demonstrating eventually an almost sculptural fascination with flesh and its contours. Freud abandoned the fine lines of his early work for broader strokes — swapping sable brushes for hogshair — and began to work with a more limited palette in which greasy whites and meaty reds predominated. His subjects were also often foreshortened or seen from a peculiar angle, a change in technique, brought on by Freud’s beginning to paint while standing up rather than sitting.

Most of the best-known works that Freud executed in the next 40 years were of nudes, rather vulnerable figures usually placed against white sheet on an iron bed or on an old Chesterfield sofa in Freud’s studio. The subjects often seem to be tired or even asleep, yet Freud’s gaze remains tireless, even pitiless under the glare thrown by an interrogator’s 500 watt bulb. Moreover, there is little independent communication between sitter and onlooker, for the eyes of Freud’s subjects rarely meet any outside the studio.

Freud sometimes ascribed the change in his style to a conversation with Bacon in which he was urged to put more of his own life into his work. Some critics who sought evidence of this concluded that what was going into the work was Freud’s dissatisfaction with his own life.

In particular, Freud’s soured romances were said to have left him with a contempt for women that made him paint them as a voyeur. He was accused of being cerebral, cruel or macabre, and, in the words of David Sylvester, having the eye not of a painter but of a pathologist.

There was certainly little I respect for frail mankind I in Freud’s work, and many of his pictures seemed to convey only the tedium of existence, the waiting for death. Thus, in perhaps his best-known composition of the 1980s, Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) (1981-83), Freud replaced the lively flirtation among members of comic troupe in Watteau’s original painting with a group of his own children and friends, seemingly bored and lost in their separate thoughts. The painting was sold in 1997 for £3.75 million, a record for a living British artist, although the money went not to Freud but to his former dealer, James Kirkman, with whom he had fallen out.

Yet if there was no outright affection for humanity in Freud’s work, there was no hostility either. Rather, there was evidence only of an unwearying fascination with the human form, and of a striving to be faithful to it in all its moments, by turns sullen, proud and tender.

Freud displayed a distinct feeling for the last of these qualities, notably in portraits painted in the 1980s of his elderly mother, of his daughter Bella, and in compositions featuring dogs, such as Double Portrait (198586), in which the hand of a sleeping subject cups the muzzle of a similarly drowsy hound.

Freud continued to paint into old age, among the most remarkable of his later works being the full-length naked self-portrait Painter Working (1993), which seemed to depict him as an elderly satyr, shod, almost comically, in a pair of ancient fell-walking shoes. It was a rare explicit glimpse of Freud himself in a body of work that otherwise was introspective only by proxy.

He exhibited regularly and had a number of retrospective showings of his paintings, including one at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1998 and a large show at Tate Britain in 2002. Since the millennium there have been solo exhibitions in New York, Edinburgh, Los Angeles, Venice, Dublin, The Hague and Paris. Comparatively few of his paintings, however, are in public collections.

Between May 2000 and December 2001, Freud painted the Queen, with controversial results. In May 2008, his 1995 picture Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold at Christie’s in New York for $33.6 million, a record for a work by a living artist. Freud was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1983, and a member of the Order of Merit in 1993.

It is difficult to be precise about Lucian Freud’s progeny, but there appear to be at least 13. He had two daughters by his first marriage. He had four children by Suze Boyt, one of whom is the novelist Rose Boyt; by Katherine McAdam, he had two sons and two daughters; by Celia Paul, he had a son; and he had two daughters by Bemadine Coverley — the writer Esther Freud and the fashion designer Bella Freud.

 

 

 

 

 

Obituary

 

 

Lucian Freud  

 

 

 

 

 

 CATHERINE LAMPERT  |  OBITUARY  |  CULTURE  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  FRIDAY, 22 JULY, 2011

 

The original, unnerving, sustained artistic achievement of Lucian Freud, who has died aged 88, had at its heart a wilful, restless personality, fired by his intelligence and attentiveness and his suspicion of method, never wanting to risk doing the same thing twice. The sexually loaded, penetrating gaze was part of his weaponry, but his art addressed the lives of individuals, whether life models or royalty, with delicacy and disturbing corporeality.

Freud had a reputation for pushing subjects to an extreme. But unlike the American painters to emerge in the 1950s, his approach was in the western tradition of working from life and brought about with painstaking slowness, rather than unleashed virtuosity. Photographs taken in the studio by his assistant, model and good friend, the painter David Dawson, show Freud working from a roughly sketched charcoal form, the paint slowly spreading outwards from the head. Some canvases were extended, others abandoned while still a fragment.

Portraits of his maturity drew comparisons with equally shocking works by Courbet, Titian and Picasso, the feelings exposed registering as both brash and profound. The recorded stages of Ria, Naked Portrait 2006–07, his last large female nude, indicate the suspenseful build-up of pigment on her toe and the radiator; heavy incretions represent her curls and flushed face.

By 1987, the critic Robert Hughes nominated Freud as the greatest living realist painter, and after the death of Francis Bacon five years later, the sobriquet could be taken as a commendation, or it could imply an honour fit for an anachronistic "figurative" artist working in London. Art critics since Freud’s first shows in the 1940s have had difficulties situating his achievement; the common solution has been to apply adjectives to the painted subjects in a way that reflects little more than personal taste, the writers telling readers whether the person portrayed was bored or intimidated, scrawny or obese, the paint slathered, crumbly or miraculously plastic.

Others, however, eschew this moralising tone and are prepared to be startled. Aidan Dunne, for example, reviewing the exhibition in Dublin in 2007, recognised how a single blonde model, "unmistakably" herself, in 1966 led Freud to push "the bounds of decorum in terms of mainstream depictions of the human body considered not as a generic type but as, to use his own term, a ’naked portrait’". Freud painted three versions of this fine-boned young woman on a cream cover, seen from above, each one a masterpiece. Her pictorial availability seems to some degree predicated on the artist’s subtle way of incorporating in his paint strokes the upheavals and new perils that would enliven traditional gender relationships.

Freud was born in Berlin, to Ernst Freud, an architect and youngest son of the great psychoanalyst Sigmund, and Lucie Brasch. The family lived near the Tiergarten, with summers spent on the estate of Freud’s maternal grandfather, a grain merchant, or at their summer house on the Baltic island of Hiddensee.

Realising the Nazi threat to Jews, his parents, Lucian and his brothers – Stephen and Clement – moved to England in the summer of 1933. At Dartington Hall, Devon, and then Bryanston, Dorset, Freud was preoccupied by horses and art rather than the classroom. He enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, in January 1939 but found the laid-back atmosphere repellent and rarely attended classes.

From 1939 to 1942 he spent periods at the unstructured school founded by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines in East Anglia, first in Dedham, Essex, and then at Hadleigh, Suffolk. Morris proved a sympathetic mentor, one whose confidence and application gave Freud a sense of what it might mean to be an artist. In March 1941 Freud signed on as an ordinary seaman on the armed merchant cruiser SS Baltrover, bound for Nova Scotia. The ship came under attack from air and then by submarine, and on the return journey he went down with tonsillitis.

By the age of 18, the charismatic, talented young man with a famous name had attracted friends such as Stephen Spender and the wealthy collector and patron Peter Watson. Freud began visiting Paris, first in 1946 while on his way to Greece, where he stayed for six months, and again in 1947, with Kitty Garman, niece of his previous girlfriend Lorna Wishart, daughter of Jacob Epstein and the subject of one of the first major paintings, Girl in a Dark Jacket 1947. His connections in Paris extended to people linked to the arts in the 1930s, such as the hostess and collector Marie-Laure de Noailles.

The handful of surviving postcards contain no mention of postwar deprivations as he offers Méraud Guinness Guevara witty accounts of the installation of André Breton’s surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1947, designed by Marcel Duchamp and Frederick Kiesler, and thanks for her hospitality in Provence. Freud expresses admiration for the "malevolence" the French showed to foreigners.

On familiar terms with Alberto Giacometti and Balthus, and, to some degree, Picasso, the young Freud, one senses, was marked for life by seeing how single-mindedly, and self-critically, these already famous artists pushed forward their art. When he moved in 1943 to Delamere Terrace on the Grand Union canal, the first of five addresses in Paddington, London, several of his Irish working-class neighbours became models, especially the brothers Charlie and Billy. A large picture with a spiky palm tree and a tense, young East Ender, Harry Diamond, comprises a poignant drama about survival, Interior in Paddington 1951.

Paintings of Freud’s two wives – Garman (whom he married in 1948 and divorced four years later) and Caroline Blackwood (whom he married in 1953 and divorced in 1957) – and other intimate friends are filled with suspense and pain, apparent in the strands of hair and a hand raised to the cheek as much as the wide eyes. The pearly skin of these subjects becomes more translucent and the detail extra-perfect. In an article written in 1950, the critic and curator David Sylvester questioned the perversity of feeling in Freud’s latest portrayals. "It is impossible to say whether this indicates the incipient decline of an art whose talent flowered remarkably early or simply that every new departure implies growing-pains."

By the time of the Venice Biennale in 1954 – Freud shared the British pavilion with Bacon and Ben Nicholson – the question of prodigy versus an ultimately significant artist was being argued regularly. Freud’s only involvement with the art colleges came though accepting William Coldstream’s invitation to join the new staff at the Slade in 1949 (he made occasional appearances in the studios until 1954).

It became convenient to account for shifts in Freud’s work by focusing on his early reliance on drawing and to cite the influence of painters from northern Europe such as Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Albrecht Dürer, or even to suggest a false comparison with the Neue Sachlichkeit painters (active in Germany in the 1920s but unknown to the young Freud) and overlook others as relevant as Paul Cézanne and Chaim Soutine. The significance of the change from sable to hogs’ hair brush and flake white to Kremnitz white in the late 1950s was exaggerated. Freud was attracted to Bacon’s merciless wit and risk-taking, admiring his impulsive handling of paint, yet curiously it was Bacon who tried repeatedly to fix an image of his younger friend’s physical magnetism.

By the end of the 1950s Freud’s fraught personal life contributed to a visual restlessness, and he began standing to paint, letting the raked perspective exaggerate the anatomies of his subjects. A greenish-yellow palette and vein-marked skin made the subjects, such as Woman Smiling 1958-59, superficially less attractive; the paintings exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in London in 1958 and 1963 were harder to sell.

Freud’s obsession with gambling on horses and dogs brought on debts and dangerous threats, although many of the most singular paintings are of fleshly men within the racing fraternity. The journalist Jeffrey Bernard, describing Freud’s afternoons in the betting shop and evenings with the rich and distinguished (including "Princess Margaret’s set"), wrote admiringly: "He has cracked the nut of how to conduct a double life." The artist’s slightly leering face and naked shoulders appear between the fronds of a giant Deremensis, Interior with Plant, Reflection Listening 1967–68. A superb, dangerously over-worked, standing self-portrait, Painter Working, Reflection 1993 portrays the ageing artist wearing only unlaced boots, holding a palette and knife (he was left-handed), addressing the viewer like a silent actor; invariably paint applied imaginatively to the planes of walls and floor reads as though a leitmotif for the prevailing mood. Each millimetre, he insisted, had to become essential to the whole.

In the 1980s the bodies of the nudes pressed into the surrounding space, their three-dimensionality and almost modelled impasto describing deeply contoured forms like those within Freud’s favourite bronzes by Rodin – Naked Balzac and Iris. Freud spoke of his curiosity about "the insides and undersides of things".

The reserved Bella Freud placed diagonally on a red sofa (1986) is one of the artist’s masterpieces. Leigh Bowery and Freud had a mutually sustaining friendship that went on until just before the performance artist succumbed to an Aids-related illness at the end of 1994. Bowery’s "wonderfully buoyant bulk was an instrument I felt I could use in my painting"; "yet it’s the quality of his mind that makes me want to portray him". In front of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon in 2008, he explained: "When something is really convincing, I don’t think about how it was done, I think about the effect on me."

Several paintings approach allegory revisited as parody, beginning with Large Interior, W9 1973 (his mother and his lover), and the heavily promoted Large Interior W11 (After Watteau) 1981–83, with its awkward (and memorable) conjunction of five people from the artist’s intimate life. Sitters sometimes came separately, as with Evening in the Studio, where the model Sue Tilley sprawls on the floor in the pose of seaside postcards with captions such as "Roll over Betty". The shuttered interior in Freud’s house in Notting Hill was recorded in several large paintings, one now in a Dallas museum: a long-time friend, Francis Wyndham, sits reading in the foreground, whippet at his feet, and in the space beyond, a hybrid Jerry Hall/David Dawson nurses her son.

Annabel Mullion was painted with her shaggy-haired dog Rattler and reappears seven years later with a pregnant belly in Expecting the Fourth 2005 (only 10x15cm), and in a larger etching, limbs still like a thoroughbred, as described by one of Freud’s favourite authors, Baudelaire: "vainly have time and love sunk their teeth into her".

Freud’s exceptional ability to convey tactile information is evident in early drawings, especially those of gorse sprigs, a dead heron and a bearded Christian Bérard in a dressing gown. A similarly heightened, highly poetic, sensibility invades the etchings that began in the 1980s, black whorls and stippled textures fanatically worked, the artist relishing the "element of danger and mystery" that accompanies slipping a heavily worked plate into acid.

International exposure increased after the 1974 Hayward exhibition, nurtured by Freud’s admirers, particularly William Feaver, curator of a Tate retrospective in 2002, and the dealer James Kirkman. The revival of interest in painting that emerged around 1980 led to outstanding British artists being ringfenced with an inappropriate label, the School of London. Freud thought his close friend Frank Auerbach the best British painter of his lifetime. Auerbach understood how no original concept or idiom could be credited with the mesmerising reality of art: "I think of Lucian’s attention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter, he would come off the tightrope. He has no safety net of manner."

A retrospective organised by the British Council reached Washington, Paris, London and Berlin in 1987–88, and the "recent work" exhibition created by the Whitechapel Gallery in 1993 drew crowds in New York and Madrid as well as the East End. Freud’s representative from 1993, William Acquavella, had a buoyant, unwavering reckoning of the artist’s worth – in other words in the league of 20th-century masters. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organised an exhibition with great impact, titled The Painter’s Etchings, Freud’s place in postwar art history admitted through a side-door rather than placed in the canon.

The completion of a single picture turned into a newsworthy event. In 1993 a Daily Mail front-page headline asked: "Is this man the greatest lover in Britain?" A disconcerting recent painting, the artist working while "surprised by a naked admirer", fed readers’ curiosity about the octogenarian’s love life. The rather sensational Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) achieved a record auction price for a living artist in May 2008, £17m, by which time Russian oligarchs had joined the wealthy North American collectors who had already replaced upper-class British patrons. The promotion of pictures at auction sometimes gave unfortunate prominence to the failures, notably the truncated picture of a pregnant Kate Moss.

The artist related his acceptance of honours – the CH in 1983 and the OM in 1993 – to his family’s debt to Britain, the country that allowed them naturalisation in 1939. Freud described the move to England as "linked to my luck. Hitler’s attitude to the Jews persuaded my father to bring us to London, the place I prefer in every way to anywhere I’ve been."

Queen Elizabeth II sat for a small portrait in 2001 which Freud donated to the Royal Collection. He selected the pictures for the important Constable exhibition that opened in Paris in 2002, respecting the artist’s "truth-telling. The way he used the undergrowths to suit himself – things being soaked in water and so on – was a way of looking at nature that no one had really done before."

The portraits Freud made of his mother, beginning in 1972 and ending with a drawing from her deathbed in 1989, are a remarkable elegy of ageing and depression. When his children (15 or so were recognised) began leading independent lives, most of them came to sit for him and he was proud of their talents. Bella Freud is a fashion designer and four others are successful writers – Annie Freud, Esther Freud, and Rose and Susie Boyt. Contrary to what has been written about anonymity, the identities of at least 168 sitters have been revealed in various interviews, commentaries and published information.

Thinking about the women who were closest to him for the longest duration, one realises how reticent they preferred to be, particularly Baroness Willoughby d’Eresby and Susanna Chancellor. Any biography of the artist that is written with the claim to analyse character or feelings is doomed.

The list of those he knew and affected would be enormous (and incomplete), the narratives lopsided, with anecdotes and memoirs exaggerating their author’s familiarity. Freud’s own, sharp recollections are both exciting and skewed. He recently spoke of how it amused him to hold the heads of schoolmates under water, but his occasional violence was countered by a precise, rather Germanic use of language and good manners.

An admitted control freak, who lived alone and liked to use the telephone but not give out his number, Freud kept relationships in separate compartments. He lived with the same aesthetic as that of his work – fine linen, worn leather, superb works of art (and a few cartoons), buddleia and bamboo in the overgrown garden and the residue of paint carried down from the studio. In this setting, he sustained until the end his ability to make portrayals of many of the people and animals who mattered to him (the one still on the easel, Portrait of a Hound), paintings that face-to-face are all-consuming and oddly liberating.

 Lucian Michael Freud, artist, born 8 December 1922; died 20 July 2011

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                       Francis Bacon, Portrait of Lucian Freud (Sideways), 1971

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES TOWARDS A PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BACON

 

 

 

 

 


 BY PAUL  GALLAGHER   |  ARTICLE  |  DANGEROUS MINDS  |  THURSDAY, JULY 14, 2011

 

 

In the final moments of a documentary on Francis Bacon, made by a French TV channel, the great artist turned to camera and jovially announced, in his best Franglais, that he had lost all his teeth to his lovers. That is what he was like – dramatically revealing intimate scenes from his life at the most unexpected of moments. His paintings did the same, as they were images, which unnervingly presented the “brutality of fact,” within the most intimate and commonplace of locations – a bedroom, a living room, a toilet.

I once played Francis Bacon on his deathbed, tended by nuns. It was for a drama-documentary, which examined the Bacon’s work through his asthma. The idea was to find out how much this medical condition shaped the artist’s life. For as Bacon once said to critic John Russell:

“If I hadn’t been an asthmatic, I might never have gone on painting at all.”

If this was true, then arguably, it was his asthma that made him a painter, and his asthma, which induced the heart attack that killed him.

Of course, there have been other suggestions as to why Bacon became an artist: the childhood trauma of being locked in a cupboard by the family nanny, or more luridly, as writer John Richardson has claimed, it was Bacon’s masochism that inspired his work. Yet, neither of these fully explain his drive or resilience, or the influence of his strange relationship with his father had on his work

Bacon was 82-years-old when he died in Madrid, on the 28th April 1992. In many respects, it is a surprise he lived so long.  Bacon was a prodigious drinker, had a damaged and diseased heart, lost a kidney to cancer, and once, nearly lost an eye, after being “pissed as a fart” and falling down the stairs of his favoured drinking den. But Bacon had resilience, rather than seek immediate medical attention he merely pushed the offending orb back into its socket, and continued with his afternoon debauch.

Bacon was a gambler. He saw himself as open to the opportunities of chance in both his life and his art.  He made and lost small fortunes on the spin of the roulette wheel. He was an atheist who saw no hope of an afterlife, and gave credence to “the individual’s perceived reality.” He claimed he had been “made aware of what is called the possibility of danger at a very young age,” which led him to treat life as if it were always within the shadow of death:

“If you really love life, you’re walking in the shadow of death all the time…Death is the shadow of life, and the more one is obsessed with life the more one is obsessed with death.  I’m greedy for life and I’m greedy as an artist.”

In the late 1940s, Bacon was told by his doctor he had an enlarged heart. One of his friends, Lady Caroline Blackwood, then wife to artist Lucian Freud, later recounted a tale of a dinner when Francis had joined her and Lucian, at Wheeler’s Restaurant:

“His (Francis) doctor had told him that his heart was in such a bad state that not a ventricle was functioning; he had rarely seen such a diseased organ, and he warned Francis that if he had one more drink or even became excited it could kill him.

“Having told us the bad news he waved to the waiter and ordered a bottle of champagne, and once it was finished ordered several more.  He was ebullient throughout the evening but, Lucian and I went home feeling very depressed.  He seemed doomed.  We were convinced he was going to die, aged forty.”

Francis Bacon was born, of English parentage, on the 28th October 1909 in Dublin.  Bacon later said he had few happy memories of his “traumatically painful childhood.”  His father, Edward Mortimer Bacon, an ex-army captain, was according to Francis, “a failed horse trainer.’” He was a tyrant and a sadistic bully, known and feared for his wild outbursts of rage. He also had a Victorian moralizing attitude, which terrified the young Francis.  Unlike his two other brothers and his two sisters, the young Francis soon realized he was never going to be the son his parents wanted.

Lady Caroline Blackwood claimed the subject of his Irish childhood made Bacon “freeze”:

“He became agitated whenever I broached it. He started to tug at the collar of his shirt as if he were trying to loosen some kind of noose which he found asphyxiating; for a moment he resembled the agonized figures in his paintings, whose faces turn a truly dangerous shade of indigo-purple.”

Because of his asthma, the young Francis was considered the “sickly child of the Bacon household.” Being the “weakling,” as Bacon later described himself, did nothing to win the affections of his macho father, who delighted in putting Francis “on a pony and sending him off to hunt at every opportunity.”

His father was well aware that any prolonged contact with horses or dogs caused Francis to suffer an asthma attack, which left the child bed-ridden, “blue in the face, desperately struggling for each breath.”  It is ironic the “weakling” Francis was the only one of the three sons to live beyond the age of thirty. One brother died after an asthma attack; the other, according to Bacon “a hypochondriac,” died from tetanus after cutting his finger while peeling potatoes.

In his superlative biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Michael Peppiat notes what is so exceptional about Bacon’s childhood, is that we tend to see it through his eyes — in his occasional references to it, and above all through his painting.  Bacon’s artistic temperament was fuelled by a need for high drama and extremity to feed his painting, and it coloured everything that came into reach.

At one point or another, in his various interviews, Bacon referred to specific incidents of cruelty that impressed themselves on his mind.  As Peppiatt explains, one of the most disturbing stories, primarily because Bacon was so specific about it, and because he suffered it personally, is the story of his father arranging for his small son to be regularly horse-whipped by the grooms and stable boys — a punishment which reflected the father’s misguided attempt to make a man of his sickly child.

Bacon was to have his revenge on his father when he seduced his father’s grooms. The grooms were a source of sexual excitement and fixation for the Francis.

From as far back as I can remember I used to trail after the grooms at home.’

That these grooms, with whom Bacon had his first sex were the same ones that horse-whipped him is a tempting conjecture in light of Bacon’s adult sado-masochism and the tangibly violent sexuality that suffuses so much of his paintings. Michael Peppiatt also notes Bacon was sexually attracted to his father, who “ordered and witnessed the floggings, carried out by the grooms, who were themselves a source of sexual excitement, then the complexity of emotions is more than sufficient to make any later violence, in life and in his art, almost too easy to explain.”

Bacon described himself as “completely homosexual”, and his father’s exasperation at Francis’s sexual orientation reached breaking point when he discovered the precocious boy dressing up in his mother’s clothes:

“One day my father caught me trying on some of my mother’s underwear. I must have been 15 or 16 at the time.  He threw me out of the house.”

After being thrown out of his parental home, his mother organized a small monthly income, and his father had him shipped off to a tough military uncle, who promised to put some sense in the boy. The uncle took the impressionable Bacon to Berlin then Paris. The seemingly strict and austere tutelage offered by the uncle did not last long, as within two days of their arrival in Berlin, the uncle and nephew were in bed with each other.

If anything, this experience allowed Bacon to revel in his sexuality and to have his first taste of the Bohemian and artistic worlds that were so anathema to his father. The uncle would be the first of many older lovers who would help the young Francis with his artistic and social education.

It was during this first trip to Paris, in 1928, that Bacon saw the Picasso retrospective, which inspired Francis to become an artist. It was also in Paris, after his uncle had abandoned him for another young man, that Bacon had his first experiences as a male prostitute.

While sex proved liberating, it was, as Peppiatt notes, Bacon’s lifelong asthma, which was perhaps the most important key to understanding his childhood and his adult sensibilities that came from it.

“For an asthmatic, the simple process of breathing is a struggle, each attack is an ordeal to be overcome, and during Bacon’s childhood little existed to alleviate the protracted suffering.

“Nevertheless, asthmatics generally acknowledge that their condition sharpens the will to live, making mere existence — what Bacon called ’conscious life’ — a pleasure itself, since it has been so arduous to achieve.

“The asthmatic tends as a result to have a special fund of optimism, simply in order to surmount a new attack; and once the attack has passed, the optimism does in deed seem justified.  Bacon himself referred all the time to his ‘optimistic nervous system’  (while qualifying it atheistically as ‘optimism about nothing’ ), and this can be understood more fully in the context of his permanent struggle with asthma.

“If this early ordeal gives the asthmatic unusual resilience and reserves of stoicism, it also tends to form a character that appears aloof to the daily miseries of living. A certain unfeeling superiority or ruthlessness characterized much of Bacon’s behaviour in later life, to the extent that many people who came into contact with him failed to see the instinctive compassion and the sometimes startling generosity with which he responded to those whom he liked or in some way felt responsible for.”

Asthma was a hereditary ailment within the family, and in later life Bacon frequently toyed with the idea of living for part of the year in a dry climate, like his maternal grandfather, John Loxley Firth, who had tried to relieve his asthma by spending the worst of the winter in Egypt (a fact the grandson remembered because the location sounded so alluring).

Years later, after his father died and his mother remarried and settled in South Africa, Bacon seriously considered moving there to help ease the worst attacks of his asthma. Oftentimes during the damp, wet winter months in London, Bacon found himself struggling to breathe as he painted in his cold, cramped studio.  With this in mind, Bacon’s paintings take on a different meaning, the blue faces gasping not screaming, their bodies convulsed in severe asthmatic spasms.

His affliction proved useful when Bacon was called-up for National Service during the Second World War. Francis hired a dog from Harrods and spent two days and nights lying and sleeping with the long haired mutt.  When he presented himself at the call-up board, Bacon’s dire allergic reaction to the dog was more than apparent — his face was purple, his eyes were streaming, he was virtually unable to breathe.  Bacon was excluded from service. However, he did volunteer for the ARP (Air Raid Precautions). 

For Bacon, with his private sense of suffering and his imagination nourished by Greek tragedy, the scenes of death and destruction probably only confirmed an underlying belief in man’s inhumanity to man.  Like everyone else who lived through the bombings, however, he was nevertheless deeply marked by the war.  “We all need to be aware,” he later said, “of the potential disaster that stalks us everyday.’  Worsening asthma aggravated by the clouds of fine dust obliged Bacon to give up even his involvement in the war, though one must remember that, because of his medical discharge, he was not obliged to serve in any capacity at all.

The war gave Bacon time to develop his artistic vision, which culminated in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). 

Inspired by The Eumenides from Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, in particular the phrase “the reek of human blood smiles out at me,” as he explained to the French art critic Michel Leiris:

“I could not paint Agamemnon, Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that would have been merely another kind of historical painting…Therefore I tried to create an image of the effect it produced inside me.”

It was a revolutionary and sensational painting, which announced Bacon as the foremost artist of his generation. Critics and patrons were unnerved by the work, The critic John Russell said he was shocked by:

“images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal, and they were confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space. They could bite, probe, and suck, and they had very long eel-like necks, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious. Ears and mouths they had, but two at least of them were sightless.”

At the time, Bacon lived a ramshackle life with his childhood nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, in a cramped London flat. The flat was so small, Lightfoot slept on the kitchen table. Together they ran an illegal gambling den, where Jessie vetted all potential suitors for the young artist, including the ‘gentlemen’ who applied to employ Bacon as ‘a gentlemen’s gentleman’.

Though unknown as an artist, Bacon was a recognizable figure around the Earl’s Court and Soho areas of London.  His appearance was heavily made up with thick make-up, lipstick, and a strange combination of brown boot polish to darken his hair, and toilet scouring powder to whiten his teeth.  He had also attracted the interest of a variety of policemen, after making public his penchant for wearing fishnet stockings, suspenders and women’s knickers under his trousers. As he would later recall, “The blackouts were a most wonderful time.”

Bacon had no formal training as an artist. Like his school education, he was self-taught and strongly influenced by some of his early lovers, Eric Hall and in particular Roy de Maistre.

Bacon’s paintings show a constant interest with the mouth and the internal dysfunction of the body. His subjects squirm, convulse, as if they had no control of their bodies. Bacon claimed that he was trying to find out a truth about the figures he painted, and admitted that he had to know a model well before he could inflict “such violence on them.’”

His paintings also merged elements from his life. For example, in Figure Study II(1945-46), shows a man bent over and half-naked, a coat is draped over the lower part of his back. The positioning of the body suggests both an act of sex, or the memory of Bacon being horse-whipped. What makes the painting more disturbing is the blind scream or gasp that emanates from the figure’s mouth, as if desperately trying to breathe.

The repeated use of the enclosed space, or ‘glass box’, as evident in the series of Popes (1951-65) or Heads’ (1949), also present the viewer with nightmarish images of suffocation.

Bacon cross-referenced his paintings with differing source material, from medical text books to Muybridge’s photographs. His portraits of Lucian Freud were taken from a picture of Franz Kafka that “suggested” something of the “look” of Freud.

As in the series of Popes, the portrait of Innocent’s face is not so much derived from Velazquez’s painting, but rather lifted from a photograph of Bacon’s father.

The image is made more complex as Bacon cross-referenced Velazquez with his own father and the iconic image of the shot nurse from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potempkin, which was one of Bacon’s favourite films. This he added to by making it a portrait of Jessie Lightfoot.

This cross referencing makes Bacon’s paintings all the more shocking, once the images are unraveled and their associations contextualized with the events of Bacon’s life.

Moreover, Bacon’s father haunts much of Francis’s work. The only time that Bacon claimed he had seen his father openly show emotion towards another human being, was on the death of his younger brother, Edward’s favorite son. Bacon’s brother allegedly died from an attack of asthma. It is with a bitter irony, and obvious personal pain, that Edward horse-whipped Francis for his asthma, and cried when his other son died from it. Peppiatt claims the image of the Pope reveals much more than just Bacon’s anger to his father, but also his “painful sexual betrayal.”

When once asked by the critic and writer, David Sylvester, whether the paintings of the Popes was in anyway influenced by his father (the words, as Sylvester pointed out, il papa meaning the father’), Bacon coyly but revealingly answered:

“I don’t know - it’s difficult to know what forms obsessions.  The thing is I never got on with either my mother or father.”

“Well, my relationship with my father and mother was never good.  We never got on.  They were horrified at the thought that I might want to be an artist. They said, well, you will never earn your living as an artist, there is no possible chance of it, so they were totally against it.  I can’t say I had a happy home life.  I had two brothers and two sisters, one of my brothers went out to Rhodesia, somehow he got tetanus and died. And my younger brother died very early on. I remember the only time that I saw my father show any emotion was when my younger brother died; he was really very fond of my younger brother.  But I had no real relationship at all with my father.  He didn’t like me and he didn’t like the idea I was going to be an artist.  You see, there was no tradition of that kind in the family at all, and they thought it was just an eccentricity in a son of theirs to think he would like to be an artist.”

 

 

  

               

               Francis Bacon in his studio in 1984.   Estate of Bruce Bernard

 

 

 

 

 

Stanley Seeger, Who Collected, but Didn’t Discuss,

Art, Dies at 81

 

 

 

 


 BY WILLIAM GRIMES  |  OBITUARIES  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  THURSDAY, JULY 14, 2011

 

Stanley J. Seeger, a reclusive, idiosyncratic art collector who disposed of Picassos, Beckmanns and Bacons nearly as fast as he bought them, and who for several years in the 1980s owned Sutton Place, one of Britain’s grandest Tudor estates, died in Whitby, North Yorkshire, on June 24. He was 81.

The cause was an aortic aneurysm, said his companion, Christopher Cone. Mr. Seeger, a Milwaukee native and heir to a family timber and oil fortune, lived most of his adult life in Britain, where he pursued his passion for modern art and expensive houses exuberantly but anonymously. When The Financial Times ran a profile of him in 2010, it claimed that the photograph of him that accompanied the article was the first to be published in his lifetime.

In the meantime, he indulged his highly developed taste for Picasso, modern British artists like Ben Nicholson, historic cookbooks and the illustrator E. H. Shepard, best known for the Winnie-the-Pooh books.

He came to public notice intermittently, and always surrounded by question marks, whenever he decided to auction off a collection that had, as he once put it, “fulfilled itself.” In 1993, when the art market looked very iffy, he sold 88 Picassos through Sotheby’s in New York, spanning the artist’s entire career, from 1899 to 1972. All lots sold, for a total of $32 million.

In 2001, a collection that included works by Braque, Miró, Schiele and other moderns sold for $54 million, with Bacon’s 1979 triptych “Studies of the Human Body” fetching $8.5 million, then a record price for the artist.

“He was absolutely a pure collector,” said David Nash, who handled the Picasso sale and now, with his wife, Lucy Mitchell-Innes, runs the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in Manhattan. “He was not interested in the investment side of things. When he felt that one collection was complete he’d get rid of it and start on another.”

In 1980, Mr. Seeger found himself in the spotlight when he bought Sutton Place, a red-brick manor house built in the 1520s, from the estate of J. Paul Getty for $17 million. With 14 bedrooms, large banquet halls, a 100-foot-long library and more than 700 acres of grounds, it is one of the grandest of English country houses. Its original owner, Sir Richard Weston, entertained Henry VIII in its halls in 1533.

Mr. Seeger embarked on a grand redecoration that raised eyebrows, and a few hackles, in Britain. He modernized the décor and installed much of his art collection in the house, hanging the Bacon triptych of contorted nudes in the great hall. He hired the eminent landscape architect Geoffrey Jellicoe to reconfigure the gardens. A wall by Ben Nicholson was unveiled by the Prince and Princess of Wales.

“I hear rumors of cascades,” the Queen Mother told the royal biographer Hugo Vickers.

Six years later, tiring of the whole venture, Mr. Seeger sold the house. It was bought by another American, Frederick R. Koch, of Koch Industries. Stanley Joseph Seeger Jr. was born on May 28, 1930, in Milwaukee, where his father was a prominent surgeon. The family’s wealth came from Stanley’s maternal grandfather, William Buchanan, who built a timber and oil empire in Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana.

While attending boarding school in Arizona, Stanley saw a traveling exhibition of works from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and developed a keen interest in art.

He studied music composition at Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1952 and spent a year with the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence. A fellow student was Francis James Brown, who later became Mr. Seeger’s collaborator in writing numerous works under the name Joseph James.

While working toward a master of fine arts degree in composition at Princeton, which he received in 1956, he began buying art in a serious way, mostly from the New York dealer Catherine Viviano, who represented the estate of Max Beckmann as well as a group of young British and Italian artists.

He lived in Greece in the 1960s and became a Greek citizen. In 1979 he gave Princeton $2 million to create a fund that supports the university’s program in Hellenic studies. In the late 1970s he settled, more or less, in London, where he met Mr. Cone, a staff member at Sotheby’s Belgravia branch, which specialized in Victorian art. He began buying older British artists like Fuseli and Turner, and moderns like Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Malcolm Morley and Howard Hodgkin.

His whereabouts could be hard to pin down. At various times he lived on his 1929 yacht, the Rosenkavalier, sailing in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. He also had, for brief periods, homes in Barbados and St. Moritz. After selling Sutton Place, he lived in country homes in Berkshire and Devon before finding his way to Yorkshire, collecting all the while. Quietly.

“One of the last things he did was to sell his Gauguin prints,” said Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, referring to a sale of 10 works on paper that took place in March. “It was a really wonderful collection he put together, but he never talked about it.”

 

 

 

 

                                                                         Stanley Seeger in an undated photograph.  Roy Riley

 

 

 

 

 

Echoing the Tones of Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 


BY ROSLYN SULCAS  |  DANCE REVIEW  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  MONDAY, JULY 11, 2011

 

PARIS — The stakes are high for Wayne McGregor in his new Anatomie de la Sensation, at the Paris Opera Ballet. It is this British choreographer’s first full-length work for a ballet company; the music is by Mark-Anthony Turnage of recent Anna Nicole  fame; the sets by John Pawson, an architect well known for his minimalist rigor. Most pertinently, there is a discernible subject: the piece is subtitled Pour Francis Bacon and has more than a suggestion of narrative content from a choreographer best known for intellectually complex, sensually abstract dances.

L’Anatomie is the second piece, after the 2007 Genus, that Mr. McGregor has choreographed for the Paris troupe, which seems particularly well suited to his brand of knotty physicality and conceptual thinking. (The French like concepts on stage; Anglo-Saxons generally despise them there. Roughly speaking.)

It’s an odd work, choreographically repetitive and long-winded, but also intermittently compelling and strange, capturing something of the twisted bodies in Bacon’s paintings, and the imminent dissolution that always seems to possess them.

That dissolution is linked to a sustained interest in the metamorphosis of body and shape in Mr. McGregor’s work. His ballet pieces only infrequently show the harmonious lines and static poses that inform much of classical dance; whole passages can go by during which you’d be hard pressed to name a ballet step. Almost every movement mutates as you watch: bodies curve and swoop, hips angle, legs buckle, chests and heads push out with ungainly emphasis.

There’s a kinetic fascination to all of this, but too often in Anatomie, Mr. McGregor seems hard-pressed to match Mr. Turnage’s score, Blood on the Floor, a nine-part 1994 composition inspired by Bacon’s artworks. (The title is a loose adaption of his painting Blood on Pavement . Originally composed for the Ensemble Modern, and played in Paris by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, it’s an often frenzied, powerful piece in which the influences of Gershwin, Bernstein, Miles Davis and Stravinsky are clear. But its relentlessly percussive energy and jazz riffs have little discernible dance impetus, and Mr. McGregor frequently seems to throw as much physical complexity at us as he can in the hope of meeting the music halfway.

The piece opens with a long duet for two men (Jérémie Bélingard and Mathias Heymann on Saturday), who strip down to their briefs (the minimal, attractive costumes are by Moritz Junge) before engaging in grappling, erotic combat and the kind of formal partnering maneuvers more usually found in heterosexual pas de deux. The huge expanse of the Bastille stage is emphasized by Mr. Pawson’s simple set: two gray fins or wings that protrude from a flat backdrop and move throughout the piece to create different configurations, often evoking the triptych forms of Bacon’s paintings. The beautiful lighting, by Lucy Carter, similarly evokes the paintings in its intermittent washes of chartreuse, pink, orange and black, and its occasional smoky allusiveness.

Both Mr. Bélingard and Mr. Heymann — who presumably represent Bacon and a lover (perhaps Bacon’s companion George Dyer, whose suicide is suggested at the end) — are mesmerizing performers, but their encounter began to feel repetitive in tone and physicality midway through.

That feeling of repetitive time filling is a problem that pervades L’Anatomie, which invokes various paintings and biographical moments in Bacon’s life without undue emphasis over its nine movements. There is a plaintive, winding solo for Marie-Agnès Gillot; a nightclub scene) with three leading women (Mathilde Froustey stood out here) that is a bit of a mess; an inventive leg-slicing, undulating duet for Mr. Bélingard and Aurélie Dupont (also very well danced on Friday by Alexandre Gasse and Myriam Ould-Braham); and a marvelously quirky, humorous pas de deux, brilliantly danced by both Sabrina Mallem and Julien Meyzindi on Friday, and Alice Renavand and Josua Hoffalt on Saturday.

The elements of “L’Anatomie” never quite add up. The episodic pacing, dictated by the music, feels sluggish, there is no dramatic or emotional arc, an extensive ensemble (39 in total ) is underused, and many of the design elements (the steel bars, the mesh screen) feel extraneous. But there is also much to admire in the ambition of Mr. McGregor’s conception, its physical daring and aesthetic beauty. It makes you think about things: art, color, light, bodies, movement, stories, lives. That’s no small achievement in a ballet.

L’Anatomie de la Sensation continues through Friday at the Opera Bastille

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon outsells Warhol soup in £108m auction

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE LONDON EVENING STANDARD   |  THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2011

 

Sotheby’s secured its highest total for a contemporary art sale in London when it took £108.8 million.

German and British paintings were the chief targets as the auction house last night doubled the total sales for the same auction last summer. Twenty-nine lots sold for more than £1 million each as prices climbed back above the record levels of 2008.

Francis Bacon confirmed his status as the most sought-after contemporary artist when Crouching Nude (1961) — one of a series of visceral portraits of his muse Henrietta Moraes — sold for £8.3 million.

Bidding climbed rapidly but stopped just above the work’s low estimate. Sotheby’s called the price "strong". At a  Christie’s auction in London on Tuesday, another Bacon painting, Study for a Portrait (1953), sold for £18 million — £7 million more than its estimate. Last night’s sale was a mainly German affair.

Thirty-four lots came from the collection of Christian Graf Duerckheim-Ketelhodt, who died last year. He was a friend and champion of Georg Baselitz and an avid collector of Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.

 

 

 

 

 

Mystery buyer forks out £18m for a Bacon

 

 

 

 

DAILY MAIL REPORTER   |  THE DAILY MAIL   |  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2011

 

AN ‘arresting and dark’ painting by Francis Bacon was sold at auction yesterday for nearly £18 miIlion. Study for a Portrait, produced in 1953, was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder when it went under the hammer at Christie’s in London.

The artwork had been expected to fetch somewhere in the region of £11 million but went on to reach an astonishing £17,961,250. It is the second most valuable piece to be sold at a post-War and contemporary art sale at the auction house, a spokesman said.

The highest selling work in this category was another piece by, Bacon, Triptych, which went for £26.3million in February 2008.

Study for a Portrait, a moody oil on canvas which measures 2m by 1.4m, is described as ‘an arresting and dark study in the degradation of power’.

It was previously owned by two of Francis Bacon’s contemporaries — Rodrigo Moynihan, a pioneer of abstract painting in the 1930s, and Louis le Brocquy, one of Ireland’s most important painters of the 20th century.

The sale of 67 works at Christie’s is expected to make up to £77,620,000.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon portrait sells for £18 million

 

 

 

The sale of a Francis Bacon portrait from one of his darkest periods has exceeded estimates by £7 million.

 

 

 

 

BY FLORENCE WATERS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH    | WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2011

 

Study for a Portrait, 1953, became the second most valuable piece to be sold at a post-War and contemporary art sale at Christie’s last night when it was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder. The highest selling work in this category is Bacon’s Triptych which went for £26.3 million in February 2008. The artwork had been expected to fetch somewhere in the region of £11 million but instead reached £17,961,250.

 

The work was painted in 1953 when, following the death of his former nanny and companion, Jessie Lightfoot, he spent a lot of time in his studio and painted a series of large moody dark works. It is thought to be one of his most inventive and prolific periods.

 

Nobody knows who the subject of the portrait, which measures two metres by 1.4m, is. In a recent feature about the resurgent demand for on the market, art market correspondent Colin Gleadell wrote: "The painting bears resemblances at once to Velazquez’s Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, to a photograph of Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, to the art critic David Sylvester and to Bacon’s lover at the time, Peter Lacy.

 

"Whoever it is, it is a figure of power, seated on a semi-gilded throne and staring menacingly down at the viewer from the dark, caged solitude in which he is trapped."

 

The masterpiece was sold by Swiss entrepreneur and wine producer Donald M Hess. But, historically, the work has been owned by two of Francis Bacon’s contemporaries — Rodrigo Moynihan, a pioneer of abstract painting in the 1930’s, and Louis Le Brocquy, one of Ireland’s most important painters of the 20th century.



 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon painting sells for £18m as art buyers chase gritty Britons

 

 

 

 

 

GODFREY BARKER AND LOUISE JURY  |  LONDON EVENING STANDARD  |  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2011

 

A masterpiece by Francis Bacon has sold for £18 million after being given an estimate of £11million at an auction at Christie’s in London. 

Americans and Russians lined up to bid for Study for a Portrait (1953), which was being offered at auction for the first time.

Brett Gorvy, Christie’s contemporary art expert, said a passion for British artists such as Bacon and Freud had become a permanent feature of the market. "Buyers round the world chase them now because they want truth and realism and are tired of slick conceptualism," he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 
 Christie’s Contemporary Art Sale signals Continued Strength in Market
 
 
 
  
 

 

  BY CAROL VOGEL  |  AUCTION SALES  |  THE NEW YORK TIME  |  TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2011

 


LONDON–Even after the May auctions in New York and last month’s Art Basel, the giant contemporary art fair in Switzerland, collectors were still spending big on post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s here on Tuesday night, where examples of blue chip artists topped expectations.

In a jam-packed salesroom, the audience watched attentively as the evening’s star painting–Francis Bacon’s Study for a Portrait, from 1953–sold to an eager telephone bidder for $25.5 million, or $28.6 million with Christie’s fees.

Belonging to the Hess family from Napa, Calif., it depicted a man dressed in a dark suit, regally seated on a gilded armchair reminiscent of a papal throne. (It was painted the same year Bacon created his series of Popes.)

Four bidders went for the painting, which had been expected to bring around $17.5 million. The price seemed huge, but not compared to 2008, when a 1976 triptych by the artist fetched $86.3 million at Sotheby’s in New York.



 

 

 

 

 

John Hedgecoe: Artists off their guard

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHARLOTTE CRIPPS  |  CULTURE  |  FEATURES  |  ART  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  WEDNESDAY, 22 JUNE 2011

 

Hundreds of portraits of famous artists including Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, recently rediscovered in a barn, are on display in The Face of the Artist: Photographs by John Hedgecoe at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.

Hedgecoe died in 2010, but the pictures, all signed and dated, were found in boxes belonging to a friend of the family in Essex. Hedgecoe had boxed up much of the collection while living at Oxnead Hall in Norfolk. After he ferreted them away – some he sold and others he gave away – nobody knew what was left.

"There were some real discoveries when we unpacked the boxes," says the show’s curator Calvin Winner. "A group of photos of Moore show a humorous and frivolous side to the sculptor that you don’t usually see with a highly regarded artist. In one image Moore in Forte del Marmi, Italy, is wearing his daughter Mary’s wig and in another he is reclining in a deck chair, in a holiday mood reminiscent of a Martin Parr photograph. It’s rare to see artists let their hair down but there was real trust between him and the photographer." The photographs reveal the artists in their studios or catch them just at the moment they realise they are being photographed; often Hedgecoe focused heavily on their hands, and he kept notes about his sessions in his diaries.

Bacon, pictured in 1969, is shown just after he had just accidentally burnt down his own studio and was working from a studio at the Royal College of Art, where these photos were taken. Moore has his hands outstretched, displaying how enlarged they had become through toil with chisels and hammers.

The John Hedgecoe estate contacted the Sainsbury Centre last year saying that the family wanted to keep the collection together and, because of Hedgecoe’s connection with Norfolk, find a home for the works nearby. A central focus of this show will be photographs of Bacon and Moore, alongside their works from the Centre’s permanent collections.

John Hedgecoe, who was born in 1931, was one of the leading British portrait photographers of the 20th century, and focused much of his work on artists and writers. He joined Queen magazine as staff photographer after he left the Guildford school of Art in 1957. By the mid-1960s he was taking portraits of eminent people for freelance commissions published in newspapers and magazines. He was also responsible for the 1966 photograph of the Queen which is still used on postage stamps.

In 1965, he established the photography department at the Royal College of Art, where he became Professor of Photography from 1975. He said: "A good portrait photograph should try to tell us something about the subject’s character, for the portrait is a visual biography in a sense." Hedgecoe also wrote photography manuals and a novel, Breakfast with Dolly (1996). He was working on a second novel just before he died.

According to Dr Paul Greenhalgh, director of the Sainsbury Centre: "The physical appearance of the artist, his or her features, mannerisms, eccentricities, and posture has long fascinated us. John Hedgecoe, one of the great society photographers and educators of the last half century, brilliantly photographed many of the greatest painters, sculptors, poets, and cultural thinkers of his age. This exhibition presents these artistic faces, in celebration of a great photographer, and a great artistic age."

"Francis Bacon was moody, and to really get on with him you had to enjoy his lifestyle, spending afternoons drinking and exchanging abuse with Muriel Belcher, owner of the Colony Room club in Soho. He loved drinking champagne and was incredibly generous. I often used to see him waiting in the queue for the bus to South Kensington, where he lived, and he was a frequent visitor to the Senior Common Room at the Royal College of Art. When I photographed him he’d just accidentally burnt down his studio, so Robin Darwin, rector of the RCA, let him have a studio in the college."

The Face of the Artist: Photographs by John Hedgecoe, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (01603 593 199)to 4 December

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                           

                                                                                         Francis Bacon 1969 by John Hedgecoe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Portrait‎ of tortured Bacon’s inner dominatrix is as unpalatable as his real self

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By EMER O’KELLY   |   THEATRE   |   SUNDAY INDEPENDENT   |   INDEPENDENT IRELAND   |   SUNDAY JUNE 19 2011

 

 

 

FRANCIS Bacon’s work is tormented, terrifying, agonised and extraordinary.

 

He was a genius. He was also sexually voracious, a sexual masochist, and was personally sadistic in his relationships. Which matters most? Or at all?

 

Well, the reason we’ve heard about the alcoholic, almost demented little man, who was born in Dublin of English parents and was resident in London for most of his life, is because of his dark, wildly soaring painting. His sad sexual life would otherwise have been merely another little unimportant Soho chronicle.

 

Brian McAvera has tackled his subject by dividing Bacon into two, himself, and a female dominatrix "other self". But his play Francis and Frances at Focus in Dublin is almost as sad as its subject. There is little of Bacon in it, either the work or the character, merely a parade of largely unimportant chronological facts.

 

The two actors prance around the stage quipping wordily but extremely superficially at each other, and culminating in a passage (excuse the vulgar pun) in which Bacon, on his hands and knees, supposedly has a broom handle thrust deep into him, his "other self" describing its progress up the body to the thorax and through the mouth until he explodes in ecstasy, reaching for paint to describe the experience.

 

Frightful and unnecessarily graphic? Well no, actually. It’s hilarious, but not in the right way.

 

The play deals not at all with the art, except to relate it continually to the single childhood episode in which Bacon’s militaristic father supposedly "gave" him to the stable boys to be whipped and presumably buggered. (There are scholarly doubts as to whether this ever happened.)

 

And even with the boring concentration on his unhappy sexuality, there is no attempt to deal with Bacon’s relationships – from his first lover Peter Lacy, who beat the hell out of him, and frequently left him in the street half-dead, to George Dyer, the long-term rough trade companion/lover whom Bacon in turn abused (and who killed himself in 1971 while visiting Paris with the painter for the latter’s much-heralded retrospective there).

 

Cathal Quinn plays Bacon, Tara Breathnach his other self. Both gabble the text without visible sign of emotional or mental contact with it, and Breathnach in addition has absolutely no verbal variation throughout, and also manages to look as though she’s rather embarrassed by her gear.

 

Quinn fares rather better, but still does little other than pose and raise his eyebrows, although it must be admitted that the text gives little opportunity to do anything else.

 

At one stage McAvera (who also directs, dispiritedly) has Bacon saying "I always believe something marvellous is going to happen".  If only.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Outside the frame

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Brian McAvera’s lack of sectarian allegiances feeds into

 his play about conflicted Irish-born artist Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 BY EITHNE SHORTALL  |  INTERVIEW  |  THE SUNDAY TIMES  |  SUNDAY 12 JUNE 2011

 

 

 

There is a line in Brian McAvera’s new play about Francis Bacon in which the painter’s alter ego says: “You liked the Anglo but not so much the Irish.” Born in Dublin to British parents, Bacon left for London at the age of 16. He adopted a cockney accent and, although others have disputed it, claimed never to have returned to Ireland.

His traumatic childhood undoubtedly influenced his violent paintings. Equally, it led him to shun his Irish heritage. The national question was part of what drew McAvera to the artist, a fitting topic for a playwright and art critic whose refusal to be English or Irish has followed him his whole life. McAvera was born in a republican area of Belfast and baptised a Catholic, yet had no nationalist leanings.

He wrote serious plays for the duration of the Troubles but nobody felt comfortable with a Northern Irish playwright who said “a plague on both your houses” with his tongue nowhere near his cheek.

 

“I always had great difficulty getting stuff produced in Ireland,” he says. “I was writing political plays. In the same way that the Arts Council and the like didn’t want to know about the socio-political artists, for example Gerry Gleason and Graham Gingles, who were producing work during the Troubles, it really wasn’t interested in political theatre material,” he says.

 

“People either wanted escapist material or, if someone was going to do a play about the Troubles, then it had to be relatively jolly, preferably a comedy, or what we used to call ‘balaclava drama’. The problem seemed to be that I was perceived as a Catholic born in Andersonstown who did not support either the Provos or Sinn Fein.

“People wanted you to take sides and be either a republican or a loyalist. I didn’t fit the categories. A lot of rubbish has been written about Northern Ireland and the Troubles, largely by people who didn’t live through them. I decided in the early Nineties that I was going to stop working in Ireland and concentrate my efforts on England and Europe, so that’s what I did.”

McAvera is best known in Ireland for his writings on the visual arts, including a feature interview in every issue of Irish Arts Review since 2002. Beyond this island he is a dramatist whose works have been translated into 15 languages, and the only link between him and art is his series of plays about the women in Pablo Picasso’s life and the imminent work about Bacon.

 

The rare freedom of being able to refuse a nationality, particularly for someone born in Northern Ireland, has permeated McAvera’s theatrical perspective and his plays. There is a propensity in Ireland to think of theatre as beginning with the foundation of the Abbey. However, McAvera is acutely aware of international styles and the speck that Irish drama represents in the art form’s history. He dislikes naturalism and encourages his characters to talk directly to the audience. Reminding spectators that they are watching a play has become a postmodern device, but McAvera took it from the Elizabethans.

The playwright’s thick northern accent is the only feature that gives him away. With a broad white goatee, corduroy trousers and a slate-grey scarf thrown once over the shoulder, he looks every inch the European artist.

 

His reference points extend to Asia, and his theatrical style and influences stretch from eastern Europe to medieval England. In Francis & Frances the characters use the audience as a mute actor and, like Shakespeare, they make jokes during seemingly serious scenes.

 

“I don’t want the audience to anticipate what will happen next because they are used to [watching plays],” he says. “Who in their right mind would want to adhere to Aristotelian notions when he [Aristotle] was writing for a specific culture over 3,000 years ago with specific sexual and religious attitudes, none of which pertain today?”

 

McAvera discovered Bacon in an art magazine when he was 17 and working a summer job in London. It was the beginning of his interest in the visual arts.

“If you look at Bacon’s life coldly from the outside, it can seem seriously off-putting. This was a man who liked being beaten, who liked being taken, who was a voyeur. The true love of his life, Peter Lacy, would bring in guys off the street to fuck him. I wasn’t interested in sensationalising. What you have to do is find the human being in there and how, with the kind of life he led, that stayed in the work,” he says.

 

“It’s such an abhorrent sexuality, one that was clearly formed early in his childhood. I wanted to explore how certain kinds of images arose from the nature of that sexuality. It is dealt with overtly [in the play] but we do not have naked bodies on stage or somebody buggering somebody else.

 

“For example, the penultimate scene in the play is of Bacon seemingly being buggered by a yard brush, in the course of which he discovers all of the images that are imploding towards making up a painting. But it is done as a musical routine. I’m trying to find ways of using humour to get at what is quite a dark subject matter. I am not interested in verisimilitude, because then you tend towards pornography.”

 

Despite his undefined nationality, McAvera — like Bacon — can’t escape the influence of his early surroundings. In his early twenties he saw a paramilitary punch an actor at a bus stop because of “camp” behaviour. “These were guys who’d done active service everywhere and they were frightened by the notion of this man being gay,” he recalls. “Looking back, and to take an extreme variant on that, I was interested in seeing could I get an audience to understand, and not be put off by it.”

 

Francis & Frances opens at the Focus theatre, Dublin, tomorrow


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon’s portrait of mystery man likely to fetch €12m at auction‎

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BY JAMES J GIBBONS   |   THE IRISH INDEPENDENT   |   SUNDAY JUNE 12 2011

 

 

A painting by Irish artist Francis Bacon, which was once owned by artist Louis Le Brocquy, is expected to sell for £11m (€12.4m) at a London art auction next month.

The large picture, painted in 1953 and simply entitled Study for a Portrait, resembles Velazquez’s Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, but the identity of the subject is unknown.

Neither Louis le Brocquy (94) nor his son Pierre would comment on the picture this weekend, which means that even if they do know the sitter’s identity, it is still safe.

It has been said that if paintings had voices, then Francis Bacon’s would shriek. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once called him "that man who paints those dreadful pictures".

In 1951, grief-stricken at the death of his former nanny and companion, Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon left his flat in South Kensington in London, which they shared. He borrowed the studio of the professor of painting at the Royal College of Art, Rodrigo Moynihan, to work in and gave him this picture in return. The picture was acquired from Moynihan by Louis Le Brocquy, who in turn eventually sold it to Marlborough Fine Art. In 1984 it was bought from the gallery by the Swiss entrepreneur and wine producer Donald M Hess, the current vendor.

Bacon, who said his painting career was delayed because he had "spent too long looking for a subject that would sustain his interest", was born at 63 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, in 1909. His father, a former captain in the British Army, moved to Ireland to breed and train racehorses. The family was based in Co Kildare and rented Canny Court House, near Kilcullen.

Following a disagreement with his father, Bacon left home at the age of 16 and after a stint in Berlin settled in London, where he began his most dynamic work during the latter stages of World War Two. Despite what many see as an existentialist philosophy expressed through his paintings, Bacon always appeared to favour the lifestyle of the bon vivant, spending much of his days eating, drinking and gambling in London’s Soho with other noted bohemians such as Lucian Freud and Jeffrey Bernard.

His work is one of the most sought after in the world, with his Tryptich 1976 making $86.3m (€60.1) when it was bought by Roman Abramovich – the Chelsea FC owner – in 2008 at Sotheby’s in New York

The auction takes place on June 28 at Christie’s, London.

– James J Gibbons

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHRISTIE’S

 

Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction

 


Sale 7977 / Lot 15, 28 June 2011, King Street, London 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992)  Study for a Portrait

 

 

 

Sold £17,961,250

 

Lot Description

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) 
Study for a Portrait 
oil on canvas 
78 x 54in. (198 x 137.5cm.) 
Painted in 1953 

 

 

Special Notice

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 20% on the buyer’s premium.

 

 

Provenance

Rodrigo Moynihan, London.
Louis Le Brocquy, Carros (Alpes Maritimes).
Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1984. 

 

 

Pre-Lot Text

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

 


Literature

W. Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts, London 1954, no. 4 (illustrated, titled Man in a Chair).
J. Rothenstein and R. Alley, Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné, London 1964, no. 78 (illustrated, unpaged).
D. Ades and A. Forge, Francis Bacon, London 1985, no. 23 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). 

 

 

Exhibited

London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Francis Bacon, 1955, no. 10.
Paris, Galerie Maeght, Francis Bacon, 1966. This exhibition later travelled to Rome, Marlborough Galleria d’Arte; London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd. and Siegen, Oberes Schloss.
Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, Francis Bacon: Paintings 1945-1982, 1983. This exhibition later travelled to Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art and Nagoya, Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery.
Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Francis Bacon, Retrospektive, 1987, no. 6 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art, 2003-04, no. 89 (illustrated in colour, p. 237). This exhibition later travelled to Basel, Fondation Beyeler.
London, Tate Britain, Francis Bacon, 2008-09 (illustrated in colour, p. 131). This exhibition later travelled to Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

 

 

 

Lot Essay

 

’He managed in the course of 1953 to produce over twenty pictures in an annus mirabilis as inventive as it was prolific’ 
(M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich 2006, p. 33)

Situated between the seminal first series of Popes in 1953 and the landmark suite of Man in Blue paintings in 1954, Study for a Portrait represents a highly significant moment in Francis Bacon’s oeuvre. Its vast scale makes it larger than most of the aforementioned, with Bacon making full use of the painting’s extraordinary atmosphere to comment on the state of man in existentialist post-war Europe. Study for a Portrait is the last painting that Bacon created in his studio at the Royal College of Art, which Rodrigo Moynihan lent to him between 1951-53. It is imbued with all the pioneering works he created there including the Papal portraits and his first ever triptych portrait realised in 1953, Three Studies of the Human Head. All of these works were cast against the exquisite backdrop of his unique, ethereal liquid blue paint so expertly applied in Study for a Portrait. The painting has a distinguished and exclusive heritage of artistic ownership. Rodrigo Moynihan was the first owner and it later belonged to Louis Le Brocquy, the renowned Irish painter, who was the last to keep it before its acquisition by the present owner in 1984.
 

Enshrouded by a sea of midnight blue, Bacon artfully depicts a besuited man, seated on a gilded armchair evocative of a Papal throne. With his disdainful gaze cast through lightly rimmed, pince-nez glasses, the man imports an aura of authority, isolated and enclosed within the cage of Bacon’s architectural spaceframe. His atmosphere is dark, rendered through washes of blue-black oil and turpentine saturated on canvas. The twilight of the painting is broken up by striations of pale parallel lines, evocative of the folds of rich drapery depicted in the artist’s studies of Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. Highlights adorn the man’s armchair with flashes of ochre tracing its contours like some golden throne for a ruling leader or the corporate seat of the trenchant capitalist. As David Sylvester has described, ’in these claustrophobic curtained settings, there loom up before us beings whose shadowy, ambiguous, unexpected presence takes command of any setting they survey, making real beings seem like shadows. They are as appalling as they are compelling, for these are creatures faced with their tragic destiny’ (D. Sylvester, ‘Francis Bacon’, The British Pavilion: Exhibition of Works by Nicholson, Bacon, Freud, Venice XXVII Biennale, Venice 1954). In Study for a Portrait, Bacon imports a sense of the era’s European post-war existentialism, cutting through the veneers of civilised society to distil the raw and visceral qualities of the human character onto canvas. As Michael Peppiatt has suggested, ‘Bacon’s genius was to have found a single image through which he could express the whole range of his most extreme emotions: fear, disdain, hate, lust, and even a fierce kind of love’ (M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, exh. cat., Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich 2006, p. 26).

The early 1950s was a time of great interaction between the artist and his friends and peers Rodrigo Moynihan, Lucian Freud and David Sylvester. Indeed as David Sylvester recalls, ’in those early days Lucian clearly had a crush on Francis, as I did. (We both copied his uniform of a plain, dark grey, worsted double-breasted Saville Row suit, plain shirt, plain dark tie, brown suede shoes)’ (D. Sylvester, ’All the Pulsations of a Person’, The Independent, 24 October 1993). The shadows of all of these men, including the artist’s caustic lover Peter Lacy can be found in the face of this extraordinary portrait. KA

Francis Bacon’s Study for a Portrait, 1953
By Martin Harrison

’Study for a Portrait (1953) relates to the ’Pope’ paintings that preceded it, and it is clear that it anticipates the Man in Blue series commenced in 1954, yet in some decisive respects it conforms with neither of these categories, nor with his other contemporary portraits of seated men, and stands as a unique work’
(M. Harrison, May 2011).

In evaluating Francis Bacon’s entire oeuvre it is evident that between 1948 and 1963 he had a strong tendency to paint in series. These series — several of popes, heads, studies from the life-mask of William Blake, the seven Man in Blue paintings, the seven men in glasses — were sometimes identified as such and each painting numbered, while others constituted, in effect, a series, such as the three dog paintings dating from 1952. In some of these Bacon appears to have been exploring the cumulative impact of a group of paintings in which he made incremental shifts around the formal matrix, adjusting the mood, gestures and emotion of the ’sitter’. As Bacon explained to Ronald Alley, he saw the images ’in a shifting way, and almost in shifting sequences. The pictures are painted one after the other, the last one suggests the next.’ 1

 

This explanation was appended to Alley’s entry for Study for Portrait 1 (1953), the first painting in what became a notable series of eight papal portraits, which Bacon completed shortly before commencing the present painting.2 Conversely, other important paintings that Bacon made in this period appear to have been conceived as discrete statements: he may have regarded subjects such as Elephant Fording a River (1952), for example, as too specific to be susceptible to further development. Study for a Portrait (1953) relates to the ’Pope’ paintings that preceded it, and it is clear that it anticipates the Man in Blue series commenced in 1954, yet in some decisive respects it conforms with neither of these categories, nor with his other contemporary portraits of seated men, and stands as a unique work.

Firstly, Study for a Portrait (1953) is the most rigorously grisaille among Bacon’s paintings of the period. The ground is painted in a dark, stygian register, the deeply-saturated, inky, Prussian blue-black contrasting with the greys of the inner image. The monumental figure, bespectacled and wearing a dark suit and neatly starched (and somewhat constricting) white collar and purple tie, is pictured from a quite low viewpoint. Strictly speaking the ’spectacles’ are pince-nez, and thus refer to the film still of the screaming nurse from the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin that Bacon had grafted onto his Pope figures since 1949; this is further indicated by the extra ’falling’ lens that Bacon painted under the man’s right eye. Frontal, imperious, head raised, he is among the most magisterially aloof of all Bacon’s ’authority’ figures, be they popes or ’businessmen’. The atmosphere of hieratic indomitability is emphasised by the formal armature – the inner ’spaceframe’ that interrupts the ground of vertical ’shuttering’ (and secondary traces of curtaining) is virtually symmetrical and eschews the playfully ’incorrect’ diagonals of which Bacon was so fond. The confined space that the figure occupies is delineated in pale blue paint, and its darker, receding planes mark this as one of Bacon’s most coolly dramatic arenas, the spatial recession and the unlined dark ’roof’ intensifying the isolation of the resolutely impassive man.

’Frontal, imperious, head raised, he is among the most magisterially aloof of all Bacons authority figures, be they popes or businessmen’ (M. Harrison on Study for Portrait, 1953).

’Study for a Portrait (1953) shares some fundamental characteristics with the paintings of Mark Rothko, conspicuously its soaring abstract planes and subtle chromatic juxtapositions’
(M. Harrison, May 2011).

’In these claustrophobic curtained settings, there loom up before us beings whose shadowy, ambiguous, unexpected presence takes command of any setting they survey, making real beings seem like shadows. They are as appalling as they are compelling, for these are creatures faced with their tragic destiny’ (D. Sylvester, ’Francis Bacon’, The British Pavilion: Exhibition of Works by Nicholson, Bacon, Freud, Venice XXVII Biennale, Venice 1954). 


Comparisons have often been made between Giacometti and Bacon, both figurative modernists committed to finding new ways to capture appearance and to represent the human body in space; for example, the the open cage construction of Giacometti’s early sculpture The Palace at 4 a.m.(1933; Museum of Modern Art, New York) has been posited as a source for Bacon’s spaceframes. The strong influence exercised on Britain’s ’Geometry of Fear’ sculptors by the gaunt, attenuated figures Giacometti evolved about 1946 was manifested in London in several of the entries to the competition for a ’Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner’ in 1953 – contemporaneously, that is, with Study for a Portrait (1953). Bacon professed indifference to Giacometti’s sculpture but greatly admired his paintings and drawings and called him the ’greatest draughtsman of our time’.3

 

In their unflinching frontality, monochrome palette and the device of the rectangular inner frame, Giacometti’s Portrait of Peter Watson (1953; Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Bacon’s Study for a Portrait (1953) have marked affinities; Bacon was closely acquainted with the art patron and collector Peter Watson, and probably knew this painting. But Bacon must have been familiar with the portrait busts in spaceframes that Giacometti had been painting since 1947, and it is likely that his own portraits were informed by them.
 

The chair in Study for a Portrait (1953) establishes continuity with the eight Popes that Bacon had painted a few months earlier in that despite being stripped down to a simplified, geometrical shape (it is shorn of the finials, for example) its edges are picked out in running lines and dabs of gold paint that refer back to the papal throne. In fact this was the first painting in which the legs and arms of the chair were painted in this more elaborate manner, and the immediate pictorial inspiration for this treatment was probably the studded armband worn by the king in Velázquez’s Philip IV of Spain (c. 1656; National Gallery, London). Similarly, the man’s purple tie was doubtless, like the vestigial tassel at the top of the painting, an atavistic reference to a leading motif of his pope paintings: Bacon initially believed, erroneously – he had only seen Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X in black and white reproduction – that the Pope’s surplice was purple. The man’s mouth is neither open in anguish nor baring teeth, but firmly closed, self-contained. Georges Bataille’s observations in ’La Bouche’ seem especially relevant here: Bataille claimed that ’human life is concentrated bestially in the mouth’,4 and he evoked ’the magisterial aspect of the face with its mouth closed, beautiful as a strong-box’.5


The fleshy pink lips of Bacon’s protagonist are unusual, and if they do point to an individual characterization it is possible they refer to David Sylvester, to whom Bacon was very close at the time the painting was made. The artist and critic briefly shared accommodation in 9 Apollo Place at the end of 1953 and lived in the same house at 19 Cromwell Road at the beginning of 1954; Sylvester was lecturing at the Royal College of Art while Bacon was painting there, and also dealing privately in Bacon’s paintings during this period. Furthermore, Study for Portrait I (1953) had begun as a portrait of Sylvester ’who sat about four times for it until it turned into a pope’.6

 

Peter Lacy was possibly in the mix, too, but given Bacon’s habit of merging and transposing the representations of individuals the identity of the ’sitter’ will probably have to remain conjectural. A more definite comparison with the prominent lips is provided by Velázquez’s portraits of Philip IV of Spain; besides the reproductions that Bacon owned of Velázquez’s various versions of this subject, the National Gallery, London, held originals of not only the c. 1656 head-and-shoulders portrait, referred to above, but also Philip IV in Brown and Silver, c. 1631-32.

Study for a Portrait (1953), together with the painting that immediately preceded it, Portrait of a Man (1953), in which this detail is more cursorily delineated, represents the first occasion on which Bacon painted a man with his legs crossing. This pose, which recurred frequently in his paintings subsequently, was habitually adopted by Bacon himself when seated. In Study for a Portrait (1953) the suited body is painted quite thinly, with a broad brush, and evidently very rapidly, its energy providing an agitated, abbreviated counterpoint to the calmness and composure of the figure’s general demeanour. The high reflectance of the oil-rich pigments in this passage is in marked contrast to the dominant low key of the painting. There is also implied movement in the positioning of the body, which twists round in the diagonally-positioned chair to confront the viewer directly.

Study for a Portrait (1953) was, then, a quintessential Bacon painting of the kind in which the leading art writers of the day found such compelling evocations of the existential zeitgeist. Their critical reception, and the resonance of Bacon’s powerful (and powerless) figures, is clearly demonstrated in contemporary descriptions of them. Robert Melville thought Bacon’s paintings fulfilled Nietzsche’s gloomy prophecy to epitomise ’an age in which the breakdown in values has been completed’, and he described Bacon’s isolated figures as ’incarcerated’ in glass boxes.7 The American critic Sam Hunter commented that Bacon’s art was ’thoroughly contemporary in its vitality’ and that ’No one has interpreted the acute postwar moods more vividly.’8 David Sylvester might have been addressing Study for a Portrait (1953) specifically in his remarks on Bacon’s ’Settings which are luxurious and simple: lush velvet curtains and a gilded armchair. Like prison cells for highborn traitors.’ 9

 

As a consequence of his peremptory departure from his flat at 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, in about April 1951, following the death of his former nanny and companion Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon had no access to a regular studio until the Autumn of that year, when Rodrigo Moynihan lent him his painting studio at the Royal College of Art. Moynihan had been appointed Professor of Painting at the college in 1948, and he was central to the drastic overhaul of its aims and syllabus initiated by Robin Darwin; it was in this studio that Moynihan painted the striking Portrait Group (1950; Tate Britain), which featured nine members of the Royal College’s teaching staff. Bacon had already spent some time at the college deputising for John Minton in Autumn 1950. Although Bacon refused to teach any classes on either occasion, Albert Herbert was one of several artists who recalled the students’ intoxication with Bacon’s ’emotional realism’ as well as his unconstrained attitude towards making art. These events serve as a reminder that at this stage in his career Bacon’s interactions with London’s cultural scene and its artists (Isabel Lambert, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Victor Willing and Michael Andrews) were of reciprocal significance.

Paradoxically, considering he was working in a borrowed space, Bacon had embarked on a creatively extremely fertile period. He began a passionate if turbulent love affair with Peter Lacy in 1952, and although their relationship eventually became problematical at first it undoubtedly acted as a stimulus for new paintings. Bacon was able to use the studio at the Royal College for two years, and Study for a Portrait (1953) was in fact the last painting that he finished there, in about October 1953. He apparently made a gift of it to Moynihan, a gesture of thanks he would repeat in 1969 when he presented the college with Study for a Bullfight No. I (1969), having been loaned a studio there for seven months while repairs were carried out on his house at 7 Reece Mews.10 Study for a Portrait (1953) was subsequently acquired by Louis le Brocquy, and was thus also unique in having been owned by two of Bacon’s distinguished artist peers and friends.

That such a major painting as Study for a Portrait (1953) has not featured more extensively in the Bacon bibliography can probably be accounted for by its having been in private hands throughout the fifty-eight years of its existence. Since it had been acquired by Rodrigo Moynihan shortly after it was completed it was never exhibited at the Hanover Gallery and its sole public appearance in the 1950s was in Bacon’s first museum retrospective, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in January and February 1955. Thereafter, prior to its spectacular reappearance in the Tate centenary retrospective in 2008-09, it was exhibited only twice during the next thirty years, at Fondation Maeght in 1966 and in Japan in 1983; it was even absent from Lorenza Trucchi’s comprehensive monograph of 1975. Interestingly, however, it had been published in 1954 by Wyndham Lewis in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, in which it was illustrated under the title ’Man in a Chair’. Lewis, who was responsible for some of the most perceptive writing on Bacon at this time, considered him ’the most astonishingly sinister artist in England, and one of the most original’.11

 

Although, in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, Lewis compares him with Goya and Bosch, an analogy Bacon would have firmly repudiated, he observed that ’the ethical and literary impulses throughout the work of Bacon constitute him an artist at the opposite pole to the pretentious blanks and voids of Réalités Nouvelles.’12 Lewis’s remark raises the question of Bacon’s dialogue with abstract expressionism, about which he was also notoriously dismissive. In spite of his public statements, however, Study for a Portrait (1953) shares some fundamental characteristics with the paintings of Mark Rothko, conspicuously its soaring ’abstract’ planes and subtle chromatic juxtapositions.13

Bacon’s individual idiom generally precluded all but the most superficial imitations, but Graham Sutherland’s controversial Portrait of Sir Winston Churchill (1954), which Churchill abhorred and his wife eventually destroyed, resembled Study for a Portrait (1953) in too many respects for a connection between them to be mere coincidence: in this instance the younger artist appears to have influenced Sutherland. The blurred, ethereal rendition of the man’s head in Study for a Portrait (1953) is redolent of a plaster cast, and curiously prefigures the five variations he began in 1955 based on a life-mask of William Blake. The rapt expression and raised head suggest the self-possessed figure may have been involved in activity such as listening to music, or was otherwise deep in thought. Its spectral quality is also reminiscent of an early daguerreotype, as though the man were a sitter in a photographic studio a century earlier. As usual, the greatest attention is reserved for the head, its poignant, urgent brushwork recalling Robert Melville’s contemporary remark that Bacon was ’unquestionably, the greatest painter of flesh since Renoir’.14

Study for a Portrait (1953) takes its place, then, in a pantheon of arresting images of male angst and seclusion, extending a lineage that embraces such disparate images as Durer’s engraving Melancholia (1514), Rubens’s Daniel in the Lion’s Den (c. 1615; National Gallery of Art, Washington) and Blake’s Elisha in the Chamber on the Wall (c. 1819-20; Tate Britain), to which Bacon added a modern image of unsettling power and distinction.

 

Martin Harrison, May 2011

Martin Harrison is editor of the Francis Bacon Catalogue Raisonné being published in 2013.

 

 

 

 

 

   George Dyer, Rodrigo Moynihan, Danny Moynihan, Francis Bacon and

   Denis Wirth-Miller in Provence, 1966.

 

 

 

Notes

1. Sir John Rothenstein and Ronald Alley, Francis Bacon, 1964, p. 72.

2. See: Hugh M. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953, 2002.

3. David Sylvester, Looking back at Francis Bacon, 2000, p. 200.

4. G. Bataille, ‘La Bouche’, Documents 2, 1930, pp. 299-300.

5. ibid.


6. Rothenstein and Alley, op cit, loc cit.

7. R. Melville, ‘The Iconoclasm of Francis Bacon’, World Review, January 1951, pp. 63-64.

8. S. Hunter, ‘Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror’, Magazine of Art, January 1952, pp. 11-15.

9. D. Sylvester, ‘In Camera’, Encounter, April 1957, pp. 22-24.

10. In 1975 Bacon exchanged this painting, at the college’s request, for Study from the Human Body: Man Turning on the Light (1973-74). See: ‘Study from the Human Body: Man Turning on the Light’, An essay by Martin Harrison, Christie’s, London, Post-war and Contemporary Art, Evening Sale, 14 October 2007, pp. 20-25.

11. W. Lewis, ‘Round the London Art Galleries’, The Listener, 21 September 1950, p. 368.

12. Wyndham Lewis, The Demon of Progress in the Arts, 1954; in ‘Explanatory Notes’, (unnum.)

13. The broad, coloured planes in several of Rothko’s paintings dating from 1948/49 are comparable with the ground of Bacon’s Painting (1950; City of Leeds Art Gallery). Rothko stayed in London twice during a tour of Europe in 1950, although it is not know if he and Bacon met then; but Bacon would certainly have encountered Rothko’s paintings by 1953.

14. Melville, op cit, p. 64.

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

                                                                                             

 

 

 

 

 

 

FRANCIS BACON: PAINTING IN A GODLESS WORLD.

 

 

 

By Rina Arya. Farnham, UK: Lund Humphries, 2012. Pp. 176. $80.00

 

 

 

 

JEREMY BILES  |  RELIGIOUS STUDIES REVIEW  |  VOLUME 39  |  NUMBER 2  |  11 JUNE 2011

 

This lavishly illustrated book sets out to address “an area of continued neglect in Bacon studies,” namely, “the religious aspect of [Bacon’s] work.” One of the most influential painters of mid- to late-twentieth century, Bacon is known especially for his grotesque distortions of human figures, and his harrowing evocation of viscera through the thick application of paint.

Among his iconic canvases are those featuring obsessively revisited religious imagery, especially the crucifixion and images of popes. Though “unequivocally atheist,” Bacon was fascinated by the possibilities of such imagery for continued revision and formal experimentation.

In this book, Arya argues that the “preponderance of Christian symbols” in Bacon’s work is best understood as a rejection of any “formalized conception of religion and the institutions of religion”—a rejection that, “paradoxically, is dependent on the very tradition that he denounces.”

Bacon’s paintings—to which Arya attributes the “dualistic power” of attraction and repulsion often associated with the sacred—provoke an experience of the death of God, a “state of Godlessness where eschatology . . . leads us to the body of flesh with its appetites and urges.” Arya makes her case by setting out the grounds of Bacon’s “godless world” before moving into chapters treating major themes and structures of Bacon’s work: the crucifixion, the Pope, the triptych, the body, and the sacred and the profane.

Arya’s readings of Baconian imagery are observant and highly suggestive, providing biographical context and some theological background for approaching the work. Although at times the thesis that Bacon reaffirms what he critically distorts seems a bit forced (Do his screaming Popes really “ironically [emphasize] the unique status of the Pope”?

Does Bacon ultimately “[crucify] religion, only to redeem it”? And is this the same as “depending” on the tradition he “renounces”?), this study should be consulted by art historians interested in uses of religious imagery in modern art, while scholars of religion engaging visual art should take Arya’s study as an invitation toward further examination of Bacon as an (anti) religious thinker, as well as an occasion for formulating thicker theological contextualization for Bacon’s work.

Jeremy Biles

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

 

 

 

 

 

 

INFLUENCE OR AFFINITY?

 

Case in Paint: Soutine and Bacon

 

 

 

 

BY ROBERT C. MORGAN | ART SEEN | THE BROOKLYN RAIL | FRIDAY, 3 JUNE, 2011

 

I honestly can’t say if the Soutine / Bacon exhibition is a great one, but it clearly reveals something about the enigma of painting. More specifically, it is the kind of enigma that slides between representation and abstraction, yet still manages to hold its painterly ground on all sides. It also takes us further away from the kind of academic jargon and calculated prowess that has become so endemic to contemporary painting in recent years. After seeing the exhibition at the Helly Nahmad Gallery on Madison Avenue a second time—after pushing my way through the crowds on opening day—it seemed that somehow Chaim Soutine comes out on top. Again, this is not to imply a competition between two masters. This is a select group of paintings—somewhat, but not entirely based on availability—made by curators Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow for a gallery setting that would necessarily include all the contrivances that go with such an affair. Therefore it would not be fair to posit this as a final conclusion or as some sort of fatuous, overarching assertion. This is not what I mean, and certainly not what happens to be the case. While I am a great admirer of Francis Bacon—even though I tend toward a more geometric abstract proclivity—there is no doubt that he became one of the great painters of the 20th century, as evidenced by two or three of the paintings included in his show. They would most likely include “Study for a Portrait” (1966), “Lying Figure” (1969), and the remarkable “Triptych: Three Studies of George Dyer” (1969). These suggest that perhaps the 1960s were a dynamic and profound sequence of painterly moments in the artist’s sensibility, shooting out of the cannon into a galactic ether that brought him to the brink of madness and episodic fits of self-recognition.

Given the paintings of Soutine, both early and late, it is difficult to make a similar assertion. I think I can defend the notion that Soutine was the kind of “natural primitive” that Bacon was not. For Bacon to do his best work, he had to rend his mind from his body in such a way as to create a schizophrenic polarity ’twixt the two. Soutine never had to endure this process, namely because that was his state from the beginning. To put it mildly, there is a purity in the gestural phenomena of Soutine that has nothing to do with what art students today call mark making. To observe and thereby enter the environs of Ceret, as in “Landscape at Ceret (the Storm)” (c. 1920 – 21), “Les Gorges du Loup” (c. 1921), and especially “Group of Trees” (c. 1922), is to become part of another world. Put simply, what Ceret provided Soutine was a subject that held the appearance of innocence, but clearly, once inside the landscape, an allegory took hold beyond normative recognition, a site that tore away at the vestiges of what a landscape is supposed to be, and went directly to the mind, like taking absinthe in the late wee hours before suddenly catching the bright light of dawn through the crevice of a lace curtain. This is to say, these tumultuous and haunted paintings each tell their own story—and it’s a horrifying one. It would be as if the interior site of conflict suddenly found its manifestation on the outside, as if there was nothing to thwart the envisioned rapture that would involuntarily become a relentless upheaval. I find these paintings harrowing and terrifying, as much as if not more than “Flayed Beef” (1925), which also dramatizes the fierce visions that would not let go of Soutine.

But, on another level, there’s an art historical conundrum that this exhibition further connotes, and that is the problem of influence versus what might be termed affinity, or the ability to comprehend what two painters from an approximate though not exact time period may hold in common and therefore express through highly individual masteries of the medium, but without having any actual contact in terms of a tactile or spoken sequence of events in which they both participated. In the old days before contemporary art had a market, before art was masterminded as an investment, and before oil paint was confused with oil, there was an art historical notion that certain artists were influenced by other artists, such as the influence of Poussin on Claude de Lorrain or Jacques-Louis David’s influence on Ingres or Cezanne’s influence on Braque.

In more relative contemporary terms, one might say that Duchamp had a certain influence on Nauman, or that Beuys influenced Polke or Palermo. How about Eva Hesse’s influence on Bourgeois—or was it the other way around? The point being this: Not so long ago—before market interference came into the picture—it was easier to do research and have it mean something. Now that investment has usurped aesthetics, it would appear that influences once used in art history—especially contemporary art (whatever that is)—are like derivatives on the financial market. They really don’t exist. If the argument over influences is brought to trial, you simply hire some sweet young punk in a turtleneck to take the stand and discuss “appropriation art.” Furthermore, to bring influences into the auction house would suggest that the artist on the block is not original and therefore the prices may equivocate or even slacken. For an artist to have market power, you can’t dwell on this stuff or the boat sinks. Just refer to your commodity as “the artist” in the most pious or hallowed tone possible. Make the audience understand that it’s not about rewriting history, but just cleaning it up a bit. Doesn’t everybody influence everybody else, anyway? And by the way, is everyone going to the fair in Dubai tomorrow evening?

Not to confuse the issue, there is a lot to be said about these artists and a lot to be said about why they are positioned together. Yet the difference between artists who may have directly influenced one another, and artists who have some kind of structural relationship to one another—an affinity—based on aesthetic appreciation, is not exactly the same. I believe there is the possibility to unwittingly engender a certain distortion of history if this distinction is not made clear. Unfortunately, this has become clear in a wide range of exhibitions in recent years, from Matisse and Picasso, to Barney and Beuys, and Pissarro and Cezanne, among others. Still, there can be no hard-and-fast or black-and-white distinctions to be made. One might claim, for example, that Matisse and Picasso did not exactly travel in the same circles, but they lived at the same time and were certainly aware of one another’s presence. Matthew Barney’s relation to Beuys is something else, perhaps more aesthetic (anti-aesthetic?) than personal; nonetheless, I found this pairing problematic, largely based on the absence of cynicism in Beuys, to which Barney seems largely susceptible. Pissarro and Cezanne had some cogency, but I was disturbed that the infrequent overlapping of these two Impressionists seemed to put them on the same qualitative level, which is simply not the case. Such comparisons seem to have become increasingly apparent. In some cases (not all), the comparison of one major figure with another lesser figure—particularly if the former is deceased and the latter is still in the throes of a career—is questionable, and perhaps more involved with marketing than actual art history. But the case for Soutine and Bacon is not that. It is something else. They are two great painters with raging visions of the human condition that stagger both eye and mind, and that reach the heart before grabbing you by the throat, making it difficult to breathe. Both artists confront us with dark realities that most of us realize somewhere down deep—or, as my Welsh friend says, “down there”—meaning, as Jacques Lipchitz once claimed to H. H. Arneson: art is something you feel in your bowels. Soutine / Bacon is a comparative exhibition – based more on affinities than influences, I would say—but still manages to hold an unmatched and unforgiving intensity, a howl beyond sensation, a turgid force beyond the spectacle. This is a show not for the faint of heart, but for romantic socialists and billionaire investors alike. The breach between the two may somewhere find a meeting ground on these premises.

Contributor

Robert C. Morgan is a non-objective painter who lectures on art and writes art criticism. In 2017, he was given an overview of his career as an artist at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City. Known primarily for his writing and curatorial projects, Morgan has published numerous books and catalogues internationally, now translated into 20 languages. His anthologies of criticism on Gary Hill and Bruce Nauman were published in 2000 and 2002 respectively through Johns Hopkins Press.

 

 

 

 

 

The art world’s record breaker 

 

 

 

 

BEL TREW  |  LONDON EVENING STANDARD  |  THURSDAY, 2 JUNE, 2011

 


Pilar Ordovas is something of a legend within the secret circle of the high-end art world. She was behind the world record-breaking sale of Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, which went for an eye-watering £21 million in 2008.

She also brought to auction Francis Bacon’s Triptych 1974-1977, which sold for £26 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at Christie’s in London. where, as one of its most successful dealers, Ordovas was responsible for nine out of 10 of the top sales.

From the auction house she went on to manage Larry Gaggosian’s   gallery in London. But after two years, much to the bemusement of the international art magnate, Ordovas, 38, quit.

Fast-forward to last month and the experienced researcher and curator announced that she was going solo, raising huge expectations, with her own gallery, Ordovas. "I know where the art is," she says meaningfully.

This is no mean feat for a woman working in a man’s world. The majority of art galleries are still owned or run by men and the auction houses come across as stuffy old boys’ clubs. "Yes, I’ve felt it, I’ve entered boardrooms where I have been the only woman present," Ordovas says. "Maybe some traditional female traits help, like being a good listener, but you don’t want to be known because of your gender." Far from trying to match their masculinity, Ordovas is warm, feminine and driven.

Ordovas also managed Valerie Beston’s estate after her death in 2005. "Miss B", the immensely private director of the Marlborough Gallery and beloved of Francis Bacon, left an extraordinary collection.

"Her flat was full of paintings nobody knew about." One of the discoveries Ordovas made was an unknown self-portrait Francis Bacon had given to Beston in 1969. It sold for £5.2 million.

"Miss Beston had touched many artists. I wrote to Frank Auerbach informing him which of his paintings she had. One of them, Frank said, was the only painting he sold in that particular show and his son had just been born. He was penniless. It was really important that she had supported him." Auerbach also told Ordovas how Miss Beston had sent him paints, because "when she asked him why he always painted in dark colours, he explained he couldn’t afford brighter paints".

This personal contact is what tempted Ordovas away from the furious schedule of the auction house.

"You’d have a month to put together an auction catalogue and an exhibition; it becomes mechanical. When I put together the Crossing the Channel exhibition for the Gagosian I dedicated three months to the research. It was great to get my teeth into that."

Ordovas talks most warmly about her biggest passion: the artwork of Lucian Freud. "I’ve got to know Lucian personally over many years. I made it my mission to learn as much as I could about his work. If anyone was going to sell his paintings, it would be me."

The Ordovas gallery is her baby, although she is hoping her English husband, Nicholas, who works in the City, will help her with the financial side. She chose Savile Row over the industry’s traditional home of Cork Street. "There has been a drive to move out of the West End. [But] you need to make things more accessible and more convenient," says Ordovas, who lives in Battersea. 

"Savile Row with Sadie Coles’s HQ, New Burlington and Hauser & Wirth, is becoming the centre of the arts."

She aims to set Ordovas apart by focusing on historical exhibitions and making new connections between existing artists, as well as providing one-on-one client services. "At an auction house at any one time you’d have 200 works and 500 collectors. With the gallery I want collectors to feel like they’re developing an eye for what they really love. I want to give personal access."

Ordovas, which opens in October for the peak autumn season, is opposite Hauser & Wirth. I wonder, with her expertise and contacts, if the Swiss art house is nervous? "Competition is good," she says. Perhaps she has secured a killer opening exhibition? "That’s a secret," she says, smiling.

"You’ll just have to wait and see.”

 

 

 

 

Soutine/Bacon Raw Painting


 

 

 

 

BY DAVID EBONY | REVIEWS | ART IN AMERICA | WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2011

 

Proving that Gagosian Galley doesn’t have a monopoly on museum-quality gallery exhibitions in New York, Helly Nahmad Gallery is currently presenting a striking show of works by Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon, on view through June 18. Eighteen paintings by Soutine and 14 by Bacon, including some major examples on loan from private and public collections, afford an unusual opportunity to compare and contrast the painterly bravura that characterizes the work of each of these modern mavericks.

 

Cocurated by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, who also contributed texts and a helpful chronology to the show’s fully illustrated catalogue, the exhibition contains well-known works, such as Soutine’s Flayed Beef (ca. 1925) and Bacon’s Lying Figure (1969), familiar self-portraits by both artists, plus rarely exhibited curiosities, including Soutine’s Portrait of the Sculptor Oscar Mietschaninoff (1923-24) and Bacon’s Untitled (Study for Dog), ca. 1960.

 

While the two artists never met, Soutine’s work had a sizable influence on Bacon after the younger painter’s first stay in Paris in 1927, when Soutine’s eccentricities, such as having an assistant pour buckets of blood over the rotting carcasses he painted, was already the stuff of legend. Both artists struggled to convey a sense of the raw, visceral power of painting and had a deep reverence for art historical precedents like Rembrandt and Chardin.

 

The exhibition makes their aesthetic relationship clear, but it also highlights some notable differences. Unlike Soutine, Bacon most often worked from photographs, and his work frequently has a kind of calculated austerity and a self-consciousness in terms of design—in pieces such as Seated Figure of 1960 and Triptych (Left Panel) of 1981–82—that contrast markedly with Soutine’s more convulsive, angst-ridden works—Praying Man (ca. 1921) and The Butcher’s Stall (1919). Surprisingly, their like-mindedness comes across most potently in the landscapes, a genre Bacon abandoned rather early on in his career. His large Figure in a Mountain Landscape (1956), for instance, has a manic and hallucinatory quality that is closely attuned to Soutine’s dizzying landscape, Group of Trees (ca. 1922). On this point, and in a wide range of other concerns, “Soutine/Bacon” sparks a wide-ranging discourse between two modern masters that is as relevant as ever to contemporary painting.

 

 

 

 

 

Soutine/Bacon

 

Helly Nahmad Gallery 
975 Madison Ave. 

Through June 18

 

 

NY CULTURE  |  THE WALL STREET JOURNAL  |  SATURDAY, MAY 28, 2011

 

The Russian-born French painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) and the Dublin-born British painter Francis Bacon (1909-92), both expressionists, are often aligned by critics and art historians. Pairing 18 paintings by Soutine with 14 by Bacon, Soutine/Bacon, surprisingly, is the first of its kind. On the surface it makes tremendous sense. Soutine’s paintings of skinned rabbits, plucked fowl, fish and beef carcasses—metaphors for suffering and martyrdom, especially the Crucifixion—were inspired by paintings of similar subjects by Titian, El Greco, Rembrandt and Chardin. When Bacon saw Soutine’s pictures of hanging, slaughtered beef in Paris in 1927, they sparked his morbid imagination; not yet an artist, Bacon had long been fascinated by butcher shops.

After Van Gogh, Soutine is perhaps the most convincing of expressionists. In his best paintings, his figures, forms and their environments intertwine, seemingly struggling against one another like embattled elements of a single organism. Nearly every one of Soutine’s paintings signals the end of the world; and he flays and eviscerates his subjects—as if unleashing the writhing bowels of hell.

In this show, Soutine’s gnarled human arms suggest twisted roots. Trees, resembling prison bars, claw at the picture’s surface. A set of forks, flanking a plate of fish, vacillate between threatening weapons and frail hands. And a flayed beef carcass is a yawning inferno. Yet Soutine’s existential outcries and fiery whirlwinds build to a state of natural beauty and calm—as if they could not have happened any other way.

Seen among Soutine’s masterpieces, Bacon, though clearly a kindred spirit, has never looked worse. At his best here, he produces unpersuasive pastiches. Bacon’s monstrosities of flesh, fueled more by Surrealism than Soutine, feel forced and cartoonish. His distortions and amputations come across as strident, theatrical, artificial. Pairing Bacon with Soutine, this show reveals the enormous gap between the bombastic and the sublime.

— Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal

 

 

 

 

 

Old and New Soho.

Photo & Text Angus Forbes

 

 

 ANGUS FORBES  |  BOHEMIAN LONDON  |  THE LONDON COLUMN  |  WEDNESDAY, 23 MAY, 2011

 

 

 Angus Forbes writes:


September 1983: the book publisher Malcolm McGregor is organising A Day in the Life of London, and the commissioning photographer Red Saunders wants me in. I tell Red I’ll cover legal London in the morning and the West End drinking clubs, of which at that time I was a frequentee, in the afternoon. On the day (Friday, September 14) I roll up at the Colony Room in Dean Street shortly after opening, at half three. The sun is reflecting off the buildings opposite and streaming through the first-floor window. I’m a member there, so I tell the irascible owner Ian Board what I’m doing and would it be OK if I took some casual, non-flash pictures? Ian’s in a mellowish state today and says yes. It’s early for the Colony and people are only just starting to drift in. I take some pictures, nothing special, and am thinking of moving on when Ian says don’t go, Francis will be here in a minute. Francis Bacon. By the time Bacon and team arrive, the drinkers have become accustomed to my Nikon-wielding antics and I ask Francis if I can take some of him too. He does not demur. My scoop in the bag, I head off to The Little House, a similar establishment in Shepherd Market, and sitting at the bar is Patrick Caulfield.

A few days later and I’m viewing the contact sheets in my darkroom in Chancery Lane. It occurs to me that by simple photocomposition I could combine the images of Francis and Patrick and drop Bacon into The Little House (which I know he uses, as that’s where I first met him). A double-scoop. But to carry it through to print, fresh permissions must be sought. I arrive at the Colony at about seven. Ian’s paralytic and his barman, Michael Wojas, is pretty well-advanced himself. I have with me three photographic enlargements: one is the shot of Ian and Francis in the Colony, another shows Patrick at The Little House and the third is a mock-up of the proposed photocomp. I show Ian the first shot and he likes it; Francis’ champagne glass is at the right angle, and Ian, arm in a sling from some rough, looks suitably mad. Next shot: indifference. But when Ian Board sees the mock-up of his Francis in a rival hostelry, all hell breaks loose.

So incensed is Ian by the image I’ve just shown him, he pitches forward and topples onto the foetid, cigarette-scorched carpet of the notorious green boite with an almighty, clattering thump. When Michael and I manage to heave him back onto his throne, Ian’s right index finger is dripping blood. He grabs the mock-up and starts jabbing at it, daubing it with dollops of his own blood. ‘It’s a disgrace! It’s an insult!’ shrieks Ian, lunging for the telephone. He gets Bacon on the line. ‘Know what that cunt photographer wanker’s done?’ Ian bellows, ‘He’s only put you in that fat Jamaican whore’s place with someone called ‘Cauliflower’ or something!’ He thrusts the phone to me. ‘Francis wants to speak to you!’ ‘The negatives must be destroyed!’ Bacon booms. He’s drunk as well and now I’m downing vodkas like there’s no Sunday – this photocomp’s not such a good idea after all. ‘Francis, I wouldn’t dream of publishing without your say-so. I just thought that as you and Patrick use the same places…’ ‘Who?’ he interrupts. ‘Patrick Caulfield’ I say. ‘Never heard of him!’ Bacon thunders.

Later I relate the story to Gerry Clancy. He tells me that not long ago Bacon had turned up at an opening at Fischer Fine Art where Caulfield was showing miniatures. Francis had proceeded to walk round the gallery, dashing the works from the wall, muttering ‘Postage stamps! Postage stamps!’ After the affair has subsided I see Patrick in the Zanzibar with John Hoyland. I repeat the Colony tale, including Bacon’s last remark to me. Patrick Caulfield bursts into tears.

Red Saunders uses my shot of Bacon and Board as a double-page spread in A Day in the Life of London. A decade later and all has long been supposedly forgiven. Francis has been dead for three years and a framed print of my shot of him and Ian has been hanging in the Colony since the time it was taken. Ian Board is on his usual perch and I’m at the next barstool knocking back the tonic water. We’re having a desultory conversation about nothing in particular, no animosity, when Ian suddenly reaches behind him, seizes the framed print from the wall and smashes it over my head. A rivulet of blood runs down my nose and splashes onto the palm of my hand. I turn to Ian in astonishment.

‘Cunt!’ says Ian Board

 

 

 

 

                      

                                           John Edwards, Francis Bacon and Ian Board at the Colony Room Club on Friday, 14 September, 1983.  Photographed by Angus Forbes

 

 

 

 

 

Bacons streaming back on the market

 

 

 

A portrait of a mystery man from 1953 by Francis Bacon could go for £11 million.

 

 

 

 COLIN GLEADELL  |  ART SALES  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  WEDNESDAY, 23 MAY, 2011

 

 

A painting by Francis Bacon that he gave to another artist in return for the use of his studio could fetch as much as £11 million at Christie’s next month. In 1951, grief-stricken at the death of his former nanny and companion, Jessie Lightfoot, Bacon left his flat in Cromwell Place, South Kensington, which they shared, and embarked on a nomadic existence, borrowing the studio of the Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, Rodrigo Moynihan, to work in. He used the studio for another two years, producing some of the most haunting images of his career, and exercising a powerful influence on the students at the college.

 

Study for Portrait was one of the last works he produced there. For Bacon, according to his biographer Michael Peppiatt, 1953 was an “annus mirabilis as inventive as it was prolific”. In spite of “flitting from debt to debt, and digs to digs”, he managed to produce more than 20 “majestic and terrifying” paintings including eight paintings of popes.

 

With the artist finding stimulation in adversity, Peppiatt concludes, “this was the period when Bacon acquired the means he needed to bring forth his vision.”

 

The subject of Study for Portrait is not known. The painting bears resemblances at once to Velazquez’s Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, to a photograph of Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, to the art critic David Sylvester and to Bacon’s lover at the time, Peter Lacy. Whoever it is, it is a figure of power, seated on a semi-gilded throne and staring menacingly down at the viewer from the dark, caged solitude in which he is trapped. Look closely at the darkness, and it is a vivid Prussian blue-black that recedes in tone to the depths of the unknown where the subject sits regally, his starched white collar and brilliant flesh tones glowing like a ghostly apparition.

 

At some point, the painting was acquired from Moynihan by the successful Irish artist, Louis Le Brocquy, known for his spectral paintings of Bacon, who in turn sold it to Marlborough Fine Art, which had become Bacon’s principal dealers. In 1984 it was bought from Marlborough by the Swiss entrepreneur and wine producer Donald M Hess, who, though not identified as such by Christie’s, is the seller next month.

 

Hess, 75, who announced his retirement from the family business last week, is one of the world’s top art collectors with more than 1,000 contemporary art works, including 30 by the American light artist James Turrell, which he displays in three museums dotted around the world in locations where his winery business operates: in Napa Valley, California; Paarl, South Africa; and Salta, Argentina. A fourth museum is being planned in the Barossa Valley, Australia. Of his art buying, Hess has said: “When I have seen an art piece which keeps me awake over several nights, I know that this art piece has touched me deeply and this is one of my most important criteria to buy an art work.” But he is not known to have previously sold any art from his collection. His website states: “Sales of artwork are for Hess taboo.”

 

So why is he now breaking that taboo? Hess has also said that he favours buying the work of living artists. He bought this Bacon when the artist was still alive, and is now thought to be buying more works by living artists. His timing might be good because the market for paintings by Bacon is back on the boil again. During 2007, buyers such as the investor Joseph Lewis and Sheikha Mayassa of Qatar paid record prices of between £25 million and £30 million for Bacon masterpieces, and in May 2008, Roman Abramovich lifted that record to £44 million for a large triptych. In the downturn that followed, several works went unsold, and then little appeared on the market.

 

This year, however, another Russian buyer, thought to be banker Pyotr Aven, paid £23 million for a small triptych of paintings of Lucian Freud. As a result, Bacons are streaming back on to the market, and two were sold this month in New York. Both had been on the market relatively recently, as has a reclining female nude which is to be sold by Sotheby’s next month with a £7 million to £9 million estimate.

 

The Hess portrait may be dark – and other dark paintings from this period, while relished by academics and critics, have not always proved commercially successful. But it is fresh to the market, which counts as a bonus. And, like the £44 million Bacon, which was sold by the Mouieux family, producers of Château Petrus wines, it comes from a collector with proven taste.

 

 

 

 

 

 

               Dark times: ‘Study for Portrait’ from 1953 is one of several Bacon works coming back on to the market

 

 

 

 

 


 

Two Meaty Visions of Flesh and blood

 

 

 

 

BY KAREN ROSENBERG  |  ART REVIEW  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2011

 

 

Bacon thought about Soutine a lot, or so we’re told by Soutine/Bacon at Helly Nahmad Gallery, an intense pairing of Soutine’s still lifes, landscapes and portraits with Bacon’s caged, half-flayed figures. It comes accompanied by a catalogue of glossy reproductions, light on commentary but with detailed chronologies of both artists.

 

The exhibition is more of a one-sided conversation, with Soutine as the dominant voice. This may come as a shock to the general public, which is well acquainted with Bacon’s record-breaking auction prices and lauded international retrospectives. But it should not surprise painters, who have consistently mined Soutine’s roiling fleshscapes for abstract and figurative inspiration.

 

And in any case the organizers, Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, are co-authors of the Chaim Soutine catalogue raisonné. They also coordinated The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art, a similarly ambitious and memorable undertaking at Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea in 2006. For this show, they’ve wrangled some incredible Soutines from the Tate and private collections in Europe.

 

Both artists exemplified the bohemian ideal, although in different ways. Soutine (1893-1943) emerged from the shtetls of Lithuania and found his way to the garrets of Montparnasse, nearly starving before the American collector Albert Barnes swept in and bought his paintings in bulk. During the World War II he lived in hiding in rural France, suffering from a stomach ulcer that eventually killed him.

 

Bacon (1909-92), born into and cast out of a well-to-do family, lived dangerously as a matter of preference. His proclivities for drinking, gambling and sado-masochistic relationships made him an enfant terrible of the postwar London set.

 

The two shared an appetite for viscera. An often-repeated, possibly apocryphal anecdote holds that the police and the department of health visited Soutine’s studio after neighbours complained about the stench of rotting meat and the blood dripping through the floors. Bacon was known to admire a line from Aeschylus’ Oresteia: “The reek of human blood smiles at me.”

 

Religion had something to do with it. “I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion,” Bacon said. One might go through this show with an eye to Soutine’s Judaism and Bacon’s Catholicism: kosher steak and blood pudding, as it were. Or one could focus on other signals of outsider status, with Bacon’s homosexuality as the counterpart to Soutine’s ethnicity.

 

It’s all there, for those who want to look. But this show isn’t really about identity or narrative or even subject matter. It’s about painting as “a direct assault on the nervous system,” as Bacon once wrote.

 

On the gallery’s cramped ground floor you will find Soutine’s “Flayed Beef,” from the Musée de Grenoble, one of the six nearly life-size renderings of bovine carcasses he made in 1924 and ’25. He had been looking at Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox at the Louvre, but his brushstrokes have a writhing urgency that evokes Titian’s more disturbing Flaying of Marsyas.

 

He could serve up surf as well as turf, a glistening Still Life With Ray Fish made in homage to Chardin’s Skate. Poultry is on the menu in Dead Fowl and Brace of Pheasants, which flank a Bacon painting of a plucked chicken suspended over a platform or butcher’s block.

 

Bacon also liked to reinterpret masters, though he gravitated to different ones: Velazquez, in his pope portraits, and van Gogh, in his landscapes. So the second-floor gallery’s pairing of Bacon and Soutine vistas feels forced, even if it includes some incredible Soutines like the Tate’s Landscape at Céret (the Storm) from around 1920-21, a crackling mass of thunderheads that anticipates Pollock and De Kooning.

 

The portrait section, also upstairs, is better matched. In works like Old Actress and Portrait of the Sculptor, Oscar Miestchaninoff, Soutine gives entire figures an astonishing plasticity, with Gumby-like limbs and twitchy features. In his triptych studies of friends and lovers Bacon goes right for the head, inducing Cubism with X-rays and deft, surgical strokes.

 

Soutine might not have held as much sway over Bacon as he did over School of London painters like Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. But Bacon, out of all of these postwar figures, has had the biggest influence on contemporary art. You can’t have Damien Hirst without Bacon.

 

Can you have Bacon without Soutine? This show won’t resolve that question to everyone’s satisfaction, though it makes clear that Soutine was a vital part of the ecosystem that nourished Bacon. “In the 1950s Soutine was the artist who mattered, as Cézanne mattered in the decade before 1914, or Warhol in the 1980s,” as Martin Hammer asserts in the catalogue.

And as any painter will tell you, he matters still.

 

Soutine/Bacon continues through June 18 at Helly Nahmad Gallery, 975 Madison Avenue, at 76th Street, (212) 879-2075

 

 

 

 

  
 

                                                                  

                                                                         Bacon’s Three Studies of Henrietta Moraes (1966)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soutine/Bacon

 

 

Helly Nahmad Gallery

975 Madison Avenue

May 2 — June 18, 2011

 

 

BY ALEXANDER ADLER  |  CONTRIBUTOR  |  THE HUFFINGTON POST  |  WEDNESDAY 11 MAY 2011    

 

 

 

 

Soutine/ Bacon, organized by former LACMA curator Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, at Helly Nahmad Gallery adds to the elite list of museum quality exhibitions visible in New York this spring.

 

Complementing Gagosian’s blockbuster Picasso and Marie-Thérèse L’Amour Fou downtown, Nahmad draws attention away from Chelsea and the realm of contemporary to something quite original within the greater discourse of Modern masters. Soutine and Bacon’s subject matter relates quite clearly from an aesthetic perspective, most notably through the prominence of wildly expressive distortions, but only now has this thoughtful analogy been examined in a gallery context. Beyond the admittedly disturbing heightened tones of bloodied remains, fragments of animals, lovers, and the self, the artists’ own temperaments suggest startling similarities that become increasingly clear as the exhibition wears on.

 

Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), a Belarusian painter of Jewish descent, developed a style that prioritized the role of color and texture over visually accurate representation. Soutine’s practice, somewhat difficult to situate historically, seems more modern than his Expressionist peers but preserves the tradition of figuration, never delving into pure abstraction. Paintings of animate carcasses heavily layered with thick, oily paint evoke feelings of pain and desperation at moments while others thrust the viewer into the thick of a swirling tempest or the depths of howling forests. The savagery of life reigns supreme in each of the works selected for exhibition.

 

Soutine’s “Brace of Pheasants” (1926) incorporates two presumably dead fowl, one plucked and bloody, the other dark and largely intact, dangling from a nonexistent strand against a murky yellow backdrop. Juxtaposed with the left panel of a Bacon Triptych from ‘81, this curatorial arrangement exposes equally dismal outlooks on love and death. Bacon’s perspective remains uncomfortably clandestine as the chicken that bears an eerie resemblance to a heart hangs constrained by a glass prism while Soutine’s birds appear despondent, especially against the nauseating backdrop. Not disgust, but rather sorrow blindsides the viewer as if neither the artist nor his subject ever really had a chance.

 

Bacon (1909-1992), an angsty and temperamental Brit, eschewed lifelike representation in favor of psychological projections, often isolating an individual figure or entity in its most vulnerable state. Like Soutine’s flayed animals, Bacon’s ravaged figures appear mangled or constrained to a point of physical agony and by implication, psychological disturbance. His whipped, rapid strokes conjure up a sense of speed and immediacy within the images that simulate the inside of a neurotic or deranged mind. Intimate portraits such as “Triptych: Three Studies of George Dyer “(1969) present quintessential Bacon.

 

In this harrowing series, Bacon outlines the profile of his lover with thin stripes of black paint and utilizes elongated dashes of white to create an almost skeletal feel. Bacon captures the shell of a man two years away from suicide, somehow deteriorating before his eyes. Dyer’s sparse, slicked back hair and angular features emphasize the same motion captured with the concurrent brush strokes. The only flaw might be that it’s too slick.

 

An arrangement of works hung on the second floor relate to earlier examples by Van Gogh. In “Cagnes, Landscape with Trees” (c. 1923-24), Soutine fixates on a singular tree in the middle of a quaint, dark neighborhood. The dashed, circular strokes are reminiscent of Van Gogh’s “Mulberry Tree” painted in Saint-Rémy during October of 1889 while the tonal structure of the painting bears stricter resemblance to some of Munch’s darker genre scenes. Bacon’s “Study for a Portrait by Van Gogh IV” (1957) harkens back to Millet’s original image but relates to Soutine’s disfigured portraits of downtrodden souls. This haunting interpretation contains an almost toxic palette of heightened colors surrounding an aching journeyman, crippled over traversing a suburban landscape. The figure, rendered in black, forsakes the path ahead in favor of the crosshatched, reddened earth. The atmospheres conjured in both pictures feel strained and cold. To both artists, the world remains an unforgiving and hostile place.

 

Despite the lack of critical attention, Nahmad’s tremendous clout within the art world and seemingly endless inventory have afforded them the opportunity to secure truly remarkable loans from both museums and important private collections. While the fully illustrated catalogue provides a thoughtful argument and demonstration of Soutine’s influence on Bacon specifically, the nature of that relationship remains somewhat indeterminable and open to conjecture. However, the exhibition succeeds in a broader scope by asserting that Soutine’s influence on subsequent generations remains too widely underrecognized. The fact that several of the most prominent artists of the 20th century, from De Kooning to Dubuffet, rose to prowess by, in part, prioritizing elements of Soutine’s practice is evidence enough.

 

Bacon postulated that as a student of circumstance, he learned from all sensory experience and that this awareness informed his painted works. Soutine never seemed to make such profound nor general claims, allowing his paintings to speak for themselves. While Bacon typically draws tremendous attention, and rightfully so, for once he is out done by an equally unusual and inventive artist. Even when put in conversation with some of Bacon’s premier works, Soutine rises to the occasion and the strength of his hand becomes increasingly clear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                       

                                                        Francis Bacon  Study for Portrait  1966


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bring home the Bacon: This marble-lined Suffolk mansion 

 

– built with the legacy of Francis Bacon – is for sale at £3.5 million

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BY ALEXIS PARR  |  HOME NEWS  |  THE DAILY MAIL  |  MONDAY 9 MAY 2011  

 

 

 

 

Most country houses priced at £3.5 million can be expected to have the odd nice painting on the wall. But this one is covered with the works of one of the world’s greatest artists – Francis Bacon.

 

The tortured, upper-class Anglo-Irish painter had a penchant for drinking and gambling in Soho’s demimondaine clubs, mingling with a markedly eclectic set of friends. But none was more charismatic than the Edwards family, from the East End, who migrated to the Constable countryside of East Anglia where Bacon joined them on many of their lively weekends at the picturesque village of Long Melford.

 

When Bacon died in 1992, he left his entire estate to his devoted companion, former barman John Edwards. Although both were homosexuals, they were not lovers. John became almost a son to Bacon, who was 40 years older. John died of lung cancer in 2003 and left a goodly chunk of the Bacon estate to David Edwards, his beloved older brother.

 

It is he who lives at the palatial Westgate Park with his companion of more than 40 years, dressage rider and interior designer John Tanner. ‘And now, after all these years in Long Melford, we are selling up because John wants to develop his equestrian facilities,’ explains David, drinking champagne on one of the terraces overlooking the property’s 14.5 acres. The plan is for the couple to build a bigger house on land near Marks Tey, also in Suffolk but closer to London and with a direct rail link. The place will be fitted out with the latest equestrian gadgetry.

 

The two are obviously inveterate self-builders, having already completed Westgate Park four years ago, incorporating the outbuildings of the Georgian property next door, which was their home for 20 years. Bacon was a regular visitor, singing along to cockney anthems around the piano. ‘His favourite was Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner,’ says David.

 

They sold the Georgian house to move into Westgate Park, a modern, low-rise property with an authentic period atmosphere packed with antique fireplaces and yet with all the convenience of contemporary living, including a high-tech integrated music system, sophisticated security – with CCTV cameras and video entrance – and underfloor heating.

 

Tanner has also filled the house with expensive Italian marble and fixtures and fittings of high quality built to last. Even the Aga has solid gold attachments. The house stands in a carefully landscaped parkland setting with surely one of the finest, uninterrupted country views in England – that of the belltower of Long Melford’s Holy Trinity church nestling in the hillside. The church is recognised as one of the finest in the country.

 

David Edwards was one of six children brought up in the East End and had a tough life growing up in postwar London but, like his siblings, he was blessed with being handsome, hardworking and intelligent. After a career owning pubs in the East End, he went on to create a successful career as an antiques dealer.

 

‘Eventually I left London altogether and it was Francis’s influence that brought us to Suffolk,’ says David. ‘Francis had an accountant who lived locally and his cousin Pam Firth lived nearby in the beautiful Regency house Cavendish Hall. So we would come out to visit him.’

 

David first met Francis at the Colony Room club in Soho in 1974 and introduced him to his brother John. ‘They became very close friends until his dying day,’ says David. ‘Francis recognised John as a loyal friend and treasured his brutal honesty as someone who would always tell him the truth. In the powerful world of art, with all its complex sensibilities, Francis valued that greatly.’

 

Superficially it seemed a strange friendship, given the social and intellectual gulf between them, but Bacon had had a loveless upbringing in Dublin.

 

He revelled in the straightforward warmth of the traditional Edwards family with their working-class values and their matriarch mother Beattie, who would cook Francis steak and kidney pies before pinning up a Bacon drawing on the wall of her East End council flat.

 

Bacon forged a strong friendship with John Edwards, and the artist’s portraits of him can now be found in art galleries around the world. ‘When Francis died his entire estate was left to John and was worth about £11 million, but in today’s terms it would be worth about £300 million – prices of Bacons have rocketed,’ says David. Caroline Edwards, of Carter Jonas, says that despite the recession, substantially larger houses are still selling well in Suffolk. While becoming increasingly fashionable, the county represents good value compared with countryside homes in the South East.

 

‘It is only larger houses with lower specifications which are a little harder to move but this is an aspirational, lifestyle home perhaps suitable for an international person,’ she explains.

‘You are getting a mini country estate and grand country home in the centre of one of the most popular and pretty villages in Suffolk – that is hard to find.

 

‘You don’t usually get both – grandeur and high quality with newbuild houses of that size. ‘It is also only about 25 miles to Newmarket, so somebody with equestrian interests might find it ideal,’ she adds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon Nude May Fetch $15 Million

as Owners Test Market demand

 

 

 

BY SCOTT REYBURN  |  BLOOMBERG  |  FRIDAY, MAY 6, 2011 

 

  

A 1961 female nude by Francis Bacon may raise $15 million at auction next month as owners regain confidence in the market for the U.K.’s most expensive artist.

Crouching Nude is valued at 7 million pounds to 9 million pounds and included in Sotheby’s (BID) London evening sale of contemporary works on June 29. The canvas of a grinning woman in an interior will be on show at Sotheby’s New York from today through May 9, the auction house said in an e-mailed statement.

The Bacon market was boosted when his 1964 triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud, fetched 23 million pounds at Sotheby’s in London on Feb. 10. The work was bought, at more than three times estimates, by the Cologne-based dealer Alex Lachmann, who acts for Russian clients.

“The market needed good works to gauge the new levels,” said James Holland-Hibbert, a London-based dealer. “Prices went up so quickly, then the crash came and no one was quite sure what Bacon was worth. The estimates had got too high.”

Crouching Nude – a composite of the artist’s friends Isabel Rawsthorne, Henrietta Moraes and Muriel Belcher – was one of 90 works included in a Tate Gallery travelling retrospective in 1962. It was also in a 2006 exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, London, where it was bought by an unidentified private collector, who is re-offering the work now, Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s European deputy chairman, said.

The seller hasn’t been offered a guaranteed price, he said. The estimate was based on a valuation of 7.5 million euros ($10.9 million) to 10 million euros placed on a similar 1961 Bacon female nude that fetched 13.7 million euros at Sotheby’s in Paris in 2007.

“Conservative estimates are the way to get the best auction prices,” Barker said. “The market’s still selective.”

Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich paid a record $86.3 million for Bacon’s 1976 Triptych at Sotheby’s New York in May 2008, dealers said. Works by the Irish-born artist were in short supply at auctions during 2009 and 2010.

Bacon’s 1974 Three Studies for Self Portrait will be offered at Christie’s International, New York, on May 11 with a low estimate of $20 million.

 

 

 

 

First Comparative Exhibition of Chaim Soutine

and Francis Bacon at Helly Nahmad Gallery

 

 

 

 

PREVIEW  |  NEWS  |  ART DAILY  |  WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 2011

 

 New York, NY. Helly Nahmad Gallery New York presents SOUTINE/BACON, the first comparative exhibition of Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon, on view May 2 through June 18, 2011. 

Chaim Soutine’s paintings have not only had a crucial impact on the development of modern art in the twentieth century, but also a sustained critical influence on contemporary practice. The artists most often associated and identified with his influence are the post-war Abstract Expressionists in the United States, best exemplified by Willem de Kooning, who referred to Soutine as his "favourite artist." 

Francis Bacon, who went to live in Paris in 1927 as a young man, with a future not yet determined, became aware of Soutine’s already legendary paintings of beef carcasses. The images and the legends about their making resonated with him, as he had always since his boyhood in Ireland been fascinated to the point of obsession with slaughtered beef carcasses in local abattoirs. 

The present exhibition demonstrates that Soutine’s paintings of carcasses were a trigger for Bacon’s essential vision, possibly even the reason he was to become a painter. He intuited from Soutine’s carcasses the basis for his art and art making. "If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there," Bacon explained, "it’s not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me." It is no great leap to believe that Soutine’s were among the works that had a decisive effect on him—that unlocked his valves of sensation. 

There are distinct links between the two painters: direct painting and general studio practice, the equation of oil pigment with flesh, and a certain aggressive re-invention of Old Master paintings. 

This groundbreaking SOUTINE/BACON exhibition is the very first to explicitly pair, compare, and historically situate these two magnificent painters. Museums and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern and Bacon Foundation in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, the Kunsthaus Zurich, and the Pearlman Foundation with the Art Museum of Princeton University have generously agreed to lend works. 

 

 

 

 

 

                                        

 

            Orlando Bloom, Tony Shafrazi, Helly Nahmad, Leonardo DiCaprio at Helly Nahmad Galley on 1st May, 2011 for Soutine/Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

 

Colour in a dark world

 

 

 

 

 

Brian Maguire’s beautiful art, influenced by Francis Bacon, belies his pessimism

and seeks to challenge our perceptions of how the world works

 

 

 

 

CRISTIN LEACH  |  REVIEWS  |  THE ARTS  |  THE SUNDAY TIMES  |  SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2011

 

When Brian Maguire was 12 or 13 he snuck into the cinema in Bray to watch a news-reel film about the rise and fall of Hitler. It was the early 1960s, the screening was intended for over-18s, and Maguire was mitching from school, so later at home he kept quiet about the shocking images he had seen. But the event marked him, establishing an early interest in the macabre, igniting his sense of injustice, and firing his curiosity about the dark side of humanity. “My painting may have come from that film,” he told the art historian Vera Ryan in 2005. “I can remember the wooden wheelbarrows of corpses.”

There are no dead bodies in Maguire’s latest solo show at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin, which runs until May 14, although he has painted them in the past. Since leaving his position as head of fine art at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) early last year, he has been painting at home and abroad. These works from 2010 and early 2011 are gathered under the unwieldy title Notes on 14 Paintings and have no real cohesive theme, but the show includes several strong paintings, and it reaffirms Maguire’s position as a significant voice in the argument that art can change how we see the world and our place in it.

There has always been something of the journalist in Maguire’s approach. He seeks out a single image that tells a bigger story, and the stories he tells are big. In the past he has made paintings about the murder of prisoners in South Africa and the killing of the Weaver family by the FBI at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, America. He has painted prisoners on Death Row and street children in Brazil, made work about the US-led invasion of Iraq and the siege at Waco in Texas. He has also painted stories closer to home, commemorating those who died in the Dublin nightclub fire in Stardust Memorial (1995), and capturing Mountjoy Prison in The Big House (1987).

At the Kerlin, new works range from the impenetrable black figure at the heart of Prison Yard, to the tragic beauty of Morecambe Bay, where a group of illegal Chinese workers drowned while picking cockles in 2004.

Despite his dark fascinations, Maguire’s work is about human dignity in the face of horrors.

Born in Bray in Co Wicklow in 1951, Maguire graduated from NCAD in 1974, and was part of the generation that rebelled against the college’s traditional style of academic teaching. He spent 15 years teaching art in Irish prisons before returning to his alma mater as head of department in 2000. Twenty-six years after student-led protests got him suspended from the college, he had clear ideas about what he wanted to change.

Under Maguire’s direction, a formal requirement for third-year students to engage with the inner-city community around NCAD’s Thomas Street locale was added to the curriculum. Maguire wanted these artists-in-training to get out into the world, not to rely on second-hand documentation or library research. He wanted them to connect their art with some aspect of real life; as he has always done.

He has argued that art history is not as relevant to his work as political history, yet it is clear that his style owes much to German expressionism and engages in a kind of visual conversation with the work of other artists, including Francis Bacon.

The Bacon connection is particularly striking in his current show. On the Nickel, a small portrait, shows a face almost in profile. The bright pinks and blues, the blurred turn of the head, the muddy yellow, the red neck: all of these elements recall Bacon’s Self Portrait with Injured Eye (1972) and more particularly his remarkable Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1969), which was on show as part of the Hugh Lane Gallery’s Bacon centenary exhibition in 2009 and 2010.

Maguire’s exhibition is book-ended by two large canvases, which face each other across the long gallery space. One is a painting of a church or cathedral interior, entitled Heart of a Heartless World; while the other is Memory and Presence, a painting of an empty, upholstered wooden chair.

Turning from one to the other, it is impossible not to think of Bacon’s 1953 Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, in which a screaming pope on a yellow throne emerges from a curtain of long black brushstrokes. Heart of a Heartless World features the same dripping black paint.

The golden glow of sun on the religious statues in Maguire’s church chancel echoes the shocking daffodil yellow of the chair on which Bacon’s pope sits.

There are enormous differences between the two artists, however. While Bacon looked inwards to explore the battle between humanity’s inherent beauty and ugliness, Maguire looks outwards to find that see-saw of contradictions in the world around him. Maguire’s approach is deeply rooted in social and political engagement, his ambitions overtly altruistic; Bacon’s motivation was insular and emotionally selfish. Yet, both share an instinctive understanding of the power of a good painting.

Maguire’s show includes Economy (Jakarta) 0.10c/hour (2000) and Economy (Paris) $140 a pair; two images that tell stories about low-paid labour. In the first, a woman holds up a garment. Her hands are nondescript, barely painted and proportionally too small for her face. But Maguire focuses on the resignation in her deep brown eyes as they gaze off to a middle distance to her right. He draws our eyes to the firmly shut lips of her predicament. The vibrant red collar on her dress is like a tether around her neck. It’s a fair illustration of Maguire’s apparently counterintuitive maxim that “the aesthetic is not the essential ingredient; empathy is the primary tool in making art”. In Economy (Paris) $140 a pair, a pair of yellow Bermuda shorts is displayed in a shop window. Maguire emphasises the dark, shadowed creases of the garment’s crotch area; the white waist string is tied in a perfect perky bow.

Despite his dark fascinations, Maguire’s work is about human dignity in the face of horrors. Strongly political all his adult life, he joined Sinn Fein at 18, studied Marxism and anti-colonialism, and pursued his left-wing politics through to membership of the Labour party. He has always been attracted to people on the edge — the disabled, the mentally ill, the homeless — not least because he believes it is the disenfranchised in society that can teach us about dignity.

Because Maguire tells dark tales, he makes beautiful images almost despite himself. The colours in this show are amazing: the acid blues of Apartment House, unapologetic pinks, turquoise, yellow, and black, lots of black.

The work called Contemporary Ruin (Dublin) is one of the most striking images. The story it tells is local and familiar: red construction cranes hang in a pale grey sky over the shell of a building somewhere on the docks. It is a painting about what happens when the money runs out. And because this is Maguire, and in context of the Economy paintings that hang nearby, we have to ask ourselves to whose low-paid and suddenly suspended labour does this steel and concrete skeleton stand as an unfinished monument? The human consequence of human actions is always implied in his output.

Maguire’s painting is rooted in the real world. It seeks to challenge our perceptions of how that world works and to question our role within it. He has known for a long time what he wants art to do for him. Scrape the surface of this show and you will also find a challenge to the viewer: what you want art to do for you.

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon Self-Portrait Triptych May Fetch

$20 Million as Demand Grows

 

 

 

 BY SCOTT REYBURN   |   ART SALES   |   BLOOMBERG   |   FRIDAY, 15 APRIL, 2011 

 

A triptych of self portraits by Francis Bacon may raise at least $20 million at auction next month as demand grows for the U.K.’s most expensive artist. 

Three Studies for Self Portrait, from 1974, are included in Christie’s International’s May 11 New York auction of contemporary art. They are part of a London show, opening tomorrow, that also includes Bacon’s 1952 painting, Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail), estimated at $10 million to $15 million in the same sale.

Owners of high-value paintings by Bacon are more confident about selling at auction after the 1964 triptych, Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud, fetched 23 million pounds at Sotheby’s in London on Feb.10.

“That result helped bring Bacons out of the woodwork,” London-based dealer Offer Waterman  said in an interview. “Up until then the market had been in a state of flux. Prices had dropped, and people found it difficult to value his paintings.”

Works by Bacon were in short supply at auctions during 2009 and 2010. In May 2008, before the financial crisis, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich paid a record $86.3 million for a 1976 Triptych at Sotheby’s (BID) New York, said dealers. Nine months later, the 1954 picture Man in Blue VI failed to sell at a Christie’s auction in London after being estimated at as much as 5 million pounds ($8.2 million).

Both of these latest Bacons have been offered by unidentified U.S. collectors and are being exhibited in the U.K. for the first time, Christie’s said in an e-mailed statement.

Guaranteed Price

The triptych of head-and-shoulder studies, one of 10 self portraits Bacon executed in the 1970s, has been owned for 35 years by the seller, who has been guaranteed a minimum price. The canvas of the nude, which doesn’t have a price guarantee, was one of a group of paintings by the artist discovered in a storeroom in London’s Chelsea in the 1990s, Christie’s said.

The 37-work exhibition, continuing through April 19, includes Impressionist and modern works from Christie’s May 4 sale, as well as contemporary pieces. Christie’s haven’t yet released an overall estimate for its auctions.

The works are on show from April 16 through 19, from 12 noon to 5p.m., at Christie’s, 8 King Street, St. James’s, London.

 

 


 Francis Bacon masterpieces to fetch £22.5 at auction

 

 

 

A pair of Francis Bacon masterpieces that have never been seen in public in Britain

are expected to fetch more than £22.5 million at auction, experts said.

 

 

BY ANDREW HOUGH   |   ART SALES   |   ART   |   CULTURE   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   FRIDAY, 15 APRIL, 2011 

 

 

The 1952 single canvas, titled Untitled (Crouching Nude on Rail), was discovered 40 years after being lost, among “one of the greatest art discoveries in modern times”.

 

Britain’s most expensive artist is said to have stored the work at his art supplier’s store on the Kings Road, Chelsea, west London, shortly after he painted them. But the unnamed owner, a close friend, is said to have forgotten about them after placing the paintings in the store backroom.

 

It was only discovered in the 1990s, together with a cache of other rare masterpieces, after the store closed down due to the owner’s death. Experts said that the 10 paintings, which were in pristine condition, represented “one of the greatest art discoveries in modern times”.  They were passed to the artist’s estate because they were found after his death in 1992.

 

Also among the cache, was his 1950 Pope painting, Study after Velazquez, thought to be one his best works and now owned by the American hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen. The canvas of the nude painting was sold privately to a United States-based individual, who has now placed it up for auction. It is to go under the hammer at Christie’s in New York next month together with a rare 1974 triptych of self portraits titled Three Studies for Self Portrait.

 

The triptych of head-and-shoulder studies, one of 10 self portraits Bacon executed in the 1970s, has been owned for 35 years by the seller, who is also based in America. Christie’s expects the paintings, part of a wider free public view in London on Saturday of other artists including Monet and Andy Warhol, to fetch $US20m (£12.5) and $US15m (£10m) respectively. Brett Gorvy, Christie’s deputy chairman and head of post-war and contemporary art, said the paintings came from Bacon’s “prime periods of creativity.

 

The (nude) work was part of one of the greatest art discoveries in modern times,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “Most of his works from that time were in museums, so this was an extraordinary grouping.” Experts say that works by Bacon, who was known for “destroying” canvases, have been in short supply at auctions during the past two years.

 

In February a 1964 triptych of Lucian Freud by Bacon, his great friend, sold for more than £23 million. In 1975, the artist was quoted said: “I loathe my own face, but I go on painting it only because I haven’t got any other people to do… [there is] nobody else left to paint.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HEAD OF FRANCIS BACON BY LOUIS LE BROCQUY

 

 

 

 

 

AUCTIONS  |  UNDER THE HAMMER  |  IRISH ARTS REVIEW  |  NUMBER 1  |  VOLUME 28  |  MARCH–MAY 2011 

 

In his essay for the catalogue accompanying Louis le Brocquy’s 1996 retrospective exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Alistair Smith describes the artist as “analyst of the Irish imagination” and notes that 'His many heads of W B Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and others form an inescapable part of our image of the men and their work.”

The heads of those three writers have provided the inspiration for some of le Brocquy’s most notable imagery over the past half-century, but he also turned his attention to a number of fellow artists, notably Francis Bacon (Fig 2). The two men first came to know one another in London in 1951 and maintained contact thereafter. In August 2008 le Brocquy’s wife, the painter Anne Madden recalled that at encounters in Paris, Bacon had been “marvellous company. Trenchant, provocative, intelligent about other painters. But there was no point in arguing with him. He just wanted to put across his opinion.”

Bacon wrote an introduction for the 1966 le Brocquy exhibition catalogue at Dublin’s Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in which he described the painter as belonging “to a category of artists who have always existed – obsessed by figuration outside and on the other side of illustration – who are aware of the vast and potent possibilities of inventing ways by which fact and appearance can be reconjugated.”

In 1979 le Brocquy returned the compliment by producing a series of images of Bacon’s head which were exhibited the same year. According to Madden, Beckett “bore up nobly when confronted with the artist’s reconstructions of his handsome creviced face, his pale piercing eyes. He chuckled as Louis told him of Francis Bacon’s reservations when he viewed his own image in the gallery before the opening.

Notwithstanding Bacon’s declared admiration of Louis’ images of Yeats, Joyce and Lorca and his initial enthusiasm in a letter to Louis: “I am very flattered you have included me amongst your portraits”, he was silent before Louis’ ‘distortion of his appearance.’  

One of those ‘distortions’ came up for sale in February at a sale in London, held by Bonhams which, despite the present economic climate, with this occasion inaugurated its first auction devoted solely to Irish art. Both artist and subject of the le Brocquy portrait of Bacon, a 1979 watercolour, were immediately identifiable and in a nervous market, this should have given it immediate appeal.

The pre-sale estimate was €69,000-€92,000. Surprisingly the painting remained unsold.

 

 

 

 

The west just can’t dictate democracy to the Arab world

 

 

 

 

HENRY PORTER  |  THE OBSERVER  |  SUNDAY 13 MARCH 2011

 

Oddly enough, I am reminded of an exchange my wife once witnessed between Francis Bacon and the columnist Jeffrey Bernard in a Soho restaurant.

Bacon asked Bernard whom in the world he would most like to bed. Bernard said Cyd Charisse and Monica Vitti, then asked the great painter about his ultimate fantasy.

"I’d like to get into bed with Colonel Gaddafi," replied Bacon after some thought.

It turns out that all these governments and the previously revered LSE have a lot in common with Francis Bacon.

 

 

 

 

 

Colour research sheds new light in celebrated artist

 

 

 

The Journal Live, Tuesday, March 1st 2011

 

ART critics often return to the work of a deceased artist with the aim of repositioning him or her within the pantheon of artistic endeavour. Often this is a highly subjective process sparked by a new exhibition or publication. Someone will suggest that so-and-so has been unfairly under-rated and hope that others will pick up the idea and run with it.

In this way forgotten or once derided artists are rehabilitated and their paintings or sculptures attain a new lease on life. But the work of the late and celebrated artist Francis Bacon is undergoing scrutiny of a much less subjective nature at Northumbria University.

A team led by conservation scientist Dr Brian Singer is analysing the materials and techniques used by the controversial painter, who died in 1992. Dr Singer says: “The aim of this research is to examine the materials and techniques used by the artist Francis Bacon through the examination and sampling of paintings, and of materials left in Bacon’s studio.

“Analysis is being carried out to identify the pigments and binders present in the paint in order to build up a timeline of materials used throughout his career.”

The research has so far turned up some modern organic pigments showing that in later decades the artist used household paint in some areas of his work. More than 30 paintings from museums, galleries, private collections and the Francis Bacon Estate, which is part-funding the project, have been analysed.

Techniques used include visual examination with different light sources and special detectors, observation through microscopes and chemical analysis. “By establishing the materials used, this information will be a valuable resource for those working in the conservation of Bacon’s works,” says Dr Singer.

Also working on the paintings is PhD student Elke Cwiertnia. Bacon is best known for his disturbing portraits of popes. Margaret Thatcher apparently referred to him as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures” but they now change hands for millions of pounds.

 

 

 

 

 

Sotheby’s on the pig’s back as Bacon makes £23m

 

 

 

BONHAMS’ inaugural Irish sale on Wednesday may have failed to prise open

 the better-padded wallets but elsewhere in London staggering…

 

 

 

BY MICHAEL PARSONS  |  FINE ART & ANTIQUES  |  THE IRISH TIMES |  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2011 

 

BONHAMS’ inaugural Irish sale on Wednesday may have failed to prise open the better-padded wallets but elsewhere in London staggering sums were spent on art as collectors and investors went on a major spending spree.

At Sotheby’s on Thursday night, a triptych painting by Irish-born artist Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud made £23 million – triple the pre-sale estimate of £7 million–£9 million. More than 10 bidders from four continents competed for the work, which consists of three separate panels, before it finally sold after seven minutes to an anonymous buyer in the room.

On Tuesday night, a round of applause greeted the sale of a Picasso painting at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art sale. La Lecture, which reputedly depicts the artist’s amour Marie-Thérèse Walter, sold for £25.2 million more than doubling the low estimate of £12 million

Meanwhile at Christie’s, bidders from 20 countries chased pictures by artists including Bonnard, Degas, Matisse, Magritte and Dali, many released from private collections for the first time. The top price was paid for Terrasse à Vernon by Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) which made £7.2 million – a world record price for the French artist at auction.

Giovanna Bertazzoni, director and head of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s London said the strong results illustrated a solid market for both classic Impressionism and the masterpieces of the avant-garde.

Christie’s created a new world record price for a painting by Dali – £4.1 million. That stood for just 24 hours. The next day, Sotheby’s sold the same artist’s Portrait de Paul Eluard – for £13.4 million.

A Surreal week indeed.

 

 

 

 

Bacon’s Freudian portrait triples estimate in sold our Sotheby’s sale

 

 
The single-owner auction from the estate of Geneva collection George Kostalitz
made $150m and broke records for surrealist art

 

 

BY GEORGINA ADAM  |  THE ART NEWSPAPER  |  SATURDAY, 12 FEBRUARY, 2011 

 

LONDON. Sotheby’s single-owner sale of 20th- century art, “Looking Closely, A Private Collection”, featuring works from the estate of the Geneva-based George Kostalitz, was a runaway success on Thursday night. All 60 lots sold, and the final tally of £93.5m ($150.5m, including commissions) pulverised the pre-sale target of £39m-£55m (which does not include commission). The average price per lot sold was a punchy £1.6m.

 

Leading the sale was Bacon’s 1964 Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud, expressive images of his fellow artist painted in predominantly deep scarlet. Estimated at £7m-£9m, it attracted fierce bidding from nine potential buyers, five of them on the telephone. The painting made just over £23m, falling to the Cologne-based dealer Alex Lachmann, who has many Russian clients, seated in the front row with a mobile telephone clamped to his ear. According to dealers, the work had been offered a couple of years before the owner’s death at $25m. “The estimate was very reasonable, and the work has great wall power,” said London dealer Gérard Faggionato, who represents the Bacon estate in Europe.

 

 

 

 

Three cheers for Francis Bacon after

art sale raises £93.5 million

 

 

 

 

GODFREY BARKER  |  NEWS  |  LONDON EVENING STANDARD  |  FRIDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2011

 

Three Francis Bacon portraits of his friend Lucian Freud, painted in 1964, sold for £23million at Sotheby’s last night.

It was another evening when the art market shunned austerity and went wild – even Freud, in the paintings, looked uncommonly cheerful.

The Bacon, bought for a Russian client by the German dealer Alex Lachmann, trebled expectations.

A Freud self-portrait from 1952, showing the artist scowling at himself in a mirror, quintupled its estimate to sell for £3,289,250.

The tiny work on copper, just five by 3.5 inches, came to an astonishing £188,000 per square inch of paint, second only to the National Gallery’s Raphael, The Madonna of the Pinks, as the most expensive picture ever sold, inch for inch.

The world’s millionaires spent £93,520,000 on 60 paintings owned by a mysterious "private collector", whom Sotheby’s declined to identify.

Few secrets keep, however, and London dealers spoke freely of the top-of-the-market buying between 1950 and 1980 by car and electronics trader George Kostalitz.

Bidders, many from Russia, simply stampeded. Sotheby’s bank of 82 telephones was sorely under pressure and the final price, with buyers’ premium, of £13,481,250 towered over the Spaniard’s former high of £2.4million, which lasted for 20 years.

The latest record of £4.1million, paid at Christie’s on Wednesday for Etude pour ‘Le miel est plus doux que le sang’, did not last long.

The sale came on top of £68million made at Sotheby’s last Tuesday, and left Bond Street dealers gasping at the strength of the art market.

 

 

 

 


 Francis Bacon triptych sells for £23

 – three times its estimate

 

 

 

Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud by his friend Francis Bacon

saw more than 10 bidders compete for the work

 

 

 

MARK BROWN  |  ART CORRESPONDENT  |  THE GUARDIA N  |  FRIDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2011

 

A triptych of  Lucian Freud portraits by his friend Francis Bacon have been sold for £23m at Sotheby’s in London, three times the pre-sale estimate. Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud (above) had created a buzz before the sale. The question was not if it would make its pre-sale estimate of £7m-£9m, but how much higher it would go.

 

More than 10 bidders competed for the work. After seven minutes of bidding, it reached £20.5m and a hopeful telephone bidder asked if £20.6m could be offered. The auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, insisted on £21m. “I don’t want to sound arrogant, but we’ve come so far,” he said. There was applause as he finally banged his hammer.

 

Cheyenne Westphal, the auction house’s chairman of contemporary art in Europe, said: “This striking painting has everything a collector in the current market is looking for. It is an artwork that radiates ‘wall-power’ with its brilliant colour and dramatic brushstrokes.”

 

The triptych has been in the same private collection for nearly 50 years and is a testament to the close friendship of two of the titans of 20th century British art. This triptych, Sotheby’s said, contained an “intensity and intimacy that is rarely seen elsewhere”.

 

Bacon, who died in 1992, and Freud were kindred spirits: close friends who often saw each other every day. They gambled together, drank in the same Soho dens and painted each other. The paintings were part of a truly wondrous private collection. The sale of 60 works from it also included paintings by Modigliani, Giacometti, Chagall and Miró.

 

There were many gems, including a tiny 12.5 by 9.5cm Lucian Freud self-portrait that he painted in Jamaica while visiting Ian Fleming at his house, Goldeneye. It sold for £3.3m.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Auctions in London, Finding Wheat Amid the Chaff

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BY SOUREN MELIKIAN  |  ART REVIEW  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  FRIDAY FEBRUARY 11 2011

 

LONDON — Auction houses are struggling to resolve a dilemma as supplies of Impressionist and Modern art keep shrinking. What are they to do when growing world demand sends the few remaining important pictures climbing to ever higher levels while much of what is otherwise left falls below the standard considered average a couple of decades ago?

Allowing a few gems to stand out in the midst of a morass of works that are indifferent makes the latter look even less desirable. On the other hand, the auction houses have no other option than to handle what is available. As focusing on half a dozen important works would be neither economically viable nor psychologically conceivable, they are doomed to put together sales that look increasingly unbalanced.

And then there is the odd exception. Once in a blue moon, a truly private collection surrounded by a blaze of publicity comes up. It happened at Sotheby’s on Thursday night when 60 lots added up to £93.5 million, or $150.2 million. Among other sensational scores, a Bacon triptych, “Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud,” rose to £23 million.

But the fireworks witnessed at Sotheby’s Thursday sale underline even more dramatically the widening gap between what is deemed the best and what is seen as not particularly desirable. This growing contrast was a key factor in helping the few important pictures that appeared at Sotheby’s on Tuesday evening and at Christie’s on Wednesday to climb above expectations. That was no doubt the case at Sotheby’s. In the past, Picasso’s “La Lecture” (Reading), which was the star lot, would not have been so rapturously received.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lucien Freud: rare artist painting by friend

Francis Bacon fetches £23m

 

 

 

A three-panel painting of Lucian Freud by his great friend Francis Bacon

sold last night for more than £23 million.

 

 

 

BY ANDREW HOUGH  |  NEWS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  FRIDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2011

 

The triptych involving two of the most influential figures of 20th century British art fetched almost three times its reserve value during the sale at Sotheby’s.

The rare painting shows Freud with a variety of facial expressions. It is understood that Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud was bought by Alex Lachman, a Cologne-based dealer.

It came after seven minutes of frenetic bidding involving ten potential buyers from four continents. It had been expected to fetch between £7m and £9m. The 14-inch high triptych of expressively painted heads has rarely been seen in public. It has previously been offered for private sale at about $25 million (£15.5 million).

Experts say that works by Bacon, Britain’s most expensive artist, have been in short supply at auctions during the last two years. "This striking painting has everything a collector in the current market is looking for," said Cheyenne Westphal, chairwoman of Contemporary Art Europe at Sotheby’s.

"It is an artwork that radiates ’wall-power’ with its brilliant colour and dramatic brushstrokes. It narrates one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the 20th century between two titans of British art and is desirably fresh to the market having remained in the same collection for almost half a century."

A Sotheby’s spokeswoman said more than 10 people, from four different continents, put in bids for the painting until it sold to the buyer in the room for £23,001,250. She declined to confirm the buyer’s identity.

The sale prices include buyer’s premium. Mr Lachman was unavailable for comment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

€8 Bacon on Sotheby’s menu

 

 

 

 

MICHAEL PARSONS  |  THE IRISH TIMES  |  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2011

 

“That man who paints those dreadful pictures” is set to steal the limelight – yet again.

MARGARET Thatcher once famously referred to Francis Bacon as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures”. The former British prime minister sure had her finger on the pulse.

Abstract paintings of screaming popes, crucifixion scenes and grotesquely contorted naked men are not, quite, Middle England’s cup of tea. But, despite the Iron Lady’s disdain, he is one of the most admired – and collected – of all 20th century artists.

And his paintings – which can make even hardened adults flinch – sell for more than the work of any other Irish-born artist by a very wide margin.

Born in Dublin in 1909, Bacon grew up in Co Kildare where his father, a former British army officer turned racehorse trainer, reputedly had his son flogged by stable-hands to make a man of him. Not surprisingly, he bolted abroad at the earliest opportunity and, after stints in Berlin and Paris, settled in London where he spent the rest of his life.

Papa’s “cure” backfired and Bacon was notorious for consorting with toughie Eastenders with whom he indulged his taste for sado-masochism. Although his favourite haunts were the seedier bars and nightclubs of Soho, fame opened gilded doors. He once scandalised London’s beau monde when he booed and hissed Princess Margaret as she sang a Noel Coward song at a private party – causing her to rush, mortified, from the salon. Polite society (and the Daily Mail) was aghast.

Writing in The Observer, in 2008, Oxford University professor and critic Peter Conrad described Bacon as “the most celebrated painter of his time, all the more famous for the diabolical whiff of sulphur exuded by his alcoholic binges, his homosexual promiscuity and his voluptuous taste for pain”.

In 1946, a London art dealer bought one of his paintings for £200. Anyone who bought his early works has reason to be cheerful and may well be reading this article on a yacht moored off Cannes. By 1989, Bacon had become the worlds most expensive living artist. He died, while holidaying in Madrid, in 1992. Bacon’s South Kensington studio – lock, stock and dirty paintbrushes included – was donated by his heir, John Edwards, to the Hugh Lane Gallery and was transported to Dublin in 1998 to be reassembled for permanent display.

Since his death, his reputation – and prices – have soared. In 2008, Sotheby’s New York sold his Triptych, 1976 for $86.3 million, the highest price paid for any painting created since the second World War. The triptych was sold by France’s Moueix family, producers of Château Pétrus wines, and bought by Russian billionaire and owner of Chelsea Football Club, Roman Abramovich.

Next Thursday, February 10th, Sotheby’s in London is selling another of his triptychs, Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud – a fellow painter widely regarded as Britain’s greatest living artist. Sotheby’s described it as “a testament to the friendship between these two giants of 20th century art” and has estimated it at £7m-£9m.

It’s the highlight in the sale of a private collection of modern and contemporary European paintings and sculptures.

 

 

 

 

Obituaries

 

 

 

 Denis Wirth-Miller

 

 

 

Bohemian artist who enjoyed a close association with Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

By DAVID BUCKMAN  |  OBITUARIES  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  WEDNESDAY 19 JANUARY 2011

 

Wirth-Miller was born in Folkestone, Kent, in 1915, where his Bavarian father Johann Wirthmiller (Denis later Anglicised his name) ran a busy hotel. Wirth-Miller’s mother moved him to Bamburgh in her home county of Northumberland, where he was raised by his grandmother.

After school, he joined Tootal Broadhurst Lee, the textile manufacturers in Manchester, where innate talent prompted his appointment as a designer. After arriving in London early in 1937 he met Dickie Chopping, who moved into one of the painter Walter Sickert’s former studios in north London, where Denis was living. Thus began a lifelong relationship; in December 2005 they became the first in Colchester to make a civil partnership.

It was not without disagreements, even how about they first met – according to Chopping at a Regent’s Park charity garden party, according to Wirth-Miller at the Café Royal, a celebrated meeting point for gay men. A friend was concerned about the vulnerability of the Sickert flat to bomb damage and advised them to leave London, lending them the dilapidated Felix Hall in Kelvedon, Essex. There, they scraped a living gardening and other jobs.

Then, importantly, they met the painters Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who had established the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, first at Dedham and, when that was destroyed by fire, at Benton End. The artist Mollie Russell-Smith recalled how, as a student lacking an easel, with trepidation she knocked on the door at Benton End and it was "flung open by three young men" – Chopping, Wirth-Miller and Lucian Freud. "They bundled me in, assuming that I had come to be a student, and Dickie showed me all over the house with great enthusiasm and charm. I was enchanted."

Benton End was an artistic Eden. Wirth-Miller must have absorbed much from Morris, artistically and as a plantsman. Later, in Wivenhoe, Wirth-Miller tended a walled garden producing magnificent vegetables. Their house on Wivenhoe Quay, then used as a sail storehouse, was bought in 1944, but wartime restrictions prevented their moving in until 1945, when they began converting it back to its original role as a merchant’s house.

By the late 1940s Bacon was visiting Wirth-Miller and Chopping. The friendship between Bacon and Wirth-Miller had been instigated earlier in the decade by the two Scots painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, whom Wirth-Miller had known in his Soho days. For years, Bacon had a home and studio in Wivenhoe which eventually Wirth-Miller bought from him.

Wirth-Miller, Chopping and Bacon were close, holidaying abroad. "Denis had a deep intellectual friendship with Francis," says Daniel Chapman, a close friend for many years. "Their interests in literature, philosophy, art, gambling and life in general were coincidental and were live and vibrant up to each of their dying days." For most of the last 20 years Wirth-Miller and Bacon would hold extensive telephone conversations daily.

Wivenhoe’s artistic social life was boosted in when the journalist and local resident George Gale invited the politician Edward Heath to open a Wivenhoe Arts Club, which attracted painters and writers and had its own gallery. It was not so significant in the lives of Wirth-Miller and Chopping, insists Chapman, as Denis’s assisting others such as the primitive painter Ernie Turner to develop his talent.

Known as “Wivenhoe’s Alfred|Wallis” – after the St Ives Cornish primitive – Turner began painting in 1964 when he retired as a shipwright. Wirth-Miller helped him with technical advice, encouraged him to experiment and fostered his sales in London and to overseas clients. Turner became so popular that clients had to order paintings.

Cultivating his friendships at home and abroad and partying hard were strong Wirth-Miller traits. A former near-neighbour of Bacon’s cottage and studio in Wivenhoe remembers the "outrageous" reputation he, Wirth-Miller and Chopping had. "They frequented local pubs and restaurants, sometimes to the owners’ dismay. At one time I lived above and worked in the restaurant the trio frequented.

"On those occasions the proprietor used to hide the bottles of champagne so there would not be all-night sessions. I heard tales of Wirth-Miller and Bacon having drunken painting sessions, painting on each others’ canvases."

In contrast, Chapman recalls Wirth-Miller as a serious worker. When materials were in short supply during the war, like others he would resort to house paint and enamels.

After the war years his work was in oil on a large scale. "Early works were portraits, figures and still life," Chapman said, "later a series of very large dog paintings – hounds on the move, mastiffs, great danes in motion in the act of turning or hunting or disappearing into the mist. Later works were East Anglian or Dartmoor landscapes. He was always drawing in secret, often hands and feet."

 

Denis Wirth-Miller, artist: born Folkestone, Kent 27 November 1915; died Colchester, Essex 27 October 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

     The Primal Cry of Horror:

 

The A-theology of Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

RINA ARYA  |  ARTIBUS ET HISTORIAE  |  VOLUME 32  |  NUMBER 63  |  JANUARY 2011

 

 

Introduction

In statements about his work Bacon makes many anti-religious, and more specifically, anti-Christian statements. In an interview with Sylvester, Bacon uses the term ‘anodyne’1 to refer to the effects that the Christian religion has on people – it alleviates suffering by making it purposeful. Elsewhere he remarks how, ‘faith is a fantasy’ and ‘religion is a way of disciplining people’ and how ‘governments use religion to control the people’.2 However, what is paradoxical is that although these statements are unequivocally disparaging about the Christian faith, in his art work he is not only drawn to, but is utterly preoccupied with, the symbols of Christianity, in particular those of the Crucifixion and the Pope. Peppiatt remarked how, for over half his career, Bacon’s work revolved around two of the most potent images of the Christian faith, the body on the Cross and the Pope on his throne.3

For the purposes of this paper, I want to account for Bacon’s prolific and indeed obsessive use of the symbol of the Crucifixion in his work. Yates cites the instances of Bacon’s use of the Crucifixion: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), with reference to the second version of 1988, Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950), Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962), Crucifixion (1965), Crucifixion (1933) and Crucifixion with Skull (1933).4 Many scholars and critics allude to Bacon’s use of the Crucifixion but are not explicit with regard to how far they consider Bacon’s interpretation of the Crucifixion coincides or differs from more traditional depictions of the subject in art history. There is a distinct lack of engagement with the religious or even irreligious inflection of Bacon’s images. I am inclined to think that his anti-religious statements are taken too literally and at face value by others. The absence of God in Bacon’s paintings is not the issue at dispute here. Bacon is clearly not a theist. However, his ongoing engagement with the traditions of Christianity has not been accorded enough significance and herein lies the motivation of this paper. My focus is on the construction of a dialogue between an exemplar of the Crucifixion and one of Bacon’s examples of the Crucifixion. In my study I will investigate whether Bacon was employing the Crucifixion in a conventional way to support the Christian narrative, or was he subverting or inverting its meaning? I have singled out a seminal painting in Bacon’s oeuvre for analysis: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, Fig. 1)5 which signalled a pivotal moment in the artistic career of Bacon for reasons that I will address shortly.

I am positing two traditions, a ‘Christian’ tradition (as denoted by the phrase ‘right-way up’), which is predetermined by the narrative of resolution and salvation, as typified by the Resurrection and is represented here by Grünewald’s Crucifixion panel from the Isenheim Altarpiece (in Colmar, с. 1515-1516, see Fig. 2). In my interpretation of the Crucifixion panel I draw on conventional understanding about the significance of this image that makes it an outstanding contribution in the history of art. It articulates the brutal horror of the Crucifixion of Christ whilst also pointing ahead to the hope offered by the Resurrection. The second tradition what I will term the Baconian tradition constitutes my original contribution to the subject. It presents a tradition which I will describe as an ‘inversion’ of the Christian model, where the (bodily) fragments of the Crucifixion do not partake in a salvation in the sense of being made whole, but remain as fragments. It is too simplistic to regard Bacon’s continual employment of religious symbols solely from the perspective of (expressing his) unbelief. A more radical interpretation would suggest that Bacon is employing these symbols to further his alternative spiritual message. Bacon’s redeployment of the symbol to communicate to a twentieth century audience constitutes what I have identified as a ‘partial reversion’. In other words, Bacon is using the symbol of the Crucifixion not to uphold the Christian narrative, nor to express his atheism but to convey spiritual truths about the human condition that are pertinent to his day.

In its Christian usage the Crucifix/Cross is associated with the death of Jesus. The death of Christ on the Cross is indisputably the central image in Christian art and the iconographical focus of Christian contemplation. The characteristics of the image varied according to the prevailing climate of religious thought and feeling.6 Within the narratives of Christianity, the image of the Cross became symbolic of salvation. Apostolos-Cappadona states, ‘the cross became the primary element of Christianity and the victory over death through the Resurrection’.7 In addition to the Cross another configuration which bespoke of the narrative of the Crucifixion was the presence of the figures of sorrow or the mourners at the foot of the Cross, which I will term, ’the three figures at the foot of the Cross’. These figures, which originate in the Gospels, have peopled Western art. They vary in their number and articulation. Most commonly seen in art are the figures of St John and the Virgin and they are often shown standing either side of the Cross.8 In the Gospel of St. John, Christ, whilst he still lived, entrusted the Virgin to the care of the apostle John. ‘When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home’ (John 20: 26-27). The most plausible reason for the presence of the figures was to emphasise the Passion of Christ, and the grief and sorrow instilled in the figures was relayed back to the viewer The figures also functioned within the narrative to point ahead to the Resurrection, especially John the Baptist, who prophesised Jesus as the Messiah.

Grünewald’s Crucifixion panel (from the Isenheim Altarpiece) demonstrates the convergence of theology and art. It is regarded as the apotheosis of grief, horror and hope in pictorial terms and my account concurs with standard interpretations of the painting. In his depiction we are transported through the stages of suffering, from the recognition of the significance of the human aspect of Christ’s suffering to the sorrow of the Virgin Mary, who swoons in the arms of St John9 and finally with the hope of the end of suffering, as conveyed by the Baptist figure. The narrative is communicated to the viewer by the visual and theological cycle that is set up between the figures. To the right of the Crucifix, the Virgin Mary, St John and Mary Magdalene (who crouches down in front of the Crucifix) evoke the climate of grief and despair, which is resolved through translation into a message of theological hope at the other side of the Crucifix, where John the Baptist is foretelling the prophecy of the Messiah (and the Resurrection). The viewer identifies with the theme of suffering, which is embodied by the figures at the foot of the Cross and the pointing finger of John the Baptist confirms the level of suffering whilst signalling what lies ahead.

The visual and theological point is the Christ figure, which looms above the other figures. The intensity of line and graphic realism is acute in this brutal depiction of Christ, who is displayed as disfigured and wounded and at the moment of death. The exaggerated size of the body adds to the dimension of suffering. The intended location of the Isenheim Altarpiece was that of the chapel of a lazar-house, an Antonite monastery; indeed it was commissioned by the Antonites. This powerful painting, which would have been on display when the altarpiece was closed meant that the viewers/patients would be provided with a reflection of pain and suffering. The distorted body of Christ would offer a message of community to the patients because He embodied the sufferings of humankind. The prophecy of Resurrection as represented by the gesture of the outstretched finger of John the Baptist gives the patients hope that their suffering will cease in the next life and that their outer disfigurement does not preclude them from the experience of grace.10 In his essay, ‘Ugly Beauty in Christian Art’, John Cook explores how the grotesquely ugly can operate to increase the conviction of faith. Through grotesque imagery, one is drawn to the suffering of Christ, for example, only to be renewed in one’s faith. Cook uses the example of Grünewald’s Crucifixion panel, amongst others, to demonstrate the empowerment of hope and faith that such an image can impart. In such works, one is dealing with the themes of horror, judgement, and suffering set within a liturgical setting, in which the theological function of the work is to open one to the grace of God. Cook reminds us that the grotesque can be given a positive meaning in the drama of the Eucharist. Redemption comes when one accepts human brokenness, only to pass through to a higher stage, through transformation into a new life.11

 

‘Inversion’: Desertion at the Ninth Hour

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is dated at 1944 but the panels were worked on over a period of several years.12 It was first exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in London in April 1945, a month before the end of the war in Europe. The painting signals a pivotal moment in the artistic career of Bacon, who prior to this point designed interiors for a living and had not established himself as a painter. When it was first put on public show the impact that it had was monumental to such an extent that the work of what were then such better known artists, as Matthew Smith, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore were eclipsed by Bacon’s contribution. Critics unanimously expressed the shock value this painting had on the British public.13 Russell conveys the impact the painting had:

Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was as if cornered, and only waiting for the chance to drag the observer down to its own level. They caused total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them. They were regarded as freaks, monsters irrelevant to the concerns of the day, and the product of an imagination so eccentric as not to count in any possible permanent way. They were spectres at what we all hoped was going to be a feast, and most people hoped that they would just be quietly put away.

The unequivocal message that the painting conveyed was that ‘nothing will ever be the same’.15 This was certainly true with regard to Bacon’s launch into the art world. The impact the painting had was also related to its timeliness (or untimeliness, as many of his contemporaries may have viewed it). Unlike Moore or Sutherland, Bacon was not employed as a war artist and did not have a specific agenda directed at boosting the morale of the public at the end of the Second World War. However, given the climate of spiritual malaise and general uncertainty, which permeated all aspects of British life, why then did he feel inclined to produce such a horrific image? And why did he specifically allude to the greatest symbol in Western culture, the Crucifixion of Christ?

The impact this painting had on the art world and Bacon’s prolific use of the Crucifixion led many critics who interviewed Bacon to question his use of this symbol. Russell’s account of the impact that the Three Figures had, which was typical of reactions, was qualitatively different to the perceptions that viewers have when viewing a conventional interpretation of Christ on the Cross (as epitomised in Grünewald’s Crucifixion). Given this, it seems logical to question Bacon’s motivations. Bacon attributed his perpetual fascination with the subject to the following reasons. He told Sylvester how he felt that the crucifixion is ’a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation’, adding that he hadn’t ‘found another subject so far that has been helpful for covering certain areas of human feeling and behaviour’.16 It was a culturally resonant symbol, a repository of meaning, which he placed on a parallel with the abattoir. Aside from the obvious theological allusions the crucifixion could be explored in an interdisciplinary way: anthropologically, as ’the behaviour between one man and another’17, sociologically, as indicative of the prevalence of violence in society and aesthetically. Bacon was interested in the aesthetic and formal possibilities offered by the Crucifix; ‘the very fact that the central figure is raised into a very pronounced and isolated position which gives it, from a formal point of view, greater possibilities than having all the different figures placed on the same level’.18

In my radical interpretation of Bacon’s Three Studies I suggest that he is not merely interested in using the Crucifixion because of its cultural resonance but is articulating a version of or updating the Crucifixion for a twentieth century audience. His formal reasons for employing the symbol are untenable: the possibilities of the figure raised above the others is not actualised in Three Studies by virtue of the fact that all the figures are placed on the same level. Another idiosyncrasy is the notable absence of the Crucifixion; it is alluded to only in the title and remains absent in the depiction. In paintings of the Crucifixion the image of Christ on the Cross often features as the visual focus of Christian contemplation.19 It was the point of both narrative and visual focus. From a structural perspective the figure of Christ added symmetry to the painting. He was raised high up on the Crucifix and was often flanked by figures either side, as demonstrated in the Grünewald example, where the Christ figure almost divides the painting in two – with the mourners on one side and the Baptist figure on the other. The absence of the Crucifixion in Bacon’s painting does not eradicate it from expectation. The inclusion of it in the title is highly suggestive and raises our expectations. This present absence leads us to question where we as viewers are meant to situate ourselves in relation to the absent symbol. In images of the Crucifixion the visual and narrative focal point is usually relegated to the Christ figure. In this example, it becomes deflected onto the viewer.

I suggest that we cannot see the Crucifixion because we are the crucifiers. Bacon places the three figures all at the eye level of the viewer because he is offering the viewer a reflection of him/herself. This is what we have become. We are ensconced in the brutality of the action that goes into the act of putting to death. Therefore, in the context of Bacon’s image the Crucifixion is no longer a spectacle in the sense of something that we stand back and cogitate either contemplatively and/or sadistically but we are actually implicit in the making and complicit in the act itself. The revealing nature of the title, which significantly is, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and not, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion20 with the use of the indefinite article substantiates my reading. We are not looking at the Crucifixion but at the emotions that surround the act of cruelty entailed in a generic crucifixion.

We, as viewer recoil in fear when we realise that these three figures are a representation of what we have become. By deflecting the focal point onto us, Bacon is intimating that in order to make sense of these creatures we have to place ourselves at the centre of the interpretation of them. Whilst it is indisputable that Bacon is clearly referring to a recognisable tradition, that is, the crux of the Christian narrative, he is also extending the reference to make an alternative point. The use of the indefinite article transforms the meaning and intentions of the painting and the identity of the three figures becomes unspecified. The generic nature of this crucifixion is disquieting because we cannot sanction the brutality of the act in theological (or eschatological) terms. Nor can we absolve ourselves from the scene of this heinous crime; the focus is deflected onto us as viewer and we are accountable. Some critics interpret the three figures as the perpetrators of the crime, as the crucifiers rather than the crucified. For example, Yates suggests that these figures represent ‘the ones who crucify or who embody the emotions that feed the vengeance and cruelty of the act of crucifixion’.21 And Stephen Spender comments on how:

These appalling dehumanized faces, which epitomize cruelty and mockery are those of the crucifiers rather than the crucified [...]. His figures are those who participate in the crucifixion of humanity which includes themselves. If they are not always the people who actually hammer in the nails, they are those among the crowd which shares in the guilt of cruelty to the qualities that are – or were – beneficently human, and which here seem to have banished forever.22

But in my reading I take this one step further to claim that these figures represent the viewers who are forced to contemplate their wrongdoings against humanity. We are the crucifiers and are forced to reflect on the brutal nature of humanity.

 

Sources of the Three Figures

The identity of the three figures has been the source of perpetual interest in Bacon scholarship. Possible attributions vary from Picasso-esque figures to the Greek Furies. What is indisputable is that the three figures bear little resemblance to the three mourners in the Biblical tradition.

Alley and Rothstein suggest that the three figures can be traced back to Picasso’s post-cubist work, namely the Three Dancers of 1925.23 They specify the period of the twenties and thirties as the phase of Picasso’s output, which was particularly inspirational for Bacon.24 In this phase, Picasso was experimenting with the human form by examining the possibilities of paraphrasing the human form, which paradoxically distorted the human form whilst also resembling it in terms of its organic morphology.25 This description is applicable to the three amorphous, indeterminate figures, which bear similarities to the human whilst also being animal-like, and more specifically, bird/bat-like.

Another possible attribution of the figures is to the Greek Furies. In a letter dated January 9th 1959 Bacon stated his intentions for these figures: these are ’sketches for the Eumenides (the Greek Furies), which I intend to use at the base of a large Crucifixion which I may do still’.26 The Furies are ‘the goddesses of retribution who exacted punishment for murder and other serious crimes, particularly of kin against kin, and who guarded the established order of the world’.27 The literary context in which Bacon refers to them is in Aeschylus’s Oresteia and in particular in the Eumenides, which is the third play in the trilogy. Peppiatt claims that Bacon was led to Aeschylus via T. S. Eliot’s play, The Family Reunion, which Bacon went to see when it was shown at the Westminster Theatre, London.28 The central theme of The Family Reunion is drawn from Aeschylus’ Oresteia. In the Oresteia, the Eumenides have mercilessly maddened Orestes and pursued him to Delphi for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra.29 Certain critics focus on the specific parallels between Aeschylus’ narrative and the development that occurs across Bacon’s panels. Yates states how:

The first panel is of a door open, perhaps for Clytemnestra to welcome Agamemnon home from the war. At the top of one of Bacon’s cage-like structures hangs a bird-like bat creature, grotesque and lurid, an image that may be one of the Furies. Blood flows under the door which is echoed in the second panel where the flowing red tapestry becomes the carpet upon which the royal dais and the form of the murdered body of Agamemnon, the king, now on his throne, now no more that the spine-contorted form, carcass-like imagery. The third panel shows a human figure fully formed, moved out. 30

Other critics, such as Ades, are less concerned with the systematic paralleling of the two narratives and focus instead on the exploration of emotions, which are unfolded in each panel. Ades observes Bacon’s tendency to work through a particular cultural reference point in order to broaden his exploration of human behaviour; ’each image in the triptych condenses sensations which can thematically relate to several scenes in the play, but which like Aeschylus’ own imagery are to do with observed and generalized emotions: fear, prophecy, defiance, desire’.31 The more generic interpretation of the figures is more convincing, especially given Bacon’s imagination, which Peppiatt observed ‘worked from the particular to the universal’32 and the inclusion of ’studies’ in the title which suggests that the painting and in particular, the three figures are in a preparatory state. Unlike the identity of the three figures in the Biblical narrative, which have a definite and determined identity, the three figures here may be interpreted in a number of ways. The innumerable identities that the figures can undertake, however closely related, suggests that, unlike the Christian narrative, we do not have closure in the sense of resolution. Bacon explains that he uses the word ‘study’ to imply that his paintings, ’although brought to a state of completion and valid in their own right, are not to be regarded as definitive statements’.33 The viewers are left in an anticipatory state, where there is no fulfilment and this is reflected by the fragmentary nature of the three figures.

Ades interprets the figures in Freudian terms observing how the figure in the central panel, bearing gritted teeth and the open-mouthed release of the figure in the right hand panel vents frustration that seems to stem from their inverted positions in the genital region The displacement of mouth or teeth to the genital area contributes to the bestiality of the imagery.34 By merging the human and animal in these forms, Bacon conveys the desperate nature of these creatures, which represent the dysfunctional nature of humanity. Their bestial outlets provide channels for the ravening appetites of the figures, which are insatiable and destructive. I agree with Ades’s psychoanalytical interpretation. By equating them with the Furies Bacon can be seen to be exploring the ethical values of judgement. The action of the Oresteia is centred in the relative conception of justice, where Clytemnestra is seeking justice for the sacrifice of her daughter, and Orestes, is seeking justice for the murder of his father by his mother. In this mythological system resolution proceeds from cosmological disorder. In the narrative of the Oresteia the Furies enact their revenge and cosmological order is restored. However, I suggest that in Bacon’s system the pursuit of the Furies is unrelenting and never-ending. They are our inner demons, and in psychoanalytical terms designate the return of the repressed. Earlier, vis-à-vis Yates and Spencer I described how the three figures are regarded as the crucifiers. I am now suggesting that the paralleling of the three figures with the Furies intimates that these figures are the crucified and the hunted. It is plausible therefore to consider the figures from the perspective of both crucifier and the crucified. Reflecting this back to the viewer, we are both perpetrators of great evil and the victims of our own complexes. The three figures represent the monstrousness of the human condition.

 

‘Partial Reversion’: My Radical of Bacon’s Three Studies

In my interpretation, Three Studies represents the antithesis of the Christian narrative of Crucifixion. In all aspects we have a meeting of opposites: the narrative and devotional focus in the Grünewald Cross is met with an absent Cross in Bacon. The three mourners in the Biblical tradition are met with three figures, which articulate fury and not sorrow. Finally, the sacred significance of the Crucifixion of Christ is devalued by a generic exploration of the subject of brutality and killing. All aspects of inversion are deliberate and part of a wider intention to deride a tradition, which legitimises such an act of brutality. However, although the inverted view presents an interesting interpretation of Bacon, it is a significantly incomplete view as it rejects the possibility of the sacred aspects of Bacon’s work. I am not purporting that Bacon should be classified as a religious painter in the way that Grünewald is. However, I do not think that we either can or should dismiss the spiritual or sacred dimensions of Bacon’s paintings. In the argument that follows I want to proffer an alternative explanation of Three Studies, which claims that in his subversive articulation Bacon is actually heightening the gravity of the Crucifixion of Christ by articulating the primal moment of horror at the foot of the Cross. The message of the Three Figures, which caused consternation was equivalent to Christ’s cry at the ninth hour, ’My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’ (Matthew 27: 4)

In Three Studies Bacon disfigures the symbol of the Crucifixion by dislocating its position in the Christian narrative and positioning it within what we would now understand as a Girardian con- text (of the violence of the sacred), where it is returned to its primitive origin, as a symbol of punishment or agony. In pre-Christian times, the cross was regarded as a technical device, which referred to the mode by which people were put to death. It therefore referred to the instrument, which effected the torture. In Roman times crucifixion was a widely used form of capital punishment, reserved for criminals. Martin Hengel describes it in the following way, ’far from being a dispassionate execution of justice [...] the crucifixion satisfied the primitive lust for revenge and the sadistic cruelty of individual rulers and the masses’.35 This is the context that Bacon is employing in his image. He is not situating the three figures in the theological context of Grünewald, where the grotesque image of Christ is balanced out by the resolution of the narrative; where the horror of the Crucifixion is counteracted by the promise of eternal life. Bacon removes the teleological and eschatological justification of suffering and concentrates on suffering alone, which is embodied in the three figures. He is taking us back to the sacred transgression that is at the heart of the Christian tradition, which is the primal moment of desertion at the foot of the Cross. In that respect he is arguably more religious and more Christian than Grünewald and others who adopt a more conventional position. The reason why I am promulgating such a viewpoint is because by presenting the inverse of what we are accustomed to, he is questioning our conditioned responses to images of the Crucifixion and alerting us to the violence that lies at the heart of the Christian tradition, often than not diminished by being subsumed within the confines of the Christian narrative. By problematising and unpicking the Crucifixion, both in terms of its ethical symbolism and its aesthetic portrayal, Bacon is simultaneously reinforcing the magnanimity of the act of sacrifice that Christ undertook and, by extension sanctifying (in the sense of making sacred) the Christ figure.

By collapsing the symbolic meaning of the Crucifixion, Bacon is taking the viewer from the metaphorical to the literal, where we come face to face with the ‘real presence’36 of violence, which is correlative with the collapse of the ritual. Bacon is thus revitalising the bloodiness and violence as betokened by the Crucifixion. The Three Studies caused such an uproar at their unveiling at the Lefevre Gallery partly because it presented three unrecognisable and hideous forms which indirectly referred to the Crucifixion. Another reason for the grandiose impact that they made was because they conveyed a realism which hitherto had been unknown. Although the Grünewald is undeniably shocking, the brutality is buffered by the teleology. And the proliferation of images throughout the centuries in Western art of the Crucifixion of Christ has the effect of reducing the impact of violence and making it seem commonplace. Bacon’s Three Studies single-handedly deconstructs the sanitised and banalised shorthand that the motif of the Crucifixion has been reduced to and returns it to the violence of the abattoir. There is no salvation offered here in the sense of either making whole or being saved. Spalding describes Bacon’s approach as being ‘merciless and extreme’.37 However, a counter-argument would suggest that Bacon is giving the viewer a vision of the violence of the times, which given the year of its dissemination (1945) is deeply appropriate. Bacon lived through violent times, the Second World War and the Irish Civil War and his philosophy of the prevalence of physical danger inevitably stemmed from his life experiences. In an interview with Sylvester, Bacon claims, ’we are meat, we are potential carcasses’.38 Three Studies is a socio- logical statement which uncovers the sophisticated glosses of the political ideologies that we subscribe to in wartime and is a way of bringing us back to our natural condition of flesh-and-blood and the accompanying unanimity of violence.

When questioned about his motivations to paint, Bacon claimed that from generation to generation instincts change and one has to be attuned to the changes in order to communicate to a contemporary audience.39 Three Studies is offered as a corrective to a post-war and post-Christian audience. The three figures have, by Bacon’s own admission, been likened to the Furies, who were the powers of death who sought revenge for wrong-doings. By placing us at the same eye level as these figures, we are staring death in the face. Bacon’s interpretation in Three Studies is a partial reversion of the Christian narrative. He seemingly inverts the tradition with the meeting of opposites that we encounter but a closer reading suggests otherwise. Where the Crucifixion, or fragmentation (of the body and of cosmological order) is restored into wholeness through the Resurrection, here we remain only with the fragments as embodied in the Three Studies. In an article in the Times on June 28th, 1985 entitled, ‘A GENIUS? I SAY ROTTEN’ Bernard Levin, amongst other critics seizes on Bacon’s depictions of the Crucifixion. Levin enquires as to ‘what is wrong with Francis Bacon? He has not noticed that, halfway through, the Crucifixion turns into its opposite. Tintoretto notices; so did Rembrandt; even Dali noticed’.40 This is a gross misunderstanding of Bacon’s work. His decision not to turn the Crucifixion into its opposite, that is, his desire to withhold the possibility of theological resolution is precisely his point. He is offering a parallel to the Christian narrative which stops at the crucial moment. But ironically, his image of Three Studies is more religious, so to speak, because it takes us to the holiest moment – the cry of desertion on the Cross. In this image the experience of sacrality, or what is sacred, is not bound up with wholeness through salvation but is inextricably bound up with fragmentation.

 

Conclusion

If the ‘right-way up’ tradition can be described as the theological tradition, then by following the line of enquiry, the tradition denoted by what I described as ‘partial reversion’ can be described as a-theological. His art is more appropriately located outside the institutions of Christianity, whilst remaining fascinated by the images. The term ‘a-theology’ accommodates Bacon’s paradoxical relationship to the material symbols of Christianity. In other words, in some sense he is dependent on a theological inheritance but is also strongly repelled by this tradition. In Partial Testament Helen Lessore41 says of Bacon, ‘the very agony of his belief becomes so acute that, by the intensity of its involvement with final questions, the negative becomes as religious as the positive’.42

Bacon employs the motif of the Crucifixion to demonstrate the central truths of his age, which revolve around the omnipresence of violence and death and the subsequent condition of embodiment. With regards to the Crucifixion of Christ, Bacon is relocating (where the relocation is also a dislocation) the Crucifixion from Golgotha to the abattoir, thus reinforcing its bloodiness and violence. In his Three Studies Bacon forces the viewers to confront their destinies as potential carcasses. He is thus returning us to our natural condition of mortality, which has become so alien through the acculturation of humankind, such as in the experience of war, for example. The repulsion evoked in a viewing of Three Studies is symptomatic of our estrangement from our natural condition. Bacon’s omission of the Crucifixion from Three Studies is strategic. The symbolic resonance of the Crucifixion curtails its raw violence and serves to make the symbol appear to be more profane, in the sense of being ordinary. By revitalising the unspeakable violence at the heart of the crucifixion Bacon is consecrating the symbol by deconstructing it. We as viewers, transcend the profanity to experience the sacredness of the primal moment of desertion. And in this aporetic moment we do not experience the resolution following fragmentation but the void of humanity, which is ‘man [sic] dispossessed of any durable paradise’.43

In this paper I have demonstrated the paradoxical relationship that Bacon has with religion, vis-à-vis his use of the Crucifixion. His anti-religious statements should not be taken at face value as they do not convey the complex and ambivalent relationship that he has with the Christian tradition. His explanations for choosing the crucifixion as symbol should not be discounted but taken in isolation fails to convey the more profound issues and engagement with religion in its broad sense. Bacon is not a theist but engages with ultimate questions, such as the role of evil in humanity and the purposelessness of suffering. He explores these themes in his depiction of the Three Figures. By unpacking the brutality and violence at the heart of humanity, which he portrays in his depiction of Three Studies, I have created a dialogue between Bacon’s crucifixion and the Crucifixion of Christ. The conclusion reached is that by relocating the crucifixion in its original setting Bacon is reviving the horror of the theological by reinforcing the significance of the role and purpose of Christ. And so despite his disparaging remarks about religion, he is giving a fresh perspective to a symbol, which has lost its intensity through overuse.

At the beginning of the paper I posited two traditions: a Christian one, and a Baconian one, which emphasises the pain and brutality of suffering as exemplified in crucifixion in a generic sense but where the suffering is not salvific. I want to qualify this here and suggest that the Baconian tradition be labelled as post-Christian. Bacon refers to the symbols of Christianity not with the intention of upholding the narrative but as a way of drawing our attention to the situation of the viewer in the twentieth century, in a world of pain without redemption.

 

 

Notes

1 D. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1987, p. 200.

2 D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London, 1994, p. 134.

3 M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon. Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 1997, p. 69.

4 W. Yates, ’The Real Presence of Evil: Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’, Arts, vol. 8, 1996, no. 3, pp. 20-26, p. 21.

5 Hereafter referred to as Three Studies.

6 J. Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, London, 1974, p. 81.

7 D. Apostolos-Cappadona, Dictionary of Christian Art, Cambridge, 1995, p. 90.

8 H. Osborne, ed., The Oxford Companion to Art, Oxford, 1970, p. 292.

9 There is no biblical precedent for this image of the Virgin swooning but it was effective from a visual point of view to show the weight of grief which the Virgin was subjected to throughout the Passion. Hall, Dictionary, p. 83.

10 P. and L. Murray, Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art, New York, 2004, p. 239.

11 W. Yates, ’An Introduction to the Grotesque: Theoretical and Theological considerations’, in The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, ed. by J. L. Adams and W. Yates, Cambridge and Grand Rapids, Ml, 1997, p. 63.

12 Alley and Rothstein (or is the text by one of them) suggest that the images were developed from earlier works. For example, the composition of the central panel, was developed from Abstraction from the Human Form (no. D2) which was painted about 1936; the left-hand panel derives to some extent from, Figure getting out of a Car (no. A4) of c. 1939-1940. R. Alley and J. Rothstein, Francis Bacon, London, 1964, pp. 34-35.

13 R. Alley, ’Francis Bacon’s Place in Twentieth Century Art’, in Francis Bacon, ed. by R. Chiappini, Milan, 1993, p. 20.

14 J. Russell, Francis Bacon, London, 1993, pp. 10-11.

15 Russell, Francis Bacon, p. 11.

16 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 44.

17 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 23.

18 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 46.

19 Hall, Dictionary, p. 81.

20 Peppiatt comments how the original title for the work was, in fact, Figures at the foot of the Cross. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, p. 87.

21 Yates, ’The Real Presence’, p. 24.

22 Yates, ’The Real Presence’, p. 24.

23 Alley, ’Francis Bacon’s Place in Twentieth-Century Art’, p. 16. See also, H. M. Davies, The Screaming Pope: Past Art and Present Reality’, in Chiappini (ed.) 1993, p. 36.

24 Alley, Rothstein, Francis Bacon, 1964, p. 34.

25 Alley, ’Francis Bacon’s Place in Twentieth-Century Art’, p. 20. See also, Sylvester, Interviews, p. 8.

26 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, p. 87.

27 J. R. March, Dictionary of Classical Mythology, London, 1998, p. 165.

28 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, p. 89.

29 March, Dictionary, p. 165.

30 Yates, ’The Real Presence’, p. 23.

31 D. Ades ’Web of Images’, in D. Ades and A. Forge, Francis Bacon, London, 1985, p. 20.

32 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, p. 90.

33 Alley and Rothstein, Francis Bacon, p. 34.

34 Ades, ’Web of Images’, pp. 13, 16.

35 S. D. Moore, Post Structuralism and the New Testament. Derrida and Foucault at the Foot of the Cross, Minneapolis, 1994, p. 96.

36 The Real Presence is a phrase used in Eucharistie theology to express the actual rather than figurative presence of the Body and Blood in the Sacrament, which coheres with my explanation that Bacon is taking apart the ritual to experience the literal. Interestingly, the phrase the ’real presence’ was also used by Michel Leiris to denote the intensity of Bacon’s work, although Leiris explicitly states that his use of the phrase has no connection with theology. See M. Leiris, Francis Bacon, Full Face and in Profile, trans. J. Weightman, Oxford, 1983, p. 14.

37 F. Spalding, British Art Since 1900, London, 1986, p. 143.

38 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 46.

39 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 59.

40 Farson, The Gilded Gutter, p. 216.

41 Lessore was a gallery-owner (the Beaux Arts Gallery, London) who knew Bacon personally.

42 Farson, The Gilded Gutter, p. 134.

43 Farson, The Gilded Gutter, p. 133

 

 

 

 

Bacon’s triptych of his great friend Freud emerges after 45 years

 

 

 

 

 

BY COLIN GLEADELL   |   MODERN SALES PREVIEW   |   ART SALES   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   TUESDAY, JANUARY 4, 2011


 

A painting of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon, which has been kept in private and not exhibited anywhere since 1965, the year after it was painted, has surfaced for sale at Sotheby’s in London next month.

Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud is a powerfully rendered triptych of small, 14in x 12in portraits, and is a testament to one of the most significant artistic relationships of the 20th century.

Bacon and Freud met in 1945 through the artist Graham Sutherland and became close if competitive friends, painting each other on several occasions. At one point, they met on an almost daily basis, frequently at their favourite watering hole, the Colony Room in Soho. But their friendship cooled in the late Seventies after an argument.

Only four portraits of Freud by Bacon have been at auction in the past 20 years. The last was in 2003 when a very similar small triptych sold to Pierre Chen, chairman of the Taiwanese Yageo Foundation, for $3.8 million (£2.2 million), which was record for a Bacon painting of these dimensions.

Since then, the price of Bacon has risen dramatically, climaxing in May 2008 with the $86 million (£44 million) paid by Roman Abramovich for a large-scale triptych.

However, top-drawer paintings by Bacon have been scarce at auction during the credit crunch. Since the summer of 2008, four works of varying quality have been unsold, creating a state of uncertainty in the Bacon market, and potential sellers have been waiting for someone else to make the first move to ascertain its strength. Hopefully for Sotheby’s, that deadlock was broken last November when a late painting of a cricket player belonging to Bacon’s doctor, Paul Brass, sold for $14 million (£8.7 million), comfortably above its estimate.

Considering that two small-format self-portrait triptychs by Bacon made £14 million and more in 2008, the £7 million-£9 million estimate for this triptych of Freud does not seem unreasonable. The only thing against it is that it has recently been offered privately and not sold, but that was for a much higher sum.

Sotheby’s is not saying who is selling the portrait, which was bought directly from Bacon’s dealers, Marlborough Fine Art, in 1965, apart from indicating that it is part of a family inheritance. Trade sources, however, confirm that the painting belonged to the Geneva based collector, George Kostalitz, who died last year. A private man about whom little is on public record, Kostalitz is said to have had a close working relationship with Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art.

The Bacon triptych is part of a collection of more than 60 modern and contemporary works that could fetch more than £45 million. That, and other highlights, point to a fondness for small but special works that are the product of important artistic relationships, which is perhaps why Sotheby’s has entitled the sale Looking Closely: A Private Collection.

At the same sale, he bought a small Giacometti portrait of his wife and frequent model, Annette, for $2 million, which was, briefly, a record for a painting by Giacometti. Since then, much larger paintings by Giacometti have made more than $10 million, so the £2 million-£3 million estimate on this painting does not look excessive.

Other small but by no means unimportant paintings include a 5in x 3in self-portrait of 1952 by Lucian Freud (£600,000-£800,000), which Sotheby’s suggests is a counterpart to Freud’s intense portrait of Bacon from the Tate’s collection, which was stolen in 1988 and has yet to be found, and a refined portrait of the Belgian poet, Frans Hellens, by Modigliani (£2 million-£3 million).

The sculptures, too, are small. A wire figure of an acrobat by Alexander Calder and iron masks by Picasso’s sculptural mentor, Julio Gonzalez, are of a scale that would comfortably make hand luggage on an aircraft. There are exceptions, such as some commissioned paintings by Marc Chagall. But, overall, the collection is a reminder that modem art doesn’t have to be big to carry a punch.

 

 

 

                             

 

                                            Powerfully rendered: Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud (est £7m-£9m)   

 

 

 

 

Casino Confidential

 

 

 

PATRICK BURTON | EUROART AND BEYOND | ISSUE 11/WINTER 2010

 

I wonder, perhaps it was that BBC documentary concerning the life and times of the famed Irish born artist Francis Bacon, in which he confided his love for roulette and the unfortunate turn of events or nestling of the little spherical white object, which had instituted his going into hock forty grand with a London bookmaker, that had planted the seeds of temporary fiscal self destruction firmly within my sub conscious. Another work day and night of hierarchically driven drudgery and perhaps old fashioned industrial revolution style exploitation as a junior litigator had by some stroke of good fortune resulted in my adjournment to bed. Lying down, I had facilitated the placement of my laptop on my chest, an hospitable yet awkward locale, given the human like warmth of its energy efficient battery upon my pectoral muscles and upper abdomen, contrasted with its necessitating that I dig my chin into the flesh protecting my clavicle and wedge a pillow tightly against the back of my head, thereby generating a vague tension in the upper reaches of my spinal chord, and an occasional meandering into concerned thought regarding the potentiality that the proximity of my head to the laptop’s wireless receiver might perhaps precipitate some kind of cancerous growth in my brain, which would then be immediately followed by a feeble attempt on behalf of my long term memory to reconstruct some sensationalist, yet quite possibly factual commercial television network current affairs report relating to the health risks associated with mobile phone usage and thereupon make some kind of brief cost benefit analysis before invariably reaching a conclusion concomitant with my state of physical and mental fatigue. There, in the primeval comfort of my metaphorical cave, ostensibly free from subjugation to political necessities conveniently or humanly veiled as commercial necessities, I journeyed into the world of Francis Bacon, where it became obvious, in an experiential or existential sense and even a metaphysical sense, that one could confront the unintended vulgarities, indignities and sufferings of life with a kind of tragically spirited intuitiveness.

Each day we take something of a gamble on what to wear. For some, the stakes of this perceptual wager are infinitely greater than for others, take for example, women subject to Taliban rule or famous people afraid of being mobbed when they go to buy some milk. Bacon rendezvoused with the intrepid reporter slash interviewer wearing a black leather jacket. For some inexplicable reason, the Bermuda triangularity of which is similar in nature to certain mysterious aspects of quantum physics studied by Stephen Hawking, if you put an old man in a leather jacket, all of a sudden every single word and or painting that he utters is little short of gospel. Try it some time, I urge you to go and try talking to an old man while he’s wearing a leather jacket, let’s say at least 60 years of age or over, and I guarantee that if you can speak to him (without being biased of course, from having read this) you will be noticeably more inclined to believe everything he says or does. As an old man Bacon wore a leather jacket regularly. Good leather has been places, it has experience; it’s really no wonder that a lot of the faces in his paintings are what colloquially might be described as old ’leather faces’. Not to mention that he hailed from a family involved with the thoroughbred industry, an industry renowned for being into leather whips, saddles, boots and the like.

There is a luxurious decadence in Bacons’ pictures, which is perhaps not as readily emulated in works tending more toward photographic realism. Here, we get generous blankets of violet, scarlet, agent orange, turquoise; colours which in more sober (Bacon liked a drink or three or four or ten) works we are afforded but small morsels in careful moderation such as flower beds, the linings of clouds, patterning on curtains, and clothing. Connected with the above theme is the mythological or artificial aspect of the paintings, this conscious veering away from labourious realism provides that element of escapism, that sense of the higher consciousness of humanity imposing its culture slash technology upon the random all conquering sublimation of nature. I think Kant said something about this, and Rothko refers to this in his somewhat challenging writings on art as the ’plastic’ aspect of a picture. When asked about his favourite art or what he considered the best art, Bacon answered that he liked that which was most ’artificial’ – then emphasizing that he viewed this word as a compound comprising the words art and official. Myself personally, I love official art, and I love fake art too, so this covers so much, it includes everything all in one; limiting infinity is Godly wouldn’t you say? Additional indicia that Bacon’s art was endowed with an officially fake sensibility, might be deduced through reference to the fact that Bacon’s painting have long been pedaled by only the most wealthy dealers, coveted by the most hyper real collectors, and carefully stored in only the most posh and widely legitimated art museums.

As opposed to the picturesque expanses of impressionist works, Bacon’s spaces are intensely claustrophobic. His distressed subjects are occasionally boxed within boxes within boxes, perched upon some precarious plank like object as though perhaps starring in a new television genre, the sad-not com (the sadomasochistic assault of disapproving subjects which is not considered comedy), or apparently under observation by a mechanisms in league with those Foucault seeks to disrobe in him famous work ’The Birth of the Prison’. Location in Bacon’s paintings is generally a matter of ambiguity too. Figures often appear to be lost or at least unfamiliar with their surroundings, their expressions apprehending that in this atypical environment, they will meet their fate in whatever form it may manifest itself in. Bacon would have been well equipped to convey this emotion, no doubt having experienced that heady sensual delirium besetting one confronted with the colourful cornucopia of artificial lighting, the maize of homogenously decorated interconnecting rooms, and the constant schizophrenic audiovisual stimuli which accompanies a crowd of strangers conducting all the fevered discussions, the comings, and the goings, of multiple selves possessive of a simultaneous disparity yet retaining a distinctive crystallography as charming as diamonds harbouring a sulphuric element of pathological toxicity, when initially orientating one’s self with a well patronized casino.

Bacon’s penchant for gambling is artfully recounted in Michael Peppiat’s work Francis Bacon in the 1950’s, published by the Yale University Press. According to Peppiat, Bacon’s abiding passion was for gambling. Often, it was only through the proceeds of his manic gambling episodes, that Bacon managed to finance the continuance of his costly painterly pursuits, and circumvent the creativity constraining forces which would inevitably accompany any prolonged return to bourgeois routine occasioned by the necessity to work a regular job. Thus, it is through this Peter Pan like rubric of post war casinos in Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo, that Peppiat conducts his skillful post mortem on the creative energy ultimately brought to bare in such striking fashion in Bacon’s paintings. Amidst these aesthetic environments, capital and its assorted sophisticates reigned, and as though it were some pre menstrual chemical reactant, there exploded a most flagrant artificiality; that masquerading ’official’ fakeness that Bacon had reasoned as being most densely constructed in only the best art. For Bacon, the poetic genius evinced by the painter was analogous to that expressed by the roulette tragic. All the romantic futility of the ’art life’, that inspired confrontation with tragedy which Vincent Van Gogh had waxed so lyrically and so repetitively about to his brother Theo, was for Bacon, there, residing in a microcosm in a Monte Carlo casino ingeniously positioned so as to enable intrepid punters to bask in the sublimity of a mountainous coastal sunset whilst being besieged by a whole raft of sensual psychosomatic tensions as the wheels of fate spun with the fluidity of the ’Formula One’ motor racing tires being massacred nearby. In a free sample of the publication generously provided by Peppiat and or the Yale University Press to Amazon dot com, Peppiat recalls conversing with Bacon on the subject of his gambling habit. The passage, and verbal exchange with Bacon therein, elucidates with remarkable clarity, the cohabitation of intuition, sensuality and paradoxical gregariousness that reverberates from Bacon’s work. He was excited by the terrific highs and lows that gambling, like painting, procured.

“You can’t understand the tremendous draw gambling has unless you’ve been in that kind of position where you terribly need money and you manage to get it by gambling”, he told me once, going on to give a most memorable vignette of his experiences in Monte Carlo. I had a really marvelous win at one point I was playing on three different tables and I kept thinking I could hear the numbers called out before they came up – as if the croupiers were actually calling them out, I had very little money and was playing for small stakes. But by the time I’d finished I’d got sixteen hundred pounds, which was a very great deal for me then. And I went out and took a villa and stocked it with food and drink, and invited a lot of people to come and live there... I adore the atmosphere of Monte Carlo. It a has a kind of grandeur, even if you might call it a grandeur of futility. There’s something so beautiful about the view you get when you look out on to the bay and the curve of the hills behind. I love that kind of landscape. That, and just desert, I love that feeling of all that space, and nothing in it. It sounds ridiculous, liking a landscape from behind a window, but I actually can’t stand the countryside. After a day or two I long for streets and people, and just to be able to walk and see them. Those places like Monte Carlo fascinate me too because of all the odd people who seem to be able to exist there and nowhere else. You know, the curious kinds of doctors with their promises of rejuvenating you who at the same time could only practice in those kinds of places, and all the incredible old women who queue up in the morning for the casino to open.”

A curious and perhaps humourous aside to this passage is that Andy Warhol’s diaries, record how in the twilight of his life, Warhol would make regular trips to ’rejuvenating crystal doctors’ operating in and around Manhattan. At this point I should flag a future elaboration concerning the curious interrelationship comingling art and medical doctors and or witch doctors.

In a 1984 interview between Sylvere Lotringer and Jean Baudrillard published by Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents as a post face to Jean Baudrillard’s essay Forget Foucault, Baudrillard refers to gambling as an ’organized catastrophic apparitional form’, as ’coming from elsewhere’. This bares a certain connectivity with not only the appearance and interpretative scope often applied to Bacon’s pictures, though also to Bacon’s vignette recounting the peculiar abode of the gamblers. According to Baudrillard, ’the secret of gambling is that money has no value’. Does art then harbour the same confidence? Was the secret of Bacon’s pictures to convey the secret of gambling? Like a tortured subject in a Bacon painting, wouldn’t you too be inclined to scream (!!) on discovering that your life savings were really of no value and in fact, artificial? Would such a sham leave you reeling? In 1995, conceptual art duo, the ’K Foundation’ travelled to the Scottish island of Jura and filmed themselves incinerating a million pounds of their own money. The ashes of the fifty pound notes comprising the million pounds were later used in the manufacturing process of a single house brick. By way of contrast, in 58 BC, Julius Caesar in his Commentarii De Bello Gallico, had recounted a very different spectacle (though which also involved flames) occurring in the Scottish highlands. According to Caesar, druids (Celtic pagan priests) would construct large human effigies out of sticks (wicker men) into which a living man would be placed and then publicly burnt alive in tribute to the Gods. On conducting a comparative analysis of the work conducted by the K Foundation with that of the Celtic priests, one might lament that by 1995, art had lost its humanity and become all about money.

 

 

 

 

 

Outrageous, gifted Denis

 

 

 

 

MARTIN NEWELL | THE JOY OF ESSEX | EAST ANGLIAN DAILY TIMES | SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 201o

 

He’d lost his muse, he claimed, when he stopped painting in the 1970s. This wasn’t entirely true. It was actually an encroaching blindness, a retinal dysfunction, which he described as, “Like seeing everything through a black lace curtain”. By then, in his early 60s, it was a cruel blow for a man whose paintings were among the collections of British and international galleries, the Bank of England and Her Majesty The Queen.

That Denis Wirth-Miller was also a close friend of Francis Bacon and an associate of some of the most controversial characters of the mid twentieth century art world, was quite another thing. And when, in December 2005, he joined his partner of 70 years in one of this country’s first civil partnerships, it was a closure of a sort – although it wasn’t quite the end.

Only when he died of old age in Colchester last month – predeceased by his partner, Dicky Chopping, by two years – would the long party which had punctuated much of his extraordinary life, finally be over. He was born in Folkstone in 1915, the son of a Bavarian father and a Northumbrian mother. Because of the prevailing antiGerman sentiment at that time, his mother took the little boy north to his grandmother’s in Bamburgh.

Here, on the wild Northumbrian coast he spent much of his early childhood. Aged 16, he started work in Manchester as a runner for Tootal Broadhurst Lee, the textile empire. There, thanks his artistic talent, he was soon promoted to the position of fabric designer. Within a short time, he went to London and moved into the artist Walter Sickert’s former studio in Camden Town. Here, in the summer of 1937, he met Dicky Chopping, the man with whom he’d share the rest of his life.

Typically, for them, at least, the two men later argued about exactly where they’d first met but Denis always insisted that it had been at the Cafe Royal. There, he said, in the company of Prince Yusopov, the man who’d killed Rasputin, the two had clicked and thrown in their lot together.

During the early war years, the pair found themselves living at The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Benton End near Hadleigh, Suffolk. The place was, in reality, an artists’ commune where they were befriended by the teenage Lucien Freud.

Wirth-Miller and his friend later moved for a time to the partly-ruined Felix Hall in Kelvedon, Essex. Here they existed in bohemian poverty, sometimes digging the gardens and doing sundry other chores for the nuns of a nearby convent, who, in return, fed them.

Dicky Chopping, the son of a Colchester flour-mill owner, had roots in the area, however, and in 1944, with the aid of some money now available to him from a trust fund, purchased the Store House on Wivenhoe Quay. He and Wirth-Miller moved in shortly after the war and began converting the building back to the merchant’s house which it had once been, centuries earlier.

Meanwhile, they made their livings from painting, illustration and teaching work while creating a stunning terraced garden at the back of the property.

The things which made them legendary in their newly-adopted town of Wivenhoe, however, were their hospitality, their kindness and their drunken revels. Never mind that it was now the early 1950s. Never mind that they were a homosexual couple living in what had remained, until the mid-1960s, a rough-hewn Essex ship-building and fishing town.

They behaved at times as if it were Paris in the 1890s. Denis, always immaculately turned out – a legacy, probably, from his early days in the textile industry – presented an austerely handsome and smart figure as he walked around the town. No stranger to shock tactics, he had been known at dinner parties, to smear a burnt cork moustache on his top lip and comb his dark hair to one side in a parody of Adolf Hitler.

 Underneath an irascible hedonism, however, was a serious and soulful painter, who was able to capture the bleak and beautiful Essex flatlands on canvas quite as well any other artist. Outrageous he and his partner may have been, but when they eventually became wealthy, they were never ostentatiously so.

They had money, yet never flaunted it. For this, in the eyes of the townspeople among whom they lived, they could be forgiven practically anything. Francis Bacon, whom Wirth-Miller had known from 1940s Soho days, often visited and worked in Wivenhoe.

No one made much fuss about him, because Bacon was just another of Denis and Dicky’s strange artist friends from London. In a fame-obsessed modern culture, bedazzled by the company he once kept, it would be a mistake now for anyone to overlook the fact that Denis was actually a highly-successful painter in his own right – and one with a substantial body of work. From an isolated Northumberian childhood, he’d travelled via the Manchester textile industry, through the scuzzy demi-monde of post-war London, to settle down and paint in Essex.

Here, the ever-shifting light over the marshes snared him forever. The loving relationship with his partner Dicky Chopping – well-known for its occasional nuclear rows – survived for seven long decades. It culminated in their civil partnership at Colchester Registry Office. And, on the very first day that such a union had become legally acceptable, there they stood, each balanced either side of 90 years old.

 

Denis Wirth-Miller, Artist

        Born Folkestone

     27th November 1915.

         Died Colchester

       27th October 2010

 

 

 

         

   ARTISTS: Denis Wirth-Miller with Francis Bacon, who often visited Wivenhoe

 

 

 

 

Register Obituaries

 

 

Denis Wirth-Miller

 

 

 

Landscape painter who was inspired by East Anglia

and enjoyed a fruitful friendship with Francis Bacon

 

 

OBITUARIES  |  THE TIMES  |  SATURDAY NOVEMBER 13 2010

 

Denis Wirth-Miller was a prolific and much sought-after painter of landscapes. He exhibited regularly with the Redfern Gallery, the Beaux Arts and the Lefevre in the 1950s and 1960s, and his expressive style and meticulous draughtsmanship were much admired by his fans.

 

He was also noted, at least earlier in his career, for his studies of dogs in movement. These seemed to owe something to the atmosphere of the paintings of Francis Bacon, whom he had met in the 1940s and who was a powerful influence, both personally and artistically.

 

The most important relationship of his life was that with his long-term partner Richard Chopping, artist, writer and creator of some of the most celebrated dust jackets for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, beginning with From Russia With Love in 1957. The pair met in 1937 and subsequently lived together at the Store House in Wivenhoe, on the River Colne in Essex, until Chopping’s death in 2008.

 

Denis Wirth-Miller was born Denis Wurtmüller in Folkestone in 1915, the son of a German father and English mother. The surname was anglicised to Wirth-Miller as a result of hostility to the family experienced from local people on the South Coast — a not uncommon experience in the jingoistic atmosphere of the early years of the Great War.

 

Wirth-Miller had no formal training, but by the 1930s he was working as a commercial artist in London. The few examples of his early work bear little resemblance to his later style, being graphic rather than painterly and with a surrealist flavour. It was in 1937 that he met Chopping at a party. It was a coup de foudre for both men. In the early 1940s they found themselves at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, a community/learning environment which had been established by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines in Dedham, Essex, the heart of Constable country. Lucian Freud had been among the school’s earliest students, joining at 17 in 1939.

By the time Wirth-Miller and Chopping joined the community it had relocated to Benton End, a rambling 16th-century house with gardens, on the outskirts of Hadleigh in Suffolk.

As painters, both men were influenced by the Benton End environment, Chopping becoming a botanical and zoological painter under the influence of the plantsman Morris, while Wirth-Miller’s dedication to landscape was nurtured by the Suffolk terrain. They earned their keep by helping in the kitchen.

About this time Wirth-Miller forged the other key relationship in his life, with Bacon, whom he met in Soho in the 1940s. A long and tempestuous friendship was established, with holidays in France and Spain, and Bacon working alongside Wirth-Miller in the studio at the Store House where, it is said that they interchanged brush strokes on each others’ paintings. Both had a fascination with the reedy grass of riversides and the image of the running dog. Bacon valued his friendship with Chopping and Wirth-Miller, and bought a small house in Wivenhoe, which he eventually gave to them.

The 1950s and 1960s were the apogee in terms of Wirth-Miller’s output of paintings. His work was much sought after, being bought by the young Queen Elizabeth and the interior designer David Hicks, who liked to make sure that his clients had a Wirth-Miller to complete the decor. He continued painting until the early 1970s. At that time he said that “his muse had left him”.

Chopping was at the end of his life to repudiate his association with Bond, declaring in 2003, “Quite honestly I’m sick of it.” He felt he had never really enjoyed the financial rewards of his labours, but not long before his death gained some fresh recognition when the Post Office issued stamps commemorating the Fleming book covers.

Wirth-Miller and Chopping lived together for 71 years and entered into a civil partnership in 2005.

Denis Wirth-Miller, painter, was born on November 27, 1915. He died on October 27, 2010, aged 94

 

 

      

            Wirth-Miller, left, and Chopping, right, with Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

John Deakin’s Gods and Monsters invade

Pallant House in Chichester

 

 

 

 

BY KIRSTIE BREWER  |  PHOTOGRAPHY & FILM  |  CULTURE 24  |  WEDNESDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2010

 


Pallant House’s latest exhibition resurrects a man who, until recently, has been missing from photographic history. The man in question is Vogue photographer John Deakin: perhaps the ultimate bohemian bad boy of the 1950s Soho art scene. 

The exhibition pairs iconic portraits of British artists by Deakin with major paintings by each artist, providing a unique window into the post-war British art scene and the intimate circle of artists he was part of.

“Any exhibition of John Deakin’s photography is going to be a modest one,” explains curator Robin Muir. 

“Deakin didn’t want to be a photographer – he longed to be a painter like his friends – but fortunately for us and rather unfortunately for him, he didn’t make a very good one.” 

With friends like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, perhaps it is little wonder Deakin felt slightly perturbed. Despite recognition for his photographs, he fiercely resisted his talent, treating success with mistrust and greeting failure with indifference. 

A notorious drunk, Deakin never took his work seriously and never expected to make any money from it. In fact, he might well have found more relish in being the only staff photographer in the magazine’s history to be hired and fired twice by the same admiring but exasperated editor.       

The exhibition is drawn largely from a portfolio commissioned by Vogue in 1951 and 1952 of 12 contemporary artists, along with other portraits of painters and sculptors Deakin made for the magazine at various points throughout his brief career.  

Artists and subjects featured in the show include heavyweights like Barbara Hepworth, Michael Andrews, Eduardo Paolozzi and John Piper, as well as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. 
  
In their ragged state, the photographs are a refreshing change to the pristine prints so often seen in exhibitions. Like so much of Deakin’s practice, they are lucky to have survived him. 

They make no concessions to vanity and were described by friend Daniel Farson as “prison mugshots taken by a real artist”. What is most striking is their rawness and lack of ‘style’- rather ironic 
for a Vogue photographer.  

Loved or loathed, god or monster, Deakin’s influence on British art and the mythology of Soho in the 1950s can’t be overlooked. The photographs he made for his closest friend, Francis Bacon, are credited as being vital to the artist’s interpretation of the human form. 

“Of all these ‘sacred monsters’, Deakin may have behaved the worst – the Woolworth’s heiress, Barbara Hutton, called him the ‘second nastiest little man I ever met,’”says Muir

“But to his peers he was a true original, his professionalism behind the lens, for the most part, unimpeachable.”

I wonder what the man himself would have made of this bittersweet exhibition.

Brighton Photo Biennial 2010: Gods and Monsters: John Deakin’s Portraits of British Artists, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until  January 10 2011

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                         

                                                                                                 Francis Bacon   Vogue  1952  John Deakin 

 

 

 

 

 

Pop Goes the Art Market

 

 

 

By KELLY CROW  |  THE WALL STREET JOURNAL  |  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2010

 

Never underestimate the power of suggestion: On Tuesday, Sotheby’s hired waiters with silver trays to offer up tiny glass bottles of soda pop to collectors arriving for its major evening sale of contemporary art. Half an hour later, eight bidders fought over the sale’s priciest offering - Andy Warhol’s 1962 soda bottle, Coca-Cola [4] [Large Coca-Cola]. A telephone bidder won it for $35.3 million, over its $25 million high estimate.

But the sale relied heavily on faraway collectors to pick up its priciest pieces, including examples by boom-era favourites Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon. An Asian telephone bidder paid $22.4 million for a lemony, untitled Rothko from 1955 that was being sold by architect Graham Gund. Sotheby’s London-based expert Oliver Barker also fielded the $14 million winning telephone bid for Bacon’s orange-and-blue Figure in Movement, which was priced to sell for up to $10 million with fees. (Sale prices include the auction house’s commission, which estimate prices omit.)

 

 

 

 

Eager Collectors Snap Up Pop Art at Sotheby’s Auction

 

 

 

By CAROL VOGEL   |   THE NEW YORK TIMES   |   TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2010

 

It was to have been Warhol’s night. Waiters in black served Coca-Cola in old-fashioned green-glass bottles to the throngs of collectors and dealers who packed Sotheby’s salesroom on Tuesday night, an homage to a 1962 Coke bottle painting by the artist that was on offer.

There has been far less work by Francis Bacon to come on the market this season than in years past, but Figure in Movement, a 1985 painting of one of the artist’s anguished figures, this one wearing knee pads and boxed in by sky-blue bars against a black background, was a present from Bacon to his doctor, Paul Brass, who had decided it was time to sell and was watching the sale from a skybox. Four people fought over the painting, which was estimated to bring $7 million to $10 million, and sold for $14 million.

 

 

 

 

  Sotheby’s

 

  CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION

 

 

    SESSION 1  |  09 NOVEMBER 2010  |  7:00 PM EST  |  NEW YORK

 

LOT NO. 31

 

FRANCIS BACON

FIGURE IN MOVEMENT

 

 

ESTIMATE

 

$7,000,00 - 10,000,000

 

 

LOT SOLD 

 

Hammer Price with Buyer’s Premium:  14,082,500 USD

 

 

PROVENANCE

 

A gift from the artist to the present owner in 1985

 

 

EXHIBITED

 

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., Francis Bacon: Paintings, May - July 1985, cat. no. 17, p. 39, illustrated in colour

Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, Current Affairs: British Painting and Sculpture in the 1980s, March 1987, cat. no. 2, illustrated in colour

Moscow, Maison Centrale Des Artistes, Nouvelle Galerie Tretyakov, Francis Bacon, September - November 1988, cat. no. 17, p. 61, illustrated in colour (organized by the British Council)

Glasgow, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow’s Great British Art Exhibition, March - May 1990, p. 37, illustrated in colour

Paris, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Francis Bacon, June - October 1996, cat. no. 81, p. 217, illustrated in colour

London, Hayward Gallery, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, February - April 1998, cat. no. 22, n.p., illustrated in colour

The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Francis Bacon, January - May 2001, p. 111, illustrated in colour

London, Tate Britain; Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Francis Bacon, September 2008 - August 2009, p. 243, illustrated in colour

London, Tate Gallery, 2000 - 2010 (extended loan)

 

 

LITERATURE

 

Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Modern Masters: Francis Bacon, New York, London and Paris, 1986, no. 102, p. 107, illustrated and illustrated in colour on the back cover

Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Paris, 1987, no. 149, n.p., illustrated in colour

 

CATALOGUE NOTE

 

In the catalogue to the spectacular retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1985, the museum’s renowned director Alan Bowness described the art of Francis Bacon thus: "His own work sets the standard for our time, for he is surely the greatest living painter; no artist in our century has presented the human predicament with such insight and feeling....for Bacon, the virtues of truth and honesty transcend the tasteful. They give to his paintings a terrible beauty that has placed them among the most memorable images in the entire history of art" (Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1985, p. 7). Executed in this very year,Figure in Movement represents physical testament to this acclamation. Exhibiting the most striking composition, a magnificent array of brushwork and a supremely arresting palette, this is a formidable portrayal of the human animal that epitomises the full gamut of Bacon’s artistic genius. Indeed, the inimitable traits of his method, specifically the intense combination of brilliant cadmium orange with depthless black, directly compare with the masterpieces Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 (Tate Britain, London) and Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York).

 

Gifted by the artist to his physician Dr. Paul Brass, who followed his father Dr. Stanley Brass as Bacon’s personal doctor and with whom Bacon maintained a close bond until his death in 1992, Figure in Movement possesses an exceptional provenance. The terms of its ownership vividly reflect its importance to Bacon: not only was Dr. Brass a most trusted friend, but when he was first offered a choice of painting and initially suggested another work, the artist instead recommended Figure in Movement, assuring his doctor that it was a superior painting. Eminently regarded through its distinguished exhibition history in major shows in Moscow, Paris, London and The Hague, as well as its long-term loan to the Tate; this marks the historic occasion of its first appearance to market.

 

Foremost among Bacon’s innermost clique in 1985 was John Edwards, a handsome East-Ender and the artist’s closest companion at this time. Edwards wrote, "it was a perfect relationship. I was never Francis’ lover, but I loved him as the best friend a man could have. He was fond of me like a son" (Exh. Cat., New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Francis Bacon, 1998, p. 7) and Dr. Brass has also stated: "I never heard Francis say a bad word about John. He said to me...’I think of John like a son. He’s a son to me really’" (interviewed for Bacon’s Arena, directed by Adam Low, produced by Anthony Wall, BBC Arena and The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2005). The parity between Edwards and the present physiognomy is clear: the long jaw-line, the geometries of the eye, nose and mouth and the jet-black hairline. However, Bacon never painted his friend from life and the naked torso of this body is adapted from photos of other models, notably the infamous shots of George Dyer in his underwear taken 20 years earlier. Thus, Figure in Movement conflates two of the most important figures in the artist’s life. Significantly, Bacon inserts this being, an amalgamation of that which he held most dear, onto an exposed dais that is a crucible of existential isolation: the natural environment of his extraordinary artistic and philosophical innovation.

 

While the figure twists and writhes as if to struggle free of the canvas, it is contained within indications of rigid cricket pads. The sport was a subject of fascination for the artist’s later career. A photograph of source material littering his studio floor reveals the intriguing arrangement of a copy of Physique Pictorial lying on top of England cricketer David Gower’s book With Time to Spare, so that the legs of a brooding male bodybuilder join up with the cricket pads of a batsman underneath. This fusion of diametrically opposed images is archetypal of Bacon’s ability to meld starkly eclectic themes to portray the chaos of human existence, and provides apt parallel with Figure in Movement. Bacon draws on his knowledge of art historical precedent, such as the incomparable figural studies of Michelangelo. He accelerates the effects of light and shadow, plunging form in and out of darkness so that several passages of light flow in simultaneous chorus. Chiaroscuro rhythms of anatomic gesture negotiate between material and void, while the figure’s left leg dissolves in the black ether of the platform.

 

More than any other artist of the 20th Century, Bacon held a mirror to the nature of the Human Condition, and Figure in Movement provides the perfect reflection of what he saw. He was fascinated by the postwar works of the French existentialists Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir, and their themes of alienation, imprisonment and the absurd. The most important actors of Bacon’s canon, typified by this figure, crystallise this entire philosophical enquiry, as they let go of the sureties of the past and stand on the threshold of an unknowable future.

 

An interview between Sotheby’s Michael Macaulay and Martin Harrison, editor of the Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné in preparation for publication.

 

MM: Could you share your opinion of Bacon’s late work of the 1980s and explain how Figure in Movement from 1985 fits into this important period?

 

MH: Bacon’s project in the 1980s can be summed up as refining to their essence the themes that preoccupied him most of his career – the human body, gesture and movement. In eliminating superfluous detail, he could be described as a figurative minimalist. Figure in Movement is a quintessential exemplar of this process. It is a compelling variation of a concept he had first essayed in 1982, in which a naked form wearing cricket pads was raised on a dais. In the 1982 paintings, the ’figure’ is an abstracted semi-torso, as in the panel Study from the Human Body, 1982–84, from the diptych in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D. C. and in Study of the Human Body, 1982 (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). Evidently, in Figure in Movement, 1985, Bacon set himself the challenge of representing a more complete human body.

 

MM: How does Bacon’s symbolic content, in this case the gladiatorial inference of the inclusion of the cricket pads, relate to the isolation of his figures?

 

MH: The reference to cricket is deliberately ambiguous: the figure, isolated in an artificial arena, is simultaneously vulnerable and aggressive. Bacon’s figures are radically decontextualised into a  kind of existential vacuum: cricket is an outdoor sport, but Bacon’s visual field is neither exterior nor interior. Figure in Movement is one of a select group of works made in the last decade of his life that feature a dominant, bright cadmium orange ground, Bacon’s favourite colour. In its positive and vibrant aspects it intensifies the confinement of the abject yet heroic figures.     

 

MM: The cricket pads invoke Bacon’s appropriation of found imagery as cues for composition. How had the artist’s treatment of found imagery altered by this stage in his career?

 

MH: Bacon collected images of cricketers in the 1980s, and four books on cricket that remained in his Reece Mews studio at the time of his death are now in the collection of Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane: Patrick Eagar and John Arlott, An Eye for Cricket, (1979); David Gower and Alan Lee, With Time to Spare (1980); Mike Brearley, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Story of the England – Australia Series 1981, (1982); Patrick Eagar and Graeme Wright, Test Decade 1972–1982 (1982). He was familiar with cricket through his relationship with Eric Hall from the 1930s to the 1950s; Hall was an aficionado of the sport and on intimate terms with many of the leading players. Bacon greatly admired David Gower, one of England’s leading batsmen renowned for his good looks, and David Sylvester identified Gower as a specific spur for the paintings. [Interviews, p. 180] However, even in the last painting to reference cricket, the central panel of Triptych 1987, the head is unequivocally that of John Edwards whose representations were based on photographs: therefore, Bacon’s modus operandi in terms of appropriated imagery remained the same as it had since the 1940s, when he first adapted reproductions of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X and Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion.

 

MM: This work was executed seven years before Bacon’s death. Do you perceive a growing sense of his own mortality, and what does Figure in Movement say about the artist’s self-perception in this final period?

 

MH: Crucial to Bacon’s anti-narrative strategy, he located the elements of Figure in Movement in a zone of ambiguity. The protagonist is non-specific, adopting neither an offensive or defensive attitude. The figure also defies spatial logic, occupying an abstract field both behind and in front of the pale blue and black backdrop. The padded left leg dissolves into a smoky shadow on the floor of the elevated dais, the dissociated ’field of play’ that acts as a cipher for the confrontation between batsman and bowler on the cricket field. It is too facile to relate the dissolving of forms to his consciousness of mortality, although the black backdrops – opaque voids that resemble tombstones – tend to support such an interpretation, as would the collapsing of the head into the negative space.

 

This intense and deceptively simple painting transforms the role of the viewer from a passive to an active state: Bacon’s fragmented forms and anatomical diversions – the tilt of the body and the violent diagonal sweep of the sketchy arms and hand – insist on a creative interaction. Our gaze is drawn through the converging perspective of the wicket/pedestal and we become both observer and participant.

 

 

 

 

 

ART UNCOVERED: THE PUBLIC’S ARTWORK DENIED AN AUDIENCE

 

 

IN THE current tough climate of arts cuts, Jane Clinton reports on the treasures that are costing taxpayers

thousands of pounds to store but which remain hidden from view for much of the time.

 

 

By Jane Clinton | Sunday Express | Sunday November 7, 2010

 

 

THEY are the art treasures that are often away from view and include works by Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst. 

 

News that the Arts Council England (ACE) has two thirds  of its 7,500-strong collection in storage has drawn criticism from some quarters but it has hit back insisting theirs is the hardest-working collection in the country. 

 

“We are like a gallery without walls,” says a spokeswoman. “We have a third of our collection on show whereas some museums have less than 10 per cent of theirs on display.”

 

Among those not on loan are Francis Bacon’s Head VI, 1949, Lucian Freud’s Girl In A Green Dress, 1954 and Damien Hirst’s He Tried To Internalise Everything, 1992-1994.

 

The Arts Council England is facing budget cuts of £100million and last week announced it will have to cut funding for more than 100 organisations by 2015.

 

It has also launched a new process whereby organisations will have to reapply for their grants. Despite the cuts, however, it insists the loans collection will not be sold off and is not under threat. “Selling off the collection would mean these world-class works would be lost to the British people for ever,” says Arts CouncilEngland chief executive Alan Davey.

 

“I’ve not heard anyone suggesting that we should sell off any of our other great national collections to pay off the national debt.

 

“A modest amount is invested on behalf of the public, supporting artists at the very beginning of their careers, many of whom have gone on to become key figures in the history of art. Francis Bacon’s Head VI was bought for £60 in 1952 and is now worth an estimated £12million. This means that these important works, a world-class collection of post-war British art, belong to, and can be seen by, the British people for ever.”

 

There are, however, plans to review the amount spent on new acquisitions. The Arts Council England collection is funded through its development fund, the budget of which has been cut by 64 per cent. “We are now evaluating priority projects which are supported from our development fund and hope to be in a position to confirm some funding soon,” adds a spokeswoman.

 

However, leading art critic Brian Sewell believes the Arts Council should sell off the collection to free up funds and save on the expense of storage and conservation. “I see no purpose in the collection at all,” he says. “The Arts Council is in many ways just duplicating what is done by the Tate and other collectors and collecting bodies. There is a great mass of material being accumulated by the museums and galleries that no one ever sees and the Arts Council simply joined in. 

 

It has very little out on loan. The collection should be spread into galleries. The Tate Gallery, as the heritage body in contemporary art, should be encouraged to go through the collection and select what it doesn’t have. Then that should automatically pass to the Tate. “The rest of it could easily be sold and even if it doesn’t make a substantial amount of money you will immediately save the costs of storage, conservation, maintenance security and curatorial staff. It would be a neat solution to the budget cuts.”

 

 

 

 

Kundera, unmoved, turns the canon on itself

 

 

MILAN Kundera is a great essayist, and yet his best essays are reserved for his fiction.

 

Encounter: Essays By Milan Kundera Faber & Faber, 178pp, $24.95

 

 

GEORDIE WILLIAMSON  |  THE AUSTRALIAN  |  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2010 

 

It is in the novel, that zone of total imaginative freedom, where the Czech author’s genius for melding pure idea to character and narrative is most apparent.

Taking in the four volumes of essays made available in English since The Art of the Novel in 1986, we might say Kundera’s nonfiction operates as a series of retrospective explanations and genealogical justifications for the louche, playful and incorrigibly metaphysical content of his imaginative work.

Nonetheless, there is much that is fresh here, not least because the writer’s attention is thrown outward, towards other creative figures (hence the title). The collection opens, for example, with an essay on Francis Bacon that aims straight at the heart of that magnificent and brutal artist’s program:

 

Bacon’s portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? . . . Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?

What impresses Kundera about Bacon is not only his quest for an originality that does not sever modernism from earlier painterly traditions, but also his willingness to search, "in a time when the ’self’ has everywhere begun to take cover", for (in Bacon’s words) "that treasure, that gold nugget, that hidden diamond" that is "the face of the self".

And so Bacon serves as a template for what the creative figure should possess: "a clear-sighted, sorrowing, thoughtful gaze trying to penetrate to the essential". writing unique: "

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

An encounter on familiar turf

 

 

Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera revisits favourite

themes in collection of unrelated essays

 

 

By Jose Teodoro  |  Edmonton Journal  |  Sunday, October 24, 2010

 

 

 

In The Painter’s Brutal Gesture: On Francis Bacon, the piece that opens Encounter, Milan Kundera evokes that singular horror that characterizes Bacon’s painting by aligning its effect on him to a personal experience.

 

He recalls meeting with a woman in a Prague suburb in 1972. The woman had been mercilessly interrogated by police about Kundera only days before, and remained so traumatized by the incident that she had yet to recover control of her bowels and had to repeatedly adjourn to the toilet. Like "a great knife," Kundera writes, "fear had laid her open. She was gaping wide before me like the split carcass of a heifer hanging from a meat hook."

 

Kundera was suddenly seized by the desire to rape her, a desire "uncalled for and unconscionable" - and, I hasten to note, not acted upon - yet nonetheless real. This desire is summoned back into memory when Kundera surveys Bacon’s triptych of portraits of Henrietta Moraes, in which "the painter’s gaze comes down on the face like a brutal hand trying to seize hold of her essence."

 

By confessing to such unsavoury urges, Kundera illuminates Bacon’s portraits as "an interrogation of the limits of the self."

 

Jose Teodoro is a former Edmonton playwright now based in Toronto.

 


 Encounter Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher, HarperCollins 178 pp, $26.99 

 

 

 

 

 

 

£94 million of art sold at Frieze auctions

 

 

 

Last week’s auctions fetched more than double the amount achieved last year.

 

 

BY COLIN GLEADELL   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   MONDAY 18 OCTOBER 2010

 

No one, it seems, was bold enough to bid at Christie’s fund-raiser for the Royal College of Art for the chance to have their portrait painted by Jake and Dinos Chapman.

Nor was anyone prepared to bid on a scrappy painting of a dog by Francis Bacon that the artist chucked in a skip.

The painting was rescued by an electrician, Mac Robertson, who sold it at an auction in Surrey three years ago, when it fetched £30,000 from a New York gallery against a £1,000 estimate.

Last week it was presented by Christie’s with a £120,000 estimate, but with no mention of its history in the catalogue.

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                           

                                                                   Study for a Dog  Francis Bacon

 

 

 

Howzat? Francis Bacon’s cricketing

portrait to fetch £6m

 

 

A Francis Bacon portrait which the artist gave as a gift to his doctor

 is expected to fetch over £6 million at auction.

 

 

 

By Anita Singh, Arts Correspondent, The Daily Telegraph, Tuesday, 12 October 2010

 

 

 

The 1985 painting, Figure In Movement, is being sold by Dr Paul Brass, the artist’s friend and personal physician.

 

 It depicts a figure wearing cricketer’s kneepads – Bacon had a lifelong passion for the sport.

 

Bacon, who died in 1992, was the perfect patient, Dr Brass said. "He was always 15 minutes early for every appointment."

 

The portrait has been on loan to Tate Britain for the past decade and will be sold at Sotheby’s in New York on November 9.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon painting of cricketer

to be auctioned in New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure in Movement, a gift to the artist’s friend and GP,

expected to fetch at least £4m in Sotheby’s sale

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MARK BROWN  |  ARTS CORRESPONDENT  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  MONDAY 11 OCTOBER 2010   

 

 

 

A Francis Bacon painting of a tortured cricketer twisting and writhing is to be sold at auction after hanging in Tate Britain for much of the last decade, Sotheby’s announced today.

 

The painting is being sold by Bacon’s friend and personal doctor, Paul Brass, who was given the portrait in 1985, the year it was completed.

After loaning it to the Tate, Brass has decided to sell and an estimate of $7m-$10m (£4.4m-£6.3m) has been placed on it ahead of the auction in New York on 9 November.

Figure in Movement, featuring a typically agonised figure, common in Bacon’s work, this time in cricket pads and against a black and bright orange background with blue cage-like struts, also featured in the major 2008 Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain, which toured New York and Madrid.

Brass took over the role of being Bacon’s personal physician from his father, Dr Stanley Brass, and was offered a choice between two paintings – the cricketer and one of a jet of water.

In an interview with the New York Times, Brass said: "I was tempted to opt for the jet of water, but when I told that to Francis, he said no, that painting happened by mistake when he spilled white paint on the canvas. He told me, ’If I were you, I would choose the cricketer’."

Bacon died in 1992 and his works attract some of the biggest prices for any 20th century artist although no one expects the painting to get anywhere near the record, set in 2008 when Bacon’s Triptych 1976 was bought by Roman Abramovich for $86m, reportedly to hang on the walls of his London home.

There have been disagreements about what is going on in Figure In Movement and who it is based on. The figure seems to resemble John Edwards, the man Bacon found solace in after the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971, but there have also been suggestions Bacon based it on David Gower, captain of the England cricket team in the mid-1980s.

 

 

 

   

 

A Bacon Cricketer With a Back Story

 

 

 

 

By CAROL VOGEL   |   THE NEW YORK TIMES   |   FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2010  

 

The Francis Bacon that Dr. Paul Brass knew was altogether different from the raucous, hard-drinking artist whose canvases depict distorted figures screaming to be freed from their frames.

Dr. Brass, an internist, knew Bacon as a friend and as a patient of his father’s. “The first time I met him I must have been 16,” Dr. Brass recalled, sipping tea in a conference room at Sotheby’s in London recently. He added later, “I would occasionally treat him when my father was on holiday.”

When the senior Dr. Brass retired, his son took over the practice. “I never liked to send fees” — that is, bills — “to friends and family,” he said. “And one day I received a letter from Francis saying that if I didn’t send him a bill for the last two years he would have to find another doctor.”

Not only did Bacon, who died in 1992, pay by “return post,” as Dr. Brass put it, but he also “was always 15 minutes early for every appointment.”

Over the years, as their friendship grew, Dr. Brass would make a point of going to Bacon’s exhibitions. At a show at the Marlborough Gallery in London, Valerie Beston, a director of the gallery at the time, told Dr. Brass that Bacon wanted to give him a painting and that he was to choose from two in the show: one of a jet of water, the other a figure of a cricketer.

“I was tempted to opt for the jet of water, but when I told that to Francis, he said no, that painting happened by mistake when he spilled white paint on the canvas,” Dr. Brass said. “He told me, ‘If I were you, I would choose the cricketer.’ ”

So he did. But Dr. Brass has decided to sell this 1985 painting, Figure in Movement, which features one of Bacon’s anguished figures, this one wearing knee pads and boxed against a black background within a sky-blue frame that is much like a cage. It will go on the block on Nov. 9 at Sotheby’s  in New York, where it is expected to bring $7 million to $10 million.

For the past decade the painting has been on loan to Tate Britain. It has also been included in many major Bacon exhibitions, most recently a retrospective at the Tate that travelled to the Prado in Madrid and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year.

Cricket fascinated Bacon, and beginning in the 1950s he would attend matches. Over the years the subject crept into several of his paintings. In Figure in Movement, however, the man’s jaw line, eyes, nose, mouth and hair are unmistakably those of John Edwards, Bacon’s closest companion from the mid-1970s until his death.

But the body was adapted from 20-year-old photographs of George Dyer in his underwear. Mr. Dyer was Bacon’s companion until Mr. Dyer committed suicide in 1971. “Dyer and Edwards were both patients,” Dr. Brass noted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Francis Bacon Painting Shown Alongside Artist’s Favourite Work

 

 

    Art Daily | Tuesday, September 28, 2010

 

 

 

The Estate of Francis Bacon has generously placed an important painting by the artist on loan to The Courtauld Gallery. Untitled (Crouching Figures), c.1952, went on display from yesterday and will initially be presented alongside Honoré Daumier’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, c.1870, in recognition of Bacon’s admiration for Daumier’s masterpiece. 

When James Thrall Soby, curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, was researching his book on Francis Bacon he contacted Harry Fischer, director of Marlborough Fine Art, the artist’s dealer. Fischer was able to give him some fresh insight into Bacon’s artistic taste and favourite works, noting: “He considers Daumier’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and El Greco’s View of Toledo to be amongst the greatest paintings in the world...”. Bacon knew Daumier’s masterpiece from his visits to The Courtauld Gallery, where it forms part of the Gallery’s celebrated collection of 19th century French paintings. 

Untitled (Crouching Figures) is one of Bacon’s most important works from the early 1950s, a period when he was emerging as the leading British painter of his generation. It is one of a group of works in which nude figures are paired in sexually charged homoerotic compositions. In the post-war world of the 1950s, Bacon’s revelation through his paintings of the potentially destructive potential of human desire resonated particularly strongly. 

Miguel de Cervantes’s great 17th century novel tells the story of the farcical Don Quixote who sets out on a series of illusory chivalrous quests, mounted on his emaciated horse Rocinante and accompanied by the witness squire Sancho Panza. Bacon scholar Martin Harrison, who first recognised the importance of Fischer’s correspondence with Soby, has written of Daumier’s Don Quixote: “To gaze at this great painting is comparable to experiencing a slightly scaled-down Bacon of the 1950s”, pointing out how the subdued palette and loose brushwork of Daumier’s painting is echoed in Bacon’s work. Bacon may have also have felt an affinity for Daumier’s bleak representation of the tragicomic figures from Cervantes’s novel.

 

 

   

                     Untitled (Crouching Figures), c.1952 Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Deakin: a cruel heart and unsparing eye

 

 

 

 

 

The acid- tongued photographer hated his medium but his portraits tell a stark truth

that set a complete human being before us

 

 

 

EXHIBITIONS   |   THE TIMES   |   FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2010

 

A vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom.” That was George Melly’s opinion of the photographer John Deakin. And yet this “wizened little acned jockey of a man” (as another acquaintance, Jeffrey Barnard, described him) became, during the Fifties, one of the finest photographers to be employed by the fashionistas at Vogue.

 

It was, to be frank, an improbable liaison, and Deakin enjoyed the unusual distinction of being the only photographer to be hired and then fired by the same editorial team twice. He had the alcoholic’s trick of constantly mislaying valuable pieces from his loaned equipment. And it didn’t much help that he had always wanted to be a painter and considered photography an inferior art form.

 

Yet to look at his images is to be struck by their stark integrity, by the relentless acuity of his unsparing eye. Next week Pallant House opens Gods and Monsters, an exhibition that presents Deakin at his most iconic. Setting a dozen of his photographs of postwar British artists alongside paintings by each sitter, it sets him back at the heart of the bohemian circles in which he once belonged: a cantankerous maverick in the corner of the Colony in Soho, as fiercely witty as he was wilfully cruel.

 

Deakin, born in 1912 in Bedington, near Liverpool, was a misfit who escaped his northern hometown as quickly as he could, travelling for a while before eventually fetching up in London, where, finding a rich sugar-daddy in the form of a millionaire American art collector to keep him in luxury, he decided to embark upon a painter’s career. But although his naive talent did not go unnoticed, he seemed, as Dan Farson, the famous Soho biographer was to put it, more fearful of success than he was of failure and, with that compulsively self-destructive streak that drove him always to drag down not just himself but those who surrounded him, he gave up on painting and, after a few further efforts at first collage and then sculpture, turned to the camera instead.

 

His first pictures, taken in Paris at the end of the 1930s, were mostly street scenes. They captured the down-at-heel glamour that the guide books forget. And though shortly afterwards he found work as a war photographer, when peace was declared, these were the pictures that he made his calling card. They caught the attention of Audrey Withers, the editor of British Vogue.

 

Deakin by then badly needed the work. In the wake of a scandal involving a Venetian gondolier, his erstwhile lover had committed suicide. And from 1948 to 1949 and then, again, from 1951 until 1954 he worked under contract for the fashionable glossy. It was not that he was anything more than a mediocre fashion photographer. A diminutive figure with pock-marked skin, stained clothes and a Mickey Mouse grin that split to reveal a row of yellowing teeth and a tongue the colour of an aubergine, he was incapable, Withers declared, “of taking a good picture of a beautiful young woman”.

 

And yet he had remarkable talents as a portraitist. Not that he seemed to care. Reluctantly winkled out of the drinking dens of Soho for a work appointment, he would stumble off to the Vogue studios in Shaftesbury Avenue to stick his subjects in front of a black velvet backcloth and shoot them full face and profile like prison mug shots before returning as quickly as he could to the French House pub.

 

It hardly sounds promising. And yet his prints were possessed of an extraordinary power. “I was stunned by their excitement,” Farson declared after first seeing them. Their harsh contrasts, exposing every pore and blemish, endowed them with a raking intensity beside which the flatteries of Deakin’s Vogue competitor Cecil Beaton start to look sycophantic. “Being fatally drawn to the human race, what I want to do is to make a revelation about it. So my sitters turn into my victims,” Deakin said. And yet, even as his subjects fall prey to his scrutiny, they take on an aura of grandeur, a peculiar gravitas that arises perhaps from the fact that he always uses a Rolleiflex camera, a box which the photographer holds at chest height. Since Deakin was little more than five feet tall, he was always shooting his subjects from a slightly upward-looking angle.

 

His portraits of the artists with whom he shared a particular intimacy — of Francis Bacon stripped to the waist between a cloven carcass of beef, of Lucian Freud, “a strange fox-like person” who liked “creating small fusses”, of Robert Colquhoun, caught in an uncharacteristically gentle pose with his lover Robert MacBryde leaning against him — have become the defining images of a great era of British art. Deakin may have appeared utterly indifferent to his job, Farson said, but he was at the same time furiously proud of his work.

 

Giving up photography altogether in the Sixties, Deakin survived on sales of old works and handouts from Bacon, who employed him to take the images that he used in his painting. On one notorious occasion he hawked the nude photographs of Bacon’s model Henrietta Moraes to lustful sailors on leave and drinking in the bars of Soho. Notoriously mean, Deakin would scrounge drinks from anyone prepared to pay, though he never tempered his vituperative tongue.

 

Deakin died in 1972, alone in a Brighton hotel, where he had gone to recuperate from a lung cancer operation. He was 60 and unknown as a photographer. And yet, almost by a miracle, several of the images survived, carelessly crumpled and torn, in corners of the dingy basement where he had lived. Rescued from the obscurity to which their taker had been consigned, they survived, said the critic John Russell much later, to remind us of the talents of a “lost photographer who often rivalled Bacon in his ability to make a likeness in which truth came wrapped and unpackaged”, to set a complete human being before us, without additives.

 

Gods & Monsters: John Deakin’s Portraits of British Artists is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, West Sussex, Oct 2 to Jan 10

 

 

 

     

 

                            Isabel Rawsthorne, Looking into a Window in Soho, 1964, by John Deakin

 

 

 

 

   


 Brian Clarke: rock star of stained glass

 

 

Paul McCartney and David Bailey are fans and friends; Francis Bacon chose him to look after his estate;

and later this month the Pope will bless his work.

 

Meet Brian Clarke, the world’s grooviest stained-glass artist.

 

 

 

By DAVID JENKINS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  WEDNESDAY 8 SEPTEMBER 2010

 

There’s a stained-glass window in one corner of the former ballroom that occupies the first floor of Brian Clarke’s west London house, and it’s a marvel of smoky blues, glowing reds and trenchant whites.

It’s by Clarke and, as the 57 year-old talks about it, his rich Lancashire accent throbbing with enthusiasm, he sings a hymn to the glory of light and of stained glass as a medium: how the blue becomes transparent, the red goes on fire and the white becomes incandescent at 6pm each day, just 30 summer days a year. It’s how ‘stained glass is always kinetic’ that he adores, the ‘liquid element’ of glass that he loves, the ‘transillumination’ he reveres.

Beneath the glass is an ice-blue, geometric, double-sided sofa designed for him by his old friend Zaha Hadid to complement the window, a window she calls ‘fluid and stunning’; on the other walls are a huge lead on sheet lead representation of his even older friend Paul McCartney’s hands – ‘I was drawing his face for a record cover or something and he started playing air guitar, and I drew that, so it’s a sort of portrait of Paul’; a Warhol of Jackie Kennedy – ‘you felt, when you were with Andy, that you were with an artist. He was Narcissus looking into the pool and telling us our reflection was all right’; and a Francis Bacon – ‘I said to Francis once: “You know Francis, some of the things you’re doing could translate into stained glass in a tremendously interesting way, and you’d have the benefit of transmitted colour rather than reflected colour. Have you ever thought of doing any stained glass?” And Francis said [Clarke adopts a camp and bitchy voice]: “No, dear – and I’ve not done any macramé either.”’

Clarke honks with laughter, his broad, large-eared face creased with amusement and shakes his head. ‘He was such a b-----d.’ (Clarke is chairman of the Bacon Estate; so, he says, ‘a lot of people in the art world are, you know, very, very keen to be my friend’).

For all his famous friends and success as a painter, it’s for his stained glass that Clarke is best known. He has, he says, done ‘more stained glass than anyone, probably ever’, and it’s found in settings as diverse as the Pyramid of Peace in Kazakhstan, the Pfizer building in New York, the Holocaust memorial in Darmstadt and the lobby of the Apax Group in Jermyn Street – the last a shimmering mix of deep blues, greens and carnation reds that is, Hadid says, like a ‘window to the outside world, very controlled, very strong’.

Right now, though, Clarke is having an ecclesiastical moment, having fled the overpowering shadow of church architecture 25 years ago: last weekend, in Linköping Cathedral, Sweden, three of his windows are being unveiled in a medieval church that has never before had stained glass in it (‘They went on a tour of Europe, the bishop and his mates and advisers from Swedish Heritage, to look at contemporary stained glass. And they saw a Cistercian Convent I’d done in Switzerland and commissioned me’). And in 12 days’ time the Pope will be blessing a stained-glass window, suffused in ultramarines and ruby reds, which Clarke has done for the Papal Nunciature in Wimbledon.

‘I’d said it wasn’t really my bag: I’m definitely not holy. But the Papal Nuncio is a genuinely cool guy, he really is; he’s everything you want in an archbishop. It’s a small work, but I’m very, very pleased with it – it’s a winner.’

As he tells me this we’re sitting in the kitchen of his house, eating chicken wrapped in bacon, couscous and salad. He’s wearing a pink shirt, khaki-coloured jeans and no shoes; glinting in his right earlobe is a gold cross. The house has been home to many artists from the late Victorian era onward, though Clarke bought it from the singer Leo Sayer (‘we found one of his clown outfits in the attic’) after his then dealer – the ultra-hip and very dangerous Robert Fraser – found it and told him: ‘If you don’t buy it, I’ll regard it as a personal insult.’

Ever ready with an anecdote and dauntingly erudite, Clarke is very affable company. ‘He’s good fun,’ cackles David Bailey, another good friend, ‘though not as funny as me – he hasn’t got my vicious cockney tongue.’ And it’s true: there’s a Lancastrian warmth to Clarke that helps explain why he’s so liked by so many.

The son of working-class parents, Clarke was born in the cotton-spinning town of Oldham. At ‘11 or 12’, a school trip to York Minster was a ‘very powerful juvenile experience. It’s a very warm stone, and I remember the light coming through the stained glass and the choir was practising. In my head, I say I could smell incense, but I suspect… But that was a definite moment, and in a way I’m always trying to recapture it.’

At 12, he won a scholarship to the Oldham School of Arts and Crafts and moved on, via Burnley School of Art and North Devon College of Art and Design, to be awarded a Churchill Memorial Travelling Scholarship. He was already working with stained glass, as well as painting. Teachers thought him: ‘Nuts. Most people were just worried I wouldn’t earn a living.’ Still, by 23, he was already the subject of a BBC arts documentary and living in an old vicarage in Derbyshire with his then wife, Liz. 

It was, he says, an idyllic existence, but the capital beckoned and in 1978 he moved to London. ‘There was no possibility of me realising the grandiose ambitions I had for stained glass if I’d stayed.’ And there was his frisky character to take into account.

Clarke was, John McEwen wrote in the Spectator, ‘the most Sixties character to have emerged in the London art scene since the Sixties’, and, Clarke says, his Finsbury Square studio became ‘a hub of activity and of what today, I suppose, is called glamour’. Bailey became a friend (‘I learnt a lot about light from Bailey’), and Bacon’s lover, John Edwards, and then the McCartneys.

An electrifying period, then? ‘Oh yeah. I was the kid, I was the young one. And if I’d thought about it long enough, I couldn’t possibly have dealt with Francis, for example, because I would have been in awe. But I wasn’t, because I thought I was as good as he was: I was full of the arrogance of inexperience. And I wasn’t impressed, you know – by then I’d become friends with Paul [McCartney], close friends with Paul and Linda, and after Paul and Linda it’s difficult to be impressed, really.

‘They took it all so easily, so matter-of-factly – they were so unimpressed themselves. They were very supportive: they bought paintings from me, commissioned me to do stained glass projects for their home, stage sets. Paul really gets art: he gets it very quick, very sharp. And I was working ferociously.’

As McEwen put it when a show of Clarke’s paintings reopened Fraser’s gallery in 1983: ‘A year for Clarke is an age for most of us. His energy is both undeniable and commendably against the English grain.’

But there’s something very English in the singer and actor Richard Strange’s memory of that opening: Clarke’s mother was the guest of honour at an event littered with stars. And, Strange says, Mrs Clarke saw a familiar face across the room and said: ‘“Ooh Brian, you’ve got to introduce me.” So Brian took her across the room, saying: “Excuse me, Andy, excuse me, Mick, I’ve got to introduce my mum to someone.” And they come up to Paul McCartney and Brian says: “Now, mum, I’d like to introduce you to…’ and she interrupts him and says, “Oh Brian, Derek Nimmo needs no introduction.’”

Another important friend made at this time was Norman Foster, with whom Clarke later worked extensively. ‘We shared enthusiasms,’ Clarke says. ‘One of them is light. And the early period of our friendship – by which I mean the first 15 years or so – was just ricocheting from one thrilling moment to another. We’d see each other three or four times a day – breakfast, lunch and dinner, with telephone calls in between. It was all about discovery, new things; we developed new technologies.’

Clarke developed techniques that involve the bonding of glazed colours to architectural ‘float’ glass, often doing this in multiple layers that create an oscillating visual effect; a method that allows colour to be applied to large areas of glass without the familiar dividing lead strap work. Colour, in Clarke’s case, that’s radiantly life affirming.

Many of Clarke’s best friends are architects – Hadid, Foster, Peter Cook, the late Jan Kaplicky – and it is, Hadid says, ‘very rare to have someone who’s an artist who knows about architecture’. 

Still, Clarke says: ‘I’ve done things I consider among my best work and they’re in buildings I think should be pulled down, quite frankly. But I can’t do that any more, because it’s lipstick on a gorilla. I can only really do my best when it’s in harmonious tandem.’

That harmony is what he enjoys about working with architects. ‘Artists work on the principle that they have a direct line to God. Well, very often that direct line has bad reception. And what was so thrilling about Norman, and architectural culture, was the inclusiveness of it, the collaboration,’ Clarke says. The downside being, of course, that people introduce him as ‘some kind of architect, or designer. And I’m not. I’m an artist – I’m a poet, not an organiser of imagery.’

It was that savage poet of violence, Francis Bacon who threw a spanner in Clarke’s works. ‘Francis quite liked talking about dying and how he was leaving everything to John – he kind of boasted about it. And John would say: “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Francis; I don’t know how I’ll manage all this.” And Francis would say: “Oh, Brian’ll help you.”

‘It was like that. And then it became that; I’d made a solemn promise I would. And John was as close a friend as I’ve ever had – he had great intuition; he could spot a phoney across a crowded pub. And Francis had been dead about three years and John came for help; he said to me: “I don’t understand these papers.”’

Clarke was, he says, in the middle of ‘an incredibly productive and exciting period of my life’. Still, at Edwards’s request, the High Court made Clarke sole executor of the Bacon Estate and he took up legal cudgels against Bacon’s old gallery, the Marlborough.

He assumed the matter would be over in months; six years later, litigation was still going on – at one stage, Clarke had 20 lawyers working for him. ‘It was horrible. It nearly killed me. If I could rewind the clock, that would be something I would definitely not want to be involved with.’

While the case was going on, ‘we moved Francis’s studio [from Reece Mews, Kensington] to Dublin and that helped me, because it showed some good could come out of this s---, as well as angst and anger and money – the money got bigger and bigger’. No surprise, really: as Clarke notes: ‘Francis used to say: “What people like about my paintings are the noughts.”’

Edwards died before the case was over, leaving Clarke his sole executor. He is chairman of the Bacon Trust, but he’s keen to resign. Meanwhile, a catalogue raisonné is in preparation, works are loaned and gifted, grants given. And ‘there’s one big pay off: I’ve been so close to Francis’s work now, at such an intimate level, with access to great masterpieces on a daily basis’.

Bacon’s studio was famously squalid and chaotic. Clarke’s – on an industrial estate in north-west London – is more ordered, despite the presence of his son’s drum kit. Classical music plays; there’s a view of the ‘lumpen’ Wembley arch; seven people work there.

Over here are the stairs down which Dennis Hopper fell on a visit to the studio; over there an oil on canvas study for a portrait of Andy Warhol. Here are drawings Clarke is making of paint tubes and of chocolate caramel sweet wrappers – ‘I’ve eaten thousands of them.’ Here’s the Fleur de Lys glass he did for Linda McCartney. Here’s multiple evidence of the ‘great hand’ and ‘fine line’ both Hadid and Doris Saatchi Lockhart praise. Here are the skulls that preoccupy him.

And here’s a large-scale proposal he’s preparing for a stained-glass installation at Stratford International, ‘where you get off the train from Paris and Brussels and for the Olympics’. It’s to be 300ft long and 20ft high, his first big work in London, green and yellow and flickering, punctuated with bands of swirling blue. ‘It’s such a quintessentially English thing,’ he says, ‘light coming through oak leaves.’

He pauses. ‘Stained glass – I’m more excited about it than I’ve ever been. It can transform the way you feel when you enter a building in the way nothing else can.’

 

 

 

 

Encounter: Essays by Milan Kundera

 

 

 

Milan Kundera’s exhumed essays cast a spell with their insights into creativity,

writes Geoff Dyer

 

 

 

GEOFF DYER   |   THE OBSERVER   |   SUNDAY, 2 AUGUST 2010

 

It is a tribute to Kundera’s ability to weave his essayistic spell that my interest was undiminished by the fact that I am either wholly ignorant of many of the composers and writers discussed (Iannis Xenakis, Marek Bienczyk, Gudbergur Bergsson) correct or am familiar with them only through Kundera’s earlier books. In any case, Kundera’s subjects are mirrors, offering variously distorted reflections on his own work and situation. As he says with reference to a remark by Francis Bacon about Beckett: "When one artist is talking about another, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself, and that is what’s valuable in his judgment."

The book kicks off with a particularly outrageous example as he reflects on and reprints a piece from the 1970s. In 1972, in an apartment in Prague, he met a demure young woman he knew well who had been interrogated for several days by the authorities. The trauma had upset her bowels so badly that every few minutes she had to rush off to the lavatory. "The noise of the water refilling the toilet tank practically never let up and I suddenly had the urge to rape her."

"Unconscionable" though this desire was, Kundera cannot disavow it; it forms the basis of his understanding of "the brutal gesture" – the "hand movement that roughs up another person’s face in hopes of finding, in it and behind it, something that is hidden there" – of Francis Bacon’s art. This may not be art history as understood by Kenneth Clark but it shoves us into a horrible confrontation with Bacon’s art. The standard art-critical habit is to comment on the horror without conveying it so that we look and listen quite comfortably.

 

 

 


 Milan Kundera’s Encounter is an excellent essay collection 

 

 

Book review: In Encounter (Faber, £12.99) Milan Kundera reflects on the artists and aesthetic tenets he holds dear.

 

 

 

Metro (UK), Alan Chadwick - 17th August, 2010

 

 

Memory and forgetting, exile, identity and the power of art as a safeguard against the erosion of history and our own humanity: these are the themes that dominate this excellent collection of essays in which Milan Kundera reflects on the artists and aesthetic tenets he holds dear. 

 

Writing about the art of Francis Bacon, Kundera praises Bacon’s ‘clearsighted, sorrowful gaze trying to penetrate to the essential’. 

 

Yet that description could just as easily apply to Kundera’s own writing here, whether he is celebrating the music of Janácek or delighting in the comic marker laid down by Rabelais. 

 

At one point, Kundera bemoans the demands of contemporary fashion (cultural ‘blacklists’) in a world where the importance of art is becoming diminished.

 

 

 

 

The art of forgetting

 

 

Milan Kundera’s reflections on other writers shed some light on his own tricky past

 

 

VICTOR SEBASTYEN   |   ESSAYS   |   THE SUNDAY TIMES   |   SUNDAY 15 AUGUST 2010

 

When a couple of years ago the controversy erupted in the Czech Republic about the communist past of Milan Kundera, the writer said he would stay out of the row as far as possible. It was alleged that as a student in 1950 he denounced a western spy to the then Stalinist secret police, the feared StB, who as a result served 14 years’ hard labour. Kundera, who rarely gives interviews, called the charges “a lie” but said he would discuss the case no further. He left it to a dozen other great writers, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Orhan Pamuk, JM Coetzee and Salman Rushdie — not a bad defence team — to speak on his behalf.

Yet, despite his vow of silence, on the first page of this sparkling collection of essays, Kundera refers, albeit obliquely, to the story that has overshadowed the autumn of his life and made his always uneasy relationship with the country of his birth even more difficult. Almost as a superfluous aside, in a piece about the art of Francis Bacon, Kundera writes of exile and memories of his erstwhile home as “a land of interrogations and surveillance”. But nothing in Kundera’s spare, taut prose is ever superfluous. It is clear what he is trying to do. He seems to expect continued exposure of himself and his past, however painful, in the way Bacon sought “truth by exposing raw flesh.” This is typical Kundera, a nick he plays repeatedly in these essays.

What is the truth about his past, as a man with the subtle mind of a Kundera would never ask so plainly? In 1950, he was a fervent communist and a highly ambitious young man desperate to gain a place in film school. The charges against him were made by a wellknown Czech historian with impeccable credentials and based on material from StB archives. On the other hand, as we know from countless cases since 1989, secret police files often lie. And why should we believe spies who worked for a brutal dictatorship rather than the word of one of the greatest of post-war writers?

In the land of Schweik and Kafka, where The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting are rooted, both sides of the case can simultaneously be true. One could be a communist and not a communist — most Czechs were, for 40 years; one could meet an StB agent for a genial drink in the pub, but not be a collaborator. Millions of Czechs did so. This kind of duality was part of survival in middle Europe during the last century and is an essential part of Kundera’s beguiling genius.

There are brilliant examples of his style in these essays, mostly in praise of some of his favourite writers, artists and musicians. The quintessential middle European intellectual, he stands for the polyglot values of high culture in an unashamedly elitist fashion. He tries to rehabilitate the reputations of almost forgotten authors in that great European tradition, some of whom, interestingly given his own circumstances of the moment, have faced criticism, ridicule or worse for their political views. He praises the sublime beauty of Louis Ferdinand Celine’s vigorous prose — no matter that he was a Nazi. He claims that the Italian reporter/ novelist Curzio Malaparte was the original exponent of new journalism, decades before Tom Wolfe was supposed to have invented the style in the 1960s. Malaparte’s soft spot for Mussolini is not ignored, but doesn’t count when weighing him up as an artist, according to Kundera.

Some of these essays are old pieces updated with new thoughts, including the article on Bacon, and a tribute to Federico Fellini originally published on the 100th anniversary, in 1995, of the invention of the moving picture by the Lumiere brothers. Others are published here for the first time — for example an elegiac tribute to Janacek’s operas, and a whimsical little essay on laughter in fiction, using as a starting point Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. It is a short book, but none the worse for that, full of the wit and irony and lyricism of Kundera’s fiction: “When one artist talks about another, he is always.. talking about himself,” he says, which puts literary criticism in its place.

In a luminous appreciation of Philip Roth he despairs at the crudity of modem writing about sex, not on bourgeois grounds that readers may be shocked — far from it — but with nostalgic feelings towards “old-fashioned love... Without the memory of how it used to be, what would remain of love, of the very notion of love?” But he can be strangely practical. Why, he asks, do so few protagonists in the great novels have children? Sceptical? Make a quick count and you will find he is right — and has a profound point.

Does Kundera’s past matter? On the whole not, though his reputation in his erstwhile homeland — where if is mentioned at all he is called “The Frenchman” — is perhaps irredeemably destroyed. His best known aphorism, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, is true, whatever Kundera himself may or may not be trying to forget.

Victor Sebestyen is the author of Revolution 1989: The Fall ofthe Soviet Empire (Phoenix). The Encounter is available at the Sunday Times Bookshop price of £11.69 

 

 

 

 

Book review: ‘Encounter’ by Milan Kundera

 

 

Compelling essays by someone who writes of authors, composers and artists from whom he continues to learn.

Encounter Essays  Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher Harper: 192 pp., $23.99

 

 

By Michael S. Roth, Special to the Los Angeles Times, Sunday, August 15, 2010

 

Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself?"

Milan Kundera asks this question in writing about the painter Francis Bacon, one of many cultural figures he addresses in his commanding, compelling new collection of essays, "Encounter."

It’s a question that resonates throughout the book. To what degree can we be distorted by violence and fear — in short, by history — and still be ourselves? Kundera sees this distortion everywhere, a distortion that art engages. As the author looks at contemporary culture, his skepticism curdles into pessimism.

In a world increasingly disinterested in art, when do we cross the border and forget what art has taught us about being human? Would we even realize that we crossed that border?

 

 

 

Trauma, Tragedy, Therapy

 

The Arts and Human Suffering
by Stephen K. Levine
Jessica Kingsley, 2009

 

Review by Marko Zlomislic, Ph.D.

 


Metapsycholog, Volume 14, Issue 32, Aug 10th 2010

 

Levine would have us "embrace our own chaos". However, what does this exactly mean? He writes, "Since we are chaotic, we can face the chaos of trauma without feeling that we must expel it from our being". Is it not the other way around? Since we are not chaotic, we have such difficulty with trauma. If chaos were the essence of our Heideggerian ground, then there would be no problem in dealing with trauma. Trauma would be just another form of chaos that we already are. The experience of trauma says otherwise.

Levine asks, "What kind of art is adequate to the experience of trauma? To me, the answer is the art of the terrible, the grotesque, and the ugly". Here Levine cites the paintings of Francis Bacon. Bacon’s work had a huge impact on me. I thought, yes, this is it. I must take his work further into ugliness and darkness. Therefore, I painted a la Bacon and then I had an epiphany. 

What I was painting was only giving strength to death, darkness and chaos. I then began to paint landscapes and I think this is when I began to heal. Ten years after my traumatic event, I realize that art cannot save us from anything. Art is not salvific. It is not a salve or ointment. Returning to life is the grace that saves.

 

 

 

 

 

Master thatcher advises fire crews

 

 

 

Wokingham Times - Tuesday 3 August 2010

 

 


 Thatching work on a cottage once occupied by painter Francis Bacon led to a lesson in fighting thatch fires.

Wokingham fire crews passing Long Cottage in Davis Street, Hurst, took the opportunity to quiz master thatcher James McCormack on how thatch roofs are constructed so they would have a better idea of how to fight a future thatch blaze.

Mr McCormack, of Country Thatching based in Wokingham, told firefighters about the types of reed and straw used in thatching and explained how twisted hazel spares are used to fix bundles of wheat reed to the original thatch.

The impromptu lesson proved so popular a further five teams from fire stations around Wokingham went along to quiz Mr McCormack, who has been a thatcher for 21 years.

He is currently working on Long Cottage which is believed to date back to 1629 and has featured in a BBC film about 20th century painter Mr Bacon.

The owners of the cottage would like to hear from anyone with details about the history of the cottage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Master Painters Side by Side for the

First Time in the Frans Hals Museum

 

 

 

 

Art Daily  |  Saturday, July 10, 2010

 

HAARLEM.- The Frans Hals Museum is presenting a work by the British artist Francis Bacon flanked by two monumental paintings by Cornelis van Haarlem. What links these artists is their admiration for Michelangelo. This Italian painter, sculptor, architect and poet was a great source of inspiration for them both. The exhibition Conversation Piece II is on view from 3 July to 10 October 2010. 

With the series ‘Conversation Piece’, the Frans Hals Museum wants to encourage visitors to take a fresh look at the 16th and 17th-century collection of paintings. By juxtaposing these works with modern and contemporary art, surprising links are laid between highly varied styles and periods in the history of art. The museum demonstrates that even though certain perceptions and opinions have a long history they are nevertheless still valid today and continue to be revisited and explored. 

Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) was extremely indebted to tradition; as he formulated it himself: ‘in the long run art cannot cut loose from its tradition, but only renew it in a way which will be compelling to a contemporary sensibility.’ In this connection, he also repeatedly acknowledged having a strong affinity with Michelangelo. Bacon particularly admired the Italian master’s nudes: ‘the fleshy figure, coiled around his own axis as if he were about to hurl a discus.’ This description could equally apply to the two works by Cornelis van Haarlem. 
Tension and drama


In the painting From Muybridge The Human Figure in Motion: Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water / Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (1965; on loan from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) the contorted, misshapen figures infuse the composition with enormous tension and drama. The way in which the paint twists and turns gives the painting a sense of plasticity and movement. The human body has a fleshy fullness and assumes an expressive pose that lend it a distinct sculptural quality. This is also seen in the work of Cornelis van Haarlem. 
Voluptuous flesh

The influence of Michelangelo (1475 – 1564) is also evident in the paintings The Massacre of the Innocents (1591) and The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis(1592/1593) by Cornelis van Haarlem (1562 – 1638). His nudes exhibit a comparable interest in exaggerated poses and a voluptuous rendering of ‘flesh’. They are bravura pieces, action-packed and dynamic with an unprecedented drama and vivacity, and with extreme foreshortening and torsion. The poses are immensely complex and the bodies are recreated in innumerable contorted attitudes. The paintings demonstrate Van Haarlem’s artistic virtuosity, and testify to his thorough command of the human figure. 

‘Conversation Piece I’ took place in the Frans Hals Museum in 2008 and juxtaposed the German artist Thomas Eggerer (born 1963) to the 17th-century painters Pieter Saenredam (1597 – 1665) and Jacob van Ruisdael (1628 – 1682). The common thread then was the clear organisation and definition of space in combination with a precise positioning of the figures. Composition, colour and the effects of light are finely attuned to one another and crafted into a harmonious entity in the work of these three artists.

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Wojas obituary

 

 

 

Genial barman and owner of the Colony Room, a boozy den of Soho bohemia

 

 

 

PAUL WILLETTS  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  FRIDAY 11 JUNE 2010

 

 

 

Michael Wojas, who has died aged 53, was the former barman and owner of the Colony Room, a Soho drinking club famous for being the haunt of Francis Bacon and other sharp-tongued, bibulous denizens of the metropolitan art scene. But Wojas’s duties extended far beyond those of genial host. "I am the proprietor, bar manager, lavatory attendant, psychiatric counsellor, odd job man and accountant," he said.

 

Like many a romance, his love affair with the Colony Room started by accident. Born in London, Wojas attended Haberdashers’ Aske’s school, Hertfordshire, and went on to study chemistry at Nottingham University. On completing his degree in 1981, he looked around for temporary employment while he pondered what to do with the rest of his life. Via his girlfriend’s mother, he landed a job as barman of the Colony, a cramped and dingy one-room drinking den on the first floor of a Georgian building in Dean Street.

 

Founded in 1948, it was the longest surviving of those clubs that had flourished in the era before the liberalisation of British licensing laws in the early 1960s. In those days, the Colony and other such establishments enabled determined boozers to continue drinking when the pubs were closed. Its founder was Muriel Belcher, an imperious lesbian with a fondness for insulting banter. Under her tenure, the club acquired a raucous, artistic clientele that encompassed not only Bacon but also Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, John Deakin and Michael Andrews. In settlement of overdue bar bills, hard-up members got into the habit of handing over works of art. Together with an assortment of photographs and other memorabilia, several of these hung on the club’s dark green walls, the colour of which accentuated its claustrophobic ambience.

 

When Belcher died in 1979, her throne was inherited by her bottle-nosed, brandy-marinated barman, Ian Board, who maintained her tradition of unprovoked belligerence. While Belcher dispensed acerbic one-liners, Board specialised in expletive-strewn tirades.

 

Being a gentle, rather shy young man who had enjoyed a sheltered upbringing, Wojas appeared ill-equipped for this sort of environment – bohemian London’s equivalent of a gladiatorial arena, swords and tridents replaced by barbed comments, withering sarcasm and assorted bad behaviour. Yet he flourished at the Colony, offering an incongruously sensitive and gentle counterpoint to his boss’s excesses. "I was fascinated by the range of crazy extroverts there," he admitted.

 

Instead of leaving after a few months and pursuing a conventional career, Wojas remained as Board’s sidekick for 13 years, during which he spent more time at the Colony than at home. Board repaid this stamina-sapping loyalty by bequeathing the club to Wojas on his death in 1994.

 

Aware that the club could not survive on its reputation and ageing membership, Wojas set about recruiting fresh blood. Before long, a new generation of young artists was cavorting in his dishevelled, smoke-wreathed kingdom. Perched on a bar-stool near the entrance, his demeanour infinitely more hospitable than either of his predecessors, Wojas cast an indulgent eye over the frivolous antics of the artists Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and their circle.

 

"I remember evenings when the revels went on through the night," said the film-maker John Maybury. "I fondly recall Michael performing the Alastair Sim-like role of gym mistress while Sarah Lucas, Lisa Stansfield and I – all completely blotto – did forward-rolls across the carpet."

 

As part of the process of reviving the club, Wojas started holding exhibitions of artwork by its members. He also launched regular music nights, the entertainment provided by Suggs, Billy Bragg and other well-known performers. His most inventive promotional gimmick entailed him persuading members and their friends to work as guest bar staff. Each Tuesday night, anyone from Kate Moss to Sam Taylor-Wood could be found serving drinks.

 

In 1997 Maybury exploited similar communal spirit when he filmed his brilliant Francis Bacon biopic, Love Is the Devil, starring Derek Jacobi. "Michael was happy to let me shoot the Colony sequences in the club, but there wasn’t enough space there for all our equipment," Maybury recalled. "I ended up building an exact replica of the club in a film studio. I employed Michael as an extra. He brought with him numerous old-time members who appeared as extras, too. When Jacobi walked on to the set, several sozzled veterans thought he was Francis. Michael had to patiently explain to them, ’It isn’t Francis because Francis is dead, and this isn’t the Colony Room.’"

 

A decade after Maybury’s film came out, the lease on the Colony’s premises expired. His health deteriorating, Wojas decided to close the club and sell its better-known pictures, notably a large Michael Andrews painting. The announcement and ensuing auction provoked a bitter legal dispute with many of the regulars.

 

Diagnosed as suffering from cancer soon after the club’s closure, in the final year of his life Wojas was proud to register what was, for any Colony Room stalwart, a rare accomplishment – he gave up smoking and drinking. He is survived by his mother.

 

 

Michael Wojas, club owner, born 9 August 1956; died 6 June 2010

 

 

 

 


 Michael Wojas: Proprietor, barman, counsellor...

 

 

The man who ran the notorious Colony Room Club has died, aged 53.

 

Jerome Taylor looks back at the Soho establishment that for decades

attracted London’s literary and artistic elite

 

 

JEROME TAYLOR  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  WEDNESDAY 9 JUNE 2010

 

Michael Wojas was characteristically sanguine when he was asked five years ago to describe what it had been like running one of London’s most notorious private clubs. "I’m the proprietor, the bar manager, lavatory attendant, psychiatric counsellor, odd-job man and accountant," he beamed in a self-penned article for The Independent. "There certainly isn’t anything I haven’t done."

Wojas, who died on Sunday from cancer at the age of 53, was musing over the 21 years he had spent as a barman, and later proprietor, of the Colony Room Club, a debauched drinking establishment frequented by artists, dandies, thinkers, wits, pimps and whores which came to symbolise both the heart – and the eventual demise – of London’s Soho.

Until its closure in 2008, when Wojas suddenly announced to the surprise of his patrons that he had sold the club’s lease, the one-room members only bar had served some of the capital’s thirstiest, rowdiest and most outspoken wits.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s it became Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud’s favourite drinking hole, a place where the two artistic titans could row, lunge, battle and then embrace in the comfort of an establishment that adored eccentricity and eschewed the mundane.

A literate fly on the club’s nicotine-stained walls could have published the sort of no-holds-barred memoir of London’s literary elite that would have had scandal-lovers and publishers alike foaming at the mouth in anticipation.

One only had to glance upon those frighteningly green walls to get an understanding of the type of clientele that came to call 41 Dean Street their home. Behind the bar stood an enormous mural painted by Michael Andrews depicting a typical night in the rooms. At the centre was the bar’s founder Muriel Belcher, surrounded by scions of Soho such as great wit Jeffrey Bernard, Henrietta Moraes – a Bacon muse – and flamboyant aristocrat Lady Rose McClaren.

A Birmingham-born Jew and proud lesbian, Belcher discovered that the best way to keep her clientele interesting was to hire Bacon, through the medium of a healthy tab, to invite his friends. He acted as a sort of Pied Piper of unusual drinking companions attracting, as Wojas later remarked, "a mixture of people from Lord and Lady Muck to the barrow boys from the market where Muriel bought her vegetables".

Belcher opened her club in 1948 and was rarely seen without a cigarette and glass in hand. She was famed for referring to all her clients in the female form. At a time when pubs were forced to close in the afternoon, the Colony Room offered its parched guests a place to drink until the sun went down, and then some more.

Journalist and writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft spent many afternoons at the club in the Seventies. "Its heyday was probably just before I arrived but even in the 1970s it was an extraordinary place," he said. On one particularly debauched evening Bacon ripped his shirt open. "That wasn’t anger or lust," he recalled. "Simply ... he couldn’t quite stand upright and was trying to break his fall."

At first glance, Polish-born Wojas might have seemed an unlikely character to take over such a gregarious venue. Quiet, slim and almost luminescently pale, he studied chemistry at Nottingham University arriving in London two years after Belcher’s death in 1979. Ownership of the club had passed to Ian Board, an even louder – and brasher – version of Belcher who was renowned for getting drunk, hiding the night’s takings and then forgetting where he had put them the following day. Wojas would spend the first few hours of the morning looking for buried treasure. "I thought I’d work for a couple of months before I figured out exactly what I want to do – that was 24 years ago," he once recalled in 2005. "I didn’t realise at first that I’d found my home."

The club nearly disappeared into the annals of Soho history during the 1980s, as yuppie culture stamped its mark on the capital. But the following decade a new breed of artistic clientele – forever dubbed the Young British Artists – led the Colony Rooms through a prolonged and heady renaissance.

"It was a mad and eccentric place," recalled Tracey Emin, who spent much of the 1990s quaffing the club’s notoriously poor wine alongside fellow Young British Artists Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. "There were so many extraordinary funny occasions and nights there, but they all blend into one big night at the Colony Room."

Sebastian Horsley, one of London’s most delightfully dysfunctional and outspoken wits, was known to spend weeks at a time propping up the bar at the Colony Room. "I first visited it when I was 20 because I’d read that that was where Francis Bacon used to hang out," he said. "I ran up the narrow stairs and was promptly told to ’fuck off’ by Ian Board. I knew all about rudeness masquerading as honesty." A decade later he returned and was allowed in by Wojas. "The Club reminded me of an alcoholic tardis," he recalled. "It was minute on the outside but huge on the inside and you went there for love, which they served by the glassful."

But love was in short supply during the gruesome decline of the Colony Room, which, in many ways, came to symbolise the purification of Soho, once London’s seedy, beating heart. By the mid-2000s the club and Wojas were in deep financial trouble.

Artists of all different hues pitched in to save their favourite drinking den by donating their work. But the mood soon turned sour with accusations that the club’s proprietor had begun treating the paintings as gifts, sold off for his own personal gain, rather than for the greater good of the favourite venue.

Wojas sold the lease for the Colony back to the building’s landlord and took a backstage role in the Soho scene. The camaraderie that once bound the club together was shattered as Wojas’s detractors and defenders went to war, even in the courts. Horsley, who was initially a firm friend of Wojas but later fell out publicly with him over a campaign to save the club, said the Colony’s closure represented the wider demise of Soho tradition.

"Soho has gone down hill immeasurably," he said. "Ten years ago, on a good night here, you could get your throat cut. The air used to be clean and the sex used to be dirty. Now it is the other way round. Now it’s full of boutiques, ’weave-your-own-yoghurt’ establishments, wall-to-wall coffee shops and gay hairdressers. There is even a health club. A health club in Soho, for Satan’s sake! Can you imagine? That’s like having a brothel in a church."

But others say Wojas did the best he could to sail against prevailing winds and remember the club before rancour took over. "He was a very special man who, following the death of Ian Board, turned the club on its head and revolutionised a little piece of Soho as we knew it then," recalls singer Lisa Stansfield, who knew Wojas for more than 20 years. "When no one else would listen, he embraced the young British and brought live music to the Club."

Above all, Stansfield remembers the way the Colony’s last owner would call out last orders at the end of the night with the words "rush-up, dash-up, spend-up and fuck off."

"He was a punk at heart," she said. "He will probably be appalled if he finds that heaven actually exists."

 

 

 

 

 

Obituary: Michael Wojas

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final proprietor of the bohemian Soho drinking club where generations

of London’s artistic set met to drink and exchange scandal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 OBITUARIES  |  THE TIMES  |  TUESDAY 8 JUNE 2010

 

  

If the walls of the Colony Room Club in Soho could speak, polite society would blush. It had been the archetypal louche drinking den for artistic bohemians for the past 60 years or so, with only three proprietors, the last of whom was Michael Wojas.

 

He did not cut a prepossessing figure. Pale, diminutive and hunched, he tended to slink through the streets of Soho in dark glasses, hugging the walls, as if trying to look inconspicuous. He had a serious vodka habit and the characteristic etiolated look of one for whom daylight was anathema. One acquaintance described him as looking like a blade of grass growing under a bucket. In his latter years he said little but would sit on a chair quietly rocking. He never seemed to eat. Or, at least, that’s what some saw. To others, he was quite the opposite: talkative, amusing, sensitive and with a great capacity to listen and dispense sympathetic advice — “our twisted shepherd”, as one friend described him. He was also an enthusiastic cook.

 

Some 18 months ago he incurred the wrath of some of the club’s stalwarts by giving up the unequal struggle to make ends meet and handing the premises back to the landlord, thus bringing down the shutters not only on their favourite watering hole and meeting place but also on a little piece of Soho history.

 

Over the years the tiny first-floor club in Dean Street, with its bilious green walls and battered carpet with countless cigarette burns, had become celebrated for its unbridled conversation and excess. It had gained notoriety in the 1950s as the place where the painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud let rip in heroic drinking bouts under the baleful eye of its then chatelaine Muriel Belcher, a Portuguese-Jewish lesbian with an acid tongue who referred to everyone as “she”. Bacon mixed generosity with tartness. “Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends,” he would say.

 

The Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg (later Lord Bradwell) was a regular, sometimes with a young man on his arm. The jazz singer George Melly was a habitue; the artists Patrick Caulfield and Frank Auerbach were members, as was Colin MacInnes whose novel about London life in the 1950s, Absolute Beginners, has more than a whiff of the Colony Room Club about it.

 

Tennessee Williams, Noël Coward, E. M. Forster, David Bowie, Dennis Hopper, even, it was said, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon — all had made the pilgrimage to the bohemian shrine and crossed the tattered threshold to savour its disreputable atmosphere. In recent years, the club had been colonised by the Britart pack of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Gavin Turk and Sarah Lucas.

 

Michael Wojas was born in Edgware, North London, in 1956 and was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School and then Nottingham University where he read chemistry. On graduating he came to London where he got a job as a barman at the Colony Room in 1981. His girlfriend’s mother was a friend of Muriel Belcher who had set up the club in 1948. Belcher had died a year before he arrived and her place had been taken by the even more foul-mouthed Ian Board.

 

“I thought I would work there for a couple of months before I figured out exactly what I wanted to do,” Wojas said. “I didn’t realise at first that I had found my home. I spend more time here than I do in my flat.

 

“I had led quite a sheltered upbringing, coming from a scientific background,” Wojas said, “and I was fascinated by the range of crazy extroverts here; Ian perhaps being the maddest. The first couple of years Ian would hide the takings from the till every night, when he was drunk. The next day we would spend an hour trying to find them. He thought I was going to nick the money. It took him two years before he realised I was going to stay, and he started to trust me. He drove a lot of people away.”

 

Board died in 1995 and left the business to Wojas. “I’m the proprietor, the bar manager, lavatory attendant, psychiatric counsellor, odd job man and accountant. There certainly isn’t anything I haven’t done,” he said.

Latterly, Wojas had suffered from depression and the vodka had taken its toll on his liver. He is survived by his long-term partner, the actress Amanda Harris.

 

Latterly, Wojas had suffered from depression and the vodka had taken its toll on his liver. He is survived by his long-term partner, the actress Amanda Harris.

 

Michael Wojas, proprietor of the Colony Room Club, was born on August 9, 1956. He died of cancer on June 6, 2010, aged 53

 

 

 


 Obituary: Michael Wojas

 

 

Michael Wojas, who has died aged 53, was the third and last proprietor of the Colony Room Club in Soho,

the drinking club known for its bohemian ways and members such as Francis Bacon and Jeffrey Bernard.

 

 

OBITUARIES   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   MONDAY, 7 JUNE, 2010

 

The Colony, fundamentally an afternoon drinking club, in the days of restricted pub hours, formed, from 1948, a notable part of the real-life, comic-tragic soap opera of Soho. Wojas, an English Pole with a nasal London accent and a long chiv-mark down one pale cheek, arrived as a barman in 1981 and took over on the death of Ian Board in 1994.

Board, who called himself Ida after his supposititious initials, was a monster: hoarse-voiced, swollen-nosed and foul-mouthed, he fell into uncontrollable rages. He was also very funny. While the club’s founder, Muriel Belcher, had taken to using as an affectionate diminutive a four-letter word with the letter -y tacked on, Board’s speciality was a torrent of obscenities artfully studded with demoralising terms such as "dreary".

For 13 years under Board, Wojas served quietly behind the bar in the upstairs room with its dark-green walls covered with photographs and its carpet like asphalt. He dried up glasses, all the while clocking the peculiarities of the customers: Bacon, alternately hilarious and stiletto-tongued; Daniel Farson, who would suddenly turn from affability into strangulated tirades of abuse; Graham Mason, a former television journalist known for his stupendous intake of alcohol, once going for nine days without eating. Wojas knew too the habits of the solicitor who often fell backwards off his barstool, or of the old woman known as Mumsy whose son had died. At his best, Wojas was a therapist.

In his first two years at the club, each day would begin with a hunt to find the previous day’s takings, which a suspicious Ian Board had hidden behind a mirror or inside the piano before passing out and forgetting the spot.

Some members grew tired of being insulted, and Wojas attempted after Board’s death to prevent the club from turning into a museum by encouraging its use by a generation of young British artists such as Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin.

Wojas would sit on the high stool at the end of the bar near the door, taking note of who should be repelled. He also decided who could become a member. On top of the fridge by the window a bust of Ian Board, in which his ashes had been inserted, sullenly eyed proceedings. Opposite, a smoke-darkened mural by Michael Andrews covered the wall behind the piano that was seldom played.

But Wojas initiated music nights in the one small room, attracting names such as The Magic Numbers, Alabama 3, Billy Bragg and Paul Weller. Suggs, from Madness, whose mother had long visited the club, presented a music series for ITV from there.

Wojas also came up with the wheeze of holding a series of art exhibitions by members. Behind the bar, above a caption "Not worth a fucking penny", hung a spot-painting by Damien Hirst, who bucked the general trend by giving up drink and moving to the country.

Like most stories associated with the Colony, Wojas’s ended in tragedy, with the closure of the club at the end of 2008, and a tangled series of lawsuits over his right to artworks he had offered for sale.

Michael Wojas was born in London on August 9 1956. After Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School, he studied Chemistry at Nottingham University. The rest of his life he gave to Soho.

Habitués of the Colony were used to the florid symptoms of decay of fellow-drinkers; observing them was said to be Ian Board’s pastime. In the last decade of his life Wojas, who died of cancer, could sleep only by leaving on the radio and rocking backwards and forwards. The rocking and shaking increasingly invaded his daytime life.

    He did not marry, but had a succession of more or less long-term girlfriends. 

 

 

 

 

  Crossing the Channel

 

 

Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Alberto Giacometti

 

Friendships and Connections in Paris and London 1946-1965
 

Gagosian gallery,

17-19 Davies Street
 London W1K 3DE
 

June 2 - July 31, 2010   

 

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Crossing the Channel: Friendships and Connections in London and Paris 1946-1965, which examines the vibrant exchange of ideas and influences between Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Alberto Giacometti in Paris and London during the postwar years.
 
 This exhibition spans the period from 1946-the year that the international borders reopened--to 1965, when the Tate Gallery presented Giacometti’s retrospective. During this time, the web of friendships and alliances between artists, patrons and collectors from London and Paris proved to be enormously influential. It was Peter Watson — the important British collector and patron of the arts as well as a founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London –who connected Bacon, Freud and Giacometti as well as collecting their works, providing stipends and organising exhibitions, including retrospectives for Giacometti and Bacon with the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1955. In Portrait of Peter Watson (1954), Giacometti paid homage to this dynamic and instrumental patron.
 
 The eldest of the three artists, Giacometti was, to some extent, the trio’s imaginative lynchpin. With Watson’s assistance, Freud travelled to Paris in the mid-forties, where he met Giacometti and sat for two portraits. Giacometti first visited London in 1955, where he witnessed the still-devastating effects of the War. Although he did not meet Bacon until the early sixties, his influence on the younger artist is evident in works such as Miss Muriel Belcher (1959), whose sculpted facial features and dark, abstracted background recall devices that Giacometti used in paintings and sculptures of Annette and Diego.
 
 Bacon and Freud became close friends around 1943. Each chose to paint only their most intimate friends, although Bacon worked exclusively from photographs while Freud painted from live models. Freud’s portrait of his future wife Lady Caroline Blackwood, Girl in Bed (1952) was one of the many paintings that travelled with him between Paris and London. In John Deakin (1963-64), Freud portrayed the renowned photographer whose images of Muriel Belcher, Isabel Rawsthorne, George Dyer and others became the basis for many of Bacon’s paintings. Bacon also painted a series of portraits of Freud from Deakin’s photographs as counterparts to Freud’s portraits of Bacon.

 

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Pilar Ordovás.

 

 

 

 

 

Collecting

 

Liberation in paint

 

 

 

Richard Cork takes a fresh look at the landscapes of Matthew Smith,

who was once among Britain’s best-known artists

 

 

 

RICHARD CORK  |  LIFE & ARTS  |  FINANCIAL TIMES WEEKEND  |  SATURDAY JUNE 5/ SUNDAY JUNE 6 2010

 

 

When the Tate gallery in London held a major Matthew Smith exhibition in 1953, Francis Bacon wrote “I very much admire Matthew Smith.” before explaining that “he seems to me to be one of the very few English painters since Constable and Turner to be concerned with painting that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable.” Bacon praised Smith for achieving “a complete interlocking of image and paint”, so that “the brushstroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in”.

 

Bacon was far from alone in lauding Smith. At the time, he was widely regarded as a leading British painter of the 20th century. But after Smith died in 1959, he gradually became less well-known. So the selling exhibition of his landscapes, now at the Crane Kalman Gallery in London, provides a reminder of his extraordinary gusto. Taken in conjunction with John Gledhill’s catalogue raisonné of Smith’s oil paintings, published last year by Lund Humphries, it vividly conveys his ability to arrive at a free, vigorous and above all visceral response to the world – launching what Bacon described as “a direct assault upon the nervous system”.

 

At first glance, Smith’s mature landscapes may appear straightforwardly ecstatic. Yet the man who taught himself to unleash these uninhibited brushmarks was riddled with severe inner tensions. His father, a prosperous Yorkshire wire manufacturer, felt ambivalent about Smith’s choice of career and supported his student period only on condition that he avoided Paris and never drew from the nude model. Smith always maintained that this paternal antagonism was “a serious psychological obstruction”, but he disobeyed his father in any case, and studied briefly with Matisse in 1910 before beginning his long love affair with the South of France.

 

The earliest paintings in the Crane Kalman show, dating from 1911, show how indebted he was to Post-Impressionism. His youthful fascination with the dynamism of sunlight was interrupted, however, by the first world war. Put in charge of burying the enemy dead after battle. Smith was exposed to gruelling dangers. He was wounded at the battle of Passchendaele in 1917, and only recovered his impetus as a painter on a visit to Cornwall three years later. Here, at St Columb Major, he produced some powerful, ominous and haunting images of a nocturnal church steeple thrusting into a dark mauve sky.

 

Stripped of all detail, these stark yet deeply glowing canvases announce Smith’s forceful originality. Even so, his time at St. Columb Major, which he proudly described as “unknown to painters who continue to cluster like limpets around Newlyn and St Ives”, was short-lived. Afflicted by chronic nervous depression, he attended a Swiss sanatorium and then underwent treatment with the psychotherapist Dr Roger Vittoz, who had successfully treated T.S. Eliot. Encouraged by Vittoz’s chief disciple in Lyons, Smith started painting again in 1922. His paintings of Lyons are intensely dramatic: almost overwhelmed by foliage. they recall the dark colours of his Cornish work. “Près de Lyons” (on sale at Crane Kalman for £85,000) seems about to explode in an apocalyptic tempest.

 

Bespectacled and primly dressed, Smith looks the epitome of uptight English decorum in surviving photographs. But his paintings became ever wilder as he struggled to liberate his trapped emotions. “Storm in the Mediterranean”, swiftly painted around this time, is devoid of buildings and vegetation, and here Smith handles his brush with such windblown freedom that everything – sea, land and sky appears to change as we gaze at this marvellously impulsive painting.

 

From now on, Smith makes us increasingly aware of his prowess. He explores Cézanne’s Mont St Victoire, making it almost disappear beneath an impetuous blue sky and dense areas of burgeoning foliage. Provence becomes, time and again, the focus of his most avid and audacious attention. “Landscape, South of France” (priced at £85,000) is enhanced by brushwork so urgent and zestful that it takes on an outspoken life of its own. Looking forward at times to Frank Auerbach, these expressive gestures give Smith’s work its essential vivacity

 

Tragedy scarred him once more in the second world war when both his sons, Frederic and Dermot. were killed. But he managed to continue pursuing his infatuation with the French countryside. And in “Landscape, pres d’Avignon” (priced at £65.000) he leaves crucial areas of the canvas empty in order to give the trees and water even more breathing-space.

 

“In painting,” Smith once stressed, “the gravest immorality is to try to finish what isn’t well begun. But a picture that is well begun may be left off at any point.”

 

Here, near the close of his prolific career, Smith knew precisely when to stop and leave us eagerly waiting for more

 

Matthew Smith Landscapes, Crane Kalman Gallery, London until June 12  Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, June 26 September 5

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon on the menu at Gorbachev gala

 

 

By Arifa Akbar, The Independent, Friday, 4 June 2010

An original, signed Francis Bacon triptych is one of the remarkable items up for auction at the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation Annual Gala, which raises money for cancer care in Russia and Marie Curie in Britain. The work was kept by the late artist in his private collection at his 7 Reece Mews studio in London and, after his death, treasured by his lover, John Edwards, who died in 2003.

The foundation’s patron, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose late wife it is named after, and chair, Evgeny Lebedev, who is also chairman of Independent Print Ltd, publishers of The Independent, are hoping money raised in the fifth annual gala will exceed the £1.1m generated last year at a star-studded event in the grounds of Stud House in Hampton Court Park. Other lots under the hammer include a pair of tickets to the 2011 FA Cup final at Wembley, lunch with the actor Kevin Spacey, and a dinner cooked by the model-turned-chef Sophie Dahl, with musical accompaniment by Jamie Cullum. Those of a frothier disposition can bid for a jelly wrestle with Lara Stone, refereed by David Walliams.

 

 

 

 

Critic’s choice

 

Crossing the Channel

 

 

 

    JACKIE  WULLSCHLAGER  |  VISUAL ARTS  |  ARTS & BOOKS  |  FINANCIAL TIMES  |  MAY 29–30 MAY, 2010

 

The title sounds quaint because it is meant to. This intimate, gossipy show of paintings, drawings and photographs turns on “friendship and connections Paris and London 1946–1965”, and evokes just how far away the other side of the Channel seemed when international borders re-opened in 1946. During the war years in London. access to major art was restricted to the National Gallery’s changing monthly display of a single Old Master, brought up from the collection’s underground hideout, and shows of war artists – Moore, Spencer, Sutherland, Nash. Paris in 1946 therefore offered a window on the European avant-garde whose excitement can barely be imagined in today’s global culture.

 Both Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud travelled there that year, and were particularly linked over the next two decades by ties of friendship and influence to Giacometti. the works and relationships of all three, benchmarks for European figuration as American abstraction rose to dominate the international scene, is the focus here. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote at the time, “Giacometti’s viewpoint fitted in with the phenomenological viewpoint, because he claimed to be sculpting a face in its situation, in its existence for others.” If Giacometti was the high priest of existentialism in sculpture. Bacon was the equivalent in painting. In the light of the Pompidou’s current Freud retrospective, which repositions the artist into a more European tradition, it is intriguing, too, to see him here as a young man – he was 24 in 1946 – in this Parisian context.

The show also unravels the role of charismatic doomed aesthete Peter Watson, collector and founder of the ICA. whose patronage supported the three artists and who introduced Freud to Giacometti. Highlights include Giticometti’s “Portrait of Peter Watson”, Bacon’s “Crucifixion” and “Portrait of Miss Muriel Belcher” and Freud’s “Girl in a Bed” and “Portrait of John Deakin”.

 

Crossing the Channel, Gagosian Gallery. London Wl   +44 (0)20 7493 3020, from Wednesday to July 31

 

 

 

 

 

 

All The Rage

 

 

Q&A: Geren Lockhart dishes on her Francis Bacon-inspired fall collection

 

 

REVIEW  |  THE LOS ANGELES TIMES  |  WEDNESDAY, MAY 26, 2010s

 

Geren Lockhart, designer for L.A. contemporary brand Geren Ford, always turns out chic, body-friendly looks. But for her fall 2010 collection, she also amped up the sex appeal — creating va-va-voom pieces such as metallic leather minis, body-clinging maxi skirts and silk cropped pants in rich jewel tones that slouch in all the right places. The overall effect: retro slink.

We caught up with the downtown-based designer to chat about how the streamlined collection came to be:

 

What was your key inspiration for fall?

 

Francis Bacon’s Met exhibit last year, and the research I ended up doing on his life after seeing it. I walked into the exhibit the day before leaving to head back to L.A., which was also the last day of the exhibit. A friend was set to meet me there and ended up getting stuck on a conference call. So like the nerd that I can be, I got the audio guide, and while I’ve always been a fan of Mr. Bacon, I had never heard the story behind the work. I was mesmerized by his restraint and the delicate way that he delivers gore and violence. It’s poetic.

At the end of the exhibit I practically dove into the bookstore and purchased every book I could on his life rather than his work. His studio 7 Reece Mews provided the inspiration for the prints in the collection; one modeled after the pock marks on an amazing antique mirror in his space, another by the shapes that his brushes made when he tested his paints on the walls and doors of one room rather than using a pallet. Another is inspired by the shaded and somewhat subtle idea of fingers pulling paint down a canvas, as in his Pope series. Mr. Bacon also informed the colour pallet — colour-blocked but not intense.

  

How did the design process start for you?

 

When I design it’s a cumulative process of a constant “eyes open” state of mind — for what I like or have a reaction to, from colour to texture to vintage. At the same time, we work on a schedule so there is always a time frame that’s slated for the process being put to paper. I was already into this process when I attended the Francis Bacon exhibit, and it all just came together as I was walking around and then digesting the books about his life and work.

 

You worked with so many different materials on this collection — what were your favourite to work with?

 

 

Metallic lamb, a floaty, soft stretch charmeuse  and a crafted open-weave silk linen blend. And, as always, zippers, rivets — our own signature [zippers] modeled after man-hole covers — and grosgrain ribbon.

 

What type of woman do you see loving these pieces?

 

Four words need to describe every garment we make: chic, effortless, sophisticated and sexy. That said, the same can be said of our core customer base. They’re amazing adventurers — whether that be an around-the-world adventure or a local one.

 

— Emili Vesilind

 

 


 A very unlikely encounter with Profumo girl Keeler

 

 

Over 60 years, historian and writer Paul Johnson came to know everyone who mattered.

 

In this second extract from his brilliantly indiscreet memoirs, he recounts encounters

with autocrats, scoundrels, lechers and boozers...

 

 

PAUL JOHNSON  |  NEWS  |  THE DAILY MAIL  |  MONDAY, 24 MAY, 2010

 

The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell. While Picasso was painting his famous anti-war canvas, Guernica, he deliberately set two of his women upon each other and, to his delight, they were fighting on the floor of his studio. He admitted to me he was not a genius but a clown. I was warned, however: ‘If you publish that, he will sue you.’ 

Maxwell was similarly prone to meeting criticism with the threat of writs. The first time I met him, in 1955, I thought: ‘This is a thoroughly bad man. He was heavy, with a large head and enormous face. His eyes glittered darkly, his hair shone with black oiliness, his voice was deep and very loud. He genuinely radiated evil.

He had a habit, when walking along, of dropping anything for which he had no further use – a tissue, a newspaper, a letter and envelope – for others to pick up. People were scared of him. He could be terrifying, face to face. Whenever he came up to me at a party, I’d say to him: ‘I don’t want to talk to you, Mr Maxwell. Go away.’

The most intimidating world leader was Lyndon Johnson, who became U.S. President when John Kennedy was assassinated. He exulted in this power and liked to inspire fear. When I was at the White House interviewing him about the Vietnam War, he moved his rocking chair nearer and nearer to me, so that his huge face loomed close. He had truly enormous ears, so that it was like being approached by a wild African elephant.

He smelt of power, or something distasteful, and his pockets were full of bits of paper – cardiograms to prove his heart was sound. How his wife, Ladybird Johnson, a grand woman, could bear him, I never understood. 

Genearl Charles de Gaulle, the postwar President of France, suffered from halitosis. The affliction was key to his character – to forestall people retreating from his bad breath in revulsion, de Gaulle himself rejected them with hauteur.

Diana Cooper, the wife of Duff Cooper, Britain’s ambassador to France, told me about a dinner she gave for him and his wife after he had just resigned as head of the government. Madame de Gaulle was a severe figure in black, a pillar of the church in their home village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises.

At the dinner, someone asked her, in English, what she was most looking forward to now her husband was relieved of his onerous responsibilities. She replied, to the consternation of the table: ‘A penis.’ In the silence that followed, De Gaulle spoke: ‘no, ma cherie, you ’ave mispronounced the word. You mean ‘appiness.’

Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts. In 1947, I was in college in Oxford talking to Gilbert Ryle, my philosophy tutor, when a sprightly figure pranced rapidly across the lawns and vanished into Magdalen cloisters. ‘That,’ said Ryle, ‘was Freddie Ayer.’

As a young philosopher in the Thirties, A. J. Ayer published a book on language and logic which made him famous. But he never thereafter did anything else of note except become more famous and seduce young women. Ryle paused. ‘Might have been a great philosopher. Ruined by sex. Let that be a warning to you.’

At that stage of my life, however, I would have happily taken the risk of ruin by having a great deal more sex than I was getting. For some I knew, this difficulty was never resolved. The poet Philip Larkin, a most unhappy and usually lonely man, said to me once: ‘I have never had enough sex. It’s the most important non-event of my life. I can tell you about every fuck I’ve had, and almost every fumble. It isn’t right!’

In the London of the Fifties, one of the places I liked to drink in the afternoon was the Colony Room in Soho. Muriel Belcher, its owner-manager, would sit for hours on a stool, just inside the door, and when it opened would stretch out a claw-like arm, draw in the person entering, inspect him and decide whether he could stay.

She was fat and horrible to look at, but not disagreeable if you were in her good books. Muriel would allow the artist Francis Bacon unlimited credit, and at one time his champagne bill stood at more than £2,000, an immense sum in those days.

The Colony Room was unique in that ravenous queers, ferocious lesbians and perfectly normal sex maniacs mixed in friendly promiscuity. She had a talent for creating an atmosphere in which gifted and famous, but lonely, people could be happy.

The place had only one loo, used by both men and women, and I remember around the time of the Profumo scandal finding it locked when I tried the door. A female voice within said prissily: ‘It’s occupied.’ So I waited.

Francis Bacon, drunk and bursting, arrived. I said: ‘There’s a woman inside.’ And he shouted: ‘Come out of there, you bitch!’ Then he began to kick the door. Eventually, the door opened and a beautiful woman emerged, nose in the air. It was the ravishingly beautiful Christine Keeler, the call girl responsible for Profumo’s downfall. She did not look at us, but strode back to the bar. All she said was: ‘Men!’ A lifetime of experience went with that one contemptuous word. 

Another of my haunts was the Beefsteak Club, and I remember dining there and listening to the poet John Betjeman. Gossip and stories about schoolgirls. He liked panamas, velour hats, pigtails, gymslips, black stockings and navy-blue serge bloomers.

He was also fascinated by the case involving a disgraced vicar who seduced a married parishioner and used to enjoy her on the table in his Gothic study. She was called Mrs Brandy. ‘Which gives a real zest to the business,’ as Betjeman put it. He was an ugly man for a poet, but when he smiled his whole face lit up and became seraphic.

In Fifties, the three most vivacious ladies in literary London were Edna O’Brien, Sonia Orwell and Barbara Skelton. Of these, Barbara was the most desirable, and the most desired. She loved fat men, liked them to lie on top of her and squash her..

She married two of her fat lovers, writer Cyril Connolly and publisher George Weidenfeld, and oscillated between them, causing poor George much distress. Her grandest lover was King Farouk of Egypt, who liked to beat her with the cord of his dressing gown.

Alan Clark was a rich, noisy ruffian who benefited from wealth and privilege all his life. But he was not generous and never reciprocated kindness: utterly selfish. An ex-girlfriend of his told me that applied to his love-making: ‘A terrible lover.’

When his notorious Diaries came out, and he revealed how he had seduced the wife and two daughters of a judge, I was told not to invite him to our summer party that year, but I did so and he and his wife, Jane, came. All the well-behaved upper-middle-class ladies begged to be introduced to him.

His father, Kenneth Clark, whose series, Civilisation, was a TV triumph, was a ladykiller and a practised adulterer, too. I remember him at Oxford as the best lecturer I ever heard. He had a golden voice. He radiated charm, with which he entranced even the chilliest women.

He never had to work. Both he and his wife inherited money. He bought paintings and drawings very shrewdly, when they were still cheap, and thus became a multimillionaire. He told me: ‘Strictly between you and me, Matisse is a fraud. And Picasso is worse.’

But he broke his wife’s heart and turned her from a beautiful woman into a raddled drunk. Once, tipsy, she attempted to curtsey to the Queen but fell over and banged her head. The Queen said: ‘Oh, that was a bump.’ The American diplomat Henry Kissinger, a good man to run into because he always told you something worth knowing, was bemused by Clark.

He held strongly to the view that power in men acted as an aphrodisiac on women. It didn’t matter how ugly you were or how fat you were; if you had enough power, the women were yours. When the number of Clark’s conquests was revealed in his diaries, Kissinger was astonished. ‘What does this guy Clark have?' he complained to me. ‘He wasn’t even in the Cabinet.’

The actor David Niven, another notorious success with women, was once asked by Prince rainier of Monaco who he had the best sex with. Niven replied: ‘Oh, there’s absolutely no doubt about that, it was Grace – ’ when he suddenly realised who he was talking to and finished, ‘Gracie Fields.’

Tom Driberg was the most persistent and promiscuous homosexual ever to sit in the House of Commons. He was shameless in pursuit of vice and was a persistent ‘cottager’, accosting men in public lavatories. How he escaped gaol is a mystery. At the Colony room, he often invited me back to his ‘place’, in order, he said, ‘to discuss Gnosticism’. ‘Oh, is that what you call it, Tom? no thanks!’

He was no respecter of persons. When he was Chairman of the Labour Party, he and Jim Callaghan, the Prime Minister, had to attend a Labour occasion in the North, involving a long car journey. They stopped to have a pee behind a hedge, and Driberg, ever alert, propositioned the PM. ‘May I have a closer look?’ he inquired. For once, Jim was at a loss.

An abridged extract from Brief Lives: An Intimate And Very Personal Portrait Of The 20th Century, by Paul Johnson, to be published by Hutchinson on June 3 at £20, @ 2010, Paul Johnson

 

 

 

 

 

THE GILDED GUTTER LIFE OF FRANCIS BACON

 

 

 

by Daniel Farson

 

 

REVIEW  |  KIRKUS MAGAZINE  |  THURSDAY, MAY 20, 2010

 

“Gilded gutter life” means rough but rich trade among gays, and Farson thus identifies the sex life of the English painter Francis Bacon (1909-92) with his work–which many think of with sheer horror. Farson (The Man Who Wrote Dracula, 1976; the fictional Swansdowne, 1987, etc.) was friends with Bacon for 40 years, and he intends a memoir here, not a biography, although the latter is charcoaled in amid the gay barhopping.

Born in Dublin around the corner from Oscar Wilde’s birthplace, Bacon was so wildly and ingeniously wise that his life seems secondary to his table talk, as captured here and in David Sylvester’s 1975 Interviews. Though eventually very wealthy, Bacon dismissed material possessions, lived in reclusive squalor, thought posterity was rubbish, and–to the outsider–seemed to project some ghastly self-hatred upon the monstrously distorted humans in his canvases. Bacon could paint as literally as anyone, was bored by mere likeness, and set out to distort reality into reality. He’d paint from photos rather than hurt the feelings of subjects who sat for him, then saw themselves “damaged’’ by his distortions. Says Farson: “He...was totally amoral. He had little time for weakness in others and no patience with human foibles or small vanities. He was easily bored.... Even if he had not become a painter his personality was so original that he would have made an impression on his time.’’

When his father found him dressing up in his mother’s underwear at 15, he was shipped off to London to live alone on three pounds a week. Completely irreligious, he said he painted death as the shadow of life because he loved life so greatly. A physical masochist, a mental sadist, he offered as his favourite saying: “We are meat. Cheerio!’’ Like crawling in a tub of dead fish–but a great read.

 

 

                      

                          Francis Bacon and Lady Rose MacLaren on the author’s balcony in Narrow Street

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon’s bits in Camera

 

 

 

 

    BY BRIAN SEWELL  |  LONDON EVENING STANDARD  |  THURSDAY, 13 MAY, 2010

 

Francis Bacon, the greatest and most ambitious figurative painter of the later 20th century, was born in Ireland in 1909. The centenary of that event was most thoroughly celebrated in Dublin — Ireland thus laying claim to him as heroic successor to Brian Boru, Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement — and only a pedant might grumble that as in 1909 what is now Eire was then as much part of the United Kingdom as Ulster is still, Francis was as British as anyone born within the sound of Bow Bells. For those who knew him during the long years of his life in London  before and after the Second World War, there was indeed nothing about him to suggest an Irish origin — Guinness played no part in his heavy drinking habits, the once ubiquitous record of Count John McCormack singing Ave Maria was never heard in his cottage in Reece Mews, and though Brompton Oratory was within very easy walking distance, he never set foot within its Catholic walls.

I must argue further that Francis did not even spring from the centuries-old Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry that made Dublin something of a European capital of culture in the 18th century, and that being the son of an ex-Army officer born in Australia and an heiress mother born in Northumberland gave him neither jottle nor tit of Celtic-Hibernian ancestry. That he was a direct descendant of that other Francis Bacon, the philosopher-statesman and political Iago who encouraged the suppression of Hugh Tyrone’s Irish rebellion in 1596, does much to prove his Englishness.

Francis died in 1992. His affairs were not quite in the simple order that he thought and when the time eventually came to decide on what should be done with the contents of his studio, we English (that is, Tate Britain, which might have been expected to become the enthusiastic owners of the studio) had exhausted our emotional involvement and moved on to other things.

Besides, health and safety regulations meant that the cottage could never be made into a museum; thus we let what was left in it pass to the Dublin City Gallery, and there the studio has been reconstructed in the perfect image of the room in which he had worked since the autumn of 1961.

This was no ordinary task. Francis discarded a great deal in his lifetime, but then accumulated more — more tubes and tins of paint that lost their labels, more brushes, more books and illustrations torn from books, more photographs and tearings from newspapers and magazines, all piled high, leaving no space on the floor on which to plant his easel or his feet (for these he had to kick clear a square foot or two if and when he wished to paint).

As for paintings, these stood face-in propped against a wall at angles increasingly perilous. I have seen photographs of Francis posed painting at an easel in this clutter, but never, over 30 years or so, did I see the man himself at work, nor did I ever see a space in which the vast triptychs of his later years could have been assembled. In a studio measuring only four by eight metres it would not have been easy, even in the neatest circumstances, for Francis to have viewed comfortably three related canvases with an overall measurement of two by five metres; knee-deep, thigh-deep even, in squalor and detritus, it must have been impossible. In addition to unfinished canvases to which he might return, a hundred more had been savagely slashed as a preliminary to their total destruction. And I must remind all concerned for Bacon’s reputation that over the past decade or so, many more slashed canvases with large areas lost beyond recovery or reinvention have come onto the peripheral art market, consigned by butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers with improbable explanations of their ownership.

It could be argued that reconstructing Bacon’s studio is itself a work of art, an installation in the manner of Edward Kienholz, with the same obsessive attention to detail. Dublin’s argument is that it is an act of archaeological deconstruction-reconstruction essential for the preservation of what must be the most significant archive of Bacon’s work and life, and that in this act of piety an irreplaceably rich hoard of source material survives to be examined and re-examined by art historians who, sooner or later and from time to time, will identify an odd scrap of paper with a scribbled or disrupted image as the springboard for a well-known painting. Alas, there are too few paintings for there ever to be a match with the thousands of photographs and pieces of printed paper that were removed to Dublin (there were some 7,500 objects altogether).

To Francis all this would have seemed madness. He was always dismissive of any attempt by critics to uncover the why and how of what he did. I believe that he had a pretty clear idea in his mind’s eye before he began a painting and that this came about from several concurrent sources or stimuli, often unrelated and very different and primarily from printed images and photographs. These suffered in his hands. For the photograph as a work of art he had not the slightest respect — it was merely paper that he could maul, crush, crumple, fold and tear until the image was as fractured as a reflection in a shattered mirror, frayed, abraded, scoured, torn in pieces and reconstructed to make hideous what had formerly been ordinary. This he was even capable of doing to reproductions or his own paintings.

I have wondered if he knew André Breton’s philosophical treatise, Crise de l’Objet of 1936, in which the notion of the tortured object is discussed — he was certainly capable of reading it. One tortured image informed another and the first clarification of their union was a bold brush drawing on the canvas perhaps supported by the presence of a model. From then on, the development was an impulsive conversation with the canvas. Francis painted, paused, stepped back and considered what he had done; what he saw on the canvas then told him whether it was right or wrong, and he responded by surrendering to another impulse. We now know that we can rely on hardly a word or statement attributed to him by his famous but inventive interviewers, but the paintings — finished, unfinished and partly destroyed — speak for themselves and they support the notion of impulse superimposed on impulse, with the occasional acceptable accident thrown in. No wonder that the pigment occasionally clogged.

All this is made clear by Francis Bacon: In Camera, an exhibition at Compton Verney, six miles short of  Stratford-upon-Avon. It is, however, a thoroughly worthy and didactic examination of his working processes, and the pity is that it is not in London where far the largest audience for such instruction is. What a pity, too, that no one thought of combining it with a season of Titus Andronicus at Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre. A handful of earlier paintings, remarkable for the passionate intensity of which he was capable in his forties, establish the marvellous and mystifying Bacon before so much of him evaporated in expanded triptychs and tedious self-reference. A handful of later paintings in various states of unfinish reveal all the processes from vigorous initial drawing to the overworked and clogged pigment that clouded his imagined images and balked their further development. Slashed canvases demonstrate how determined Francis was that unsatisfactory paintings should not survive. And a mass of material from the studio floor offers incontrovertible evidence of his dependence on the photographic and found image.

Two important issues are raised by the preservation of Bacon’s studio and the survival of paintings that he clearly wished to be utterly destroyed. There is now a widespread assumption that the artist’s studio embodies something of his aesthetic and imaginative potency and in doing so offers us insight and understanding.

This may well be so in some degree — the contrasting studios of Anna and Michael Ancher in Skagen, Jutland, make the point most strongly, but what we may reasonably preserve in a holiday destination on the northern tip of Denmark is an unreasonable demand in a great and growing city like London. There is no sane argument for preserving the rooms in which every briefly celebrated artist worked (and if artists, why not poets, playwrights and philosophers, composers and choreographers too?), and we should not, in perpetuity, remove from the currency of studio accommodation every space once used to create their work by Hirst, Emin, Gormley, Kapoor, Hockney, Freud, Gilbert and George, the Chapman Brothers, Doig, Ofili and the thousand others who revel in the support of the Arts Council, the various Tates and the Royal Academy. To do so is to go too far with veneration and to venture into the realms of superstition, fetish and belief in relics. That a paint brush once held in Bacon’s thaumaturgical fingers should be, in Dublin’s reconstruction of his studio, within fractions of a millimetre in the same relationship with this jam jar and that pot of paint as it was in Reece Mews is to accord these trifles the same reverent awe as the medieval peasant rendered to fragments of the True Cross and the thousand teeth of John the Baptist.

As for the slashed canvases, enough bad Bacons to do serious mischief to his reputation were “abducted” from his studio for sale by his dealers, without the absurdity of keeping in the public eye those whose destruction he had begun with a Stanley knife. It is unfair to Francis to interrupt that process and we should respect this evidence of his profound self-criticism. The survival of a hundred of these wrecks should appal all who care for his renown.

I am one of those who see Francis as the perfect mirror of his age, the utterly selfish painter self-concerned, not an astute commentator employing metaphor in place of observation. In the wilderness of later 20th-century painting he was a towering giant, but he was not a Titian, not a Michelangelo, not a Velázquez, not a Picasso capable of Guernica, and we should not make more of him than he was. The cottage industry of the multitude of critics and curators whose raw material he has become risks doing him a grave disservice.

Francis Bacon: In Camera is at Compton Verney Warwickshire until June 20. Open 11am-5pm, Tuesday-Sunday; admission £8 (concessions available).

 

 

 

 

       Rough stuff: a portrait of Bacon’s lover, John Edwards, in 1988, probably inspired by a photograph

       folded to reduce the height of the torso and the back of the chair

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon e la terza via Calarsi all’infimo a vedere il sublime

 

 

 

 

ARTE. La rilettura critica di Deleuze sul Caravaggio del nostro tempo
 Oltre l’astrattismo di pura evasione e la pittura senza figure.

 

Il grande irlandese trovò la sua ardua strada tormentando l’immagine umana

 

 

 

GIANI LUIGI VERZELLESI   |   NEWS  |   LA ARENA   |   ITALY   |  FRIDAY, 07 MAY, 2010

  

L’ombra cupa, che s’allunga dietro la figura di Francis Bacon (1909-1992), ricompare sulla scena dell’arte contemporanea come un’intermittente apparizione che inquieta.


Nel 2008, a un secolo dalla nascita del pittore, si aprì a Londra una grande mostra antologica (di 60 opere), trasferita poi a Madrid e quindi in America. Nel 2009, la romana Galleria Borghese ha organizzato una rassegna mozzafiato, in cui erano a confronto — certamente provocatorio — 13 opere di Caravaggio con 17 di Bacon. E ieri, la vicenda tormentata del pittore di Dublino è stata rievocata da Barbara Briganti: con precisi riferimenti ai provini fotografici di cui Bacon si valeva come figurazioni stimolanti fatte di immagini di lottatori infuriati, che preannunciano i conturbanti sviluppi pittorici eseguiti dal pittore travolto dalla foga espressionistica: «Quasi in trance, anzi molto spesso in trance etilica» (Briganti).


Il suo intento primario era rivolto a tormentare la figura umana fino a farle conseguire un’imprevedibile presenza orrenda: talmente deformata da colpire l’osservatore con il complesso delle sue irregolarità squadernate e fermentanti.


Per intendere questo processo di desublimazione, coltivato come un’esigenza irrecusabile, giova rammentare che Bacon «percepiva la vita come una corsa inarrestabile verso il baratro» (Diez). Una lunga avventura malata di inguaribile estetismo, sempre e unicamente impegnato nel compito di scovare e dare evidenza visiva alla condizione umana stravolta e derelitta: così come ha fatto — secondo il gusto dei tempi — la pittura prenovecentesca delle varie tradizioni, studiata e ristudiata da Bacon con quel suo terribile occhio indagatore. Simile a una lama di luce gelida, che spregia ogni specie d’astrazione, rifugge da artisti come Matisse e si crogiola in Van Gogh, in Picasso e in quelle zone d’ombra tragica che, sia negli antichi che nei moderni, s’addensa come una caligine spesso inavvertita da osservatori poco attenti.


PROTAGONISTA I pareri, le predilizioni e i rifiuti netti di Bacon risultano raccolti nel libro che Gilles Deleuze ha dedicato alla Logica della sensazione (Quodlibet edizioni): un testo critico rigoroso che consente al lettore intelligente di mettere a fuoco non solo la figura di Bacon protagonista, ricercatore instancabile di fermenti pittorici carichi d’angoscia, ma anche quella delle varie tendenze artistiche novecentesche, sottoposte da Bacon a una lucida revisione correttiva.


Secondo Deleuze, l’espressionismo astratto, come arte informale, al contrario dell’astrattismo evasivo, «cerca l’abisso e il caos». Con Pollock, non si compie «una trasformazione della forma, ma una scomposizione della materia». Per l’autore del saggio, a Bacon spetta il merito di aver proceduto lungo la terza via: aldilà dell’ottica d’evasione della pittura astratta, e dell’appiattimento manuale, senza figure, tipico della Pittura azione.


Di fronte a non pochi suoi dipinti aggressivi, si potrà arretrare perplessi, quasi fustigati dalla feroce carica espressionistica che emanano. ma non si può negare che in essi la ricerca pittorica, così tormentata e complessa, risulta sorretta da un’energia che le consente di uscire dalla catastrofe invece di lasciarsene travolgere morendo nell’indeterminatezza soltanto suggestiva.


In parole povere, la figurazione non si estingue: mantiene tratti del motivo figurale prescelto, che cresce aldilà della rappresentazione solo imitativa. E «rappresenta ancora qualcuno, un uomo che grida»; un viluppo di corpi animalesco, talora ridotto a «carne macellata che urla e racconta ancora qualcosa» (Deleuze), con quella sua speciale presenza condensata, simile a una reliquia di sofferenze irriducibili. Guardate il Ritratto di Isabel Rawsthorne, del 1966: quasi un ritratto di Courbet, incapsulato in una sequenza di curvature provenienti dal Boccioni più spavaldo.

Gian Luigi Verzellesi

 

 

 

                           

     

                                                                                        

 

                                                                                                                  Il pittore irlandese Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and the Lefevre Gallery

 

 

 

 

by Martin Hammer

 

 

MARTIN HAMMER  |  THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE  |  VOLUME 152  |  NUMBER 1286  |  MAY 2010

 

 

THE LEFEVRE GALLERY in London, founded in 1871, played a significant role in selling modern European art, mostly French, to British collectors and, through its exhibitions, in assisting successive generations of artists to assimilate new directions in art. 1 Between the Wars, it mounted shows devoted to Georges Seurat (1926), Edgar Degas (1928), Paul Cézanne (1935) as well as then current figures such as Matisse (1927), Picasso (1931), Braque (1934) and Salvador Dalí (1936). Multiple-artist exhibitions, containing a work or two by big names, were a recurrent feature of the schedule. The Gallery also dealt in modern British art, and was especially active in this capacity around the end of the Second World War. Duncan Macdonald (Fig.21), a director of the Gallery, sought to seize the initiative in showing marketable British artists as the art world gradually revived, even though cross-Channel communications remained difficult and the cost of importing pictures prohibitive. 2 During the early part of the War, the Gallery had only been open around two days a week, and its holdings were evacuated to the Mendip Hills. This was fortunate as in spring 1943 its long-serving premises in King Street were destroyed in a German bombing raid. Macdonald, who for some time had been in New York working at the associated Bignou Gallery, then returned to London and oversaw the relaunching of Lefevre at 131–34 New Bond Street towards the end of 1944. Thereafter, the Gallery showed modern British art, interwoven with displays of French pictures from stock. The programme included exhibitions of established abstract artists such as Ben Nicholson (1945) and Barbara Hepworth (1944 and 1946), independent figures such as Jankel Adler (1946), Frances Hodgkins (1946) and L.S. Lowry (1945), and the younger Neoromantics such as John Minton (1945), Keith Vaughan (1944 and 1946) and Lucian Freud (1944 and 1947, the latter shared with John Craxton). This story would repay general investigation with reference to the Gallery’s extensive archives, and to the parallel activities of rivals such as the Leicester, Gimpel Fils and Redfern Galleries.

 

The focus of this article is on the Gallery’s dealings with Francis Bacon, and the light they shed on his biography and work. The Lefevre is probably most frequently cited in relation to the group show of spring 1945 in which Bacon first exhibited Three studies for figures at the base of a Crucifixion (1944), the mythic point of origin for his mature work. What the archives confirm is that Bacon’s inclusion was a direct consequence of his close personal and creative rapport with Graham Sutherland, which had begun in 1943. 3 Sutherland’s reputation then was extremely elevated, as a result of his dark landscape imagery and his work over the previous five years as an official war artist, featuring images of bomb-blasted buildings, mining and apocalyptic steel-works interiors. 4 With the end of the War in sight, Macdonald had decided to cultivate Sutherland, encouraging him to contribute to a group show that would help to relaunch his independent career and serve as the prelude to a one-man show and a continuing association with the Gallery. Over the coming months, artist and dealer talked also about a show in Paris, where Macdonald had a partnership arrangement, although that idea never materialised. Sutherland’s powerful position is reflected in his communications with the Gallery. He was able to be quite fastidious about which artists’ work his own would be hung alongside, announcing early in 1945 that he would prefer Moore, Hodgkins and Nicholson. 5 When Nicholson withdrew, Sutherland suggested a bold alternative:

 

. . . as for the painter to take BN’s place it seems there is not much choice other than Piper. I should really prefer Francis Bacon for whose work you know I have a really profound admiration. It is true he has shown very little; but nowadays with every Tom, Dick and Harry showing yards of painting without much selection or standard this is refreshing, & his recent things, while being quite uncompromising, have a grandeur & brilliance which is rarely seen in English art. 6

 

Macdonald responded with suitable enthusiasm. On 22nd January he stated: ‘if you prefer Francis Bacon I shall try him’. He took the opportunity to suggest a further possibility, which resulted in another addition to the line-up: ‘what would you think of Matthew Smith being added to the group? He is [. . .] a different generation in work, but [. . .] surely the best painter of his generation’. 7 That same day, Macdonald opened up communications with Bacon: ‘Your friend Graham Sutherland has spoken very highly of your Painting and is very keen that I should see it. May I come as soon as we can arrange a suitable date between us?’. He was, he explained, aiming to bring together works by several artists and ‘Sutherland suggests that you should be one of these’. 8 The following month Macdonald told Sutherland: ‘I went to see Francis Bacon and have asked him to send four or five works to the Show. I shall tell you about his work when we meet’. 9 He subsequently reported to Bacon that he had lunched with the Sutherlands and ‘was delighted to hear from this artist that he had seen some of your new pictures, which he praised highly’. Bacon should telephone him to talk about which pictures to include. 10

 

The exhibition Recent Paintings by Francis Bacon, Frances Hodgkins, Henry Moore, Matthew Smith, Graham Sutherland ran at the Lefevre Gallery throughout April 1945. Bacon was represented by the Three studies and Figure in a landscape (1945). The catalogue also listed eight works by Hodgkins, fifteen by Moore (including thirteen drawings), nine by Smith and eleven by Sutherland. Macdonald was able to inform Sutherland that all his works had sold. Moreover the Bacons had contributed to the overall success of the show: ‘many people are interested in the Francis Bacon pictures, even though they find them “frightening”. 11 I think myself they are very well designed and painted and I look forward to seeing more of his later oil paintings. I shall watch his new work with interest if I have the opportunity’.

 

Subsequently, he informed Sutherland: ‘there are now only two Smith oil paintings and two Moore drawings left in the whole Exhibition. You [. . .] would be very glad if you could hear the enthusiasm of many young people for your part of the Show, and indeed for the whole Exhibition’. Macdonald was delighted by the reviews and visitor numbers, such that they had to reprint the catalogue three times. 12 Clearly Bacon benefited not just from the company he was keeping, but also from the current situation in which many people desired to visit galleries, with wartime pressures finally waning but all the big museums still devoid of their contents

 

After the exhibition, Bacon asked to be paid for Figure in a landscape, which had been sold to the artist’s cousin Diana Watson. Interestingly, the cheque for £108.6.8 included a deduction of £25 for ‘the three Pictures sold to Mr Hall, owing to the fact that they were sold in your Studio. Do you remember the arrangement we came to on my last visit to your studio?’. 13 Bacon apologised for the tardy sending of a receipt: ‘I have been laid up with asthma and forgot about it. Yes of course I remember about the arrangement over Mr Hall’s pictures and am very grateful to you for only taking half the percentage on them’. 14 Presumably, Bacon had originally intended to show and potentially sell Three studies, but his lover and supporter Eric Hall was able at the last minute, by means of this arrangement with the Lefevre, to acquire the work and prevent it being lost to another collector and possibly even sold as three separate pictures. Hall may have been ahead of Bacon himself in estimating the triptych as a major breakthrough. He eventually presented the work to the Tate Gallery, after the breakdown in his relationship with Bacon.

 

Macdonald now viewed Bacon as one of his stable of rising artists. Towards the end of 1945, he told Sutherland that he hoped to include Bacon, Craxton, Freud, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde and probably Julian Trevelyan in an exhibition of ‘good contemporary painters’ in February 1946: ‘naturally your last canvasses would have the centre of the show [. . .] If in the New Year you see B, F or C, I hope you will encourage them to do their utmost to make this next show a fine one’. 15 In the event, Bacon contributed Figure study I and Figure study II to the show. His advance commentary suggests that other pictures had seemed possible at one stage: ‘I am afraid I have only been able to send 2 pictures. The one I sold I have not been able to get a frame for and the new one you saw I am not satisfied with yet . . .’. 16 Perhaps the former was the picture Bacon sold to Peter Watson, but later took back and destroyed. 17 Regarding the two works that were dispatched, Bacon remarked: ‘These paintings are studies for the Magdalene and the smaller of the two was the first studie [sic] and I would like them entitled as such in the catalogue’. 18 The association lingered, and Figure study II was entitled Magdalene in the catalogue for Bacon’s 1962 Tate Gallery retrospective. The artist was at pains to refute this; according to Alley’s catalogue raisonné of 1964, ‘the artist says he never thought of the figure as the Magdalene and never associated it in any way with the Crucifixion’. 19 The allusion in the letter seems to contradict this, and has been discussed elsewhere in the context of Bacon’s extraordinary fusion during this period of references to religious imagery and to Nazi propaganda photography. 20 Nevertheless in the catalogue for the Lefevre Gallery show, as it appeared in February 1946 (Fig.22), the pictures were listed as ‘Figure Study (No.1)’and ‘Figure Study (No.2)’. Indeed, Bacon generally opted hereafter for neutral titles, such as Painting (1946), even though the latter picture too alludes to Crucifixion imagery. He may have carried on improvising the pictures after writing the letter, and introduced changes that rendered the titles he originally had in mind inappropriate. But the shift may also capture Bacon’s realisation, for reasons unknown, that evocative titles could be counterproductive, encouraging over-literal or reductive readings. 21

 

The gallery succeeded in selling both pictures, resulting in a further cheque for £183.6.8. 22 Figure study I was purchased by Brenda Bomford on behalf of her husband, James, who collected French Impressionist and modern British art and proceeded to acquire a significant quantity of Bacons over the coming years. 23 Figure study II was acquired by the Contemporary Art Society, the charitable body that bought works of art for onward distribution to public galleries. The purchase is likely to have been contentious, given the picture’s disturbing imagery and the artist’s obscurity, and several years elapsed before it found a home in the Bagshaw Art Gallery, Batley (subsequently transferred to Huddersfield Art Gallery). The initial acquisition was supported, one imagines, by two figures active in the C.A.S. who became friendly with Bacon around this time. One was John Russell, whose enthusiasm for the artist can only have been reinforced by his recent contacts with Sutherland, documented in the Lefevre Archive, in connection with Russell’s forthcoming book From Sickert to 1948, a survey of British art based around C.A.S. acquisitions. 24 Russell went on to write the first monograph on Bacon, incorporating vivid recollections of first seeing Three studies for figures at the base of the Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery. 25 The other was Sir Colin Anderson, the wealthy collector and patron, a new member of the C.A.S. committee and the recipient over the following few years of letters from Bacon that have recently been published, providing a valuable complement to the exchanges with Sutherland, and the Hanover and Lefevre Galleries. 26 Like the Lefevre correspondence, the Anderson letters lay bare Bacon’s acute and persistent financial disarray, including an apparent threat of bankruptcy for what sound like gambling debts, and they indicate his somewhat unscrupulous attitude towards wealthy individuals who could easily afford to help him out.

 

In April 1946 Macdonald was eager to sustain the connection with Bacon, who was planning to leave London: ‘I hope you will come and dine with me, one evening before you leave for the South of France, so that we may make any arrangements possible, regarding the sending of pictures and the exhibition of same in the Lefevre Galleries. We shall do our utmost to find a good home for the large picture which is now here’.27 The latter must have been Study for man with microphones (Fig.23), which the Gallery showed that summer. This and Painting (1946) were evidently carried out in quick succession during the first half of 1946. The latter has often been seen to descend from a tradition of butchery images as epitomised in Rembrandt’s Carcass of beef (1657) in the Louvre, Paris. The variations on this theme by Chaim Soutine, an artist much admired by Bacon, can also be seen as a more immediate catalyst for Painting (1946).28 He could certainly have known the versions by Soutine in which the suspended Crucifix-like carcass is rendered with the artist’s characteristic heightened palette and painterly touch. It is worth noting that one such Soutine had been in Britain for several years, in the collection of Sutherland’s friend Eardley Knollys, and was in fact included in the Lefevre’s exhibition School of Paris (Picasso and his Contemporaries) that immediately followed the group show which launched Bacon.29 In this atypical variation, Soutine focused rather on one slab of beef, with its rich colouration, textures and formal structure. Memories of the picture may have informed Bacon’s ribs of beef suspended to such compelling effect on the tubular metal podium in front of his generic fascist dictator.

 

It was the sale of Painting (1946) to the Redfern Gallery that made it possible for Bacon to leave a still-dismal, post-War Britain for the sunshine and hedonistic pursuits of the South of France. His life and artistic activities in Monte Carlo are conveyed in communications to Macdonald and others. In August he wrote:

 

I have been meaning to write to you for ages. I have found a flat here, not really what I like but it will do until I decide what I am going to do. I do not know how long I want to stay here. I may go to Paris after the winter if I can find anything there. Life is curious here very expensive in some ways and in others cheaper than England. I am working but afraid the things are still very large & it is unfortunate for me financially but there is nothing to be done at the moment. Everything in the way of food can be got here from Cumberland hams to caviar if one chooses to pay. The really difficult thing even on the black market is canvas but I have been able to get some very good coarse linen sheets which turn into very good canvases. Nobody down here has ever heard of painting except the extraordinary lesbian affairs they concoct out of the landscape and the bougainvilleas which have to be seen to be believed but perhaps their ignorance is no greater than the knowing ones at home. 30

 

Bacon’s preference for working on a large scale was deemed to be imprudent, with Macdonald ruefully noting: ‘If you do not feel like shrinking your sizes, I fear there is nothing to be done about it’. 31 Nevertheless he encouraged Bacon to consider showing work in France: ‘If you are still there in January, we may meet, and between us we might devise a scheme for putting British Painting (via Francis Bacon) on the map, dans le Midi’. In the meantime, he had seen Figure study II in the show of C.A.S. acquisitions at the Tate, as well as Painting (1946) at the Redfern: ‘the colour was certainly startling and for me quite brilliant but I suppose the size militated against its sale’. In the Gallery’s own exhibition British Painters, Past and Present in August, Study for a man with microphones ‘had a whole wall to itself, and looked very well but alas it did not find a purchaser’. Bacon for his part felt that the South of France was unlikely to produce buyers, and that everything was becoming too expensive:

 

I am going to Paris on the 1st of November for two or three weeks [. . .] I am looking for a large room in Paris to work in. I have heard of a room and am going up to see it. I do not feel I could stay here permanently, not because of work, because as long as it is fairly quiet I can work anywhere, but I do not care for its sort of village life after a time. I am working on three studies of Velasquez portrait of Innocent II [sic]. I have almost finished one. I find them exciting to do, and of course always hoping it is going to be the real thing. 32

 

That December, Macdonald reported to Bacon about further showings of his pictures in London: ‘I am sending you the catalogue of an Exhibition of British Painters at the Anglo-French Centre, which is later going on to Paris. He [the organiser] borrowed the three studies, I think, from one of your friends [Eric Hall], and from me he borrowed the one illustrated [Study for a man with microphones], but found he had not the space to hang it . . .’. 33 Macdonald also commented that he had been deeply impressed by Sutherland’s Crucifixion, having attended the unveiling at St Matthew’s church, Northampton: ‘I believe it is the finest thing he has done’. The affinity with Bacon struck Macdonald: ‘I keep wondering how it would affect you, who have already done so many studies for a similar subject’. He was also keen to see the Velázquez studies, also described in Bacon’s letters to Sutherland from late 1946, although the earliest such variation to survive is Head VI of 1949. 34 During 1947 Macdonald maintained his contacts with both Bacon and Sutherland, judging by scattered reports of his sightings of the one in letters to the other. That spring he expressed regret at missing Bacon on his last visit to London, and asked for photographs of recent works completed in France to show James Soby of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, who he clearly hoped might buy a picture. 35 Meanwhile Soby himself needed reassurance in relation to Bacon’s eccentric titling of his works: ‘I think I told you that Francis Bacon’s “Man with Microphones” is really a highly finished picture, and any new one he makes will probably be called a “study”, in spite of its finality. He has a large imagination, and always hopes that another picture will turn out to be 12 feet by 15 feet’. 36 The correspondence with Soby suggests that Macdonald was responsible for galvanising the American critic and collector’s enthusiastic interest in Bacon, culminating in his unrealised work of the early 1960s on what would have been the first book on the artist. Soby wrote about Bacon and reproduced Study for a man with microphones in his 1948 survey of the current state of painting. 37 By his own testimony, Soby also played a key role in the Museum of Modern Art’s decision to purchase Painting (1946) from the Redfern Gallery in 1948, and in the commission to the young critic Sam Hunter to produce what turned out to be an exceptional article on Bacon and his immersion in photography. 38

 

Bacon’s next letter to Macdonald in May took into account the dealer’s recent six-week visit to New York. Notwithstanding the wonderful weather and light in France, the cost of living was proving oppressive, and America was starting to look an attractive alternative. Of late he had ‘been acting as nurse as there is someone rather ill in the flat’, but would send Soby some photographs in the next few weeks:

 

I had not finished anything, but in the last few days have been able to finish a large one I like at the moment, and a smaller one. I was so pleased to see Graham and Kathy, and I am sure the change here gave him a good rest, as he looked so well when he left. If I sent you over two or three pictures at the end of June, do you think you could do anything with them? I am getting nearly completely broke. If I am going to try and go to America next year to try and live there for a bit, and if I can’t sell anything or haven’t anything to sell, I will get a job as a valet or cook. I can do both well, so if you have any rich friends who want a good English slave, do let me know, as I can always make an arrangement over these sorts of jobs so as to evade the permits for work which are so difficult to get. 39

 

Bacon had perhaps been inspired by the accounts of life in the United States by his friends Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson, both of whom had recently crossed the Atlantic and encountered a culture richer and more vulgar in every sense than in Britain. Their discoveries and contacts resulted in a special double-issue of Horizon magazine in October 1947 devoted to contemporary America. 40

 

In response, Macdonald indicated that he would certainly try to find buyers given the chance, and notwithstanding current difficulties in the commercial art world:

 

The selling of pictures has slowed down somewhat in England, and a good deal in America, while Paris is worse still. If you can get a few of your new pictures that are not too large [. . .] we will all do our damnedest to find purchasers. Would you have any difficulty in getting them out of France? I am sure you would have to give me warning when you are sending them, how many, and the prices, so that I could get an import licence from the Board of Trade. I wonder whether it would not be wiser for you to bring them yourself and settle all your other affairs at the same time. 41

 

He further indicated that he could indeed help Bacon to get to America, given his connections with the likes of Soby and James Johnson Sweeney, until 1946 a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 

Bacon’s financial concerns come to the fore in his next letter that summer, where we encounter descriptions of new pictures:

 

I think your suggestion of bringing the painting back will be better. I will come back at the end of September or beginning of October. I shall have a group of 3 large paintings about the size of the one which went to the CAS. Is there any chance of your having an exhibition in the autumn in which you could hang them? They want to be hung together in a series as they are a sort of Crucifixion. I am finishing the 2nd now. I think they are the most formal things I have done and the colour is a sort of intense blue violet. I think they are better than what I have done up to now. I hope so at any rate. If you think there is a chance of your being able to show them, as I really need the money desperately, I will write to the framer I go to and see what they can do about framing them. I want £750 for the set. It is not a quarter of what is has cost me with gambling etc; if you think you can get more, it would be tremendously welcome. Or perhaps your gallery would speculate in buying them directly, or would they have to be Scottish darning for that. I do not mean this bitterly [. . .] I am sure the Bonnard Exhibition must be very interesting. I would love to have seen it.42

 

The idea of a direct gallery purchase did not bear fruit. However, Bacon resumed his campaign to sell the same or related pictures through the Lefevre early in 1948:

 

I have done a set of three paintings I would like to show. They are about the same size as the Contemporary Art Society one or a little smaller. Have you an Exhibition this spring or summer in which you would show them? I could get them to you by the end of April or beginning of May. I am glad to say I can work a lot now. A friend of mine, Eric Hall, is coming in to see you, and could give you some idea of them, as he is coming back here, perhaps you could tell him if there is any chance of showing them. They are things I have tried to do several times before, but I have never been able to bring them off, but this time I think it is much nearer.

 

Bacon’s preoccupations were yet again financial:

 

There is another thing. Is it possible to make me a small advance? I am quite broke, and canvas and paints are terribly expensive. Would it be possible to advance me £150. You can speak to Eric Hall about this, as if you could make me the advance, I would be grateful if you would let him have it on my behalf. I would be terribly grateful if you could possibly do this.

 

Finally, Bacon raised the issue of a picture that he wished to take back and rework: ‘Some time when you have a van passing in the Kensington area, could you send back that awful picture of mine to 7 Cromwell Place. I want to use the back of the canvas and the frame’. Conversely, he tried to keep Macdonald sweet by making optimistic noises about future productivity:

 

Here [Monte Carlo] the weather is lovely, and wonderfully isolated. There is no-one here. Now that I think I can produce the things much more rapidly, I hope I will become perhaps a better money-making proposition. If you know of anyone who will take the risk and supply me with paints, canvas, and the minimum of vittles think of me. I might make them money. 43

 

The ‘awful picture’ in question was presumably Study for man with microphones, which had not sold at the Lefevre Gallery and which Bacon did indeed significantly rework around 1949, although the revised version in turn fell victim to Bacon’s sacrificial knife after being exhibited in 1962. Equally, the blueviolet ‘sort of Crucifixion’ pictures, mentioned earlier in his letter, seem not to have survived Bacon’s culling.

 

In late 1949, the year in which he turned forty, Bacon finally had his first one-man show, which turned out to be an immense critical and commercial success. 44 However, the venue was not the Lefevre but the Hanover Gallery, which had opened the previous year and had made an early splash with new pictures from the South of France by Sutherland. The Gallery, backed by Arthur Jeffress and run by Erica Brausen, formerly of the Redfern Gallery, emerged as probably the most lively venue for innovative British art over the next decade. The shift in power was undoubtedly hastened by the death of Duncan Macdonald in 1949. For a period the Lefevre Gallery had undoubtedly been one of the first points of call for anyone wishing to keep abreast of developments in British art. That prominence had been relatively short-lived, however, and the mantle was now passing to younger rivals.

 

I am grateful to the former owners of the Lefevre Gallery for giving me permission to study the Gallery’s papers at Tate Gallery Archive. Abbreviations used in the notes are: LGA: Lefevre Gallery Archive, TGA: Tate Gallery Archive; FB: Francis Bacon; DM: Duncan Macdonald; and GS: Graham Sutherland.

1 D. Cooper: ‘A Franco-Scottish link with the Past’, exh. cat. Alex Reid & Lefevre, London (Lefevre Gallery) 1976, pp.3–26; for historical background, see F. Fowle: exh. cat. Impressionism and Scotland, Edinburgh (National Galleries of Scotland) 2008, p.141. After a 1926 merger it became the Alex Reid and Lefevre Gallery, although the shorthand version was more often used, as it is here.

2 See M. Garlake: New Art New World, New Haven and London 1998, p.25

3 For the relationship between the two artists, see M. Hammer: Bacon and Sutherland, New Haven and London 2005. The reciprocal nature of their admiration is further suggested in a remark inserted by J.T. Soby into his early 1960s text for an unrealised monograph on Bacon, based on a ‘recent interview’: ‘all his life he had been looking for some help to find a theoretical background for his painting [. . .] Once in his life he hoped Graham Sutherland might provide him with it’; New York, Museum of Modern Art Archive, J.T. Soby Papers, typescript draft of book on Bacon, p.4.

4 On Sutherland’s work in the 1940s, see M. Hammer: Graham Sutherland: Landscapes, War Scenes, Portraits 1924–1950, London 2005.

5 GS to DM, n.d. [mid-January 1945], LGA; the P.S. to the letter rammed home the message: ‘Do see F. Bacon’s new works’.

6 GS to DM, n.d. [mid-January 1945], LGA.

7 DM to GS, 22nd January 1945, LGA.

8 DM to FB, 22nd January 1945, LGA. 9 DM to GS, 1st March [1945], LGA. 10 DM to FB, 12th March 1945, LGA.

11 DM to GS, 11th April [1945], LGA. 12 DM to GS, 19th April [1945], LGA.

13 DM to FB, 14th May 1945, LGA.

14 FB to DM, 25th May 1945, LGA.

15 DM to GS, 27th December 1945, LGA.

16 FB to DM, n.d. [?January 1946], LGA.

17 Hammer, op. cit. (note 3), p.55.

18 FB to DM, n.d. [?January 1946], LGA.

19 R. Alley: Francis Bacon, London 1964, p.39.

20 M. Hammer and C. Stephens: ‘“Seeing the story of one’s time”: appropriations from Nazi photography in the work of Francis Bacon’, Visual Culture in Britain 10 (2009), pp.315–52 (issue devoted to Francis Bacon)

21 A parallel move away from mythic and evocative to neutral titles is encountered in the contemporary work of American Abstract Expressionists such as Clyfford Still.

22 DM to FB, 9th April [1946], LGA.

23 See the provenances provided in Alley, op. cit. (note 19).

24 DM/GS correspondence from November and December 1945, LGA; indicating that Sutherland knew Russell quite well and liked his writing.

 25 J. Russell: Francis Bacon, London 1979, p.10.

26 A. Clark: ‘Francis Bacon’s correspondence with Sir Colin Anderson’, The British Art Journal 8 (2007), pp.39–43; Hammer, op. cit. (note 3), pp.234–40 (letters to GS); and M. Peppiatt: Bacon in the 1950s, New Haven and London 2006, pp.141–53 (Hanover Gallery letters).

27 DM to FB, 9th April [1946], LGA.

28 On Soutine’s importance for Bacon and his fellow ‘School of London’ artists, see the present writer’s forthcoming article; ‘Soutine in English Translation’, Modernist Cultures (October 2010).

29 M. Tuchman, E. Dunow and K. Perls: Chaim Soutine (1893–1943): Catalogue Raisonné, Part I, Cologne 2002, pp.470 and 473, no.99.

30 FB to DM, sent from Hotel Ré, Monte Carlo, 20th August 1946, LGA.

31 DM to FB, 1st October 1946, LGA. A year later Bacon announced to Anderson that ‘at the moment I can paint much smaller pictures which I am glad to be able to do’; Clark, op. cit. (note 26), p.41.

 32 FB to DM, 19th October [1946], typed copy, LGA.

33 DM to FB, 4th December 1946, LGA; see exh. cat. Seventh Exhibition: Adler, Bacon, Colquhoun, Hubert, MacBryde, Trevelyan, London (Anglo-French ArtCentre) November to December 1946, nos.6–8, as ‘Studies for figures at the base of a crucifix’.

34 Hammer, op. cit. (note 3), pp.237–38.

35 DM to FB, 23rd April 1947, LGA.

36 DM to J.T. Soby, 21st April 1947, LGA.

37 J.T. Soby: Contemporary Painters, New York 1948, p.151.

38 At the time that his planned monograph on Bacon was running into difficulties with a typescript found wanting by Bacon and his London associates, Soby protested his credentials: ‘I was the one who persuaded the Museum to buy its first Francis Bacon, I commissioned Sam Hunter to do his excellent article. I myself wrote the first article in America about his extraordinary talent’; Soby to Erica Brausen, 27th July 1962, document cited at note 3 above. The article in question was S. Hunter: ‘Francis Bacon: the Anatomy of Horror’, Magazine of Art 95 (1952), pp.13–14.

39 FB to DM, 26th May [1947], LGA. He was still toying with the idea of going to America for a while in the following February; see Clark, op. cit. (note 26), p.41.

40 Horizon 93–94 (October 1947).

41 DM to FB, 10th June 1947, LGA.

42 FB to DM, Friday 20th [June 1947], LGA. ‘Scottish darning’ may refer to the Gallery’s commitment to the Scottish painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, as suggested by Richard Shone.

43 FB to DM, 23rd January 1948, LGA.

44 Hammer, op. cit. (note 3), p.42.

 

 

Great works:

 

Sand dune (1983), Francis Bacon

 

 

 

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel

 

 

TOM LUBBOCK  |  CULTURE  |  ART  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  FRIDAY 30 APRIL 2010

 

W H Auden’s lines make a clear announcement. "To me Art’s subject is the human clay/ And landscape but a background to a torso". It’s a manifesto. Humanity, he wants to say, is the primary thing in Art. Everything else takes second place. Or so it seems.

But the words he chooses are not so sure. The human clay? They could let our imaginations run, taking us into stranger regions of flesh and matter and flux. Auden envisages a little moulding, a little baking, producing a safe and separate figure, and that’s all.

Clay, though, is a very malleable and transformative medium. It is wet. It squashes. It has no limits. It comes from the earth and can be pressed back into the earth. And so the distinction that Auden strictly draws between a torso and a landscape is only relative. Body and ground can easily merge.

Look at paintings. Landscapes and nudes often lie down together. The rolling hills and the curving limbs can join in harmony, or fuse into something even closer. There is view of a coast by Degas, for example, where the shapes of the grassy terrain are also clearly the emerging forms of a naked woman on her back. And this Degas is probably an inspiration to a painting made almost a century later. Here the medium is a different stuff: human sand.

Francis Bacon’s Sand Dune isn’t exactly landscape. It is a heap and a slide of sand, an extract of the outside, perhaps from the seaside, perhaps from a builder’s site, but now it’s been taken inside, and put on stage. The scene has various stagey devices often used by the artist: a glass chamber, a hanging light bulb, a pointing arrow, a disc of blue spotlight on the floor, a dark suggestion of a shadow or a leak

On this stage, the volume of sand has a weird physical presence. It is partly contained within the tank, and partly spilling out and through the sides of the tank, and most of it seems to be viewed as if in a 3D magnifying case, so when it appears outside (at the right) it visually shrinks. The bright blue screen at the back is sky, another extract of outdoors, or a screen projection.

But the sand dune itself is obviously the protagonist. You could call it a thing. You could call it stuff. It’s certainly the subject. And unlike many of Bacon’s subjects, bodies or heads, this one retains its integrity. Its form is not radically distorted or disrupted or dematerialised. This dune is a solid, continuous mass.

It is sand; but of course not only sand. It is also flesh, a pure flesh. This flesh has no rigidity, no internal structure, no tension, no action. It is simply a contour of skin, containing soft blob. It lies, lolls in itself, it has sinkings and swellings, it rolls in indolence, melding into a single flow. It might be the fattest person in the world, who has lost all parts.

Or rather, not quite. It is like pure flesh but it also has hints of a creature within it too. An anatomy exists, just about. There are buttocks rising, a bending left knee sticks out at the front, a right thigh is stretched out, even a shoulder and an elbow become visible. As you look more closely, this figure appears, face down, stirring like mounds from the sand, like somebody covered in sand, or made loosely from sand.

Ambiguities arise. This mass is uncertain between anatomy and sheer flesh, uncertain between flesh and various other substances, which could be powder or liquid or pulp. Sand itself is well-chosen and imagined. It’s an intermediate stuff that can be dry and pulverised, or a running, pourable fluid, or a quite compacted, malleable paste, like clay.

Sand Dune is in metamorphosis, in a calm hysteria. It’s an entity that can come half alive, and enjoy feelings. It can be picked up by the shovelful. It can be stroked and smoothed. It can cascade. It can be dispersed and lose all sense of limits. At different points around the dune, these different sensations come to the fore. There are even moments when it seems like dust in air

And then at the crest of the dune there is something like a tuft of rough grass, or a crop of hair. It comes to the vestigial beginning of a head – a final intimation of the human about to break the surface.

About the artist

Francis Bacon (1909-92) used to be a nightmare visionary. His Screaming Popes and Crucifixions were horror shows. But this Soho bohemian was also a performer. His colours are gorgeous. His paintings look less blood-curdling – and more sumptuous, energetic, graceful, playful, even jolly.

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

£13 million Francis Bacon painting

to be returned to heirs 

 

 

A £13 million painting by Francis Bacon is to be returned to the late Irish painter’s

heirs after a French court quashed claims that he wanted it to stay in France.

 

 

BY HENRY SAMUEL IN PARIS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  THURSDAY, 22nd APRIL, 2010

 

The court in Aix-en-Provence ruled that Homage to Van Gogh, Arles, which Bacon painted in 1985, should be handed over to the Estate of Francis Bacon as it had only ever been on loan.

The disputed work, based on Van Gogh’s 1888 self-portrait, The Painter On The Road To Tarascon, has been hanging in Arles, southwestern France, since 1991. Bacon had painted it at the behest of Yolande Clergue, a curator who wanted to create a foundation to exhibit works inspired by Van Gogh for the 100th anniversary of his two-year stay in Arles

She had claimed he had expressed his desire to leave it to her Van Gogh foundation in letters and in person.

The foundation first borrowed it for an exhibition from July 1988 to May 1989, when Bacon asked for it back. It borrowed it a second time in May 1991, and a contract showed it was due to be returned in July 1996.

The Arles foundation had kept it from then on, but the appeals court ruled that "Francis Bacon never implied that he was giving this painting away." "There is neither donation of the painting nor any promise of donating this painting" and no proof he intended it to stay in Arles indefinitely, it ruled.

Besides, under French law, it went on, "there is no such thing as a permanent loan which the lender can never put an end to".

Bacon died in 1992 and his partner John Edwards inherited his estate. When Mr Edwards died in 2003, it was handed over to a four-person trust based on the Channel island of Jersey.

This trust had been demanding the return of the painting since 2006.

Currently on display, it must be taken down in the next ten days, and the foundation faces a fine of 1,000 euros (£866) for each day its return is delayed.

 

 

 

 

Court orders French museum to return Francis Bacon painting

 

 

 

RFI, Thursday 22nd March 2010

 

A court has ordered a French museum to return a Francis Bacon painting to the painter’s heirs. On Thursday an appeals court in Aix-en-Provence ordered the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles to return Homage to Van Gogh to the heirs of John Edwards, Bacon’s friend and main heir who died in 2003.

The Irish-born painter’s picture was a tribute to an earlier self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh and had been loaned to the museum in southern France in 1991, just before Bacon’s death.

However it was never returned and this latest ruling overturns an earlier decision which stated that the painting could stay with the museum, which claimed Bacon meant to give it as a work to keep.

“The painting was not given as a gift, nor was there any promise of a gift,” the court said in its ruling.

“We will now bury the hatched,” said the foundation’s director Mary Gruber. She said she was in a state of “shock”, and while the foundation’s lawyer said a further appeal was possible, it would, for the moment, give the painting back.

Bacon, who died in 1992, cited Vincent Van Gogh as one of his great influences, and a “Homage to Van Gogh” was a version of the Expressionist’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon which was originally painted near Arles in 1888.

 

 

 

 

Van Gogh tribute must be returned to Bacon’s estate

 

 

TERRY KIRBY  |  LONDON EVENING STANDARD  |  THURSDAY, 22 APRIL, 2010

 

An original, signed Francis Bacon triptych is one of the remarkable items up for auction at the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation Annual Gala, which raises money for cancer care in Russia and Marie Curie in Britain. The work was kept by the late artist in his private collection at his 7 Reece Mews studio in London and, after his death, treasured by his lover, John Edwards, who died in 2003.

The foundation’s patron, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose late wife it is named after, and chair, Evgeny Lebedev, who is also chairman of Independent Print Ltd, publishers of The Independent, are hoping money raised in the fifth annual gala will exceed the £1.1m generated last year at a star-studded event in the grounds of Stud House in Hampton Court Park. Other lots under the hammer include a pair of tickets to the 2011 FA Cup final at Wembley, lunch with the actor Kevin Spacey, and a dinner cooked by the model-turned-chef Sophie Dahl, with musical accompaniment by Jamie Cullum. Those of a frothier disposition can bid for a jelly wrestle with Lara Stone, refereed by David Walliams.

 

 

 

Van Gogh’s ‘heirs’ battle against 

attempt to bring home the Bacon

 

 

IN LIFE, Francis Bacon regarded Van Gogh as a kindred spirit and

would constantly pay tribute to the genius of the Dutch master.

 

 

 

BY HENRY SAMUEL IN PARIS   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   WEDNESDAY 21 APRIL 2010

 

He quoted his letters as inspiration saying it was the artist’s job to create "lies that are truer than the literal truth".

But the late Irish painter’s eagerness to do all he could to celebrate his hero has left behind a bitter dispute between the estates of the two men. The heirs of Francis Bacon and The Vincent Van Gogh Foundation are embroiled in a legal battle for a £13 million Bacon painting that both claim is theirs.

A court will rule today on whether Homage to Van Gogh, Arles, painted in 1985, should be handed back to the Bacon estate or remain in Arles, in southwestern France, where the Dutch master spent two years.

The row centres on a claim that Bacon promised the work to the foundation a few years before his death in 1992.

He painted the disputed work at the behest of Yolande Clergue, a curator who wanted to create a foundation to exhibit works inspired by Van Gogh for the 100th anniversary of his stay in Arles. 

The tableau was based on Van Gogh’s 1888 self-portrait, The Painter On The Road To Tarascon, showing the artist in straw hat, carrying his easel and paints, and casting an ominous shadow.

Bacon never saw Van Gogh’s original – destroyed when Dresden was firebombed in 1945 – and had to make do with photographs of the "haunting’ work, from which he produced as series of paintings. His 1985 work shows the painter from waist down, blending into his shadow.

Bacon’s estate was left to his partner John Edwards when he died in 2003, it was handed over to a four-person trust based on the Channel island of Jersey.

Bacon’s paintings fetch astronomical sums, with his nightmarish Triptych, 1976, sold to Roman Abramovich in 2008 for £56 million – a record for an auctioned work of contemporary art at the time.

His "heirs" are now demanding the Van Gogh Foundation hand over the painting, which they argue has merely been on a long-term loan.

The foundation has refused, arguing that Bacon had implied in letters that he wanted the painting to stay in Arles. A photographer friend, Pierre Richard, also swore that he was present at a meeting in London in May 1985 between Mrs Clergue and Bacon in which he said his "dearest wish" was for the work to stay in Arles.

Bernard Jouanno, the Van Gogh foundation’s lawyer, said the painting itself – the circular sandy form referring to Arles bullfighting ring and the red the torreador’s cape – was enough evidence it was destined to stay in the town, he said.

The "sudden" interest by John Edward’s "friends" for the work may have had something to do with its "sudden rise in market value – between 12 and 18 million euros," he added. "These so-called heirs are nothing of the sort. A trust in Jersey is an Anglo-Saxon institution not recognised by French law," he added.

However, Michel Pitron, the lawyer for the Estate of Francis Bacon, dismissed the claims.

"Our argument is simple: there was a loan contract, which came to an end; I am asking for the painting back, full stop!" he said. "There is no such thing as an indefinite loan in French law."

Both parties can take today’s appeal ruling at a court in Aix-en-Provence to the supreme court.

 

 

 

 

Too poor to buy paint: how Francis Bacon starved for his art

 

 

Lost letters reveal millionaire artist’s early struggle

 

 

 

DALYA ALBERGE   |   THE OBSERVER   |   SUNDAY 18 APRIL 2010

 

He is one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, whose paintings change hands for more than £40m, but Francis Bacon’s early struggle to sell his paintings became so desperate that he threatened to become a cook or a valet, according to unpublished letters that have just come to light.

Bacon, a self-taught artist, was 40 before he gained proper recognition. The letters, dating from the 1940s, reveal that he was frequently reduced to begging for handouts from his dealer, his debts no doubt aggravated by his addiction to gambling.

"Is it possible to make me a small advance?" he implores in one. "I am quite broke, and canvas and paints are terribly expensive."

In another he laments: "If I can’t sell anything or haven’t anything to sell, I will get a job as a valet or cook."

The correspondence, contained in the archives of the Lefevre Gallery in London, is between Bacon and Duncan Macdonald, then its director. It is certain to deepen future biographers’ understanding of the artist’s struggle to launch his career. Barry Joule, the artist’s friend who is now writing a Bacon memoir, said: "I haven’t seen these letters before. They’re a revelation. I’ve read everything on him inside out. The struggle is not covered in the biographies and is perhaps overlooked because of the prices paid for his paintings later in his life."

In one letter, Bacon reveals his battle to afford basic art tools: "If you know of anyone who will take the risk and supply me with paints, canvas, and the minimum of vittles, think of me. I might make them money."

Bacon, who died in 1992, believed his pictures deserved either the National Gallery or the dustbin, and he often dumped or slashed his own works.

Study for Man with Microphones in 1946 was among paintings that no one wanted to buy. Bacon painted over it. The letters also list numerous other works which no longer exist.

Many of the letters convey his desperation to exhibit his work. In one passage the artist wrote: "I shall have a group of 3 large paintings… Is there any chance of your having an exhibition in the autumn…? They want to be hung together in a series as they are a sort of Crucifixion… I think they are the most formal things I have done and the colour is a sort of intense blue violet. I think they are better than what I have done up to now…

"If you think there is a chance of your being able to show them, as I really need the money desperately … I want £750 for the set. It is not a quarter of what is has cost me with gambling etc; if you think you can get more, it would be tremendously welcome."

The paintings are thought not to have survived.

Richard Shone, editor of The Burlington Magazine, which will publish the letters in May, said: "One day a really comprehensive biography of Bacon will be written and these letters will be indispensable."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maggie O’Farrell interview

 

 

Maggie O’Farrell tells Alastair Sooke about the photographs

that inspired her latest novel, The Hand that First Held Mine

 

 

 

BY ALASTAIR SOOKE  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  SATURDAY 17 APRIL 2010

 

‘He could be vicious,” says Maggie O’Farrell, her eyes glinting with anarchic glee. “I would love to have witnessed it.”

The bestselling British novelist is sitting in a corner of the French House in Soho. She is talking about one of the bar’s most infamous regulars during the Fifties and Sixties: the witty photographer John Deakin, once described by the jazz singer George Melly as “a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom”.

In the early Sixties, Francis Bacon commissioned Deakin to take photographs of his friends and lovers, which the artist then used as aides-mémoires for his paintings. Deakin’s close-cropped mug shot of Bacon, taken in August 1952, has become the quintessential portrait of the artist, who died in 1992. A talented but devious and unreliable photographer, who loved gossip and pink gin and was twice fired from Vogue magazine, Deakin documented many of his acquaintances among post-war Soho’s barflies and bohemians.

His pictures from this period, many of which were haphazardly stored in cardboard boxes under his bed and only discovered after his death in 1972, have inspired O’Farrell’s fifth novel, The Hand That First Held Mine, which will be published later this month.

“The starting point was an exhibition of Deakin’s photographs that I saw in Edinburgh,” O’Farrell tells me, while turning the pages of the catalogue that accompanied the show, which opened at the Dean Gallery in 2002. “I didn’t know much about the art scene in Soho in the Fifties, but I was really struck by it, and the atmosphere of the novel fell into place.”

Decorating the bar behind her are scores of black-and-white photographs depicting some of the frequently inebriated figures who knew Deakin, including Bacon who wears a belted black leather jacket.

What did she like about Deakin’s photographs? “Portraiture today can be so constructed,” she says. “Think of [the American portrait photographer] Annie Leibovitz, whose work is imaginative and exciting, but so theatrical, with the clothes, the make-up, the airbrushing. Deakin was the opposite. There’s nothing constructed about his photographs. They look like he couldn’t be bothered to think them through. That’s mesmerising.”

The characters whom Deakin captured with his camera fascinated O’Farrell, who returned several times to the exhibition and bought lots of postcards, which she put up around her study. Slowly the structure of her novel crystallised: The Hand That First Held Mine weaves together two stories, one set in the present day, the other in post-war London.

The heroine of the latter strand is a headstrong young woman called Alexandra, who is desperate for her life “to turn from blurred monochrome into glorious Technicolor”. One summer in the mid-Fifties, after meeting a hedonistic art critic with whom she later falls in love, Alexandra runs away from her childhood home in Devon and heads to London, where she calls herself “Lexie” and works for a magazine in Soho.

She spends her evenings in the French House, then a dissolute pub called the York Minster, as well as Bacon’s favourite haunt, the Colony Room, a riotously uninhibited drinking club run by a dragonish landlady called Muriel Belcher. “I started reading about this bohemian scene in Soho and imagining what it would have been like to arrive there and meet these interesting people who defied convention,” O’Farrell says. “An artistic world burned very brightly in this grid of streets for a decade or so. But now it has vanished. The Colony Room has gone. The only place that’s really left is the French House.”

Even this, though, has changed. As we talk, the “hordes of whores and sailors” who throng its “fetid interior” in O’Farrell’s novel are nowhere to be seen. “I still hope the sailors might come around the corner,” O’Farrell says, with a laugh. “I suppose I’m drawn to the romance of things that have vanished. That’s what fascinates me about living in cities. Everywhere you go, you’re constantly bumping into the past.”

While O’Farrell was inspired by post-war London, she wanted to avoid writing about the past in a nostalgic manner. “I don’t think that everything in the past was great and that modern life is awful – not at all,” she says. “In the Fifties, children were dying of diphtheria and polio. Yes, there was less traffic on the streets, but it was quite normal to beat your child with a leather belt. There are laws against that now. Life moves on, doesn’t it?”

But what about Deakin? Now the book is finished, will O’Farrell move on from her obsession with his work? She shakes her head. “I’m not going to take down my Deakin pictures – not yet, anyway.”

To pay tribute to him, O’Farrell gave Deakin a walk-on part in her new novel. At one point the photographer appears in the Colony Room, where an acquaintance asks if he might spare “a bob or two” to buy her a drink. Deakin turns and curls his lip:

“‘Fuck off,’ he drawled. ‘Buy your own.’”

“One of my editors was worried that this insulted Deakin’s memory,” O’Farrell says. “But I honestly think that’s what he would have said.”

Alastair Sooke is a commissioning editor on the Telegraph Arts pages

The Hand That First Held Mine is published by Headline Review on April 29 (£16.99)

 

 

 

                Francis Bacon on the Orient Express, 1965  John Deakin

 

 

 

 Snapshot of Bacon’s secret love

 

 

 

A show that promises discovery of the private artist finds a man simply in thrall to the photograph

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OSSIAN WARD   |   VISUAL ART   |   THE CRITICS   |   INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY   |   SUNDAY 4 APRIL 2010


 

 Thankfully, this country-house exhibition is not Francis Bacon on Camera – yet another show of black-and-white headshots of the troubled painter – although there are a handful of him on holiday in Athens, in front of a photographer’s shop in Soho, or posing in his leather jacket, as was his wont.

No, this is Francis Bacon: In Camera, which translates from the Latin as "in chamber" or "in private". Of course, we already know much of what the notoriously boozy bohemian did behind closed doors, precisely because there was invariably a camera lens pointing at him, recording his every mood and love.

Over and above his friends, models and relationships, photography was Bacon’s primary painterly muse. Indeed, so many newspaper scraps, crumpled photos and magazine cuttings have been excavated from the mounds of detritus left on the floor of his old Kensington studio, that scholars have been piecing together, almost frame by frame, the specific photographic references for each painting.

In many ways, the studio was his "camera" – a private chamber of experimentation – where he allowed no one to observe or document him while painting (not even his sitters were allowed to watch after the 1963 triple portrait of Henrietta Moraes, included in this display). Yet Bacon’s famously cluttered workspace in Reece Mews is now also his most public bequest, left to us not only in imagery – more of those posed portraits by Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others – but in the physical remnants of the studio, now installed permanently at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, from where much of this show’s fascinatingly decrepit stuff has come.

What, then, is this exhibition about? Francis Bacon and his Chamber of Secrets, or Bacon the Photo-copier? In Dublin, this show was titled A Terrible Beauty, which gets us no nearer the truth. It’s hard to be clear-eyed about an artist who was so full of his own myth. Better to dive headlong into the material and see which Bacon emerges.

Among the 1,500 photos found in the hoard of paint pots, slashed canvases, postcards and records, a key source was always going to be the early motion-capture stills of Eadweard Muybridge, whom Bacon rated on a par with Michelangelo for his treatment of the human body.

It’s never a bad time to look at Muybridge (he’ll be getting the full museum treatment later this year at Tate Britain) and the pages ripped from his book, The Human Figure in Motion, were pored over obsessively by Bacon, who spattered them with paint as he placed these wrestling, shadowboxing or exercising nudes centre-stage in his paintings. The sweeping leg in one unfinished work, (Figure with Raised Arm, 1949) suggests that Bacon might have been searching for something in-between Muybridge’s sequential snaps that not even the Victorian’s rapid shutter could catch: an image, not of motion, but in perpetual motion.

Previously I’d assumed that Bacon’s smeared, mangled faces, with their sliding jaws and torqued cheeks, were his approximations of a photographic blur – reproducing the moment when a head swivels or waggles too vigorously to be stilled. Yet these disfigurements (seen in portraits of Moraes, as well as Bacon’s lovers John Edwards and Peter Lacy) seem to follow almost precisely the creases, crops, folds and crumples that Bacon, perhaps accidentally, perhaps not, inflicted on his photos, often underfoot on the studio floor.

There’s still more of the man and his myth to contend with in the scores of macho bullfighting, footballing and wildlife shots that made their way into other paintings. But even if no fresh view of Bacon surfaces from this soup of influence, then at least he is gradually being seen in a less dazzling, more illuminating light than before. His skewed vision had to come from somewhere – it wasn’t an accident of his subconscious as he often claimed. In fact, Bacon eventually began to cannibalise his own images, deconstructing his face from photos, and repainting versions of previous works once they’d been photographed. He, like the child or tribesman who first sees the fixative settle their image for ever, was simply in thrall to the photograph. That was his dirty little secret.

 

Francis Bacon: In Camera, Compton Verney, Warwickshire C  to 20 June (01926 645500)

 

 

 

The archaeology of an artist

 

 

 

An exhibition of the photographs Francis Bacon used as sources illuminates 

the ‘ordered chaos’ of his work. By Robin Blake

 

 

ROBIN BLAKE  |  ARTS & BOOKS  |  LIFE & ARTS  |  THE FINANCIAL TIMES  |  APRIL 3/APRIL 4 2010

 

 "I believe in a deeply ordered chaos,” Francis Bacon once said in a television interview, making an apparently mischievous remark about his own studio, in which he was standing. Visitors to the reconstructed studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, with the encroaching heaps of detritus that accumulated over half the artist’s lifetime, will readily appreciate Bacon’s affinity for deep chaos. But what, if anything, might “ordered chaos” mean as a description of his work? Francis Bacon: In Camera, an exhibition that has transferred from the Hugh Lane to Compton Verney, Warwickshire’s beautiful country house art gallery, throws a few shafts of light on the question.

The exhibition curated by Martin Harrison and Antonia Harrison reveals Bacon’s creative starting-points by showing a selection from the vast number of photographs that he collected. Many were taken by photographer friends – notably John Deakin, his fellow denizen of Soho’s Colony Club, and the wildlife photographer Peter Beard – but he also culled a huge number from published sources.

These relics have been sifted from the confused mess of papers, rags, painting detritus, books, newspapers and magazines found in the studio, and carefully themed, mounted and framed in serried collections. Such careful, even artful presentation is as different as can be from the conditions under which Bacon himself kept the items. Their creased, yellowed, fragmentary and paint-stained state makes them look more like archaeological finds. The Hugh Lane Gallery’s archive is really not Bacon’s, but a posthumous invention.

Yet it is a useful one because the “ordered chaos” of Bacon’s actual painting demands more serious attention, and a study of his photographic sources is a part of that effort. Bacon used them directly – often cut, torn through, folded or amalgamated – as models. He rarely made preparatory studies, and he neither drew nor painted from life. If he wanted to make a self-portrait, or a portrait of his boyfriend George Dyer or friend Isabel Rawsthorne, he would start from a photograph Deakin had taken, often at Bacon’s request.

At other times he used news photographs, advertisements, film stills and fine art reproductions. None of his many versions of the portrait of Pope Innocent X were from studies he made from Velázquez’s painting; all were sourced from photographs in books. Of the nine volumes on Velázquez found at the studio after Bacon’s death in 1992, illustrations of the seated pope had been ripped from eight of them. Some are on display here, as is the source of the papal mouth in mid-scream, a close-up that Bacon found in a book of stills from Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin.

There are no “screaming pope” paintings in this exhibition, but it does give a few opportunities to look from a source to a particular canvas. One room exemplifies Bacon’s reliance on reproductions of Michel­angelo’s drawings, and on the sequential photographs made by the Victorian Edweard Muybridge to illustrate human and animal movement. A large canvas, untitled and unfinished, is shown of a nude male in a throwing attitude. The adjoining walls are hung with figure drawings by Michelangelo, torn by Bacon from fine art books, and with scores of Muybridge sequences of nude men and women walking, running, turning, reaching, bending. Eventually, we locate the particular one of these that is related to the painting, from a sequence entitled Man Heaving a 75lb Rock. But we can also easily see the other element, the similarity of the half-finished form to isolated Michelangelesque sketches of limbs and torsos.

The critic Norbert Lynton once floated the idea that Bacon might be seen as a modernist Vermeer depicting ordinary human activity behind the closed doors of the home. If this is true of some of his work, it is a simple step to see how it relates to the history of photography in Bacon’s lifetime. The box camera turned photography into the most accessible form of image-making. Photographs were a news medium but they were even more an art of the familiar and the mundane, and a handy means of ordering memory. Deakin was a Vogue photographer but his style was a refinement of the domestic snapper – which is why he was of such use to Bacon. It may be surprising to discover how domestic photography could inspire an artist celebrated for his distortion of figures and forms, but not when you look more deeply.

The deformity of his figures are of a kind that, in nature, might result from random mutations in the genetic pattern. Bacon was not interested in representing people with actual deformities, like Velázquez’s dwarves or the freaks photographed by Diane Arbus. His business, I think, was to visualise the mutations in all of us, the ways in which the randomness of experience tugs and rubs and twists our perfection out of shape. Bacon seeks to convey, too, the uncontrollable manipulations of the unconscious mind and the existential disruption that results from irrational choices – all of which are brought about by the distorting action of chaos on ordered patterns. And meanwhile, around these displays of distorted Baconian imagery are the most carefully ordered compositions. Order and chaos always either contend or blend in Bacon: his remark in that television interview was less flippant than it seemed.

Francis Bacon: In Camera, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, until June 20. 

 

 

                                 

    

  Mutations: Bacon’s ‘Portrait of John Edwards’ 1988, photograph of George Dyer

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon double exposure

 

 

Francis Bacon: In Camera at Compton Verney

 

 

A new exhibition shows just how crucial photographs were to the artist,

says Richard Dormant

 

 

BY RICHARD DORMENT | EXHIBITION | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH | TUESDAY 30 MARCH 2010

 

Though he was primarily a painter of the human figure, Francis Bacon never drew from the nude, rarely worked from life, and painted directly onto the canvas without first making preliminary studies or using preparatory drawings. But however strange the ectoplsamic and ambiguously gendered creatures in his paintings appear to be, they don’t look wholly imaginary — at least not in the way that those in Symbolist and Surrealist paintings often do. This is because Bacon’s starting point for any new canvas was usually a photograph or a detail of a photograph he’d found in a book or magazine.

Once he selected an image, he’d refer back to the photo as he worked, using it as a spur to his imagination — or perhaps more accurately, as a means to access his unconscious. Francis Bacon: In Camera shows photos, film stills, magazines, and books found in Bacon’s studio after his death side by side with Bacon’s paintings to demonstrate the fundamental role photography played in his working method. The show, at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, isn’t large, but what it has to say poses a new set of questions about how Bacon worked and how that affect’s the viewer’s response to his pictures.

From 1949, the year of his first London exhibition, Bacon was using Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs of human and animal figures in motion as a primary visual source for his paintings. In this he was hardly original, since the influence of the stop-action photos Muybridge took in the 1870s and ’80s is detectable in the work of Degas, Picasso and Duchamp. But Bacon’s engagement with the Muybridge photos was visceral in a way that is true of no other artist. Since he had not studied anatomy and had never drawn from the live model, he pored over them, scrutinising them intently and isolating certain details by ’framing’ or circling them with crayon.

This is immediately apparent in the appalling condition of the ones we see in this show, where virtually every photo is mutilated, torn, folded, and spattered with paint.

Bacon’s unfinished Figure with Raised Arm (1949) is based on Muybridge’s photo of a nude athlete seen in profile. Sketchily painted in grisaille over raw canvas, the figure raises one arm as he strides across an empty stage against a drawn curtain. We might be looking at a Greek Kouras figure, except that the transparent right leg and the dragged striations of paint are used to create a blurred effect not unlike a doubly-exposed photograph. 

What Bacon adds to the original pose (and the classical sculpture it reminded him of) is a splatter of paint that gushes from the head like the spume of blood or spittle after a blow to the head. Here is an early example of how in Bacon’s work a single passage of smeared paint indicating extreme physical violence becomes the entire source of a picture’s visual power.

Then, too, the photos of young men wrestling certainly had a voyeuristic charge for Bacon. In those picture in which he shows two figures it is hard to make out what is happening because the implicit violence of the wrestling hold is elided with a sexual act. An example in this show is an untitled canvas of 1989 in which two indistinct figures inspired by Muybridge’s photo are so entwined that they appear to be copulating.

A triptych with three heads of Isabel Rawsthorne was painted not from life but from John Deakin’s photos of the sitter that have been torn, creased, folded and crumpled. Seeing the photos and the pictures side by side we realise that no matter how he distorts a face, Bacon was able to capture remarkable likenesses of his subjects. Usually critics attribute the otherwise inexplicable folds, cuts and mutilations in these faces to Bacon’s study of photos soldiers hideously mutilated during the First World War.

But the portraits in this show make us realise that such distortions may also reflect the physical state of the photos on which they are based.

And sometimes the level of violence to which a photo has been subjected can only be described as pathological. One, which shows the head of Bacon’s lover George Dyer, has been ripped to shreds, crumpled and crushed by hand, then repaired with adhesive tape, and attached to a large brown envelope with a safety pin through Dyer’s cheek so that end result looks like a cubist collage. It isn’t Dyer in the flesh Bacon was painting, but his mutilated photo. By constant reference back to it Bacon was able to maintain some crucial connection to the anger and violence that (I can only conjecture) fuelled his creative process.

Bacon’s sadism took many forms. He based several of his best known pictures on a photograph of Dyer wearing only his underpants, seated on a chair with one leg crossed over the other. After Dyer’s suicide Bacon continued to use the pose, simply substituting the face of his new lover John Edward for Dyer’s — as though the two men were interchangeable. The effect is like looking at a double exposure in which one figure is superimposed over another without entirely obliterating the first.

Having made his point about photography’s importance for Bacon, the curator Martin Harrison doesn’t belabour it. The second half of the show is filled with works by Bacon including some particularly good early pictures like the wonderful Half Length Figure in Sea of 1957. But by the time we come to these paintings, we’ve learned too much about Bacon’s working methods to see them as mere imaginings. Even when we don’t know the visual source for the image, we can be sure that it can be found is a photo, and that Bacon had engaged with at such a profound emotional level it had become part of his consciousness, a piece of who he was.

Until June 20

 

 

                                                    

                                           

                                  Interchangeable: Bacon’s 1988 portrait of John Edwards, left, and John Deakin’s photograph of the artist’s former lover George Dyer

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Critics’ choice

 

 Francis Bacon: In Camera

 

  Compton Verney. Warwickshire

 

 

 

 

 

 

JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER  |  VISUAL ARTS  |  FINANCIAL TIMES  |  MARCH 27/MARCH 28 2010  

 

 

As Francis Bacon’s standing as the greatest painter of the postwar era crystallises. exhibitions excavating particular aspects of his work and background — he had no formal training — proliferate. A major resource is the contents of his studio, painstakingly recreated in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery, from where this new scholarly show originates. The focus is on archival material and film footage and stills, shedding light on how references to film and photography, transformed into fluid oil paint, were key to Bacon’s working methods.

Photographs by Eadweard Muybridge. his most fecund resource — four different copies of “The Human Figure in Motion” were found in his studio at his death — and by his friend John Deakin are showcased here in the context of the reconfigurations of the human body which they informed: figures in movement such as “Untitled (figure with raised arm), portraits including those,of John Edwards. Curator Martin Harrison reckons photographs reverberated with the artist’s musings on transience and loss — “One of the great fascinations of old photographs is that you think ‘Now they’re all dead’.” Bacon commented — as well as offering formal inspiration: the camera’s ability to catch shifting viewpoints helped “generate his revisionist assault on Analytical Cubism in the multiple perspectives and sweeping brushstrokes — arcing and slicing — of his maturity.”

This show demonstrates how Bacon flattened traditional media hierarchies, manipulating equally a Velazquez reproduction, a medical textbook image or a film still. Subsuming the blur and all-over texture of photography — the great challenge to .20thcentury painting — within his own canvases while painting with the silk and velvet bravura of an Old Master, he fulfilled his ambition to "paint the history of Europe in my lifetime" through his own grandly modem restagings.

 +44 (0)1926 645500, from today to June 20

 

 

 

    

                                                      

                                                               

                                  

                                               ‘Study for a Portrait of John Edwards’ (1989)

 

 

 

 


 Beneath the layers of Bacon

 

 

A new exhibition seeks to shed new light on Francis Bacon’s working

practises and expose the fallacy of the artist’s own myth.

 

 

Matilda Battersby reports. 

 

 

 

MATILDA BATTERSBY  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  WEDNESDAY, 24 MARCH, 2010  

 

“I can dream all day long and ideas for paintings just fall into my mind like slides,” Francis Bacon once said. The self-promulgated idea that the Irish-born figurative artist’s wonderfully twisted and subversive imagery appeared fully formed in his mind, not demanding high levels of planning, drawing and experimentation, provides an interesting mythical basis for Bacon’s genius.

But a new exhibition of torn papers and photographs, manipulated film and other archival material harvested from Bacon’s studio, seeks to some way dispel this myth, by revealing the practise-runs, thought processes and scrawlings behind some of Bacon’s best work.

Co-curators Martin Harrison and Antonia Harrison have placed the scavenged studio artefacts alongside well known Bacon oil paintings, including five works never shown before in the UK, to demonstrate the root of some of his ideas, exhibited at the Compton Verney gallery in Warwickshire from this Saturday.

“No one ever saw Bacon work. But our research reveals a very different man from the public persona, which demands we unlearn what we think we know about him,” Martin Harrison said.

The notion that Bacon was only a spontaneous creative whose work emerged effortlessly and straight into paint, is rendered “unsafe” by the exhibition, the researchers claim. Bacon’s “collusion” in such ideas has been well documented, as is his devotion to other artists who often bypassed the drawing process, such as Picasso and Chaim Soutine.

Bacon said of himself that he “never knew what to paint,” yet pages of lists from a notebook taken from his studio in Reece Mews, South Kensington stand testament to his careful planning. As do the influences of other artists, particularly Velazquez, and even filmmakers like Buñuel and Resnais, according to the Harrisons.

“There’s a real risk that the myth of Bacon – albeit one in which the artist colluded- is all we will hand on to future generations. Yet the paintings are still by far the most important thing – it is only by reaching into those that we will ask the right questions and do justice to

 

Francis Bacon: In Camera is at Compton Verney gallery from 27 March until 20 June 2010. Admission is £8 Adults, £6 Concessions, £2 Children, £18 Family.

  

 

 


Francis Bacon: In Cinema.

 

 

 

MARY MIERS  |  COUNTRY LIFE  |  TUESDAY, 23 MARCH, 2010

 

Francis Bacon: In Cinema. This exhibition will focus on Bacon’s source material and working methods, and will examine Bacon’s work in relation to film and photography.

 

It includes oil paintings, film footage, stills and archival material from Bacon’s studio. From 27th March–20th June. At Compton Verney, Warwickshire CV35 9HZ. 01926 645 500

 

 

 

 

  

                                                     Head in Grey 1955 Francis Bacon 

 

 

 


 The South Bank Show: final cut

 

For decades Melvyn Bragg has persuaded key artistic figures of

the age to talk with extraordinary candour:

 

 

Here he considers the influence of The South Bank Show, and

relives his encounters with Paul McCartney, Alan Bennett,

Martin Amis, Tracey Emin and Eric Clapton

 

 

By Melvyn Bragg, The Daily Telegraph, Saturday, 20 March 2010


The first programme was in January 1978. I led with Paul McCartney because I wanted to show that I was serious. My aim on The South Bank Show was to include the “popular” arts and make them an accepted part of the arts world. There were critics who thought that by doing this we had fatally undermined any claim to be an arts programme – even though in that first season I also included Harold Pinter, Ingmar Bergman, the RSC, David Hockney, the ballet Mayerling.

The show brought together two aspects of my own life. The working-class background, which at that time had little access to ballet, opera, great galleries and classical concerts; and the traditional arts, to which I had access later at Oxford University. The arts establishment in 1978 had little truck with popular culture and even less inclination to treasure it. That’s changed substantially over the past 30 years and The South Bank Show has been part of that changing.

The process of selection was often little more than a stab in the dark. There are insights into the instincts, thoughts and craft of artists of immense and perhaps enduring talent – even, in a few cases, touching genius. These are spots in a time of their lives, like painted portraits — a few sittings. The honesty and the seriousness with which they talk about their work is, I think, impressive, often exhilarating.

Though far from all the South Bank shows were interview-based, many were. I think that a good way to discover what artists are up to is to ask them. A “talking head” can be the best of television. If there’s trust and if the preparation and research have been good, the results can reveal truths. What matters is not the personality of the interviewer nor the questions, much, but the quality of the reply. There are many ways to interview people, but for the sort of programmes our team set out to do, collaboration was the key. Now and then they were nervous. The objective was to help make the meeting a place where they felt they could talk to the best of themselves.

I began in television as a researcher, then a director, and thought then and now that in any portrait of an artist the interviewer’s job is to help gather material. I did not want to be a critic. There are plenty of those in print. Our job was to put together a portrait. I would be part of it but, as far as possible, outside it.

My conviction was and is that the viewers can make up their own minds about the subject. Our job is to provide the fullest evidence we can for them to come to their decision.

Francis Bacon

When Francis Bacon and I appeared on The South Bank Show and for a few minutes we were caught in a state of naked inebriation it provided, I think, a true insight into Francis as a man and as a painter.

We were at Mario’s in Kensington after a long lunch, alone except for a film crew which dissolved before our blurry eyes as bottle succeeded bottle. Michelangelo, Francis proclaimed, had made the greatest drawings of nude flesh that existed. "Michelangelo gave the greatest male voluptuousness to the body." The way he expressed the word ‘voluptuous’ warmed by much strong red Italian wine was vintage.

"It’s a great word," I said, through the haze, "voluptuousness – we ought to live in a state of voluptuousness."

"Yes," said Francis, and repeated the word once more and then I suggested he was not interested in fantasy.

"Fantasy? No, I’m not interested. I’m interested in reality." He glared at me, his face afire. "There you are," he said, "Melvyn Bragg. Real. How do you render that in another art?"

"Why do you want to?" Off-camera, my voice seemed to call up from an open tomb."

"I want to be able" – each word perfectly clear despite the alcoholic breath on it – "to make in another medium the reality of an image that excites me."

Once more from afar, my voice. "But why do you want to, Francis, why do you want to?’

At which he got to his feet, a redoubtable effort, picked up the bottle and steadily filled my glass once again. "Because I want to. ’Cos I happen to be a painter. That’s all." The wine almost reached the brim. "Cheerio,’ he said and did not waste a drop.

Francis was born in Dublin of English parents in 1909. His father was a breeder and trainer of horses. Tales from the stables of violent equine beasts and randy stable boys have been called up as the making of the man. In 1914 his father moved to London to work in the War Office and early life was split between the two cities. Francis was asthmatic and had no regular schooling. He went on to become a designer and his work first hit print in the early thirties. He painted and in 1933 his first Crucifixion was included in Herbert Read’s Art Now. His first exhibition failed and he took to gambling, which became a lifelong habit, at times an addiction. In the early forties he destroyed most of his paintings and there was no reason for anyone to think this young decorator would ever make his mark.

But in 1944 he produced his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The snarling, distorted bodies of almost mythical beasts struck a post-war nerve and both reflected and helped to form the zeitgeist. In one bound he was launched and although it took time to build his great reputation, there seemed to be an inevitability. When we did this film in 1985 he could be called ‘the greatest living painter in the world’.

We filmed in a vast empty storeroom of the Tate in which we had set up a screen, brought in a projector and invited Francis to comment on his own and others’ work.

We showed him one of his paintings of a distorted female body splayed on a bed and nailed to the ground with a syringe. "You’ve said that you de-form and re-form reality in your paintings," I said.

"I would say there was some de-formation there, wouldn’t you?" he laid on, a touch heavily. "I don’t think you’ve seen a human body quite like that. They said, ’Why a hypodermic syringe? Is she supposed to be a drug addict?’ I just wanted to impale her on the bed. I couldn’t use a nail."

At times Francis talked as if he were nervous, almost hesitant, but always, when he wanted to say what mattered emotionally to him, he would pause, physically steady himself, look directly at me and be emphatically clear. "I try to make concentrations of images."

Van Gogh’s The Night Café. I read from van Gogh’s notes: "The café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime." He wrote: "There’s a bar, a billiard table, lights, chairs, one or two figures, violent colours. It’s one of the ugliest paintings I’ve done."

"I love it," said Francis. "One of the inventions is the way he’s done the lights." Around each bare light bulb are concentric circles of yellow. "He’s made the light turn around the bulb. Without that the painting wouldn’t have that extreme intensity."

"He called the painting ugly. Some people have called your paintings ugly."

"I’m genuinely pleased those sort of people don’t like them. If they really hate them it means there might be something there."

A couple of days earlier, we had filmed in the mews flat in which Francis lived. We stood. There were no chairs.

"When you come to a blank canvas, do you have any idea in your head of what you want to do before you start?"

Often, when talking, Francis fidgeted with things, or looked away – slyly? Nervously? Seeking a way to pull together his concentration. But then he would plant his feet, stare and carefully deliver.

"I have an overall idea. It’s in the working that it develops. It’s a very difficult problem. I’m a figurative painter. You can’t any longer make illustrations better than a camera.’ He begins to stumble in his sentences. ‘I thought you might ask me that. I thought about it very clearly this morning and wrote it down. Now I can’t remember. Can I use it?"

Blushing a little, he unzips a pocket and takes out a scrap of paper and reads. "Not illustration of reality but to create images which are a concentration of reality and a shorthand for sensation." He smiles. He tucks the note away.

"Any drawings beforehand?"

"No. If I drew it I’d just be making an illustration of the drawing."

"You like to let your unconscious take over?"

"I like to think so. There’s this deep sea of unconsciousness and I do think I can draw from it."

"At the same time you like to see things deeply ordered?"

"Yes. I believe in a deeply ordered chaos in my work. I work very quickly."

"How do you do it?"

"Until the images come through you’re not in control. When they come up you have to control them."

"So you come up with an overall image which you don’t want to define except by working towards it?"

"Yes . . . no . . . yes, that’s exactly how it is."

And then we went for lunch around the corner, to Mario’s. A corner table by the window.

"Some people say your paintings are too full of horror."

"What horror could I make that would compete with what goes on every single day? If you read the newspapers or look at the television, what could I do to compete with that except that I’ve tried to re-create it?"

"So you paint the real world?"

"Yes! Between birth and death has always been the violence of life. I paint images of sensation. What is life but sensation?"

"Do you think anything exists outside ’the moment’?"

"No. I believe in nothing. We are born and we die and there’s nothing else."

And after that, in that late afternoon, we heaved over to the Colony Room Club (Members Only) in Soho. There were occasional overheard sentences. "They’ve been giving him a really bad time. He likes being given a really bad time. There’s a lot of men like that."

His £50 notes crossed the bar and bottles of champagne were shuttled back.

"People come in here and lose their inhibitions," he said, a little superfluously as a crimson-faced old friend yelled out, "Can I have a £50 note or two, Francis? No? Oh. I thought you and I were doing a bit of whooooring together."

Somehow he found the space to stand in front of a mirror and comb his hair. Then I heard him, loudly, "I never use make-up! Keep your make-up for yourself, you old cow!" He came across. "I am not one of those made-up poofs. It’s very old-fashioned, you know."

The roar of the Colony was growing in my ears like a mighty tide, rising and crashing with a powerful but queasy rhythm.

"Are you surprised at your success?"

"Yes. I never thought I’d sell at all. I always thought I’d have to take some other job. That’s luck."

Yet again he raised his glass. Yet again I did likewise. But whereas he would go on to Charlie Chester’s Casino, with John, to play roulette – "they say it’s the silliest game," he said, "but when you win . . ." – I managed, who knows how, to navigate a passage back to north London, contentedly, and slept. 

  • The South Bank Show: Final Cut is published next month by Hodder at £20.

  • T £18 (plus £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or from Telegraph Books

 

         The South Bank Show Revisited, a season of classic interviews, starts next Sunday March 28 on ITV1

 

 

 

 

Les lutteurs qui ont inspiré Francis Bacon

en vedettes de la section photographie

 

 

Harry Bellet  |  Le Monde  |  15.03.10

 



La Tefaf (The European Fine Art Fair), comme se nomme la foire de Maastricht, est passée de 239 exposants, en 2009, à 263 cette année. Cette augmentation du nombre de participants s’explique par la création d’une nouvelle section, Tefaf on Paper, tout spécialement dédiée aux dessins, aux estampes, aux livres et manuscrits anciens, aux aquarelles et aux photographies.

Parmi les dix-neuf marchands de cette nouvelle section, installée à l’étage, un peu à l’écart de la foire, le Londonien Michael Hoppen. Ce spécialiste de la photographie présente sous le titre Men Wrestling, New York un ensemble curieux, à la fois familier et déroutant. Ce sont de grandes planches-contacts. L’auteur en est inconnu, et elles valent essentiellement par leur commanditaire, le peintre anglais Francis Bacon (1909-1992). Elles ont été achetées par Michael Hoppen, non pas à un marchand, mais à un électricien ! Un nommé Robertson qui travaillait parfois pour Bacon, et auquel l’artiste, dont la générosité était proverbiale, a offert de nombreux objets.

A la demande de Bacon, le photographe anonyme a multiplié les clichés de deux hommes en maillot luttant, "probablement dans un gymnase new-yorkais, vers 1975. Des grands costauds, comme des chauffeurs routiers, et je suis persuadé que Bacon les a choisis pour cela, coiffés avec des bonnets de bain", commente M. Hoppen. "Bacon a utilisé ces clichés comme base de certaines de ses peintures", ajoute-t-il en comparant certains d’entre eux avec des reproductions d’oeuvres du peintre et en montrant les traces de stylo-feutre signalant les choix de l’artiste.

 

Les moeurs du peintre

Les choix, et le début d’un processus créatif, puisque Bacon a visiblement commencé à esquisser ses compositions directement sur les photos. "Ces hommes ne jouent pas, ils se battent vraiment. Je suis fasciné par ce qu’elles révèlent de l’esprit de Bacon, la violence, l’amour, la passion, le talent, la torture dans laquelle il vivait. Il faut se souvenir que dans les années 1960, en Angleterre, l’homosexualité était un crime. Les moeurs de Bacon pouvaient le conduire en prison. Ce que disent ses peintures, et aussi ces photos, c’est la passion qu’il portait au côté viscéral de la vie."

Par leur succession sur la planche, dans l’ordre exact où ils ont été pris, les clichés rappellent un peu les Chronophotographies, de Muybridge, dont Bacon s’est aussi inspiré. "Le photographe n’était qu’un outil pour Francis. Je n’y vois rien d’artistique, c’est simplement l’enregistrement d’un événement. Ce qui m’intéresse, c’est que c’est Bacon qui le dirige."

Michael Hoppen, qui rafla lors de la vente André Breton en 2003 tous les portraits des surréalistes (Dali, Buñuel, Ernst, Tanguy) réalisés dans un Photomaton, se dit fasciné par cet anonymat, ces clichés en rafale, comme réalisés par une machine. "Je les ai achetés pour la même raison que ces photos de Bacon. C’est narratif, c’est réel, et l’identité du photographe n’a pas d’importance. C’est une question qui me passionne. Comme en musique : qui est l’artiste ? L’interprète qui joue le morceau, ou l’auteur qui l’a composé ?"

Mais, Maastricht oblige, l’anonymat n’est pas toujours de règle, y compris chez Michael Hoppen, qui présente aussi d’autres photographies en relation avec Bacon, comme ce portrait du peintre pris en 1984 par Bruce Bernard, qui travaillait pour le Sunday Times, ou John Deakin, qui fut un des grands photographes de Vogue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author response

 

 

 

 

ROGER BRISTOW   |   LETTERS   |   THE NEWSROOM   |   THE SCOTSMAN   |   10 MARCH, 201o

 

In his review of my book The Last Bohemians – The Two Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde (Comment, 9 March), Professor Duncan Macmillan criticises the fact that I mention a John Houston, a fellow student of theirs at Glasgow School of Art, without pointing out that this was not the John Houston, well-known artist, husband of Elizabeth Blackadder and ex-pupil of Edinburgh School of Art.

 

I assumed, perhaps inadvertently, the fact that the John Houston I referred to was at Glasgow in the early 1930s (when the other Houston was a mere infant) would have made the distinction obvious.

 

More seriously, he takes me to task for not pointing out that two Scottish representatives on the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (“a Mr Sturrock and a Mr Foggie”) were “well-known Scottish artists”, stating that this “slackness of detail" raises a question about the book’s reliability.

 

One of the sources I used when researching the Roberts’ lives and Scottish art in general was Professor Macmillan’s Scottish Art in the 20th Century, a book I assumed to be reasonably definitive.

 

Strange then that of these two “well-known Scottish artists” Sturrock is referred to only once in the book while Foggie is not mentioned at all.

 

Macmillan concludes by stating that it was Francis Bacon who called the Roberts “the Last Bohemians” and “so gave Bristow his book title”.

 

I have no idea whether Bacon described them as such but my quote is taken from Ken Russell when describing making his TV film about them in 1959, as is clearly stated in the book, opposite the title page.

 

ROGER BRISTOW

 

Carnyorth Terrace

 

Near St Just in Penwith, Cornwall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michelangelo and the mastery of drawing

 

 

Michelangelo’s astonishing ’presentation drawings’, lessons in art technique

for a young aristocrat he adored, tell pagan stories about men and love.

 

 

 

The exhibition at the Courtauld is the most important ever devoted to them,

writes James Hall

 

 

 

JAMES HALL  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  SATURDAY, 6 MARCH, 2010

 

One of the most common complaints made about today’s artists is their apparent inability to draw. In matters of art, no question is more decisive, more majestically final, than: "But can he/she draw?" In a melodramatic hatchet job on Francis Bacon, Picasso biographer John Richardson recently claimed that Bacon’s "graphic ineptitude" was his Achilles heel: "Tragically, he failed to teach himself to draw."

Yet Michelangelo’s attack on Venetian painting points to a serious flaw in the argument. One can compile an extremely impressive list of great (and mostly unliterary) artists who got by nicely without bothering unduly with drawing. They displayed not so much graphic ineptitude as indifference. Giorgione, Titian, Caravaggio, Hals, Velázquez and Vermeer seem to have painted directly on to the canvas, just incising or brushing in a few outlines. Indeed, drawing as a major artform has been in spasmodic but continuous decline since the 17th century: most drawings by great artists after about 1850, including Manet, Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse, are barely worth exhibiting and are of interest only to specialist scholars. Bacon represents the rule rather than the exception.

Michelangelo’s Dream is at the Courtauld Gallery, London WC2 (020 7848 2526) until 16 May.

 

 

 

 

 

Karl Lagerfeld

 

 

When Vice called me last month with an out-of-the-blue offer to fly

to Paris and interview the Kaiser himself, Karl Lagerfeld—creative

director of the $10 billion Chanel empire, the house of Fendi, and

his own eponymous line—I jumped at the chance.



 

 

By BRUCE LABRUCE   |   THE FASHION ISSUE   |   VICE   |   TUESDAY, 01 MARCH, 2011

 

When Vice called me last month with an out-of-the-blue offer to fly to Paris and interview the Kaiser himself, Karl Lagerfeld—creative director of the $10 billion Chanel empire, the house of Fendi, and his own eponymous line—I jumped at the chance. I have to confess that I wasn’t an expert about the fabled fashion kingpin prior to Vice’s proposition, but I did know that for a faggot it was tantamount to an audience with the Pope! I was duly excited to meet the Man Behind the Fan (which, I would soon discover, has long since been replaced by the Collar), the guru behind the dark glasses, and to try to separate the myth from the reality.

But having now met and spent time with Mr. Lagerfeld, it seems that, as close as I can figure out, the man really is the myth. It’s not that there isn’t any there there; it’s that somehow, by some strange alchemy, the person who descends the stairway of his fashion house, infinitely multiplied by mirrors, has transcended this mortal coil to become a pure creature of creativity. Lagerfeld is a study in perpetual motion, tirelessly darting between creative endeavors while devouring both history and the ephemeral present, the zeitgeist. A voracious reader and observer of life through books and popular culture, he filters the world into his couture and other creative outlets like a sort of supercomputer. When I suggest to him in the following interview that he may have Asperger syndrome, a rare form of autism characterized by an obsessive-compulsive “disorder” manifested as a kind of genius, he concurs.

What struck me most about Lagerfeld when I was doing my research was how closely aligned many of my beliefs were with his. Despite owning a private jet and multiple luxury homes, he is anti-materialistic and remains detached from his possessions, particularly as he has become more mature. He has a healthy appreciation for what some people might consider the “low life”—prostitution, promiscuity, what have you—and he is decidedly antibourgeois, which encompasses his distaste for the idea of gay marriage.

On meeting, I presented him with a list of ten beliefs that we have in common, which acted as a nice icebreaker. From the outset, he was warm and convivial. However, I must admit he cast a spell on me. For the hour and a half that I sat with him, I felt almost as if I were in a dream or under hypnosis—relaxed but entranced, and even slightly blissed out. La Lagerfeld is a guru, all right, and not just one of the fashion variety.

 

Vice: So, you’re very busy as usual.

Karl Lagerfeld: I’m always busy, but this is a really busy time. I like really busy times.

I do too. I’ve been watching various documentaries about you. I’ve been kind of surprised, as I’ve learned more about you, by how your philosophy has become very distilled.

Down-to-earth.

Yes, very down-to-earth.

Sophisticated down-to-earth.

That’s almost like a paradox, but I understand.

I love paradoxes

Me too. I think it’s all about paradoxes. People don’t get it; they think you’re being contradictory, but two things can exist simultaneously that are opposed. There’s no mystery in that.

Truth is only a question of point of view.

I like that you make it clear that you don’t want to be photographed or filmed without your sunglasses on. I don’t either. Who would?

They’re my burka.

Exactly. A burka for the eyes.

A burka for a man. I’m a little shortsighted, and people, when they’re shortsighted, they remove their glasses and then they look like cute little dogs who want to be adopted.

What about famous gay artists like Francis Bacon or Wilhelm von Gloeden? They both had important relationships that were almost like marriages.

I knew Francis Bacon; he was the sweetest man in the world, like a Middle English lady with the finger up drinking tea in Monte Carlo. My best friend, who is dead now, was very friendly with Bacon. They gambled and drank together.

Did Bacon have his protégé with him, or was it his lover?

I think that he was dead already—the famous one was dead.

Ah, George Dyer.

I only saw Bacon with my friend, drinking and gambling heavily.

Your best friend is…

He’s dead, too.

What happened to him?

AIDS. That happened 20 years ago.

 

 

 

Gallery: Two slices of Bacon in Kirklees

 

 

 

by Sarah Bull, Huddersfield Daily Examiner, Friday, February 26, 2010

 

THERE are now two places in which to view one of the most prized images in the Kirklees Permanent Collection. Figure Study II, by Francis Bacon, the most valuable painting in the collection, was originally a gift to the old Batley Town Council from the Contemporary Art Society back in 1952.

Lately, there has been a minor campaign from Batley to have the painting shown there, with those involved including Mike Wood, MP, Allan Thompson and Clr Mary Harkin. But Robert Hall, senior curator for visual arts in Kirklees, had to explain that the security and environmental conditions needed for the painting meant it could not be seen there.

So, a photographic replica – just over half-size – has been made and this is now displayed in Batley Library (not in the art gallery there, which has changing exhibitions). Mr Hall said the original painting, currently on show at Huddersfield, was a strong image and much in demand.

Last year was Bacon’s centenary and the painting was shown at the Tate, Milan, Madrid and New York. Figure Study II, painted during the 1940s, is a colourful, dramatic, but strange painting. Daniel Farson, in his book Gallery, calling it the most spectacular painting in Huddersfield, says: “The flatness of the title conceals an act of mysterious violence.

“An apparently naked figure, loosely-draped by a herringbone overcoat, mounted by an umbrella, leans over a palm, his mouth wide-open with a scream. The background is the colour of blood. What has happened? There is no telling.”

Though spectacular and acclaimed by critics, the gift of the painting, was not appreciated by all the people in Batley. To quote Daniel Farson again “Apparently, the painting was so disliked locally (so the artist himself has told me) that motions were put forward to the council to sell it.

“These were defeated at the time by the Director of Batley Art Gallery, Ronald Gelsthorpe, who believed in the painting’s importance, and thanks to his perseverance, it now hangs to greater advantage in Huddersfield.”

So what will the present population of Batley think of the photographic replica they have got now? Time will tell, of course, but bearing in mind its history, there’s a touch of irony about.

Ref: Daniel Farson - Gallery: A Personal Guide to British Galleries and Their Unexpected Treasure, Bloomsbury, 1990.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon reproduction painting beats security

fears to go on show in Huddersfield

 

   

 Huddersfield Daily Examiner, Tuesday, February 16, 2010

 

 

A PAINTING by Francis Bacon has been copied – so it can go on show in Kirklees. The original of Figure Study II is considered too valuable to be put on public show.

 

It remains locked in secure storage by Kirklees Council’s cultural staff who will not say how much it is worth. But now a reproduction of the work has been commissioned and it will go on show later this week.

 

The painting, Figure Study II by Bacon, one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, was presented to Batley Art Gallery by the Contemporary Art Society in 1952. Over the years the issue of displaying the important work in Batley has surfaced from time to time.

 

The reasons the painting has not been able to be displayed are numerous but primarily related to security and the impact on insurance, due to the painting’s value. There are also fears about possible damage when it is being moved and transported.

 

Whenever Kirklees Galleries lend the work, and it is often in demand, they need to be sure that the borrowers can meet certain security, insurance, transport and environmental conditions.

 

Now the work has been copied and the resulting reproduction will be formally unveiled at Batley Art Gallery on Friday at 10.30 am in front of Spen Valley MP Mike Wood and local dignitaries.

 

Art experts claim the work is an important early painting by Bacon, as he destroyed much of his work from the period of 1935 to 1944.

It shows a coat motif, from which a deformed, screaming figure – perhaps lurking under the coat – emerges.

 

 

 

                                

                                 Figure Study II 1945 – 1946  Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

Grappling with Francis Bacon

 

 

 

Previously unseen images of wrestlers made in Bacon’s studio

 

demonstrate the artist’s love of the visceral, writes Peter Conrad

 

 

 

 

  PETER CONRAD  |  CULTURE  |  THE OBSERVER  |  SUNDAY 14 FEBRUARY 2010


 

 

Two bodies in a bare, drab room, experimentally trying all the things they can do to each other, from grappling, groping sex to choke holds and karate chops: here is a privileged, confidential glimpse of Francis secret theatre, never seen before. It comes from a pile of contact sheets given by Bacon to an electrician who worked in his south Kensington studio; the collection was acquired by the dealer Michael Hoppen, who will be showing it at the art fair in Maastricht next month.

Nothing is known about this long session of polymorphous play. Who were the flabby butchers in the stained, straining pants, obliged to wear swimming caps that make them look like medical orderlies kitted out for surgery? Where was the room, which might be called clinical if only the sheet on the floor were cleaner and smoother? And who gave the orders, sitting behind the anonymous photographer and directing the two men as they showed off wrestling holds? That presumably was Bacon: he commissioned the photographs, and used a felt pen to mark the images he fancied, sketching a red cage around the hired thugs.

Bacon admired photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of bodies in motion, which treat the physique as an apparatus with elegantly calibrated, agile parts. But his own version of those athletic displays is perverse, an exercise in abstracting the body by force. Picasso would have appreciated the frames in which the two men, wrestling or perhaps sexually coupling, merge into a monstrous quadruped with a pair of arses, one trailing dislocated arm, and no head.

They have come together to cause each other pain: a wrestling bout is the spectacle of physical agony, accompanied by grunts, groans, cries of excruciation. Unlike boxing, wrestling has no neatly aimed knock-out blows, no strict sporting etiquette. Here the coup de grâce is delivered with an elbow or the back of a hand, after which one man shoulders the other and carts him off like dead meat. Bacon was a connoisseur of abattoirs, and all that’s missing in these photographs is blood, although the scrap of tape on the corner looks like the trace of some intimate, dried-up fluid. Or does this stand for the imprint of Bacon’s thumb, gripping the page and depositing an equivalent to the smudges left on the floorcloth by the soles of the wrestlers’ dirty feet?

Like Greek tragedy, it is all a performance, as the men demonstrate when they forget their feud and start to jump and skip or dive into a non-existent pool. Opposed moods chase each other across the page like black and white, the two extremes of the photographic spectrum. Brutality at the top left changes to friskiness at the bottom right. But the change happens imperceptibly: sex often looks, and almost always sounds, like murder.

The detail that intrigues me most is the light socket halfway up the wall. It seems quaintly foreign, which suggests that the photographs may have been taken in Paris or New York, where Bacon spent time in the 1970s. Apart from any clue it might give about time and place, it functions, like every object in a Bacon painting, as a memento mori. In this impromptu gymnasium, energetic life goes through its paces, and soon enough confronts death; the light that floods the scene is raw and harsh, but the current can be turned off in an instant. Then perhaps an image will materialise in that dark, empty square at the centre. Some photographs – the nastiest, the most cruelly truthful – have to be looked at with your eyes closed.

The contact sheets will be shown for the first time at the European Fine Art Fair, Maastricht, Friday 12 March to Sunday 21 March.

 

 

 


 Billionaire Whistle Blower Loses $730 Million Alleging Fraud

 

 

BY VERNON SILVER & ANABELA REIS   |  BLOOMBERG MARKET NEWS  |  FRIDAY,  29 JANUARY 2010

 

Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) – On a December afternoon in 2007, billionaire Jose Berardo walked into the attorney general’s 18th-century headquarters in Lisbon to rat out executives at the Portuguese bank on which he had staked his fortune.

Sylvester Stallone

In a sun-filled gallery, Berardo examines the 1808 painting Oedipus and the Sphinx by French master Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres that’s on loan from the Louvre in Paris. The painting is being installed next to the work that it inspired, Francis Bacon’s 1983 Oedipus and the Sphinx, after Ingres. Berardo owns the Bacon painting.

“You know who used to own this one? Stallone!” Berardo shouts, referring to actor Sylvester Stallone. Berardo recounts how he ran into Stallone and told him, “I’ve got your Bacon!”

The museum is located in a state-owned cultural complex – the result of a deal Berardo cut with the Ministry of Culture in 2006. The government agreed to house part of his collection and took a 10-year option to buy 862 paintings and sculptures for 316 million euros, based on a Christie’s valuation in 2006.

 

 

 

 

A show to Bragg about: The South Bank Show frontman

Melvyn recalls his most memorable moments

 

 

 

 

After 32 years and 800 episodes, Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show has come to an end.

Here he talks about the good, the bad and the not-always-sober moments behind the scenes.

 

 

BY JOHN MCENTEE   |   CULTURE SHOCK   |   THE DAILY MAIL  |  FRIDAY,  29 JANUARY 2010

 

Making a programme with the artist Francis Bacon involved another day’s drinking. “I’d known Francis for more than 20 years. In 1985, I spent a day with him for a programme and it turned into a pub crawl.

“This was an alcoholic waterfall. Francis and I pretended to have lunch and did the interview. We ate nothing, but we drank on. We got very drunk. It showed. We slurred. Once or twice we all but stopped. We went in to a gambling club next to some blurred drinking hellhole. At some time I found my way home, my liver leaping up to my ribs like a salmon swimming against the stream.”

At this week’s final South Bank Show award lunch, Melvyn was touched by a filmed tribute from the Prince of Wales in which he described the “more or less” sober questioning of a drunken Francis Bacon while the production team guffawed.

Bragg may yet take his show to a different channel if another broadcaster can afford to bankroll it.

• The South Bank Show Awards is on ITV1 on Sunday at 10.15pm.

 

 


 Francis Bacon; valid retrospective or academic voyeurism?

 

 

The most recent exhibition of Francis Bacon’s work features his rejected pieces,

and is presented as much as an insight to the man as an artistic endeavour.

 

Trinity News, Wednesday, 27 January, 2010 

 

The hundredth anniversary of Francis Bacon’s birth was celebrated last year. By all accounts he displays the virtues recommended to tortured artists. His highly prized angst is considered a prerequisite for depicting the so-called ‘modern condition’. Whatever the catalyst was for his art, the results are clear. Bacon was one of the highest selling painters of his time. Born in Dublin at 63 Lower Baggot Street, his life was all cliché. His father, a military man, disapproved of his son’s foray into art, leading to a predictably strained relationship. Such friction lead Bacon to Europe where he could ply his intended trade free from the untoward influences of convention. Or so say the critics. There are two schools of art criticism, one is interesting while the other is not. The first method attempts to find value in the art work while assessing the technical merits (if any) of the piece. The second method aims at an unnecessary archaeology of the artist’s life and thought. The artists are usually dead, before these critics feel free to extrapolate wildly and attribute significance as they please.


A Terrible beauty is the title of the Francis Bacon exhibit currently in the Hugh Lane gallery. The exhibit is an exercise in exploitation. Everything ranging from rejected works to refuse is on display if Bacon so much as touched it. His library, paints and studio are displayed so that each voyeur may garner a sufficient degree of empathy for the man, and his interests. The Egyptians buried their dead with much fanfare, but no one could say that they profited for it. Civilisation has marched on somewhat since then, we still have fanfare, but now we’re also willing to profit from our famous dead. Walking through the Hugh Lane you gain a considerable education, but it’s an odd process somewhat like tearing through your sister’s diary. What you find is of no particular use. Bacon was well known for masochistic tendencies, with highly destructive and violent relationships with his partners and muses for his disturbing works.


His revulsion at his own homosexuality, something he was open about all his life is equally well known. One of his defining relationships was with a George Dyer, thirty years his junior, who he claimed to have met when he had burgled his apartment, Dyer, a colourful personality himself, committed suicide just before Bacon’s biggest retrospective in Paris, just one instance of tragedy in his life.


Bacon’s exhibition is the visual narration of a plausible life story. Scrap books, photos and random notes are interspersed between a collection of sketches, paintings and slashed paintings. The main themes to note are progression and influence. Seeds of the final results can be seen in earlier endeavours. The ‘slashed paintings’ are failures by another name. They usually evince the same sparse background of the complete works with a hole where the central image was supposed to reside. The desecration of all the paintings displays a violent and brutal editorial hand. So the decision to display them seems counter-intuitive. This posthumous abuse is no better than the gratuitous airing of dirty laundry. But for all the flaws to be found in the exhibit there are some positive points — namely, the paintings.  


Bacon paints his scenes in a strangely figurative style on un-primed canvas. This method enforces a difficult constraint upon the painter, by which mistakes become difficult to alter, and so must be incorporated in the image. This engenders some strange effects. There is an obvious disconnect between his images and reality but at the same time, he paints hugely evocative expressions of the human form. Contorted at bizarre angles or at rest, there is always a degree of isolation to the figures depicted. As a result, one cannot look on with indifference, and what strikes one as figurative nonetheless communicates a literal truth.


It is by this principle of empathy that Bacon’s paintings communicate the sense of the situation depicted. The miserable and wretched examples of humanity in Bacon’s painting serve a cathartic effect. The appreciation of such paintings follows primarily from the knowledge that such is not my lot. The miserable nudity of the human body seems so defenceless and brittle under Bacon’s brush that the survival of our species strikes one anew as an amazing miracle. The recognition of the suffering or loneliness seems to be instinctive, such that I do not feel able to dismiss such scenes of misery as melodramatic extensions of the existentialist ‘epiphany’.


The clear emotive success achieved by Bacon’s stark depictions makes the trip to the Hugh Lane worth it, but bear in mind that while it may give a degree of insight into what was, as with many a creative mind, a troubled existence, however, as with much of todays art criticism, it should be taken with a pinch (or four) of salt.

       

 

 

 

A terrible beauty, saturated in pain

 

 

 

 

 

    CULTURE SHOCK:  The Francis Bacon ‘slashed paintings’ exhibit at the

Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin puts the artist’s turmoil directly in our view,

writes FINTAN O’TOOLE 

 

 

 

FINTAN O’TOOLE   |   CULTURE SHOCK   |   THE IRISH TIMES   |   9 JANUARY 2010

 

 

 

WHEN YOU put them up on a gallery wall, objects acquire meaning. This is certainly true of the slashed paintings, destroyed by their creator Francis Bacon, and now on display as part of the Hugh Lane Gallery’s intriguing A Terrible Beauty exhibition. In themselves, the torn canvasses may be no more significant than the contents of a writer’s waste-paper basket. They are the detritus of the creative process, efforts that failed to meet the artist’s standards. Yet placed in the context both of his more achieved works and of the contents of his studio, the violence with which some of the canvasses have been attacked becomes highly suggestive.

 

Bacon, as the art historian John Richardson suggests in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, has strong impulses towards both sadism and masochism. During his childhood in Ireland, he turned up at a fancy dress party hosted by his parents at Cannycourt dressed as a flapper. When his father discovered him wearing his mother’s underclothes, he delivered a violent beating.

 

Subsequently, Bacon came to associate sexual pleasure with cruelty, even with extreme violence. One of his lovers, Peter Lacy, who appears in the Hugh Lane exhibition both in Bacon’s awestruck portrait and in photographs of a suave, handsome man in early middle-age, inspired some of Bacon’s most important works. He also, according to Richardson, “hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place. Bacon loved Lacy even more”.

 

Conversely, another of Bacon’s most important muses, George Dyer, was subjected to psychological torment and goading. On the day of Bacon’s ascension into the firmament of modern art greatness, with the opening of his exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, Dyer’s third attempt to take his own life proved to be fatal.

 

If all of this places Bacon closer to the casebook of Sigmund Freud than to the studio of his own friend and contemporary Lucien Freud, it is not necessary to be a brilliant psychoanalyst to get some sense of what was going on. The need to punish or be punished was clearly rooted in shame. Tellingly, Bacon, openly gay throughout his life, had no interest in the gay rights movement. Richardson recalls him remarking, a propos of moves to decriminalise homosexuality in England, that “they should bring back hanging for buggery”. Guilt – and the consequent connection to violence – was too strongly intertwined with sex to be dispensed with.

 

Richardson sees these cruel relationships as central to Bacon’s work, to the point of arguing that there is a direct link between them and the quality of his art. When Bacon settled with John Edwards in a relationship “less fraught for being platonic, seemingly free of sadomasochistic overtones”, his work, Richardson claims, “lost its sting and failed to thrill”.

 

It is hard not be uneasy about all of this. From an aesthetic point of view, it is unpleasantly reductive to make such direct connections between the work and the life. As Richardson himself points out, there is a danger of making Bacon “a kind of Michael Jackson of art – an anomalous weirdo of divine power”. From a moral standpoint, there is an obvious discomfort in the notion that Bacon’s art was better when he was involved in violent relationships than when he was not. And yet, even without necessarily going all the way with Richardson, it is hard to gainsay the obvious ways in which his best paintings are indeed related to his sadomasochistic desires.

 

Paradoxically perhaps, it is pain that humanises Bacon’s art. There is a studied coldness to his images of the naked body isolated in a space that Richardson memorably calls “a photographer’s studio in Hell”. The studio materials that are now on view at the Hugh Lane give us the sense of a lurid, almost voyeuristic interest in violence, death and disease. The sources he used include deliberately sensational and explicit depictions of terrible brutality, such as the French propaganda publication The True Aspects of the Algerian Revolution, showing the aftermaths of murders. He does not seem to have been greatly interested in the people shown in these images, merely in the strange dispositions of their bodies.

 

And yet when he places his formalised versions of these images within the abstract spaces of his canvasses, something truly strange happens. Instead of becoming more distant, more removed from their sources in the real horrors of the 20th century, they become almost unbearably real. They are saturated with pain itself – not a metaphysical angst but a visceral bodily agony. They almost literally scream out from the frame.

 

And just as the paintings become the bearers of pain, they also seem to inflict it. Bacon brings into painting what Antonin Artaud had brought into drama – a theatre of cruelty. What Artaud meant by that phrase was not, of course, physical violence, but the psychic shock that he felt the audience needed. He imagined theatre as a ritual power aimed at shattering the facade of daily illusions and stripping reality down to its essence.

 

Even if Bacon’s art has its roots in an actual, rather than a metaphysical cruelty, the important thing about it is that it transcends those origins.

 

It reaches for a shock value that has nothing to do with the lurid sadism that may hover around it. It is the shock of the human body from whose depiction all trace of both classical ideals and romantic heroism has been stripped. Contorted in an agony or an ecstasy that are indistinguishable from each other, it becomes again shockingly beautiful. In the complicity that great art enforces we, too, end up deriving pleasure from this pain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon

 

 

Dublin and Compton Verney

 

 

MARTIN HAMMER | EXHIBITIONS | THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE | NUMBER 1282 | VOLUME 152 | JANUARY 2010

 

OPENING ONE HUNDRED YEARS to the day after the artist’s birth in Dublin, Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, at the Dublin City Gallery, Hugh Lane (to 7th March),1 is a very different exhibition from the recent ‘greatest hits’ treatment in London, Madrid and New York.2 Most memorably, it features a cluster of such rarely seen pictures as Study for a Figure (1944-1945), a variation on the left-hand panel of Three studies for a figures at the base of a Crucifixion. Close inspection suggests that this was also originally painted with an orange backdrop, but finished with a setting and curtains in Sickertian khaki and a vase of flowers that show how Bacon was already pressing fabric into the paint to create surface textures. The 1950s yield the beautifully insubstantial Untitled (man at washbasin) (Fig. 74) and a pair of unusual seascapes. Head of a woman (1960), with its tentative intimations of Bacon’s mature idiom, is paired with the sumptuous Seated figure from 1962, a close relative of the Three studies for a Crucifixion (Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York) that inaugurated his re-engagement with the triptych. Such loans from private collections are augmented by a few, more familiar works to offer a concise survey of Bacon’s evolution, although the hang in these four galleries is neither chronological nor always visually cohesive. A dozen or so pictures remind us, then, that Bacon at his best had a way with paint and a technical inventiveness which put him into the most elevated company among modern painters. Confronted by his drawings, unfinished canvases, and pictures where the flair eventually deserted him (as in a couple of the late portraits shown here), one also feels that he was capable of a greater ineptness than any other figure of comparable accomplishment. During his lifetime, Bacon wisely kept such secondary material out of sight, doubtless destroying far more than ended up in Dublin.

The paintings are the icing on what is essentially a presentation in extenso of material from Bacon’s studio, famously transplanted to the Hugh Lane Gallery to be reinvented as a shrine to the artist. Of the some seven thousand catalogued items, a good number are shown here in nine further spaces that impose conceptual order and the visual tidiness of the display case onto Bacon’s cultivated chaos. These spaces variously address the photography of Edweard Muybridge, John Deakin and Peter Beard; books on artists and plates torn from them; unfinished and slashed canvases; sketches and handwritten notes; a miscellaneous selection of wild animal, sporting, medical and street-scene photographic imagery; and a visual record of Bacon’s own changing physical appearance. It is of course very difficult to display such archival material, the real interest of which is the light it sheds on the actual art. Curiously, in Dublin, one starts by discerning hints of Bacon as Andy Warhol when confronted  by the grid-like arrangements of Deakin’s many photographs of Lucian Freud, George Dyer, Isobel Rawsthorne (Fig. 75) et al, displayed in wall-mounted perspex boxes, recalling the many expressions of Warhol’s Ethel Scull; or Bacon as Ed Ruscha in the display of repetitive and identically framed sheets extracted from books by Muybridge; or even Bacon as a distant cousin to Lucio Fontana in the roomful of pictures to which he took the knife. Such associations were obviously unintended, but nevertheless, arrive from the interwoven displays of such heterogeneous types of object, all apparently arising to the condition of art.

The accompanying book clarifies these curatorial decisions. Only the paintings proper are individually catalogued, although the discussions here are fairly routine (and the colour plates truly dreadful). Do we need to be told again that Figure in a landscape (1945) was based on a snapshot of Eric Hall, even though a photograph by Marius Maxwell of a buffalo was just as much ‘the primary source’;3 or that the curved spaces in many backgrounds echo Georgian interiors that Bacon experienced as a lad? Such devotions to the horse’s mouth is at odds with the more independent lines of inquiry pursued elsewhere. The later includes important research by younger scholars such as Jessica O’Donnell, Marcel Fink, and Rebecca Daniels on Bacon’s appropriations of photography, especially by Deakin, and a fascinating account by Joanne Shepard of what technical investigation (conducted on the slashed pictures) is beginning to reveal about Bacon’s working methods. Although studio material has featured in numerous exhibitions over the past decade, the co-curator of the present show, Martin Harrison, quarrels ‘with certain critics’ who ‘have maintained  an implacable resistance to this vast archive, arguing that the urge to investigate Bacons aims and methods is inimical to a deeper understanding of the paintings’. Such investigation is just as relevant, he argues, as studying traditional artists sketches, since for Bacon ‘this base material functioned in an equivalent way’. Harrison observes that the unwillingness to acknowledge this has always reflected a vestigial snobbery in Britain about photography. Now, by implication, we can aspire to a more judicious grasp of how the photographic image operated within Bacon’s creative process. Certainly, thanks to the researchers of Harrison and others, it is more apparent than ever that in the paintings he was constantly adapting overall compositions and specific details from a disparate array of photographic images. Theorising that process of transformation remains a key task for scholars, who should study what is preserved in Dublin and elsewhere, but be willing to assume that other photographic sources may be documented only by the pictures themselves.4

It is currently maintained, especially here, that the alchemic process went further and that Bacons creativity is somehow illuminated by the fact that much of the photographic material in the archive ended up torn, cut up, folded, its configurations occasionally held in position by paperclips, sometimes overpainted or annotated, and generally worn and trampled upon. The evidence that such physical distressing informed the configurations in Bacons pictures is at present quite limited. Finke cleverly demonstrates that a couple of foldings enabled Bacon to hold up photos in one hand, while painting with the other. But these are exceptional cases within a sea of origami. Did Bacon always, or even usually, meaningful ‘artistic’ objectives in mind when manhandling images? For the sake of argument, one could equally say that manipulating photographs as physical objects turned into a species of compulsive behaviour. The Dublin archive certainly shows that he (or someone) frequently did exactly the same thing to ordinary newspaper cuttings, and nobody has yet  argued that they have any bearing on the paintings.5 Perhaps this was what Bacon did with his hands while standing in front of a picture in progress, and thinking about what to do next? Possibly the activity was on a par with buying endless books containing reproductions of  Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X, or editions of Muybridge — or for that matter with gambling, and going to the Colony Room and Wheeler’s restaurant. It also matched his obsessive toying with certain key concepts that he saw as fundamental to his art. Above all, and more interesting of course, it echoed the unusually compulsive traits inherent in his studio procedures, such as returning again and again to specific images, formats and pictorial devices. It was a strict regime of habit and repetition that gave Bacon the room to work on other levels, to paraphrase what Jasper Johns said of his own use of the American flag. At any rate, it seems overstated and too literal to argue that Bacon’s studio sweepings functioned in the way that preparatory drawings did for other artists, which in turn justifies the aestheticised presentation. The effect rather is an insistence that the artist’s genius infused everything. however banal, that he touched or jotted down.

Of course the best way to enable productive engagement with the studio archive would be to make the Hugh Lane’s comprehensive database available online.6 This would greatly facilitate further identification and dating of the numerous images Bacon extracted from books and magazines, which might then yield insights about the imaginative scrutiny that fed into the pictures. In the mean time, this is a fascinating and provocative exhibition, and an antidote perhaps for those who found the recent retrospective too grand and predictable. It consolidates Dublin’s position as a centre of Bacon research, in alliance an unusually proactive artist’s estate. And the Yeatsian title is brilliant, if loaded, in its suggestion that Bacon may have assimilated some cultural Irishness from the circumstances of his birth.

 

1  Catalogue  Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty. With texts by Rebecca Daniels, Barbra Dawson, Marcel Finke, Martin Harrison, Jessica O’Donnell, Joanna Shepard and Logan Sisley. 224 pp. incl.  212 col. 15  b. & w. £19. The exhibition travels to Compton Verney, Warwickshire (27th March to 20th June).

2  Reviewed by Dexter Dalwood in this Magazine, 150 (2008), pp.841—42.

3 Noted in M Hammer: Bacon and Sutherland, New Haven and London 2005, p.24. Bacon’s interest in this particular Maxwell image is confirmed by the presence in his studio of a heavily thumbed sheet extracted from Stalking Big Game with a Camera in Equatorial Africa; see M. Harrison and R. Daniels: Incunabula, London 2008, p. 139

4 For a new contribution not based on support from the studio archive, see M. Hammer and C. Stephens: “Seeing the story of one’s time”: appropriations from Nazi photography in the work of Francis Bacon, Visual Culture in Britain 10 (November 2009), pp. 317—53.

5  My thanks to the Hugh Lane Gallery staff for allowing me access to the database of the studio archive.

6  Many sheets are identical in Harrison and Daniels, op. sit. (note 3). I would add that the photograph of an elaborate system of windows and reflections, shown but not reproduced in the catalogue, is derived from  L. Moholy-Nagy: Vision in Motion, Chicago 1947, p.201. This reinforces Bacon’s known connection with the milieu of Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, for whom this was a cult book.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and the Geometry of Fear

 

 

 

 

DAVID HULKS  |  SCULPTURE JOURNAL  |  ISSUE 1  |  NUMBER 19  |  FRIDAY 1 JANUARY 2010

 

The useful and now fairly widely employed term ‘post-medium condition’, as coined by the critic and art historian Rosalind Krauss, is conventionally used only to describe the historical rejection by artists and theorists in the mid-1960s of Clement Greenberg’s insistence that painting and sculpture should be largely independent and medium-specific.1 The term, however, implies a liberation of thought that may allow us to look for earlier ‘post-medium conditions’ in the history of art, especially for moments when painters and sculptors have seemingly refused to live within the definitions of their respective mediums. An example of an earlier ‘post-medium condition’, the hybrid nature of Francis Bacon’s painting – which is about painting, certainly, but not purely about painting, and unquestionably about sculpture as well – comes to mind. This article explores the connections that can be made between Bacon’s clear interest in, and incorporation of, sculptural ideas and aesthetics, and the work of contemporary sculptors, isolated unreasonably in our minds not only from Bacon but also from closely connected artists, not least Graham Sutherland. We might begin by considering Bacon’s famous triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) (fig. 1). While this is undeniably a series of three paintings that we can place in a long history of triptych painting, it was originally conceived as a three-dimensional assemblage, the three images to be mounted on a single armature and arranged in real space around a central crucifixion, as the title suggests. Furthermore, not only did Bacon often contemplate translating his virtual-space ideas into real-space sculptural equivalents, he also aimed, especially in his later paintings, in his own words, to ‘make the painting itself very much more sculptural’.2 His pursuit of a spatial conception in fact seems to have been at least as important to him as his concern with image-making, troubling the sort of received wisdom art historians conventionally rely upon – as in David Summers’s real space/virtual space dichotomy, where he asserts, far too simplistically, that ‘sculpture and architecture are the principal arts of real space’ whereas ‘painting and the graphic arts are the principal arts of virtual space’.3 Bacon’s work, it seems, falls between these two conceptual categories and thus defeats the dichotomy. Work such as this seems to support more the position taken by Alex Potts in his refusal of any ‘clear-cut distinction between the painterly and the truly sculptural’, even when – or perhaps especially when – trying to define ‘a category so obvious that it is usually taken for granted’.4

The problem with too readily isolating sculpture as a special field of arthistorical enquiry is that the connections sculpture makes with other art forms then tend to become obscured or even entirely ignored.5 It could, for example, be argued that this is precisely what happened in 1952 at the British Pavilion in Venice, when Graham Sutherland’s paintings were treated separately to the neighbouring ‘New Aspects of British Sculpture’, featuring a collection of contemporary sculptures, drawings and maquettes, often known collectively under the title the ‘Geometry of Fear’. The obvious connections between these two shows were entirely neglected in Herbert Read’s catalogue essay of the same title, presumably so as not to step on the toes of Kenneth Clark, who had been commissioned to write the Sutherland essay.6 Read did mention Picasso’s importance, and clearly was not blind to the influence of non-sculptural media, referring by implication to both painting and literature. He nevertheless treated British sculpture as an isolatable category, underlining his ring-fencing of the sculptural medium by instating Henry Moore as head of the family with the words: ‘no doubt father to them all’.7

There are fault lines, however, in Read’s text that reveal the unsatisfactory consequences of isolating sculpture in this way. Moore may have been the paternal teacher, the new generation having ‘learnt from him, as they have learnt from Picasso, Calder and Giacometti’.8 Nevertheless, the new sculptors’ relationship to Moore was not one of simple indebtedness. Reaching for an analogy in Greek myth, Read stressed the extent to which ‘these epigone’ ought to be distinguished from ‘their immediate predecessor, Moore’, and from Hepworth as well. Picasso had ‘anticipated’ them, and Calder was important because of the innovation of movement; the new sculpture, however, to Read’s way of thinking, was strikingly original, although he failed to identify quite why this might be so. He did, however, note how it had abandoned the classical aspirations of an earlier generation: ‘Gone for ever is the serenity, the monumental calm . . . gone, too, the plastic stress of Rodin’.9 An earlier, ‘conscious’ modernist effort had been replaced in the post-war period by a new ‘nervous’ activity, a direct and profound expression of ‘immediate sensations’ driven by a compulsion ‘to move quickly from stage to stage in the progressive exploration of new possibilities of plastic expression’.10 Here is where we need to read between the lines of Read’s text. There are clues here that Read was at some level aware of the powerful impact on this work not only of Sutherland’s painting, but also of Francis Bacon’s, even if he was reluctant to state this explicitly. Nevertheless, Read does seem in the ‘New Aspects’ essay to be subliminally acknowledging Bacon’s influence, even while denying it; so much so that it seems the ‘Geometry of Fear’ aspect mainly derives from the impact of Bacon – derives, in other words, more from 1945 than from 1952.

The decisive event, then, was the exhibiting of Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London’s West End in 1945, the moment usefully marking an important sea-change in the history of British art. Three Studies was not a reflexive action, made in order to capture a crucial postwar moment; as Hugh Davies argues, ‘The Tate triptych should be viewed as the summation of a dozen years’ exploration of the Crucifixion theme rather than as a gut reaction to the devastation of World War II’.11 However, true as this is, it is also true that Three Studies was rich and ambiguous enough for it to fit the contemporary mood more or less perfectly, as we can tell from the critic John Russell’s important eye-witness account. Russell is sometimes treated sceptically by art historians, concerned as they often are to back-date the origins of Three Studies to Bacon’s pre-war development, thereby emphasizing the important influence of Surrealism.12 Russell, however, was not mistaking Bacon’s intervention for a ‘gut reaction’, he was merely remarking on a fortuitous coincidence, the impact resulting from what does appear to have been seen as – even if more gradually than sometimes suggested – a momentous event.13 While rigorous art-historical work may have successfully cast some doubt on how widespread and immediate that original impact was,14 it is inconceivable that Read, given the circles he mixed in – and acutely aware, as he always was, of the historical impact of modern art and architecture – did not feel almost immediately that the display of Three Studies would become a turning point in the history of art. If before the war Bacon had been easy to dismiss or marginalize – for example, as a minor, perhaps even derivative artist – after 1945 he became absolutely central to post-war aesthetics, specifically in connection with French existentialism and a parallel post-neoromantic English movement. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion became, as Margaret Garlake has put it, ‘an incomparable icon of the period, it encapsulated the recent past and appeared to prophesy the immediate future’.15

There has been surprisingly little scholarly discussion, however, of exactly how that impact spread beyond the confines of painting, eventually to produce the work Read describes in 1952 as the ‘Geometry of Fear’. Russell’s recollection suggests that we ought to have in mind the way Bacon’s Three Studies seemed much more apt than the post-war work of Henry Moore, contrary to Read’s central placing of Moore as the father-figure in his ‘New Aspects’ account. In Russell’s account of the 1945 exhibition at Lefevre, Moore’s work, shown alongside not only Bacon but also Frances Hodgkins, Matthew Smith and Graham Sutherland, inappropriately projected ‘a robust confidence in the continuity of normal life’,16 his remark reflecting a wider negative estimation of Moore’s work in new postwar critical discussions. Martin Harrison records that in the post-war period, ‘younger critics believed Moore’s work had become heavy and repetitive – Reyner Banham, for example, held Detroit car styling to be above “Moore-ish yokelry”’, while Margaret Garlake has pointed to the way Moore and others of his generation, including Sutherland, were increasingly seen as outmoded ‘pastoralists’.17 By contrast, Bacon’s painting seemed to aim at capturing the posttraumatic atmosphere in the aftermath of war, creating not only an immediate phenomenological shock but also a more prolonged and apt ontological disturbance.18 As Russell’s account stresses, the moment in question was April 1945, after peace had been declared, but before VE Day, when there were widespread fears about a new and unhealthy public appetite for post-war revenge and retribution. If Russell is to be believed, Bacon’s work, unlike Moore’s, represented the post-war moral fascination with violence. For Herbert Read, Moore’s greatest champion, this development appears to have been hard to accept. His response was to continue to support Moore, and to ignore Bacon, creating an interesting gap in his writing. Despite this gap, however, it does seem he paid attention to the shift in direction, eventually explicitly acknowledging the ‘growing fearsomeness’ in Sutherland’s work that he felt had to do with the influence of Heidegger and Sartre.19 It was not, however, until the early 1950s that Read finally found a language in which to express a positive response to these unwelcome yet inescapable post-war developments.

As I have argued elsewhere,20 the ‘geometry of love’ configuration, proposed slightly earlier than the term ‘geometry of fear’, can provide us with a key to unlocking Read’s coming-to-terms with the new post-war ‘cosmic anxiety’, and the accompanying visual language of violence within the context of a general ‘climate of fear’. The ‘geometry of love’ was an idea developed by Read for a paper to be read before the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1951. It was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis that same year, and was based on a much earlier article for T. S. Eliot’s journal, Criterion.21 Read’s new post-war paper and article referred to W. R. D. Fairbairn’s ‘Psychology of Art’, Fairbairn being, in Read’s view, the only psychoanalyst who had given adequate recognition to what he referred to as ‘the presentational immediacy of the object in aesthetic experience’.22 To this insight was added Anton Ehrenzweig’s suggestion that ‘unconscious sexual symbolism is the basic material of art, but this crude material is elaborated, to the degree of dissimulation, by our conscious feelings of beauty’.23 This new, non-Aristotelian (in other words, Platonist) understanding of the essential nature of art, based on psychoanalytical insight combined with evolutionary theory, allowed Read to ‘appreciate “abstract” form for its own sake’, without needing to refer to the work’s representational meaning.24 The appreciation of a ‘good’ work of art was based, Read suggested, not on any intellectual engagement, but rather on an unconscious evaluation of the ‘geometry of love’ – in other words, on a re-connection of the ‘eternal laws of beauty’ to a certain ‘pan-genital symbolism’ out of which beauty had originally arisen.25 This theory could possibly account for much of the most successfully received modern works of art. However, works not received as profoundly beautiful or arresting, but instead as shocking and disturbing, needed another kind of explanation. Put another way, Bacon’s work can be thought of as violently dismantling precisely the heterosexual assumptions that underlie Read’s geometry of love proposal. This gives us a quite tangible explanation for why Read seems to have abandoned his theory of the geometry of love, and instead adjusted the term to refer in 1952 to the ‘geometry of fear’.

To return then to the wider text of the ‘New Aspects’ essay, how can we reveal more clearly the way that Bacon’s influence appears to have been central, albeit subliminally incorporated? First, and probably the most obvious evidence of Bacon’s unacknowledged but nevertheless unmistakable presence, is Read’s description of the new work as ‘nervous, wiry’, preceded even more tellingly by his comment ‘their art is close to the nerves’.26 Here the connection to Bacon seems undeniable. Producing an art that would be ‘close to the nerves’, that would appeal directly to the nervous system rather than being intellectually apprehended, was Bacon’s trademark aim, frequently cited by him in statements and interviews.27 Secondly, and closely related to this, Read stresses in the ‘New Aspects’ essay the importance of working with chance and making instinctual choices – a clear parallel to Bacon’s privileging of ‘accident’.28 Like Bacon, the new generation of post-war sculptors ‘express their immediate sensations, sometimes with an almost sophisticated grace (Butler), sometimes with a scorn of bourgeois “finish” (Paolozzi)’.29 Thirdly, and perhaps most tellingly, Read, in order to establish some sort of precedent for ‘these new images’ referred his readers to T. S. Eliot’s poetry. In doing so, he seems to have revealed how far he had come, albeit unwillingly, to accepting the validity and importance of Bacon’s original presentation of the Three Studies. His description of the ‘new aspects’, apparent to him only in 1952, seems more like a belated acceptance of the founding event. If ‘the serenity, the monumental calm’ had been replaced by images of ‘excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, [and] the geometry of fear’, who but Francis Bacon had been responsible for this?30

None of this, of course, will come as much surprise to art historians today; Bacon’s Three Studies clearly did mark a turning point, and there would be few now who would seriously dispute this. However, it remains the case that this area is still badly under-researched, largely because Bacon’s enormous influence, it seems, has been taken for granted. For example, it is well known that in 1959 Bacon identified the three figures at the base of his intended crucifixion not as mourners but as the Greek Furies, the Eumenides; it is also well understood that Bacon further connected these figures to Aeschylus’s famous tragic poem, the Oresteian Trilogy. 31 However, although much attention has been paid to specific lines in the poem that might have given the artist various ideas for painterly depiction,32 little if any attention has been paid to the long visual tradition of depicting the Eumenides that Bacon might have referred to.

One way of addressing this deficiency is to return to Read’s notion of the ‘geometry of love’. The Eumenides, as depicted in Greek vase painting, clearly afforded the ceramic painter in the Hellenic world an ideal opportunity for an only thinly disguised erotic representation. ‘After all,’ Read remarks in his psychoanalytic paper ‘Art and the Development of the Personality’ (1951), ‘these laws are incorporated in the human body, and the sexually most attractive human form is possibly the one that best illustrates these external laws of beauty.’33 Perhaps precisely for this reason, far from fearsome or ugly creatures, the Eumenides were conventionally represented as curvaceous women, appearing to seduce Orestes as much as to repel and torment him. The erotic effect in the visual imagery of the vases frequently depends on the liberal use of curvilinear outline, often amplified by drapery. This sensuous curvilinearity was further added to by the addition of snakes, which in earlier representations are merely held threateningly towards the hero, but in later representations are shown winding themselves into the hair and spiralling around the arms (fig. 2). It is possible that Bacon may have been unaware of this tradition, but another possibility is that he was simply dissatisfied with it. In any event, his own version of the Eumenides seems much more in tune with the relevant lines in Aeschylus’s original play.34

Bacon’s pushing of the Eumenides imagery can be shown to be strikingly consistent with the way the ancient playright similarly stretched the text. Aeschylus’s description of the scene of Clytemnestra’s death with attendant Erinyes (Eumenides) is indirect, conveyed to the audience through the witness of the Prophetess of Apollo. The result is a productively disjointed description, amplifying the awfulness of the scene. In the Prophetess’s speech, the Eumenides are initially described as a ‘fearful troupe’ of women. However, this inaccurate description is quickly rejected, and instead the creatures are identified more precisely as Gorgons. The Gorgon idea, however, is itself modified, this time replaced by an image of the harpies who taunted King Phineus by robbing him of his feast. The Eumenides are wingless, however, so the harpy image also needs replacing: the Prophetess now describes the Eumenides directly. They are dark/black, snoring/snorting, generally repulsive, and from their eyes ‘a foul rheum oozes forth’.35 Thus the text lends itself perfectly not only to Bacon’s post-surrealist sensibilities, but also to his preferred ways of constructing a painting using chance and replacement. Just as the Prophetess struggles with her words, thereby conveying the inadequacy of language itself in the presence of a scene so awful that it is virtually indescribable, so Bacon similarly struggles with the medium of paint to produce a scene almost too awful to depict.

There is, however, the rather more prosaic, yet crucial, question of the painter’s two-dimensional translation of three-dimensional sculptural form.36 Ann Baldassari’s recent research has shown the extent to which Bacon is likely to have referred to Hans Bellmer’s (1902–75) famous experiments with a constructed poupée, or ‘doll’. The underlying form of the Eumenides was almost certainly derived from a similar crude ‘stuffed figure’ that Bacon and his close friend and fellow painter Roy de Maistre (1894–1968) kept in their flat. They employed this soft sculpture (referred to as ‘the Creature’) in various ways, but usually as a substitute for a human model, so that it supplied a strange, non-human presence to interiors that otherwise were conventionally populated.37 Used again in Bacon’s wartime painting, the Creature stood in for a more specific Nazi inhumanity. In Figure Getting Out of a Car (c. 1939–40) it was a substitute for Hitler, as well as suggesting a more general sense of violence. It was precisely this hybrid painterly, but also sculptural, activity that led Bacon to happen upon the triptych that was to define the start of a new post-war aesthetic.

Bacon’s identification of the Three Studies as the Eumenides, creatures from a very primitive corner of classical myth, also points to a certain Nietzschean conception38 that may further reveal why Herbert Read was compelled, albeit reluctantly, to become more favourably disposed to the geometry of fear. Read’s indebtedness to Nietzsche was made clear in a radio interview in 1947, when he suggested ‘there is nothing of value in Sartre, in Jaspers, in Heidegger, which is not expressed more forcibly, more beautifully, and more completely in the works of Nietzsche’.39 This admiration for Nietzsche was shared by many leading British intellectuals at the time, despite widespread suspicion that Nazi philosophy was to some extent founded on Nietzschean rhetoric. Nevertheless, respect for Nietzsche’s writing was considerable, and his influence was felt not only in general philosophical discourse, but also in any discussions focusing on the origins of the tragic form. In the 1940s and 50s Nietzsche’s fundamental division between Dionysian and Apollonian forms was still widely accepted, colouring the general interpretation of the Oresteian Trilogy so that it was frequently regarded as the fruitfully primitive Dionysian opposite to Euripides’ later – to a Nietzschean way of thinking, unwelcome – Apollonian refinements.40

Read’s friend Eliot was also an admirer of Nietzsche and, like Bacon, was obsessed with the Oresteian Trilogy. At the beginning of the war he had produced his own version of Aeschylus’s tragedy, The Family Reunion, 41 which Bacon apparently saw ‘several times’, judging it ‘the best of all [his] works for the stage’, and being inspired by it to study the original.42 Clearly, though, he also responded to the more general imagery of Eliot’s works, relating, as Dawn Ades has  suggested, ‘to the combination in Eliot of nostalgia for classical mythology, the abruptness of modern manners, the threat of the unseen and the eruption of casual violence’.43 At the same time, Eliot, of course, was also central to Read’s developing ‘geometry of fear’ aesthetic, several of his poetic phrases in the ‘New Aspects’ essay being directly lifted from Eliot’s poetry. It seems Eliot’s ideas, although originating in the 1920s, lent themselves perfectly to the new ‘cold war’ conditions of the post-war world,44 and could therefore be used to reinforce Read’s Jungian suggestion that the new sculpture might represent a ‘collective event’: ‘They are all involved in some wider manifestation of the creative will, some general extension of consciousness’, adding up to a ‘prevailing mood of fear’.45

Read’s use of Eliot’s Waste Land aesthetic perhaps also solved the problem of how to construct a literary and philosophical context that would not be confused with French existentialism, but instead would have a very British provenance. In Read’s wider critical writing he insisted that the new philosophy, which in his view very much depended on a central stream of art and aesthetics, was not to be understood simply as existential abandonment in the style of French philosophical pessimism, but instead needed to be seen as a stoical gazing into the abyss that would produce a rather more heroic response. ‘Despair’ would be mixed with ‘defiance’,46 and this facing up to ‘the collective guilt’ would ultimately enable pessimism to be replaced by a much more appropriate ‘affirmative, eudemonistic, optimistic . . . impulse’.47 A third use of Eliot, however, again shared by Bacon, was to articulate the inescapable centrality of sex and violence. The intimate relationship between the geometry of fear and ‘frustrated sex’ can be understood as part of Read’s more general theory based again on the Jungian notion of a ‘pan-genital symbolism’; although here again the geometry of fear appears to be sharply at odds with the geometry of love. The ‘geometry of love’ aesthetic was closely associated in Read’s mind with the modernist movement that he had long supported, and indeed that he had directly influenced. But this was now, seemingly, being surpassed

The difference between the sexuality of the geometry of love and that of the geometry of fear can also be illustrated with reference to Barbara Hepworth’s work – which Read appears to have felt, much as Russell felt about Moore, could not be adapted to the new polarities of the post-war political climate. In a recent interpretation of Hepworth’s Two Forms (1933), for example, Richard Read has shown the extent to which this work, in pink alabaster, was far from a purely abstract exercise, as the term ‘geometry’ might lead us to believe. The ‘love’ component, however, is just as present, since it can be revealed as a work depicting ‘a vaginal halter (marked with Hepworth’s signature profile) unmistakably cradl[ing] a phallic wedge whose jaunty eye is also an urethal opening’.48 That such works could be displayed in public without creating any kind of outcry or scandal depended on everyone’s acceptance of the idea of nonrepresentational abstraction, as articulated for example by Herbert Read in terms of ‘formal elements of dimension and proportion which have direct sensory appeal’.49 His theory of the ‘geometry of love’ was an attempt to explain in psychoanalytic terms the nature of this sensory appeal and why it struck such a deep chord.

Read’s Freudian explanation, however, was of course based on heterosexual assumptions, which was why it was vulnerable. Bacon’s work threatened to unbalance Read’s heterosexual model by visualizing the idea of another, socially unacceptable homoerotic sexuality that in the 1950s was still illegal, very much to do with frustration, and certainly redolent of an atmosphere of fear. The explicitness of Bacon’s work was rarely commented upon, but was obviously responded to, and in many cases must have contributed to the idea that it was about ‘horror’ or ‘outrage’. Reactions were mixed, and individual responses are difficult to decipher. However, it is safe to say that many in favour of his work were clearly personally excited by its reliably ‘unspeakable’ visual references. Lawrence Gowing, for example, using breathless tones and an only thinly disguised eroticized rhetoric, confesses:

Waiting for a new group of pictures [by Bacon] I tremble a little, lose track of my thoughts, wake in the night. Every time the image that emerges can be counted on to strike directly at a vital and vulnerable sense. One has no way of preparing or protecting oneself. There is an uncommon kind of painting which, when it really penetrates, alters everything. For some unknown reason, one’s private view of oneself is at stake.50

How then was this new, somewhat dangerous yet highly appealing visual aesthetic – excitingly located beyond the heterosexual coordinates of the geometry of love – expressed in the work of the sculptors of the geometry of fear?

All of these Baconian qualities it seems were absorbed by the leading artist of the new movement, Reg Butler. Butler was in many ways Bacon’s sculptural equivalent, partly explaining perhaps the way Read sets him ‘somewhat apart from the rest’ in his ‘New Aspects’ essay.51 Certainly the British Council selection committee appears to have favoured his work. Not only was Butler allowed to include more works than the others; he was also exhibited alongside a work by Henry Moore outside the pavilion, facilitating the comparison Read makes at the start of ‘New Aspects’ explored earlier. Butler’s work thus set the tone for the ‘geometry of fear’ movement, not only by explicit contrast with Moore, but also by the implied linkage with Bacon, producing Read’s general estimation of the new work as ‘nervous, wiry’. Unlike Moore, Butler used wire instead of volumetric form, and seemed in his welded sculpture and accompanying drawings to depict not so much the body’s skeleton as its arteries and nerves (fig. 3). He almost literally depicted the ‘nervous system’ so central to Bacon’s post-war methodology – although the nervousness of the work, of course, had a wider metaphorical, indeed allegorical, value.

While the strong indebtedness of Butler to Bacon does not appear to have been recognized by many commentators, an important exception is the work of Richard Calvocoressi. In ‘Reg Butler: The Man and the Work’, produced for the Tate retrospective (1983–84) and catalogue raisonné, Calvocoressi describes the connection to Bacon as ‘inescapable’, and cites two areas where ‘echoes of Francis Bacon’ can clearly be found.52 The first is Butler’s appropriation of Bacon’s use of the long neck and inhuman head from Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion. Like Bacon, Butler kept working on and changing this image; and, also in imitation of Bacon, he incorporated a human mouth, seemingly in despair. As Calvocoressi shows, the ‘creature’ image was clearly established in Butler’s oeuvre before the ‘New Aspects’ shown at the Venice Biennale – for example, in the wire work, Study for Head Looking Up (1951). However, it was most fully realized in Oracle (1952) (fig. 4), which, like Bacon’s painting, was realized gradually, in this case via modelling in clay after which it was cast as four bronzes. The result of this process produced, in Calvocoressi’s view, an unmistakably Baconian ‘incipient sadism’.53 The second area that Calvocoressi cites as evidence of Butler’s appropriation of Bacon is his slightly later adoption in 1953 of ‘the figure projected or suspended in space’, which became ‘an essential aspect of Butler’s iconography’.54 Not only does Calvocoressi find the resemblance to Bacon’s ‘caged or hanging lumps of flayed flesh’ inescapable, he also finds ‘other affinities between the two artists’, remarking that both ‘were of the same generation (Butler was three years younger)’, and ‘both came to artistic maturity after the war’.55 This last observation is an important one, since it is also the basis upon which Herbert Read and his co-selectors justified their favouring Butler for the ‘New Aspects’ show.56 Lastly, Calvocoressi quotes a statement by Bacon (via David Sylvester) which he says ‘might easily have been made by Butler’.57

Calvocoressi’s example is certainly not an isolated one, even if it seems to have been less than enthusiastically received. Martin Harrison, for example, follows Calvocoressi’s second point, but only dates Butler’s incorporation of ‘a Bacon-like external spaceframe’ to ‘after 1957’.58 Margaret Garlake’s take-up of Calvocoressi’s connection seems rather more promising. She suggests in New Art New World that ‘Like Bacon, Butler was concerned less with the retention of humanity than with its loss, through degradation and cruelty, to mindlessness’,59 and further relates his ‘dismemberment of the body’ and ‘denial of intellect’ to Sartrean ‘nausea’.60 This is a connection that Herbert Read would have certainly resisted. Read, by contrast with Garlake’s ‘pessimistic’ interpretation, as he would have thought of it, preferred to think of Butler’s work in ‘optimistic’ terms – not only in terms of its ability to express horror and the presumed mindlessness of existence, which he strongly disagreed with, but also in terms of a very different kind of psychological motivation: the need to express in sculptural terms ‘triumph of life,’ ‘vitality’ and ‘grace’. Garlake’s insistence on the Bacon–Butler connection seems to run counter to Herbert Read’s instincts, but it is precisely because of this that it reveals the potential for fascinating further research.61 To widen this point in conclusion, the omission of Bacon from Read’s ‘New Aspects’ essay should not discourage us from recovering his influence, or from extending Read’s original definition of the geometry of fear so as to include, at the very least, the painters Bacon and Sutherland.

To return finally to the argument that began this article, it was conventional in the 1950s to think of painting and sculpture as separate spheres, or at least not to make their many evident connections explicit. Since then, however, we have become far more aware of the collaborative and hybrid nature of most artistic practices, and appreciate therefore much better the folly of treating them separately.62 If we are able now to think about art in terms of a less blinkered ‘postmedium condition’, the implication is that we ought to be reviewing histories that in the earlier paradigm have too readily separated sculpture from painting. Looked at in this light, most of Bacon’s paintings clearly betray not only a strongly spatial exploration, but, more importantly, a specifically sculptural fascination, and a refusal of the sculpture/painting division; his pursuit of a spatial conception seems to have been at least as important to him as his concern with image-making. Meanwhile, from the opposite direction, Butler increasingly felt compelled to bend sculptural form into fleshy three-dimensional image-making. In his own words, he found himself frequently dealing with ‘quite a number of matters, normally the province of the painter’.63

 

1 Rosalind Krauss’s post-medium condition refers ‘chronologically to the rise of a critical post-modernism (institutional critique, site specificity) that in its turn has produced its own problematic aftermath (the international phenomenon of installation art)’. R. Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London, 1999, p. 7.

2 D. Sylvester (ed.), Interviews with Francis Bacon, London, 1975, p. 114.

3 D. Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London, 2003, p. 43

4 A. Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, New Haven and London, 2000, p. ix.

5 James Hyman argues a similar point in The Battle for Realism, New Haven, 2001, p. 34.

6 H. Read, essay, XXVI Venice Biennale, The British Pavilion (exh. cat.), London, 1952, unpaginated. On the circumstances that led to Read writing his famous ‘New Aspects’ catalogue essay, see M. Garlake, ‘Revisiting the Geometry of Fear’, in M. Paraskos (ed.), Rereading Read, London, 2007, p. 135.

7 Read, as at note 6.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 H. Davies, Francis Bacon, New York, 1986, p. 14.

12 See, for example, D. Ades, ‘Web of images’, in Francis Bacon, London, 1985, pp. 8–23.

13 See M. Garlake, New Art New World, New Haven, 1998, p. 180.

14 Matthew Gale, for example, writes in his 1998 online essay for the Tate catalogue: ‘Reviews of the mixed exhibition were relatively scarce. One critic breezily passed over it in one sentence as an “interesting display”’; www.tate.org.uk, accessed 17 September 2008.

15 Garlake, as at note 13.

16 J. Russell, Francis Bacon, London, 1971, p. 9.

17 M. Harrison, Transition: the London Art Scene in the Fifties, London, 2002, p. 96; Garlake, as at note 13, p. 192.

18 Aptness of course is a subjective assessment. Peter Fuller, pace Russell, has stated the opposite – that ‘Bacon was out of tune with the mood of his times’, precisely because, unlike the others, he did not seek ‘to redeem the horrors of war through the consolations of art’; P. Fuller, ‘Roulette Realist, The Art of Francis Bacon’, The Age, November, 1983, p. 5. This response is more in line with another eye-witness report: Herbert Furst wrote that Bacon’s painting made him ‘feel squeamish’, ‘shocked and disturbed’, and finally ‘glad to escape’; ‘Current shows and comments: on the significance of a word’, Apollo, XLI, 231, May 1945, p. 108.

19 H. Read, The Tenth Muse, London, 1957, p. 312.

20 D. Hulks, ‘Despair or defiance: the double inflection in Herbert Read’s Geometry of Fear’, in Paraskos, as at note 6, pp. 144–51.

21 H. Read, ‘Psycho-analysis and the problem of aesthetic value’, in The Forms of Things Unknown, London, 1960, pp. 76–93.

22 Ibid., p. 80.

23 A footnote to the 1960 edition refers the reader to Anton Ehrenzweig’s writing, ibid., p. 89. Returning the compliment, Ehrenzweig explains how deeply indebted he was to Read; A. Ehrenzweig, Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing, London, 1953, p. vi.

24 Read, as at note 19, p. 90. For the foundation of his ideas on abstract art as opposed to ‘humanistic art’, see also H. Read, Art and Industry, London, 1934, pp. 30–31.

25 Read, as at note 19.

26 Read, as at note 6.

27 Sylvester, as at note 2. Good examples at p. 18 and p. 43.

28 Ibid., p. 11 and pp. 52–56.

29 Read, as at note 6. The example of Paolozzi is particularly telling. Compare to Ehrenzweig’s description of Paolozzi’s exploitation of the ‘accidental’ in A. Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967, caption to plate 4.

30 Read, as at note 6.

31 Confirmed by Bacon in a letter to the Tate Gallery, 6 January 1959; reproduced in R. Alley, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné and Documentation, London, 1964.

32 Dawn Ades, for example, as at note 12.

33 Read, as at note 19, p. 90.

34 The Oresteia of Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Choephori, Eumenides (The Greek Text), trans. R. C. Trevelyan, Cambridge, 1920.

35 Ibid., pp. 122–23.

36 In his 1974 interview with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester refers to the ‘clearly defined plastic forms [of the Three Studies] which could almost be copied in sculpture’: Sylvester, as at note 2, p. 112.

37 A. Baldassari, Bacon Picasso: the Life of Images, Paris, 2005, p. 107.

38 The freelance art critic, novelist and poet Sue Hubbard has similarly underlined Bacon’s reliance on Nietzsche: ‘Like many other artists and writers of the early 20th century, Bacon . . . read Nietzsche, and shared something of his hypothesis of “a strong pessimism”’; Independent, 31 August 2007, sources not cited.

39 Read, as at note 19, p. 180.

40 On Nietzsche’s classic opposition, Dionysian versus Apollonian, once popular but since the 1960s generally regarded as ‘unhistorical’, see M. Silk and J. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 166–85. For an example of Read using this opposition, and thereby in Silk and Stern’s view committing a ‘common error’, see The Philosophy of Modern Art, London, 1964, p. 51.

41 T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion, a Play, New York, 1939.

42 M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London, 1996, p. 89.

43 Ades, as at note 12, p. 21.

44 The term ‘cold war’, used to refer to the tensions between America and the Soviet Bloc, was first coined in 1947.

45 Read, as at note 6.

46 Ibid. Compare Bacon’s description of his painting as being concerned with ‘exhilarated despair’. Sylvester, as at note 2, p. 83.

47 Read, as at note 20, p. 102.

48 R. Read, Art and its Discontents: the Early Life of Adrian Stokes, Aldershot, 2002, p. 223.

49 Read, Art and Industry, as at note 24, p. 31.

50 Quoted by Hilton Kramer in his 1968 article ‘The problem of Francis Bacon’; H. Kramer, The Age of the Avant-garde: An Art Chronicle of 1956–1972, London, 1974, p. 377.

51 Read, as at note 6.

52 ‘Introduction’, in R. Butler, Reg Butler, 1913–1981, London, Tate, 1983, p. 26.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., pp. 26–27.

56 Butler was allowed to exhibit six works in total, two more than his only slightly younger contemporaries Kenneth Armitage, Bernard Meadows and Lynn Chadwick, allowed four each. The younger artists, Robert Adams, Geoffrey Clarke, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, were allowed three each. Birth dates were printed in the catalogue after each artist’s name.

57 ‘I think art is an obsession with life after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves’; Sylvester, as at note 2, p. 63.

58 Harrison, as at note 17, p. 71

59 Garlake, as at note 13, p. 199.

60 Ibid.

61 Although strangely not pursued in her more recent monograph; M. Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, Aldershot, 2006.

62 Ruth Phillips and Christopher Steiner have argued that maintaining the categories of painting and sculpture ‘creates a tunnel vision’ whereby ‘the most important aesthetic traditions of many peoples are [at worst] denied the status of art’ or are, at best, unhelpfully seen as ‘artistically “hybrid”’. R. Phillips & C. Steiner, Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1999, p. 8.

63 Butler, as at note 52, p. 39.

 

 

    

                                                                                                

                                                                                                     1. Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon Agonistes

 

 

 

 

JOHN RICHARDSON  |  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS  |  VOLUME 56  |  NUMBER 20  |  DECEMBER 17, 2009 

 

To celebrate Francis Bacon’s centenary in 2009, Tate Britain mounted a retrospective exhibition that was subsequently shown at the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Bacon’s theater of cruelty was an enormous popular success at all of its venues, but especially in New York, where he was hailed by fans as the greatest painter of the twentieth century. However, such clouds of hyperbole were already a touch toxic following the sale in 2008 of a flashy triptych for $86 million, and serious reviews of the Met show were anything but favourable. Also, those of us who care about the integrity of an artist’s work were worried by the appearance on the market of paintings that, if indeed they are entirely by him, Bacon would never have allowed out of the studio.

As a longtime fan of Bacon, I have strong feelings about these matters. My admiration dates back to World War II, when, like many another art student, I was captivated by an illustration of a 1933 painting entitled Crucifixion in a popular book called Art Now, by Britain’s token modernist, Herbert Read (first published in 1933, and frequently reprinted). Read’s text was dim and theoretical, but his ragbag of black-and-white illustrations—by the giants of modernism, as well as the chauvinistic author’s pets—was the only corpus of plates then available. This Crucifixion—a cruciform gush of sperm against a night sky, prescient of searchlights in the blitz—was irresistibly eye-catching. But who Bacon was, nobody seemed to know.

And then (circa 1946), craning my neck to get a look at a large canvas carried by a youngish man with dyed hair on the doorsteps of a neighbor’s house, I realized that this had to be the mysterious Bacon. The neighbour turned out to be the artist’s cousin and patron. I arranged for a mutual friend to take me to see him. Bacon struck me as being exhilaratingly funny—very camp in his disdain for masculine pronouns. Everything about his vast, vaulted studio was over the top: martinis served in huge Waterford tumblers; a paint-stained garter belt kicked under a sofa. The place had famously belonged to the pre-Raphaelite Sir John Everett Millais, but a later owner had left more of a mark on it: Emil Otto Hoppé, the foremost "court" photographer of his time. Hoppé’s grungy hangings had survived the blitz, and so had the great dais where, crouched under a black, umbrella-like cloth (a feature of Bacon’s earlier paintings), he had photographed society beauties in aigrettes and pearls. The ramshackle theatricality that permeated the studio also permeated the three iconic mastershockers—scrotum-bellied humanoids screaming out at us from the base of a crucifixion—that were about to make the artist famous.

Francis’s blind old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, knitting away at the back of the studio, came as a surprise. Besides helping Francis cook—she slept on the kitchen table—Nanny provided cover for Francis’s shoplifting sprees (groceries, cosmetics, and Kiwi shoe polish for his hair). Nanny also helped him organize the illicit roulette parties that paid for the copious drink and excellent food he served to his guests. The lavish tips she extorted from gamblers desperate to use the one and only lavatory helped pay off Francis’s gambling debts. Supposedly she also vetted his lovers. When she died in 1951, he took against the studio and sold it—a move he would always regret. The space would linger on in his visual memory: many a triptych is set in a photographer’s studio in Hell.

Ultrasecretive about his artistic provenance, Bacon was exhibitionistically frank about the traumatic adolescent events that would define his role as an artist as well as a lover. In the recently published revised edition of his excellent, refreshingly unhagiological biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma,1 Michael Peppiatt describes a fancy dress party given by Francis’s parents—the chilly, moneyed mother and the brutal, bluish-blooded father—at Cannycourt, near Dublin, where Captain Eddy Bacon trained racehorses that, according to Francis, very seldom won. Already adept at seducing his father’s grooms, sixteen-year-old Francis had gotten himself up as

an Eton-cropped flapper, complete with backless dress, beads, and a cigarette holder so long it reached to the candles in the middle of the table. Dressed as a curate, his father stared uneasily and said nothing as Francis rolled his eyes [and] shook his earrings.

Unease turned to rage when Captain Eddy caught his son wearing his mother’s underclothes and gave him a thrashing. As a result "I fell sexually in love with him," Francis said. Years later, he would still slip on his fishnets in the hope of a replay.

To "make a man" of Francis, his father turned him over to a supposedly—though not in the least—respectable cousin for a disciplinary two months in Berlin. To Bacon’s delight, the cousin turned out to be bisexual and, he assured me, "one of the most vicious men I ever met." Two months in the German capital, at its most depraved, reinforced the boy’s masochistic and fetishistic proclivities. Berlin did indeed make a man of Francis: "Tough as old boots, albeit camp as a row of tents," an old friend recalled. However, his next stop, Paris—he spent two months nearby at Chantilly—would make an artist of him. His visit coincided with an exhibition of Picasso’s drawings at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery. Ironically, the drawings were mostly classicistic ones set in an ancient Mediterranean world. Bacon would later condemn these works, but at the age of seventeen he was captivated. Picasso would be the only contemporary artist whose influence he would ever acknowledge.

 

Francis seldom mentioned it, but he was proud of being a collateral descendant of Elizabeth I’s all-powerful chancellor, after whom he had been named. He was especially intrigued that this Renaissance genius—philosopher, cabalist, courtier, Rosicrucian, statesman, as well as a writer so sublime that he is sometimes credited with writing Shakespeare’s plays—had been a flamboyant homosexual. Lytton Strachey had made much of this in his book Elizabeth and Essex, published to wide acclaim in 1928. Strachey’s baroque characterization of his forebear had fascinated him, Francis told me. How could he not identify with Strachey’s view of the Elizabethan Bacon?

 

Instinctively and profoundly an artist...one of the supreme masters of the written word. Yet his artistry was of a very special kind.... His eye—a delicate, lively hazel eye—"it was like the eye of a viper," said William Harvey—required the perpetual refreshment of beautiful things.

 

Francis would also have sympathized with his forebear’s "exuberant temperament [that] demanded the solace of material delights," expensive boyfriends, "half servants and half companions," whom he had shod in Spanish leather boots, since "the smell of ordinary leather was torture to him." The twentieth-century Bacon would ironically mock the family’s motto, Mediocria firma ("moderation is best"), inscribed on the armorial dinner plates he would inherit. His illustrious ancestry and his sense of it might also account for his personal largesse as well as his desperate attempts at grandiloquence, which undermine many of the later triptychs.

 

Bacon’s earliest paintings were mostly pastiches of Picasso; though attractive, they failed to sell. Since this driven, as yet unformed artist had no desire to be perceived as a pasticheur, he destroyed most of them. He continued sporadically to paint and decorate, but devoted most of his energies to gambling. Successive stays at Monte Carlo—hence the glimpses of Mediterranean vegetation in the early works—financed by a lover, enabled him to become an expert roulette player as well as a canny croupier in private games. He would approach painting in much the same way as he approached gambling, risking everything on a single brushstroke.

 

Never having attended an art school was a source of pride to Bacon. With the help of a meretricious Australian painter, Roy de Maistre, he taught himself to paint, for which he turned out to have a great flair; tragically, he failed to teach himself to draw. Painting after painting would be marred by his inability to articulate a figure or its space. Peppiatt recalls that, decades later, so embarrassed was Bacon at being asked by a Parisian restaurateur to do a drawing in his livre d’or that he doubled the tip and made for the exit.

 

After Bacon’s death, David Sylvester, the artist’s Boswell-cum-Saatchi, attempted to turn this deficiency into an advantage. In a chapter of his posthumous miscellany, entitled Bacon’s Secret Vice, he proposed an "alternative view" of this fatal flaw: "His most articulate and helpful ’sketches’ took the form of the written word."[2] The "precisely worded" examples that supposedly demonstrate the linguistic origin of Bacon’s paintings turn out to be a preposterous joke: offhand notes scrawled on the endpapers of a book about monkeys: Figure upside down on sofa; Two figures on sofa making love; Acrobat on platform in middle of room; and so on. Sylvester’s contention that this shopping list constitutes "Bacon’s most articulate and helpful sketches" raises doubt about the rest of his sales pitch.[3]

 

Bacon’s own excuse for his graphic ineptitude is more to the point: "[The painter] will only catch the mystery of reality if [he] doesn’t know how to do it"[4] is what he actually told Sylvester. This is fine, but only so long as the artist avoids subjects that call for graphic skill, subjects, for instance, that include hands. His celebrated variants on Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X are either magnificent flukes or near-total disasters. In the earliest of this ten-year series, Bacon famously portrays the Pope screaming. He’s good at screams but hopeless at hands, so he amputates, conceals, or otherwise fudges them. At the age of eighty, Bacon apologized for this series to Michael Kimmelman: "Actually, I hate those popes because I think the Velázquez is such a superb image that it was silly of me to use it."

 

Infinitely more effective are the versions that Bacon did around the same time of Eadweard Muybridge’s celebrated sequential photographs in The Human Figure in Motion, which record successive stages of various physical activities. Muybridge’s photographs enormously facilitated Bacon’s drawing, literally squaring up the composition for him to transfer to canvas. The finest of them, Two Figures, is based on pictographs of two athletes wrestling each other to the ground. Known with some justice to Bacon’s friends as The Buggers, this work is the more subtle and hauntingly sexual for overtly depicting something supposedly innocent.

 

Inability to draw might explain Bacon’s initial decision to become a decorator. He had a real flair for interior design. His furniture was chic but brutal—too much for potential clients, and so he became a painter, and hustled on the side to pay the bills. Calling himself Francis Lightfoot (after his nanny), he advertised in the personal column of the London Times. An elderly client accused him of theft. "Probably true," he admitted later. Unluckily, the client was a relative of the vengeful Douglas Cooper, who had bought a major piece of Bacon’s furniture and arranged for the publication of his Crucifixion in Art Now. Later, Cooper would bad-mouth Bacon in favour of his rival, Graham Sutherland, to the former’s delight and gain.

 

Bacon’s passion for belle peinture and his inventive handling of paint would usually but not always compensate for his inept draftsmanship. Though painterliness was a quality disdained by most modernists, Bacon realized this was the element that would enable him to tweak the onlooker’s senses into accepting and indeed enjoying a painful visual shock. To enhance his paint surfaces he tried out additives—pastel and tempera—but in the end stuck to oil paint, which he manipulated with ever more gestural abandon. On an early visit to the studio, I watched Francis experiment. Ensconced in front of a mirror, he rehearsed on his own face the brushstrokes that he envisaged making on canvas. With a flourish of his wrist, he would apply great swoops of Max Factor "pancake" makeup in a gamut of flesh colours to the stubble on his chin.

 

The makeup adhered to the stubble much as the paint would adhere to the unprimed verso of the canvas that he used in preference to the smooth, white-primed recto. I told him that this effect evoked Rupert Brooke’s line about "the rough male kiss of blankets." Besides setting his faces and figures spinning, gestural twists endow his portrait heads—to my mind far and away his most powerful and original works — with a dose of his own inner turmoil.

 

Bacon’s attempts at a conventional likeness usually fail, but when he connects with what he calls "the pulsations of a person," he usually triumphs, particularly when that person is himself. Instead of working from a sitter, he would have his gay drinking companion, John Deakin, take nude photographs of the women he proposed to paint. Deakin, who on the side would sell the photographs to sailors for ten shillings each, enjoyed mortifying his "victims," as he called them. Bacon’s favourites were Henrietta Moraes, a drunken Soho groupie who worshiped Bacon and his circle; Isabel Rawsthorne, a desperate allumeuse who had had affairs with Picasso, Derain, and above all Giacometti; and Muriel Belcher, the formidable foul-mouthed fag-hag of the Colony Room. These were women Bacon could empathize with. To that extent their portraits are self-portraits, as are the superb ones of his victim-to-be, George Dyer. Significantly, there is not a trace of self-identification in the twenty or so portraits of Lucian Freud. There was no question of victimizing him.

 

In 1950, Bacon’s studio would become the focus of attention for a three-day celebration that, in retrospect, was the coming-out party for a new variety of bohemia. In its excess it could also be seen as Bacon’s debut as a star. The occasion was the wedding of his close friend Ann Dunn, penniless daughter of a steel magnate, and Michael Wishart, son of the Communist Party’s publisher. Both were painters, Dunn an exceedingly sensitive one. Two hundred guests were invited; two hundred more gate-crashed.

 

It was a totally new mix. Although the guests were mostly heterosexual, the ambience was decidedly gay. Francis had painted the chandeliers red to match his maquillage; at the piano an old queen belted out campy versions of popular songs. Same-sex couples embracing in dark corners were not necessarily the same colour. A woman known as "Sod" (real name Edomy) Johnson, who lived on the top of a bus, helped to welcome the guests: these included members of Parliament and fellows of All Souls, as well as "rough trade," slutty debutantes, cross-dressers, and the notoriously evil Kray brothers (gay gangsters Francis was proud of knowing). The bridegroom was a junkie, as were such guests as Sir Napoleon Dean Paul and his beautiful sister, who were both on the Home Office list and thus entitled to an official drug ration.

 

The consumption of hundreds of cases of champagne would have left Francis, who was as generous as he was extravagant, broke, had he not had the support of a rich and indulgent lover, a merchant banker called Eric Hall. Hall had ditched his wife and family to become a stand-in for the flagellant father Bacon desired and hated. After eight years, this relationship came to an end. A devotee of Proust, Bacon may have identified too closely with that writer’s Baron de Charlus, who, in a memorable scene, complained to his pimp that the brute procured for him was insufficiently brutal.

 

Hall’s replacement was a demonic lover out of the pages of another of Bacon’s favourite writers, Georges Bataille. A former fighter pilot, Peter Lacy was a dashing thirty-year-old whom I remember playing Gershwin and Cole Porter on a white piano in a bar called the Music Box. He owned an infamous cottage in the Thames valley, where Francis would spend much of his time—often, according to him, in bondage. Alcohol was a major link between the two men. Unfortunately, drink released a fiendish, sadistic streak in Lacy that bordered on the psychopathic. Besides taking his rage out on Bacon, he took it out on his canvases. To his credit, however, he inspired some of his lover’s most memorable works, among them, the Man in Blue paintings: a menacing, dark-suited Lacy set off against vertical draperies inspired by Emil Hoppé’s, and some black rubber curtains Bacon had used as a decorator.  

 

A 1955 self-portrait with a bandaged head seemingly refers to Lacy’s most heinous assault. In a state of alcoholic dementia, he hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place. Bacon loved Lacy even more. For weeks he would not forgive Lucian Freud for remonstrating with his torturer. Mercifully, Lacy moved to Tangier, where he played the piano in Dean’s famously raffish bar. Bacon would occasionally join him. He enjoyed Tangier’s expatriate intelligentsia: Paul and Jane Bowles; Allen Ginsberg, who tried and failed to get him to paint his portrait; William Burroughs, whom he admired and stayed friends with; and the playwright Joe Orton, soon to be done in by his murderous boyfriend. He also enjoyed the torturers in the local brothels. Tangier finished Lacy off. "He was killing himself with drink," Bacon told Peppiatt, "like a suicide, and I think in the end his pancreas simply exploded.... He was the only man I ever loved." The artist’s memorable Landscape near Malabata, Tangier depicts Lacy’s place of burial: a threatening patch of ground with a dark humanoid serpent squirming out of it.

 

On May 22, 1962, when Bacon was fifty-two, his first retrospective opened at the Tate Gallery to an avalanche of praise never as yet accorded to a modern British artist. A triumph, it was also a tragedy: the day before, death had done away with Lacy, his principal source of sensation—mental and physical, but above all pictorial. Some of his friends saw this as retribution, others as a new dawn for British art. Sylvester was quick to grab Bacon’s coattails. In the years to come he would help him transform himself into a superstar. Today Bacon has come to be seen in the blogosphere as a kind of Michael Jackson of art—an anomalous weirdo of divine power.

 

Those of us who had hoped that the organizers of the recent retrospective and contributors to the catalogue would help us to reevaluate this superstar were in for a disappointment. The badly needed deconstruction of the self-congratulatory interviews between Bacon and Sylvester was not forthcoming. True, in her essay "Real Imagination Is Technical Imagination," Victoria Walsh acknowledges "just how radical their reformatting and editing had been." In support of this she cites Sylvester’s preface to the interviews. However, no contributor takes this matter any further. Nor was there any attempt to see Bacon in his rightful historical setting: as one of a trio of brilliant young British artists—Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach being the other two—who felt that abstraction was done for and were out to explore new ways of reconciling paint and representationalism.

 

In an essay coyly entitled Comparative Strangers, Simon Ofield sees Bacon with respect to Keith Vaughn, a highly esteemed figurative painter, yet one far too artistically correct for Bacon’s taste, on the grounds that they were both openly gay men in the 1950s. Because the two artists apparently perused "physique magazines" and happened to be working at a time when the Wolfenden Report—the document that led to the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults—was about to change Britain’s social and sexual landscape, Ofield concludes that "the paintings of Francis Bacon and Keith Vaughn make sense in pretty close proximity to one another." Actually, Bacon, who was not entirely immune to the allure of Nazi kink, had little sympathy for gay rights—too politically correct. As for gay artists, the only ones Bacon had a kind word for were Michelangelo, Andy Warhol, and the pornographer known as Tom of Finland. About the Wolfenden Report, I remember Francis echoing his nanny: "They should bring back hanging for buggery." He was certainly not the only gay Englishman for whom guilt was intrinsic to sex.

 

Compared to Lacy, Bacon’s next great love, George Dyer, was more victim than victimizer, a good-looking thirtyish petty thief from London’s East End who appeared to be a great deal sharper than he actually was. Cockney sweetness and a slight speech impediment ("fink" for "think") endeared him to Bacon’s friends. Although an alcoholic like Lacy, George was not a sadist. That would now become Bacon’s role. In the course of an evening, his high-camp wit would sour into incoherent malice. Lucian Freud remembers driving a drunken Bacon home and being kept out of the studio because it was full of "victims of my tongue." Bacon would goad George into a state of psychic meltdown and then, in the early hours of the morning—his favourite time to work—he would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system. Such images, a woman admirer of Bacon told me, induced "a visceral shudder" in her.

 

The dynamics of Bacon’s relationship with George were much in evidence in November 1968, when they arrived for the first time in New York to attend a show at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery. The visit began pleasantly enough with a gallery lunch. Francis was seated next to a handsome young dealer. Averse as usual to the masculine pronoun, he hissed across the table, "Who’s the gorgeous girl they’ve put next to me?" "Jackson Pollock’s nephew," I hissed back. "You mean the niece of that old lace-maker?" he said, raising his voice. Egged on by the deafening silence, Francis proceeded to dismiss another prominent American artist as "a neat little sewer," and yet another as "what’s-his-name who does women."

 

That evening, some friends and I took Francis and George out on the town. No equivalent of London’s raffish Colony Room was to be found in Manhattan, so we ended up at a friendly, multiracial, multisexual bar around 100th Street. Childishly eager to play the host, George tried to buy us drinks. Francis wouldn’t have it. "Don’t listen to her. She’s penniless," and he called imperiously for a magnum of champagne, whereupon the bartender suggested we go elsewhere. George stumbled off and the evening soon ended. Around 3 AM, Francis called me. "She’s committed suicide!" He had found George on the floor of their room at the Algonquin, pockets stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, unconscious from having washed down a handful of his sleeping pills with a bottle of scotch. Vomiting saved him. The gallery had the two of them flown back to England first thing that morning.

 

Two years later, in a pitiful attempt to strike back, George concealed some marijuana in Bacon’s studio and denounced him to the police. Since the artist was asthmatic and virtually never smoked, a jury found him innocent. Instead of ridding himself of George, Bacon took him back, thereby sealing his fate. The goading worsened, the imagery intensified, and there was a further suicide attempt in Greece.

 

Once again, a major retrospective would coincide with death. The day of Bacon’s greatest triumph—the opening of his exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris on October 25, 1971, the show that would bring him the international recognition he craved—George succeeded in his third attempt at suicide. As before, he chose to do so in a hotel bedroom in a foreign land and, as Bacon would paint it, on a toilet seat. After the hotel manager telephoned him at the Grand Palais, the dazed artist took President Georges Pompidou around his show and later attended a dinner for several hundred people organized by his distinguished admirer Michel Leiris. "Death can be life-enhancing," he later commented, and for the next few years would apply this thought to his last great bursts of heartfelt work, in which Dyer often figures.

 

The hosannas unleashed by the Paris retrospective climaxed in a Conaissance des Arts magazine poll that crowned Bacon the world’s greatest living artist—ahead of Picasso and the members of the schools of Paris and New York. Whether or not he actually believed this claptrap, Bacon was vain enough and insecure enough to derive an enormous boost from the stardom and the huge hike in his prices. Always more Francophile than Anglophile in matters of art, he was elated by the esteem of the French public as well as the intelligentsia, so elated that he rented an apartment in the Marais where he would spend much of the 1970s.

 

Michel Leiris would be central to Bacon’s life in Paris. This great writer, ethnographer, and hero of the Surrealist wars was the only littérateur left whose judgment Picasso could trust and, to that extent, a rather more prestigious mentor than Sylvester and the boozy habitués of the Colony Room. Although Bacon had no time for Leiris’s communism, masochism and a gay streak constituted a link. Whether Leiris told Bacon that back in the 1920s he had asked a horrified Juan Gris to take a knife and carve a parting for his hair into his scalp we do not know. What we do know is that Bacon was very conscious of the fact that by virtue of being D.H. Kahnweiler’s stepdaughter, Leiris’s long-suffering wife Zette was dealer to Picasso, who was soon to die. Despite the Conaissance des Arts poll, there would be no question of Bacon stepping into the great man’s shoes.

 

Now that Paris had crowned him king, Bacon’s work developed a slight French accent. Freud, whose close friendship with Bacon had worn a bit thin, was amused at his new-found fondness for the concept of "accident," the idea that uncontrolled effects would change the character of a painting. Freud likened "accident" to a horse in Bacon’s stable. "When necessary, Francis has ’Accident’ saddled and takes him out for a canter." To judge by many of the paintings in the retrospective, there was another horse in Bacon’s stable, its name "Contrivance."

 

"Accident" takes the form of semen-like white paint that Bacon claimed to "fling" out of the tube at some of his canvases. As for the small red arrows he added to his paintings, intended to draw one’s attention to extraneous details, they strike me as little shrieks for help; likewise, the gimmicky bits of trompe l’oeil newspaper that fail to animate the inert foreground areas of his triptychs. Contrivance also takes the form of shadows that fail to generate light or space. They either look cartoonish (for instance, the Batman shadow exuded by the dying Dyer in the May–June 1973 triptych) or as if someone has spilled something.

 

Three years would pass before Bacon found a successor to George Dyer. The muscular young East Ender John Edwards was less damaged than his predecessor, and therefore less of a tragic muse. He never learned to read, but was very good at figures. Although homosexual, Edwards preferred adolescents, and his relationship with Bacon was all the less fraught for being platonic, seemingly free of sadomasochistic overtones. This may explain why Bacon’s work lost its sting and failed to thrill. Paintings inspired by Edwards as well as a Formula 1 driver and a famous cricketer the artist fancied (fetishism survives in the batting pads) reveal that in old age Bacon managed to banish his demons and move on to beefcake. His headless hunks of erectile tissue buffed to perfection have an angst-free, soft-porn glow. It comes as a surprise to find that MoMA acquired a major example of these campy subjects to replace the superb early Dog painting they had deaccessioned.

 

By the late 1970s, as the Met retrospective made very clear, Bacon’s work was becoming glib, trite, and colour-coordinated to a decorous degree. From boasting that he couldn’t do it—that was the whole point—he let it be known that he could do it, indeed had always been able to do it. Freud believes that Bacon had also lost "the most precious thing a painter has: his memory," and forgotten that he had done it all better before. The elegance of the Met’s installation, which worked so well in the earlier galleries, worked to the artist’s disadvantage at the end. Few of the later triptychs pack as much of a punch as the explosive Jet of Water and Blood on Pavement (both 1988), which are refreshingly free of the artist’s formulaic figures. As if to register the extent of Bacon’s decline, the Met enabled us to contrast the artist’s wonderful 1944 breakthrough, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, in an earlier gallery with the garish, red carpet remake of it from 1988, which brought the show to a disheartening end.

 

This year the hundredth anniversary of Bacon’s birth dovetails with the four-hundredth anniversary of Caravaggio’s death next year, and the director of the Galleria Borghese in Rome is celebrating this double event by setting these two artists, who had both been canonized in recent years by gay filmmakers (Derek Jarman, Caravaggio; John Maybury, Love Is the Devil), against each other. The museum’s six works by Caravaggio, plus a few loans, have been paired off with an equivalent group by his putative modern counterpart. These pairings are not confined to a specific space, but scattered throughout the museum’s galleries. A handout defines the show’s aim as "an exceptional aesthetic experience"—so much for art history. Bacon would have relished rubbing shoulders posthumously with the greatest of the great. He would also have relished the enormous controversy in the Italian press.

 

A few months earlier, the Florence Accademia had launched a similar show, entitled Perfection in Form, which pitted Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs against "iconic Renaissance masterpieces" by Michelangelo, etc. The show has been so successful that its run has been extended. Setting twentieth-century kinkmeisters against Renaissance masters has evidently paid off, and attracted a vast new public into museums they might not have otherwise visited.

 

However, wouldn’t it be more useful to measure Bacon against a predecessor of his own stature and genre: for example, Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), someone he went out of his way to denounce and disassociate himself from? ("Banal" was the epithet Bacon used in the interviews with Sylvester; what he probably meant was "illustrative.") Bacon was determined to prevent people realizing how indebted he was to this Swiss-born Londoner. Fuseli was a somewhat conventional manipulator of paint, but he was also one of the most spectacular draftsmen of the second half of the eighteenth century. And in many respects his neoclassical imagery was every bit as focused on the subconscious, every bit as sadomasochistic and fetishistic as Bacon’s. A master of theatrical effects, Fuseli had the courage to use his perverse sexuality to express a view of life that corresponds in certain respects to his virtual twin, the Marquis de Sade. Fuseli’s obsession differed from Bacon’s in that it involved women rather than men, but their exhibitionistic responses to the imagery of their respective times was uncannily close.

 

After his death, Victorian prudes saw to it that Fuseli’s work was suppressed. A century would pass before scholars rediscovered it. Following his centennial retrospective in 1925, there would be successive shows in London in 1935 and 1950, at a time when Bacon was formulating his style and moving in the intellectual circles where Fuseli was revered. Another artist who suffered a similar fate was the equally histrionic John "Mad" Martin (1789–1854), whose vast, enormously popular canvasses such as The Seventh Plague of Egypt and The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah had been forgotten, only to be admired anew one hundred years later. Like Halley’s Comet, these exemplars of Romantic agony seem doomed to flash in and out of the darkness of history. Might a similar trajectory be in store for Bacon Agonistes?

 

Notes

1 Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma; 1997 (Skyhorse, 2009).

2  Looking Back at Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson, 2000), p. 208.

 3  Sylvester attributes this theory to Brian Clarke, a painter who administers the Francis Bacon estate.

  4  Interviews with Francis Bacon: 1962–1979 (Thames and Hudson, 1980), pp. 100–101.

 

 


 The visceral tales of real hard livers

 

LIVER   

A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes 

 

By Will Self    Bloomsbury.  277 pp. $26 

 

 

By Richard McCann, The Washington Post, Tuesday, December 15, 2009

 

The title of this quartet of new stories by British novelist and satirist Will Self is almost as charming as it is aggressive. There are doubtless thousands of stories and novels whose titles contain the word "heart," but only Self, with his passion for the grotesque, the comic and the fantastical, would name a collection of stories after the "noble organ" – as 17th-century British physician William Harvey termed the liver – that most Westerners probably now think of as little more than a sickening item in their grocer’s meat display case, a glossy, shrink-wrapped slab of brownish viscera, bleeding out onto its foam tray.

Each of the four "lobes" in Self’s Liver – a collection of vaguely linked "hepatofictions" – features one or more human livers. Most of them are cirrhotic or cancerous, and all of them are in wretched condition, as are their owners, whose dismal maladies serve as metaphors for toxic decay. Decay is so pervasive, in fact, that in Self’s story Prometheus, it affects even the diseased "body" of London, host to the "tumour of the Swiss Re tower, the tapeworm of the Thames, the fatty deposits of Broadgate and the Barbican."

Decay also affects the Plantation Club, the private Soho drinking establishment that provides the setting for the collection’s lead story, Foie Humain. The club’s proprietor repeatedly spikes his barman/lover’s lager with vodka, performing upon him a kind of human gavage, not unlike the force-feeding that goose farmers do in the Dordogne when making foie gras. In the end, however, it’s the proprietor himself who loses his liver - to a most unlikely chef. But the story’s brilliance lies not in its narrative, which feels at once too clotted and too saggy, "proceeding not with straightforward honesty," as the narrator himself describes it, "but waddling through needless digressions and lunging into grotesque interpolations." Rather, Self’s brilliance lies in his acute rendering of the miasmal Plantation Club, "an aquarium filled with absinthe," which he models closely on the Colony Room in London’s Soho, the private drinking club founded in 1948 by the famously rude and foul-mouthed Muriel Belcher. She adopted as her "daughter" one of the club’s first members, the painter Francis Bacon, who appears in Self’s story as a world-famous painter of "brachiating apes," "well-built nudes" and "neotenous golems, their heads part skull, part the melted plastic of dolls." It’s there in the Plantation Club – "an establishment where stasis was the prevailing mode," with "a permanently fizzing rod of neon screwed to the nicotine ceiling, lending a mortuary ambience to the already deathly scene" – that Self’s bohemians destroy themselves with alcohol and the cruelly lacerating remarks they regard as wit.

Thanks to its startling language and grim sense of humour, along with its almost ceaseless sense of claustrophobia, Foie Humain is arguably the collection’s best story, along with the novella Leberknödel (liver dumplings), in which a widowed hospital administrator travels to Zurich, with "its reassuring orderliness, its stolid vitality," to be euthanized in a private clinic. Once there, however, she changes her mind, and soon afterward her disease goes into an inexplicable remission that the local Catholics who befriend her regard as a miracle. Although the novella’s elements never fully cohere – its chapters, for instance, are named for the parts of the Mass, and it alludes repeatedly to Carol Reed’s The Third Man, with Orson Welles and Trevor Howard – Leberknödel is the only work in this collection in which Self drops his ironic tone, particularly in his empathetic depiction of the protagonist’s pained and aging body.

Still, these are largely what one might regard as high-concept stories, inspired and constructed more from the shrewdness of wit and intellect than from feeling. In Prometheus, for instance, a London advertising man allows a griffon vulture to feed on his liver in exchange for renewing his "genius at breathing fire into the most sodden products." In Birdy Num Num, which takes its title from a Peter Sellers routine in Blake Edwards’s 1968 movie, The Party, the narrator is a hepatitis C virus, observing a chaotic gathering of infected human hosts.

Certainly, there are real and original pleasures to be had from these stories, particularly from Self’s extravagant and startling sense of language, as well as from the imaginative extremity of his vision. But they are not warm or merciful. These are for those who like their stories brainy, cunning, hard-edged and diabolical.

McCann is the author, most recently, of Mother of Sorrows, a collection of linked stories. He teaches at American University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ces vers hantant Bacon 

 

 

ENTRETIENS. Parler amusait le peintre anglais. 

Franck Maubert publie leur longue conversation

 

 

 

Sud Ouest, Dimanche 06 Décembre 2009

 

C’est un opuscule indispensable pour qui, un jour, fut saisi d’effarement par la peinture de Francis Bacon : entre répulsion pour ses corps de douleur et fascination hypnotique pour ses hommes sans visage, donc sans émotion, sans autre identité que celle de leurs cris. Sur cette oeuvre majeure et sa gestation, le livre de Franck Maubert se lit et se relit. Y est rapportée avec un souci du fait la longue conversation que ce journaliste d’art eut avec le peintre anglais pendant trois ans, dans les années 80.

Dans son logement nu jusqu’aux ampoules, dans son atelier que les ordures encroûtent de saleté, l’artiste se livre par bribes, aussi désespéré que vivant. D’une oeuvre de Poussin qui le traversa à 20 ans aux étals d’un boucher qui le bouleverse, le peintre raconte que seules les images extraordinaires et violentes aimantent son imaginaire : les rouges, les jaunes, les orange, le gras, la viande. Citant l’impensable vers d’Eschyle – « L’odeur du sang humain ne me quitte pas des yeux » – ou le tranchant « Macbeth » de Shakespeare, Bacon évoque Picasso, Velázquez ou Giacometti, son amour de la littérature, son amitié avec Duras, son absolue passion de la poésie.

Du thé qui le lave à l’aube, quand il rejoint l’atelier, à l’alcool qui accompagne ses déambulations de fins de journée, de son indifférence à l’argent qu’il gagna de son vivant : tout éclaire celui qui cherchait ce réalisme clinique et froid, sans émotion mais « capable paradoxalement de provoquer un grand sentiment ».

« L’odeur du sang humain ne me quitte pas des yeux », de Franck Maubert, éd. Mille et Une Nuits, 80 p., 12 ?.

Auteur : C. Debray

 

 

 

 

 

Frank Auerbach’s solitary obsessional world

 

 

 

 

His work sells for millions, but the artist refuses to dwell on past traumas or

move from his shabby north London studio

 

 

DEIRDRE FERNAND   |   ARTICLE   |   THE SUNDAY TIMES   |   SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2009

 

His coffee is getting horribly cold, but he doesn’t care. The afternoon light is fading and there’s important work to be done today. As there will be tomorrow and the day after. For the past 55 years, the artist Frank Auerbach has lived and worked in a modest studio down an alley in the London borough of Camden. Rising early and finishing late, he is totally absorbed and, at the age of 78, says there is nothing he would rather do. “I work all the time because I have always felt time is short,” he says. He never takes a holiday and rarely leaves London, let alone Britain. “I don’t recommend this way of working as a virtue; it suits me, it’s my temperament,” he says. “I do think that if I hadn’t been able to do this, I would have felt a deep sense of loss and waste with my life. The only way was to carry on painting.” Would he consider himself obsessional? “Oh yes, I hope so.”

Along with Lucian Freud and David Hockney, Auerbach is acknowledged to be one of the Grand Old Men of British painting. Together with the late Francis Bacon, who died in 1992, this group has dominated the British scene since the 1950s. And this particular Grand Old Man, notoriously private, rarely gives interviews. But he has made an exception for The Sunday Times on the occasion of his latest exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Gathering together his earliest works, it’s called London Building Sites 1952-1962, but it may as well be titled View From a Bus. It was riding around at the top of a double-decker, observing the bomb-damaged city, that gave him his earliest inspiration. These pictures of craters and pits, majestic in their beauty, have reminded the critics just how good he is. As one reviewer put it, “True art is kept safe in the strong hands of Auerbach.”

It was always safe in his hands. Long before today’s YBAs were born, Auerbach was a respected figure of the art world. Unlike them, however, he was never the object of sensational hype, merely of consistent praise. When the eminent art critic David Sylvester visited his first exhibition in 1955, he pronounced it “the most exciting and impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon in 1949”.

But if posing can be a chore, so can painting. “You do it and nothing happens and you do it again. But there’s always the possibility that you might do something marvellous and totally unpredictable and surprise yourself… Eventually it seems that the painting happens.” Later, he adds: “I think there’s an analogy in a woman bringing up a family. There’s a lot of work, then there’s an epiphany. For perhaps one and a half hours a week you are in touch with what it’s all for.” That’s the key to remaining engaged. Auerbach is always waiting to “clinch the image”, revealing “the buried truth” of his picture — what Bacon used to call “the lucky strike”.

Auerbach was born in 1931 in Berlin to German-Jewish parents who sent their precious only child, aged nearly eight, to England just before the outbreak of war. He never saw them again. They were killed in the death camps. He thinks they were sent to Auschwitz but has never bothered to find out. “What difference does it make which camp they were taken to?” he asks. “They died.”

He doesn’t drink in Soho any more. He remains close to Freud, but his friendship with Bacon ended long before the latter’s death. Bacon had dismissed his work saying: “I hate that kind of sloppy sort of Central European painting.” According to Freud, Bacon was jealous: “My feeling is when he became successful, Francis turned against him.

Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62 runs until January 17, 2010, at the Courtauld Gallery. Frank Auerbach by William Feaver (Rizzoli, £100) is out now

 

 

                             

                                Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

IS THIS THE SAUCY SECRET THAT MADE BACON SIZZLE?

 

 

 

 

A new assessment claims the Kildare-reared painter was a teen transvestite, says Colin Murphy

 

 

 

 

COLIN MURPHY   |   WEEKEND REVIEW   |   IRISH INDEPENDENT   |   SATURDAY 5 DECEMBER 2009

 

“I think artists stay much closer to their childhood than other people,” said Francis Bacon. “They remain far more constant to those early sensations.”

Bacon’s words, which are inscribed at the entrance to a new exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, have acquired new overtones with claims by a leading art historian that Bacon’s paintings were heavily influenced by sadomasochistic tendencies.

John Richardson, who knew Bacon and has written a renowned, multi-volume biography of Pablo Picasso, has traced Bacon’s sexual preferences to an incident when the painter was 16, when his father caught him trying on his mother’s underwear, and beat him severely.

The Bacons were then living in County Kildare, near the Curragh, where Francis’s father, Eddy, trained racehorses (he won the Grand National in 1911), having moved to Ireland shortly before Bacon’s birth, in 1909. Bacon later said his parents were “disgusted by me”.

Bacon duly left home, aged 17, and moved to Berlin, then in the throes of Weimar decadence, then to Paris, where an exhibition by Picasso inspired him to become a painter, and finally to London, where he stayed until his death in 1992.

At the heart of the bohemian artistic and intellectual scene in London’s Soho, Bacon’s work was heavily influenced by a series of long-term relationships. The most famous of these, with George Dyer, culminated with Dyer’s suicide in a Paris hotel bathroom the day before a retrospective of Bacon’s work opened at the Grand Palais, in 1971.

In an article forthcoming in the New York Review of Books, Richardson attributes Dyer’s suicide partly to bullying by Bacon, which he links to Bacon’s artistic impulses.

“Bacon would goad George into a state of psychic meltdown and then, in the early hours of the morning — his favourite time to work — he would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system.”

Richardson joined Bacon and Dyer on a night out in New York in 1968. Dyer left early, after an argument, and later Bacon phoned Richardson to say he had found Dyer in their hotel room, “unconscious from having washed down a handful of his sleeping pills with a bottle of scotch”.

Bacon subsequently painted the scene of Dyer’s death in Triptych, May-June 1973, considered one of his greatest works. Richardson argues that Bacon’s work from this period, inspired by his tempestuous relationships and sadomasochistic violence, was amongst his best. An earlier relationship, with the former RAF pilot Peter Lacy, was also marked by violence, which inspired Bacon’s art, says Richardson.

Lacy was “a dashing 30-year-old” who “owned an infamous cottage in the Thames valley, where Francis would spend much of his time — often, according to him, in bondage,” he writes.

“Drink released a fiendish, sadistic streak in Lacy that bordered on the psychopathic.” On one occasion, Lacy, “in a state of alcoholic dementia . . . hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place. Later relationships, such as with John Edwards, were more stable, and Richardson argues that Bacon’s art deteriorated as a result, acquiring an “angst-free, soft-porn glow” in place of the anguished, distorted violence of earlier work.

Whatever about its artistic legacy, Bacon’s relationship with Edwards proved to have a bountiful legacy for Ireland. Bacon left his estate to Edwards, and Edwards subsequently donated Bacon’s studio at Reece Mews in London to Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery.

In an extraordinary feat of preservation, the gallery spent 14 days deconstructing Bacon’s studio and had it shipped to Dublin and lovingly reconstructed in the gallery, inch by inch, down to the paint marks on the walls and scraps of newspaper on the floor.

The studio is the centrepiece of a beautifully curated new exhibition at the Hugh Lane to mark the centenary of Bacon’s birth in 1909. (The exhibition, Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, runs till March 7 next year.)

The exhibition provides something of a counterpoint to Richardson’s arguments about the psycho-sexual roots of Bacon’s best work. Based on a forensic documenting of the contents of Bacon’s studio, it provides unique clues as to the visual inspiration for his paintings.

Bacon’s studio, his working environment for three decades, is almost impossibly chaotic and cluttered. Amongst the 570 books, 1300 leaves torn from books, and 1500 photos found in the studio, samples of which are displayed in the exhibition, were over 300 photos, fragments of photos and negatives by the legendary photographer John Deakin.

These were “crucial working documents for Bacon", says Jessica O’Donnell of the Hugh Lane.

Bacon increasingly painted from photos, not from life, and the evidence of his studio demonstrates that he tore or folded photos, or used photos that were crumpled from having been discarded, or that he’d even walked on on the floor, as inspiration, “because they suggested new pictorial ideas”.

They were, in effect, Bacon’s “preparatory sketches”, explains O’Donnell, showing just where some of the ideas for Bacon’s disturbing, distorted figures come from, and undermine his claims that he worked entirely by “chance” or “accident”.

As for John Richardson’s controversial claims, they can’t be subjected to the same rigorous analysis. If anything, they deepen the enigma that lies beneath Bacon’s “terrible beauty”.

Jessica O’Donnell gives a public lecture at the Hugh Lane on the influence of Deakin’s photography on Bacon’s work tomorrow at 1.30pm.

 

 

 

 

                                                   Tempestuous: Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   A homecoming for Francis Bacon in Madrid

 

 

 

 

 

By VICTORIA BURNETT  |  ARTS  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2009

 

MADRID — On the afternoon of April 30, 1992, a plain coffin bearing the body of the Dublin-born painter Francis Bacon arrived at the brick and white-stone chapel of the vast Almudena Cemetery in Madrid. The artist then made the quiet exit he had sought. He was cremated with minimal ceremony, with no mourners present; his ashes were sent to England.

Bacon had spent his final six days in a Madrid clinic, wheezing oxygen from a bottle and nursed by nuns. He charmed them with his basic Spanish, but he asked for no visitors and reportedly received none. After he died of a heart attack on April 28, his London dealer sent a Spanish colleague to collect Bacon’s brown suitcase and his leather jacket.

Bacon’s solitary death at 82 in Madrid seems a desolate, slightly random, parting for a London dweller whose foreign playgrounds, over the years, included Berlin, Paris and Tangier. In fact, the Spanish capital became something of a haunt for the artist in his final years, which he spent entwined in an on-and-off relationship with a handsome, young art-loving Spaniard.

So the retrospective of Bacon’s work that opened at the Prado Museum in Madrid this month is something of a homecoming for the painter. The show, which drew hordes to the Tate Gallery in London over the past few months, runs in Madrid until April 19 and then moves to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Madrid was quite a late discovery for Bacon," says Michael Peppiatt, an art critic and biographer of Bacon. "It was very seductive: there was the Prado, which was a summit on his horizon, and, into the mix, a very good-looking Spanish friend who he was completely in love with."

Bacon’s discreet trips to see his lover rounded off a long-standing interest in the home of the bullfight and of the two painters who, arguably, most influenced him: Picasso and Velázquez. He was charmed by the city, with its late rhythm, its bars that emptied at dawn, its dry, baking heat and narrow, seamy streets.

In the evenings, he and his Spanish friend would stop in for a dry martini – or three – or a bottle of Champagne at Bar Cock, a rather baronial-style bar frequented by actors and artists on a downtown street, then derelict and lined with heroin addicts. From there, a favourite destination was La Trainera, a landmark seafood restaurant whose beamed dining room is decked with nautical gear.

Patricia Ferrer, an owner of Bar Cock, remembers Bacon, immaculately dressed, having a drink just days before his death. "Here he was, a perfect dandy, sitting with his back beautifully straight," she said. "He certainly died with his boots on."

Bacon was fascinated by the bullfight, or corrida, a motif that recurs in his work in the form of circling bulls, ringed spaces, thrusting horns, gored legs. He described the corrida as "death in the sunlight" and "a marvelous aperitif of sex" and probably went to see fights in Madrid at Las Ventas bullring.

"He was captivated by the torero – the sexuality, the elegance, the outfit, the ballet of it," said José Capa Eiriz, who, as director of exhibitions at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, put on the first show of Bacon’s work in Spain in 1978.

For Bacon, the artistic high point of Madrid was, naturally, the Prado itself, home to a large collection of works by Goya and by Velázquez, whose 1650 "Portrait of Pope Innocent X" Bacon revered and transformed – some would say deformed – in his paintings of agonized, screaming popes.

Manuela Mena, the Prado’s curator of 18th-century painting and Goya – and of the Madrid retrospective – remembers Bacon asking to visit the museum on a Monday, when it was closed to the public. He would stand for long stretches before a work by Velázquez or Goya, peering up close, "thrusting himself right into the painting," she said. "He wanted to see the brush strokes, the texture, the canvas."

The retrospective offers a rare opportunity to see Bacon’s work in conjunction with some of the Spanish paintings that influenced him, according to Mena, who said she found echoes of, and allusions to, many of the Prado’s works in Bacon’s paintings

In the "Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho," Mena sees the self-assuredness of Velázquez’s black-clad "Pablo de Valladolid." The stairs in the central panel of "Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer" (1971) are a reference to the Paris hotel where Dyer, Bacon’s lover, committed suicide, but they are also an allusion, Mena said, to the stairs leading to a half-open door in "Las Meninas" by Velázquez

The purplish blood that soaks the clothes in the middle panel of Bacon’s "Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes"; the rusty, mottled patch in "Blood on Pavement" – these surely owe a debt to the sticky crimson smear on the dead man’s face and the blood mingling with the earth in Goya’s "Third of May 1808," Mena said.

Friends and associates of Bacon speculated that he would be excited to see his paintings hanging in the museum that houses some of the painters he admired most. One person who seemed moved by the painter’s return to Madrid was Sister Mercedes, a nun of the Order of Servants of Mary who nursed the sick artist at the Ruber Clinic. She had no idea who Bacon was until the press descended on the hospital after he die

Standing before the "Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X," in a crowd of Madrid glitterati, Sister Mercedes looked a little pensive. "He painted what he felt," she said, nodding her head. "I could tell he was a tormented soul."

 

 

 

 

Doom, gloom and Damien Hirst

 

 

Damien Hirst: Nothing Matters

White Cube At Mason’s Yard
Mason’s Yard, SW1Y 6BU

 

 

 

BEN LUKE  |  ARTS  |  LONDON EVENING STANDARD  |  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2009

 

When Damien Hirst showed A Thousand Years, his vitrine featuring a cow’s head, maggots, flies and an insectocutor at the Saatchi in 1992, it attracted a particularly esteemed visitor. Francis Bacon, Hirst’s hero, praised the piece in a letter to a friend: “It really works,” he wrote.

Hirst had taken Bacon’s obsession with flesh and decay and his complex framed space and synthesised them with sculptural influences such as Jeff Koons and Donald Judd to create an original visual language.

Bacon’s recognition of Hirst’s achievement echoed through my thoughts as I viewed Hirst’s latest paintings at both branches of White Cube. The works’ debt to Bacon is enormous — there are numerous triptychs, his favourite format; they are set in weighty golden frames; and they contain expressively painted figures and objects set amid sketchy lines reminiscent of Bacon’s “space frames”.

But where Bacon counterbalanced his often tortured subject matter with a fluent and even graceful handling of paint, Hirst’s application is leaden and blunt. Where Bacon created spaces that were ambiguous and enticingly enigmatic, Hirst’s are confused and incoherent. Twenty years ago, Hirst was eloquently moving Bacon along. Now he hamfistedly apes him.

Both shows are divided into two discrete groups of paintings. Hoxton Square has three triptychs featuring crows shot in mid-flight, with trails of blood pouring from them, as well as several skull paintings. At Mason’s Yard, a series of works reflects Hirst’s response to the tragic suicide of the artist Angus Fairhurst last year, including five portraits of Fairhurst, while below are four triptychs depicting interiors packed with still lifes and figures.

The lexicon of forms in the paintings will be familiar to anyone who has seen Hirst’s paintings at the Wallace Collection — skulls, shark jawbones, skeletal and shadowy figures, roses and knives. The crows join this list of harbingers and symbols of death, as do the empty chairs that recur in the triptychs at Mason’s Yard and the Medusa figure who appears in two works.

Like his sculptures and installations over the past two decades, the paintings are dominated by macabre thoughts. But in those earlier works he was often able to create lucid and, I would argue, beautiful images reflecting this obsession. His painterly language remains inarticulate, especially in the cluttered triptychs at Mason’s Yard.

Even in the Fairhurst portraits, which are no doubt heartfelt, he struggles to turn his grief for his friend into fitting elegies, or to capture convincingly the anger he mentions in a catalogue interview; they are gloomy rather than poignant.

Unlike other commentators, I take no joy out of finding these works so unsuccessful. Like Bacon, I was impressed, in fact quite profoundly affected and excited when, as an art student, I saw A Thousand Years in the Saatchi Gallery. But his paintings so far feel like a gigantic backwards step. To use Bacon’s term, they really don’t work.

Until 30 January (020 7930 5373). Tues–Sat, 10am–6pm, admission free

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I shake you by the hand, comrade Bacon: British Art Abroad”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whitechapel Gallery | 77 - 82 Whitechapel High Street

December 19, 2009 - March 14, 2010

 

 

 

BY ARA H. MERJIAN   |   CRITICS’ PICKS LONDON   |   ART FORUM   |   VOLUME 48    |   NUMBER 4    |   DECEMBER 2009 

 

Taking its title from a visitor’s register at Francis Bacon’s landmark 1988 exhibition in Moscow (at the height of Glasnost), this small exhibition examines the rapports between British modernism and UK identity abroad.

 

Through the poignant prism of a handful of case studies, the show explores the efforts of the British Council, over the past seventy-five years, to export the country’s culture – not always to entirely triumphant, or even measurable, ends. As the sun finally began to set on the seemingly eternal British Empire, artworks served, in some instances, as a new form of diplomacy, with strikingly varied results.

 

Barbara Hepworth’s Maquette for a Winged Figure, 1957, was exhibited in Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004. The proposed exhibition of David Hockney’s prints illustrating Constantin Cavafy’s notably homoerotic poetry not only stirred up anxiety on behalf of Mexican officials in 1968 but also led the British Council to reconsider its own plans.

 

The cultural attaché wrote back to London, remarking that the works’ exhibition in the Mexican provinces might draw “queens and beatniks” and was thus perhaps best aborted. Francis Bacon’s exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow seemed to confirm various perceptions of Western art, whether of dissolution or of emancipation.

 

An adjoining room contains relevant archival documents, including the translated book of Russian visitors to Bacon’s show––which constitutes in its own right a compendium of cultural consciousness and culture shock. “Our civilization is a rotting corpse,” wrote one twenty-one-year-old student somewhat elusively, perhaps finding in Bacon’s images a reflection of Soviet decline, or else testament to a general decadence.

 

A sixteen-year-old saw things differently: “[This] is not art. The only feeling is one of bewilderment.”

 

 

 

 

Upon the Scents of Paint:

 

Bacon and Synaesthesia

 

 

 

 

NICHOLAS CHARE  |  VISUAL CULTURE IN BRITAIN  |  VOLUME 10  |  NUMBER 3  |  DECEMBER 2009

 

 

The spoor of an idea

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion: in the left-hand panel a nose; in the central panel a mouth with pared lips, a display of teeth, either a snarl or a smile, a bandage where the eyes should be; in the right-hand panel a maw opened as if howling or screaming, and an ear. The figures in this painting, with their tapering, tenuous limbs, are reduced to torsos and to mutilated heads. Their eyeless visages emphasize those organs of the body associated with the perceptions of smell, sound, and taste. Hybrid grey forms, they stand out against a rust background as chunks of tainted bird and animal flesh, as meat on the turn. They are blindly gathered at the base of a crucifixion. An event they can only hear as cries and moans or sniff as the stench of gore, piss, shit and sweat. This is a painting that encourages the onlooker to cease to see and instead to inhale and listen. The image privileges senses other than the visual through a refusal to depict the organs of sight. In these panels ‘the reek of human blood smiles out at me’.2

The quotation is from Aeschylus. Dawn Ades has written that Bacon was haunted by this line from the Oresteia, one spoken by the leader of the Furies as they track Orestes to Athena’s sanctuary.3 It is a line from a translation of the play by W.B. Stanford. Stanford’s book Aeschylus in his Style was an inspiration for the artist, although, as Martin Hammer has acknowledged, ‘there is no evidence to indicate how or when Bacon first encountered the [text]’.4 In the book, the line is quoted by Stanford as part of an extended discussion of the playwright’s use of synaesthetic imagery. The scholar analyses several images from Aeschylus in which sounds are visualized.5

In the reference to the reeking smile it is the olfactory that becomes something to observe: from out of a wound the stink of cruor smiles. The sense of seeing smell was valued by an artist Bacon greatly admired. In Vincent Van Gogh’s letters, which Bacon had read, the artist suggests that ‘if a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato, steam, fine – that’s not unhealthy’.6 Van Gogh was thinking of The Potato Eaters (1885, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), which he perceived to capture these odours of peasantry. Bacon’s own paintings have also been described in terms of their smell. After seeing Bacon’s display at the Marlborough gallery in 1960, David Hockney is said to have remarked: ‘One of the things I liked about them was that you could smell the balls.’7 It will be argued here that this comment should be taken literally. Bacon’s paintings, like Van Gogh’s, possess synaesthetic qualities.8 His works rouse one sense by way of another.

Synaesthesia is a phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sense causes a perception to occur in another. For a synaesthete hearing a sound can, for example, trigger the perception of a colour. In his book Visible Deeds of Music, Simon Shaw-Miller urges that a distinction be made between cultural and psychological synaesthesia.9 Psychological synaesthesia, which is particularly pronounced, is a neurological condition that is relatively rare. Cultural synaesthesia is a state we all experience, in which a sensory perception triggers associations from one or more other senses. This is a state that Bacon’s works actively encourage in the viewer. His interest in the phenomenon may ultimately be traced back to the influence of Roy de Maistre, ‘who was his first and arguably most formative mentor’.10 De Maistre was fascinated by the way that colours trigger associations with particular sounds.11 It was, perhaps, through conversations with de Maistre that Bacon first hit upon senses other than the visual as hunting grounds for his pictorial imagination.

 

Connecting people

For the arguments that follow concerning the specific sensations Bacon cultivates in his works, it is necessary to begin with a consideration of the fact that none of our five senses ever operates independently of the others. To see an exhibition of paintings, for example, is also to hear it, smell it, touch it, and taste it. Art galleries, like most places, are always multisensory experiences. At the recent Tate Britain Francis Bacon retrospective, for instance, the paintings were accompanied by the tips and taps of designer heels, the scuffs and skates of brogues, scratchy sounds of patent leather scraping the floor, as well as occasional clicks and clinks of change and keys shifting position in people’s pockets, the murmurs of hushed conversations and the occasional stifled sneeze. Every visitor to Tate will have heard these noises but few will have listened to them.

As Adrian Rifkin suggests in Street Noises, ‘to hear, at the point it becomes to listen, is to constitute random combinations of noise . . . as meaning’.12 This echoes a distinction Roland Barthes makes in his essay ‘Listening’. For Barthes, ‘hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act’.13 To listen is to decode; it is to make sense of a sensory input. The sounds that accompany an art exhibition are not usually supposed to cohere into the specific ones listed above, yet everyone who visits a gallery hears them. They simply do not listen to this acoustic ambience.

These sounds are suppressed yet their presence impinges upon the viewing experience of paintings in ways that are not easily describable or quantifiable but that nevertheless influence their reception. The irritation caused by hearing a mobile phone’s polyphonic ring tone is one example. The shift from hearing to listening that is embodied in the registration of such an annoying sound will have an effect upon the mood of the spectator, as will the calm of relative quiet. The temperament of a specific gallery goer can communicate itself to others in the same space. The serenity or the exasperation of a particular spectator can spread to those around.

In her book The Transmission of Affect, Teresa Brennan suggests that the shared mood of a group of people should not simply be explained as being rooted in their response to particular images or understood merely as their imitation of the expressions that signal another person’s temperament (such as their smile or frown).14 She argues that ‘olfactory and auditory entrainment offer more comprehensive explanations’.15

The phenomenon of entrainment will be explained below. Following Brennan, what is important for now is to recognize how the sounds or smells of other people in an exhibition space can shape our own reception of the works of art on display there. We are always open to, and influenced by, the frame of mind of those around us. This means that the idea of the self-contained subject, of the individual whose skin – or integument –  guarantees their corporeal integrity and separation from others, is an aberration. Bacon’s works clearly challenge this idea or possibility of self-containment. In Two Figures (Figure 1), for instance, or Two Figures in the Grass (1954, Private Collection), or the central panel of Triptych – Studies of the Human Body (1979, Private Collection), pairs of bodies couple, blend together and become as one.

The portraits of solitary individuals such as, for example, Head in Grey (1955, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis), Study for Head of George Dyer(1967, Private Collection), and Portrait of Michel Leiris (1976, Musee d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) have blurred, smeared and distorted faces whose structures are caving inwards or toppling outwards. In these visages, the boundary between inside and outside is collapsing. This crumpling signals the flesh’s failure to provide cover for the self, to contain it. Instead, the subject is placed out in the open, exposed in order to confront the beholder with evidence of their own permeability.

The paintings pose a challenge to a culture in denial of the intimacy that binds its inhabitants. In fact, all subjects engage in a constant material exchange between each other. In some societies this exchange is encouraged and readily acknowledged. This is, for example, the case amongst the Andamanese and Sentinelese peoples who, when they have not met someone for some time, greet that person by sitting on their lap, embracing them in silence, and holding them cheek to cheek for some minutes on one side followed by a moment on the other.16 This form of encounter probably encourages the transmission of affect through touch. Affect, or feeling, is then subsequently interpreted. The material exchange between people takes place at the level of pheromones. These are ‘chemical signals with the power to modify biology and behaviour when exchanged between individuals of the same species’.17

This transmission of affect can take two forms. In one, people become alike and develop fellow feeling; and in the other, they take opposing positions in relation to a common affective thread. For neurologists the former occurrence is ‘entrainment’. This involves a process whereby ‘one person’s or one group’s nervous and hormonal systems are brought into alignment with another’s’.18 This means that social interaction has biological effects. These effects do not, however, produce a universal response. A mood may descend upon a crowd, such as those at a busy art exhibition, but a few individuals within that crowd will resist the feeling generated by this common affect. There is the potential for detachment. It is the intersection of the public and the personal that produces a unique response. The personal here refers not to the individual as a selfcontained entity but to the self as it has been affectively permeated through time. We are each a distinctive affective palimpsest. Our moods are governed, in part, by layers of past experiences. The phenomenon of the transmission of affects has significant implications for our understanding of how artworks are received in given situations

Brennan’s ideas about affect, for instance, help to explain why, during my viewing of the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the enthusiasm I had for some of the artist’s paintings was significantly greater than when I saw the identical works at Tate Britain’s mounting of the same exhibition. Although when I visited both gallery spaces they were crowded, there were significant variations that could potentially explain my differing reception and perception of particular paintings. The exhibition in New York, for example, was carpeted, which served to muffle the strident footfalls that had accompanied my viewing in London. The New York experience was also an opening – an event often associated with wine-induced bonhomie: the crowd was in a good mood. Also notable was the aroma of expensive perfumes that hung in the air of the gallery. Perfume frequently contains pheromones and can thereby transmit affect. A particular set of affective circumstances therefore potentially explains the shift in viewing experience that occurred in one gallery compared with another.

 

The eye is cast

Bacon’s interest in synaesthesia can be detected almost from the start of his career as a painter. Early works draw the viewer’s attention to senses other than the visual. In Head VI (1949, Arts Council, London), for instance, the ears and mouth are plainly visible but the organs of sight, the eyes, are absent. The vile jelly has been cast aside in favour of grey scuffs of paint that signal empty sockets. This head, like that in Painting 1946 (1946, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), cannot see, but, unlike the half-head of Painting, it does possess acoustic organs. It can hear. Other works by Bacon also privilege the auditory apparatus over the visual, such as Head 1 (Figure 2), which again draws attention to the auricle. The ear in Head 1, for instance, is composed of such a thickness of oil paint that it protrudes from the picture plane. It is not an imitation of an ear on a flat surface. The bulging lug has the appearance of collage, of a thing stuck on to the canvas. It is built upwards, outwards, and not so much painted as sculpted. Its careful modelling draws the eye. This ear is rivalled for prominence only by the gaping mouth and attends to that mouth’s animal sound. Many of Bacon’s works depict animals – baboons, chimpanzees, or humans – howling or shrieking. These paintings, such as Chimpanzee (1955, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart) and Study for a Portrait (Man Screaming) (1952, Private Collection), can be seen as punctuated by cries and yowls. The person who stands in front of such works will often listen to, as much as look at, mute pigment. The idea of a picture that appeals to the ear is not new. In his book Listening and Voice, the philosopher Don Ihde describes his experience of hearing a postcard he had received from Japan. Ihde writes:

It depicts four peasants running from a sudden rainstorm. They hunch under grass hats and mats as they seek shelter from the wet coldness of the rain. And if I look intently at the picture, perhaps mindful of the dictates of a Zen passage read long ago, I detect the adherence of a certain auditory presence to the picture. I ‘hear’ the rain and ‘listen’ to the peasants running and to the rustling of the mats.19

The image reproduced here (Figure 3) is not Ihde’s postcard, but its patter gives a sense of what the philosopher perceived. Ando Hiroshige’s fan print is also noteworthy because it is a functional object designed to stimulate the sense of touch through cooling its user. The beholder of the fan print sees an image of rain falling, angled because of the wind, that will be accompanied by the cool breeze and the slight crumpling sound produced in the act of fanning. Idhe, however, has to turn to his inner experience in order to recreate and appreciate the picture’s acoustic and tactile qualities. This inner experience, such as the tapping of rain and the thud of footfalls, echoes or represents outer experience. The sounds are, however, seemingly private. Those who stand beside one who listens to a work of art in this way cannot share these noises. They are the product of an individual’s unique record collection of memories or fantasies.

The listener who attends to a Bacon painting such as Study of a Baboon (1953, The Museum of Modern Art, New York) might recall a nature documentary or a trip to the zoo or even some of the sound effects that accompany David Hinton’s film of the artist in conversation with Melvyn Bragg, produced to coincide with Bacon’s major Tate Gallery retrospective in 1985. In the documentary, the snarls of wildcats, the screeches of birds and the squeals of pigs go hand in hand with shots of some of the artist’s most famous works. Art documentaries are usually audio-visual experiences that rely upon the human voice to supplement the artwork, to structure its reception for the viewer. In the Hinton film, however, animal noises are used on occasion to accompany details from some of Bacon’s paintings. This could be interpreted as an example of a kind of imaginative listening to the works similar to that experienced by Ihde as he contemplated his postcard. The choice of juxtaposing noises rather than words with the images might also provide a more faithful rendering of what is taking place in and through the paint.20

Ihde’s description of his sensory response to the postcard is, however, not restricted to the acoustic realm. He also draws attention to the ‘wet, coldness of the rain’. Experiences such as damp and temperature are registered through touch – a sense which is, as Elizabeth Grosz explains in Volatile Bodies, ‘one of the most difficult and complex of all the senses to analyze because it is composed of so many interacting dimensions of sensitivity, involving a number of different functions (touch, pressure, texture, frequency, pain, and heat)’.21 Ihde seems to be sensitive to the temperature and texture of his touching encounter with rain, not to its pace or impact, although these dimensions of sensitivity were probably also available to him in the postcard.

 

Bits of rough

Bacon’s works also encourage the beholder to engage the sense of touch. The numerous ways in which he applied and impressed paint gave many of his canvases richly variegated surfaces. Bacon would sometimes place pigment on canvas and then further manipulate it using one of a number of different processes. Margarita Cappock explained that when the artist ‘required a variety of tactile effects, he found cashmere sweaters, ribbed socks, cotton flannels, even towelling dressing gowns all served his purpose’.22 These techniques provide examples of what Alistair O’Neill identifies as the ‘contamination of dress into image’ in Bacon’s work, and this interference with the image acted to obscure whatever was ostensibly being depicted.23 This process is obvious in a number of works, including the right panel of Triptych (1977, Private Collection), Three Studies for Self Portrait (Figure 4), and Portrait of Jacques Dupin (1990, Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris).

The effect of these techniques on the pigment led to the cultivation of a kind of visual noise, a figural fuzziness, a disturbance. This texturing interrupts viewing, requiring a decision on the part of the spectator either to try to see through these mottled, streaked, trembling surfaces or to focus instead on the cause of their visual malaise, the stuff of the interference itself. Bacon was by no means the first to deliberately disturb the field of vision in this way. Lucas van Valkenborch’s Winter Landscape (1586, Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna), for example, also demands that the viewer make a decision between planes of paint. When confronted by this work, one tries to peer through the depicted snowstorm to glimpse the buildings and figures behind it or one focuses on the snow instead, taking delight in the chilly, white dabs of paint added in the last stages of the composition, which overlie and obscure it. In looking at Bacon’s own works a similar decision must sometimes be made, either to try and see the face or other form behind a carefully fabricated surface or to concentrate instead upon that surface. A third surface, however, also intervenes to compete for the beholder’s attention. It is one that ostensibly works against an appreciation of the artist’s tactility but adds to the nurturing of visual noise in the paintings. This is the glass that intercedes between viewers and viewed.

In Bacon and Sutherland, Martin Hammer argues that glass ‘was traditionally a means to protect pictures, but one senses that, for Bacon, it was intended at once to distance the spectator from an imaginary tactile response to the picture surface, and at the same time perhaps to incorporate his or her own reflection into the viewer’s perceptions of the painted image’.24 This latter occurrence, whether intended or not, is encountered as a matter of fact when looking at Bacon’s works. The paintings are not static. The reflective glass renders them mutable. The exhibition space and its milling visitors appear on top of individual pictures, between beholder and image. The glass screens, it forms a motion picture. The ghostly reflections of spectators, fleeting apparitions, serve to foil vision as the eye chases them across the glass. Shifting presences must be seen through if the viewer is to appreciate the work. They must be filtered out of conscious experience.

The experience of viewing paintings through glass is, of course, common for older works. The shift towards an emphasis on surface that characterized much avant-garde picture-making of the twentieth century, however, meant that the use of glass in framing became a rarity. In this context, Bacon’s insistence upon retaining it, despite employing complex facture in his own works, acts to call attention to it.25 The unusualness of seeing an avant-garde painting mounted behind glass makes the spectator aware of what is a relatively common but usually overlooked visual phenomenon.

The mirroring effect of the framing produces a disturbance in the field of vision. If the required act of filtration is not performed then the spectator must see their reflection in place of the work of art and thereby confront their act of seeing. The glass includes the beholder and the gallery space in the painting as a kind of interference or noise. It works to produce what can be described as a ‘making strange’ both of seeing and of the picture surface. In his essay ‘Art as Technique’, Victor Shklovsky wrote that the ‘technique of art is to make objects ‘‘unfamiliar’’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged’.26 Bacon could be said to cultivate just such an aesthetic, a teasing, perhaps even sadistic, one in which the pleasure of visual comprehension is, at least initially, deferred. The way Bacon’s paintings are framed does not detract from the pictorial surface for beholders but actually draws them to attend to it through the labour of divining what lies behind the darkling glass. The unruly reflections that thwart easy looking also constitute an assault on vision. The spectator is made to think about what it is to lose sight, to reflect on the invisible.27

This loss of visual mastery is accompanied by an increased appreciation of the tactile qualities of the paintings. Hunting for the image beneath the glass’s visual haze, the eye is suddenly ensnared by texture. In some of Bacon’s works there are loci of tactility which contrast with expanses of relatively flat, evenly applied paint. If the painting includes a figure then this locus of texture is frequently the face, as is the case with Study for Head of George Dyer (1967, Private Collection). In this work, the paint is smeared, coiled, flicked and twisted so as to disturb and obscure facial features. It was then impressed with fabric whilst the paint was still wet to enhance the grain. Bacon exploited his intimate understanding of the nature of his materials to the full in order to construct elaborate surfaces. The beholder of a Bacon painting feels crenulations, ridges, dimples of pigment.

One of the synaesthetic qualities that these works foster is therefore that of touch. The pictures benefit from a haptic look – something Gilles Deleuze links with Bacon’s avowed lack of pictorial narrative. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze states that when a work moves ‘closer to the pure state of a pictorial ‘‘fact’’ which has nothing left to narrate’, it causes ‘the constitution or reconstitution of a haptic function of sight’.28 Deleuze’s understanding here is drawn from the writings of Alo ıs Riegl at the beginning of the twentieth-century.

In the context of Bacon, it is noteworthy that Riegl was initially a curator of textiles. In her book Touch, Laura U. Marks imagines ‘how the hours spent inches away from the weave of a carpet might have stimulated the art historian’s ideas about a close-up and tactile way of looking’.29 It is this weave that Bacon frequently incorporates into the surface of his works through pressing fabric into the paint. This encourages the beholder to employ haptic visuality when contemplating the works. In Touch, Marks makes a useful distinction between optic and haptic visuality, suggesting that in the latter ‘the eyes themselves function like organs of touch’.30 In an earlier work, The Skin of Film, she writes that haptic looking is of a kind that ‘tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture’.31

Deleuze connects the rich textures of Bacon’s paintings with his interest in sculpture and emphasizes that it is specifically basso-rilievo that appeals to the artist. For Deleuze, basso-rilievo ‘brings about the most rigid link between the eye and the hand because its element is the flat surface, which allows the eye to function like the sense of touch; furthermore, it confers, and indeed imposes, upon the eye a tactile, or rather haptic function’.32 Bacon’s works often lure the beholder into engaging in the kind of haptic vision described by Deleuze and Marks.

 

Undress to impress

Head 1, as discussed earlier, is particularly plastic and appears to fulfil Bacon’s declared desire, articulated during a discussion of sculpture, to make images that would arise from ‘a river of flesh’.33 For the artist, it seems that paint had something of the quality of flesh. It formed a soft, impressionable pigment-skin kneaded by the artist to clothe the skeletal canvas: a skin that Bacon then subsequently wounded by way of varied interventions and manipulations. That there was a highly erotic component to Bacon’s handling has already been recognized by Michael Peppiatt, who has remarked that when Bacon ‘said that he ‘‘painted to excite himself’’, he surely meant: to re-create certain extreme sexual sensations’, adding that ‘it would be true to say that, at one level or another, much of what he painted is a projection of sadomasochistic practices’. 34

In the same context, he has also written elsewhere about ‘the cunningly suggestive texture’ of Bacon’s paint.35 This texture forms part of a wider effort by Bacon to hypostatize pain as paint. The carnal surfaces of his paintings are frequently impressed by fabrics, which, as mentioned earlier, play an important role in the production of Bacon’s ridged and speckled, stippled effects. The results, achieved through using cashmere and cotton, can be read as reminiscent of the skin’s fleeting memory of having a textile pressed hard against it. The paint in works such as Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1969, Private Collection) and Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne (1966, Private Collection) works to remind the beholder of those red indentations, transient depressions, that form traces of a material’s forceful contact with the body. This is not to say that the pictures should be understood as depicting a violence against women. In terms of the erotic component of these works, the subject matter is of minimal importance. It is the handling which is the key. Bacon identified with the paint.

The projection recognised by Peppiatt occurs at the level of the medium. Pigment became an allegory for Bacon’s yielding flesh, part of a strategy through which to articulate sexual practices for which no pre-existing visual rhetoric was available.36 In contemporary culture, imagery of sadomasochistic practices has become relatively commonplace, often occurring in mainstream advertising.37 At the time Bacon was painting, however, it was a visual taboo. His works should therefore be considered as particularly brave in that, as will be discussed below, they acknowledge and celebrate consenting to injury in the service of sexual pleasure.

In the context of sex, the way that the clothing used to make these impressions actually came to be in Bacon’s studio in the first place is of interest. Perhaps it was already to hand, in situ, having been removed by the artist in the heat of passion. That the artist’s studio may have doubled as an impromptu place for sexual acts cannot be discounted. Three whips, for example, were found there when the studio was excavated prior to its transport to Dublin. This means that the damage to the books, magazines, and photographs strewn across the studio floor could have been caused not by random footfalls, but by forceful sexual encounters as the artist wrestled with more than paint. The remnants of clothing used to texture some of the artworks were, perhaps, imbued with memories of the context of their removal, impregnating the paintings with textures of remembrance, private meanings available only to the artist and his intimates. These clandestine meanings also extended to the studio space itself, which contained much source material that possessed sexual connotations for Bacon. On one level this may, in fact, be conceived of as a man’s highly personal collection of pornography.

This pornographic aspect manifests itself not just in obvious sources such as the photographs of past lovers and in the physique magazines that were found in the studio – magazines that Simon Ofield suggests the artist was in all likelihood ‘looking at, or walking on’ when he painted Two Figures. 38 Bacon potentially gained a thrill from any image that was damaged in some way or that bore traces of violence. He saw the surface of an image as a metaphor for his own skin. This is why the folds and tears to be found in many images are recreated in some of Bacon’s paintings.39 The frisson to be found in the injuries to these source materials was replicated through their reproduction as paint on canvas.

Bacon’s paintings are, as Peppiatt intimated, suffused with sadomasochistic allusions. This is particularly evident in relation to the thick gobs of paint that the artist threw at some of his works towards the end of their creation, globules of pigment with a particularly marked haptic appeal. Like the ear in Head 1, they literally stand out for the beholder. Triptych (1976, Private Collection), because of its pale green ground, gives a strong sense of the mass, the substantiality, of these blobs. In the left panel, the sheer quantity of paint that Bacon lobbed onto the canvas is evinced by the bleed of oil that forms a halo around each throw of white pigment. These ejaculations should not be viewed as nonrepresentational. They look like the haphazard spatters of come stains on sheets and can be read figuratively as the residue of Bacon’s act of beating his meat.

These fat spats, however, also possess an acoustic potential that gives them another layer of sexual significance. To look at these globs can be to feel the splat, the whump, of a quantity of wet paint striking the canvas. Ihde writes that a ‘thing bespeaks something of its material nature in its sounding’.40 The duet of paint upon paint contains two possible voices of pigment, the hard dried paint upon which the soft paint lands, and the supple state of the thrown substance, its changeable nature. To hear the sound is to hear the state of the material. If that medium is taken to be interchangeable with skin, however, then the sound conjured by the sight of a weal of paint such as that in Study for the Human Body (Man Turning on Light) (Figure 5) is potentially of a different kind. In it the sound of the lash can be heard. Bacon himself described a similar throw of pigment, that which occurs in Triptych May-June 1973 (1973, Private Collection), as a ‘whip of white paint’.41 This description is echoed by Michel Leiris in Francis Bacon, when he writes of the painter’s use of ‘a long trail of white paint suggesting a sudden outflow or whiplash’.42 Through techniques such as these the artist perfected a sadomasochistic facture to give voice to his desires.43

The fact that Bacon’s works are filled with the sounds of S&M may explain why so many spectators find his work difficult. The noises of the bodies in pain, the screaming figures discussed earlier, and of whip-cracks of paint are emotionally evocative. For many attending to the artist’s pictures these acoustic stimuli will register as unpleasant.44 The idea that these noises might equally be associated with pleasure will not occur to a number of people who listen to, and are touched by the works. The negative responses and the upset Bacon’s paintings cause a spectator may rapidly transmit to others in the viewing space. Brennan’s study, discussed earlier, provides a way of understanding how the synaesthetic potential held by many of Bacon’s pictures can generate negative affects in a spectator that will subsequently spread to others in close proximity. This is despite the fact that the paintings actually encode an experience, pain, that the artist found pleasurable. The enjoyment signalled by the subjects and surfaces of many of Bacon’s works will only hit upon a small group of subcultural synaesthetes.

Bacon’s paintings evoke not only the sounds of sexual pleasure but also the feel and smell of it. This is particularly the case for those that depict wrestling. Two Figures, for example, invites memories of motion and pressure for those with a certain familiarity with wrestling, as either sport or foreplay. Ofield describes both the depiction and the handling of paint in this work as exciting in its vigour.45 It can be read as a test of strength by way of both its subject matter and its textured surface. The work stimulates the intimate senses of touch and smell as well as those of hearing and seeing. In Two Figures, Bacon is expressing his sexuality through the acoustic, the olfactory and the tactile, as well as through the visual. The aim of his paintings, to arouse senses beyond sight, is paralleled in contemporary muscle erotica, which frequently celebrates the other senses through images, as in the case of those of a photographer such as Ron Lloyd, or by way of storylines that stress gesture, smell, and touch.46 Two Figures, with its wrestlers engaging in their grunting, sweaty foreplay, is a work that is pungent. It possesses a pre-ejaculate tang. The pigment bears the musk of carnal desire. These are two bodies in the struggle for pleasure, two bodies for which vision has become secondary to the sense of tactility, to the feel of flesh, of another’s meat, and the smell of each other’s sweat. The emphasis on desires that privilege senses other than sight invites a queer reading of Bacon’s practice. As Mark Graham explains, ‘desires that are olfactory, but also aural and tactile, may be less easy to compartmentalize and less amenable to a rigid heteronormative and homonormative categorization of gender and sexuality than a distant disembodied participation through the visual’.47 Smell is a sense Bacon particularly exploits in his work. The stench of blood often adheres to his paintings. This is fitting given the quotation from Aeschylus, mentioned earlier: ‘the reek of human blood smiles out at me’. In her essay ‘Web of Images’, Dawn Ades writes that ‘this line shocks because of the clashing of disgust (‘reek’) and joy (‘smiles’), but more because of the extraordinary synaesthesia of the metaphor: the wound gapes in the flesh like a smile in the face, but the blood is present not just visually but through a sense of smell’.48

Blood does literally smell. It has a ferrous, metallic scent, one which can be detected in a work such as Blood on Pavement (1988, Private Collection). The stink of gore is also placed in the foreground in Bacon’s images of meat such as Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey (Figure 6) and Figure with Meat (1954, Art Institute of Chicago). The haunches of flesh in these works call upon us to inhale their animal scent. They reek of brute bodies, reminding us of the odours that lie above and beneath our own skin. Meat was a recurring theme in Bacon’s work. Like Carracci in the Butcher’s Shop (c.1580–81, Christ Church, Oxford) before him, he employed coarse brushwork to emphasize ‘the carnal abundance of animal flesh on display’.49 The earlier Baroque painter’s open handling also signalled that there was little as common as meat. Elevated subject matter dictated a more refined, restrained facture, whilst butcher’s cuts were of a low order, earthy. This lowly classing of flesh as opposed to spirit was one subverted by Bacon, who even claimed that his choice of the theme of the Crucifixion for the 1962 triptych was motivated by his interest in meat. Bacon stated:

I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There’ve been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don’t know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they’re so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape.50

Ades reads these comments as suggestive of a theme of non-discrimination between man and animal existing in Bacon’s works. She argues that the animal’s awareness of its impending fate ‘depends on senses that we may have lost’.51 It is these non-visual senses that we are encouraged to bring into play when contemplating works such as Carcass of Meat and Bird of Prey. Deleuze writes that in Bacon, ‘each time meat is represented, we touch it, smell it, eat it, weigh it’.52 The painting seeks to return to us an appreciation of those senses we usually suppress, that are too often overlooked in the everyday. It encourages us to sniff the air like a hunter from a bygone age on the scent of quarry. Bacon’s art strives to return something of the texture of existence to us, in both pleasant and unpleasant forms, through an encouragement to engage all our senses in the reception of his paintings. His paintings push us into ‘extending knowledge of sensation, following it further along its pathways, [which] means extending consciousness into the body, infusing it with conscious understanding from which it has been split hitherto’.53 The entire body responds to Bacon, not just the eye and mind.

All works of art hold the potential to generate a synaesthetic response in the viewer. Bacon’s works, however, are carefully constructed to maximize this potential. It is a potential the artist sometimes puts to the service of expressing an outlawed sexuality, a form of sexual practice that dare not speak its name but will be given voice to through smells, sounds and textures. Whether exploring sadomasochism or not, Bacon’s treatment of subject matter is often one which deliberately emphasizes senses other than the visual through suppressing the organs of sight. This is coupled with techniques that thwart easy looking. In this context a work such as Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, with a description of which this article began, and a work Bacon was to return to for inspiration late in life, can be seen as anti-visual. Its grey forms of rancid, putrefying meat, centred at the base of an unseen crucifixion, assail our nostrils before our eyes.

 

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust for my research on this topic.

 

Notes

1 Peter Beckford, Thoughts on Hunting (London: Methuen, 1899), 111.

2 W.B. Stanford, Aeschylus in his Style (Dublin: University Press, 1942), 109.

3 Dawn Ades, Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 17.

4 Martin Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 103.

5 See Stanford, Aeschylus in his Style, 107–9.

6 Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, trans. A. Pomerans (London: Penguin, 1997), 292.

7 Quoted in Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Constable, 2008), 352.

8 This is something that I begin to gesture towards but do not significantly develop in my article on Bacon’s paintings in relation to the acoustic. See Nicholas Chare, ‘Regarding the Pain: Noise in the Art of Francis Bacon’, Angelaki 10, no. 3 (2005): 133–44.

9 Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 54.

10 Andrew Brighton, Francis Bacon (London: Tate Publishing, 2002), 22.

11 For an examination of this, see Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The Australian years 1894–1930 (Roseville: Craftsman House, 1988), 29–39; and Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930– 1968 (Roseville, Craftsman House, 1995), 84–102. I am grateful to Amanda Harrison for bringing these references to my attention.

12 Adrian Rifkin, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure 1900–40 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 88.

13 Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 245.

14 Theresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 15 Ibid., 68.

16 Madhursee Mukerjee, The Land of Naked People (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 128.

17 Richard H. Stamelman, ‘The Eros – and Thanatos – of Scents’, in The Smell Culture Reader, ed. Jim Drobnick (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 262–76 (262).

18 Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 9.

19 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), 111.

20 Bacon’s use of random combinations of Letraset letters in many paintings, his creation of a crafted linguistic gibberish, can be seen as signalling his desire to articulate experiences before or behind language. For a discussion of this technique, see Nicholas Chare, ‘Passages to Paint: Francis Bacon’s Studio Practice’, parallax 12, no. 4 (2006): 83–98 (92–93).

21 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 98.

22 Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon’s Studio (London: Merrell, 2005), 208.

23 Alistair O’Neill, London – after a Fashion (London: Reaktion, 2007), 110.

24 Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 139. Indeed, Bacon once suggested spectators gained from the experience of seeing their reflections. See Robert Alley and John Rothenstein, Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), 19.

25 I explore Bacon’s relationship with contemporaneous avant-garde painting practices in the United States elsewhere; see Nicholas Chare, ‘Sexing the Canvas: Calling on the Medium’, Art History 32, no. 4 (2009): 664–89 (683–6).

26 Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24 (12).

 27 Gilles Deleuze points out that the figures within Bacon’s paintings, screened from view as they frequently are, are reduced to screaming ‘before the invisible’. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (London: Continuum, 2003), 38.

28 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 134.

 29 Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 4.

30 Ibid., 2.

31 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 162.

32 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 122.

33 David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 83.

34 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma, 71–2.

35 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Three Studies for a Portrait (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 108.

36 In this sense Bacon’s handling can be compared to that of Jasper Johns as it is described by Fred Orton in one of the few examples of queer art history to work outwards from the physical manipulation of art materials to a consideration of their relationship to an artist’s sexuality rather than merely restricting its analysis to a consideration of subject matter. See Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns (London: Reaktion, 1994) 119–24. 37 For a discussion of the recent upsurge of representation of sadomasochism in popular culture, see Eleanor Wilkinson, ‘Perverting Visual Pleasure: Representing Sadomasochism’, Sexualities 12, no. 2 (2009): 181–98. 38 Although, in fact, Bacon lacked a regular studio at that time, having vacated 7 Cromwell Place in 1951. Simon Ofield, ‘Wrestling with Francis Bacon’, Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 1 (2001): 113–30 (125).

 

 

  

        

                       Figure 1. Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953, oil on canvas, 152.5 x 116.5 cm.


 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Seeing the Story of One’s Time’:

 

 

Appropriations from Nazi Photography

in the Work of Francis Bacon

 

 

 

MARTIN HAMMER & CHRIS STEPHENS  |  VISUAL CULTURE IN BRITAIN  |  VOLUME 10  |  NUMBER 3  |  DECEMBER 2009

 

By mid-1946, Francis Bacon had begun to establish a distinct presence on the London art scene. In April 1945, he had exhibited Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and Figure in a Landscape (1945) in a group exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery (146–7, 97). Early the following year, he showed a pair of related pictures as Figure Study I and II (98, 99), and that summer one could see both Man with Microphones (1946) at the Lefevre and Painting (1946) at the Redfern Gallery (Figure 1 and 101).* The latter two works prompted an interesting aside from one rather unimpressed reviewer: ‘Some people have said, though not in print, that these latest works of Francis Bacon’s are comments of the first importance on the times.’1 Such a reticence about acknowledging a connection between Bacon’s pictures and the realities of the contemporary world has generally been maintained in the literature on the artist. The leading authorities have continued to avoid mentioning the war, or to do so only to assert that his art transcended the immediate circumstances of its production, and addressed a more universal and tragic human condition, understood in broadly existentialist terms. The notable exception is John Russell’s 1964 book on the artist, with its set-piece account of his encounter with the Three Studies in 1945, which seemed an artistic corollary to the many images of horrendous violence that were blighting the atmosphere of celebration at the end of the war.2 But at the time Russell was more inhibited: reviewing the Lefevre Gallery show, he raved about the works of Matthew Smith and Graham Sutherland, and remarked only of Bacon: ‘This [the triptych] reaches the furthest reach of anatomical Guignol; but a large ‘‘Figure in a Landscape’’ compels respect by its ambition and morbid accomplishment.’3

Nowadays, by contrast, the war cannot get mentioned enough. For generations who did not experience them directly, the events and psychological impact of the Second World War have become an obsessive and exotic source of fascination, as evidenced by numerous historical studies, films and novels.4 What might it be like to read Bacon’s early work as some kind of comment on what were by any standards extraordinary times? He had witnessed the rise of the Nazis and worked as an ARP (Air Raid Precaution) warden in London during the Blitz. The war had finally ended in Europe at around the same time as Bacon’s initial public appearance, but alongside the news of victory and liberation came the endless revelations of continuing destruction, civilian and military deaths, large-scale rape and looting, migration of displaced persons on a massive scale, and, above all, the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the subsequent sufferings of Jewish survivors.5 Meanwhile, the first uses of the atom bomb in August 1945 terminated the war in Asia, and thereafter the early stages in the cold war added a bitter twist to the traumatized, impoverished and gloom-laden atmosphere of post-war Britain, as fears of a potential and even more deadly new conflict coincided with poring over the horrors of the last one at the Nuremberg Trials.

In sum, Bacon’s key early works emerged from a period in his life during which he witnessed an utterly traumatic historical scenario. The problem is framing the connection. His friends related how it was the war that galvanized a renewed creativity; the experience ‘suddenly turned him on to painting again, after several year’s withdrawal . . . when he was discharged from his ARP post, he found, against all expectation, that painting had become an obsession for him’.6 By extension, is there any sense in which Bacon resumed painting in order to comment, in his own very singular way,upon the specific moment? To construct a reading of his art in such terms, the key evidence is his use of Nazi propaganda images as points of reference and departure for many pictures from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s and beyond. No systematic study has been undertaken of this neglected topic, notwithstanding a few hints in Ronald Alley’s 1964 catalogue raisonne.7

Throughout his life, as we now know, Bacon accumulated photographs from books, newspapers or magazines documenting contemporary political power and violence. That this was one ingredient in the general inspiration for his painting that he derived from photography was established in the early 1950s. Sam Hunter described the extensive collection of photographs kept on a table at one end of Bacon’s studio, encompassing ‘Goebbels wagging a finger on the public platform, the human carnage of a highway accident, every sort of war atrocity, the bloody streets of Moscow during the October Revolution’, and so on.8 The presence of such imagery, as well as that of photographs of works of art that interested Bacon, was also documented by Hunter in the form of three selections of photographic material arranged on the studio floor, two of which illustrated his article in New York’s Magazine of Art (Figures 2 and 3).9 In his famous book of interviews, David Sylvester illustrated other kinds of photographic imagery that fascinated Bacon, who remarked on how he found photographs more interesting than paintings, and had ‘always been haunted’ by them, describing the process of reverie and imaginative insight they could provoke:

I think it’s the slight remove from fact, which returns me onto the fact more violently. Through the photographic image I find myself beginning to wander into the image and unlock what I think of as its reality more than I can by looking at it. And photographs are not only points of reference; they’re often triggers of ideas.10

Later, he elaborated frankly on the ‘incredibly useful source of inspiration’ that photographs provided: ‘Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates. When I paint, I want to paint an image from my imagination, and this image is subsequently transformed.’11

To explore his appropriations of Nazi imagery, we want to propose several connections between the paintings and specific photographs, which raise intriguing issues about what he pinched, how he transformed such sources in accordance with his imaginative conceptions, and what meanings might thereby be extracted from the final works. Regarding his been disseminated in the press, but others were more esoteric and may have been acquired in Germany in the 1930s. Concerning his incorporation of a swastika in his 1965 Crucifixion triptych (151), Bacon remarked: ‘You see, with those enormous crowds that have so often been filmed and photographed at the Nuremberg rallies, I had seen all those people and they all had those armbands on with their swastikas on them and I wanted that in this image.’12 If the implication is indeed that Bacon had visited Germany on one or more occasions in the 1930s, as he certainly had in 1929 and 1930, then he could of course have returned with a cache of illustrated books, including some of the numerous volumes produced by Hitler’s friend and favourite photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. But his means of access may have been less direct.

It has been proposed that photographs of leading Nazis were a source for Bacon as early as the 1936–7 Figure in a Garden (47), although the only known evidence is Alley’s remark that one of its several nicknames was ‘Goering and his Lion Cub’.13 Alley proceeded to comment that in the later 1930s Bacon ‘became particularly interested in photographs of Hitler and Mussolini when these began to reach England’.14 Fascist imagery was certainly relevant for the two pictures made after he started painting again in the early to mid-1940s. In Alley’s catalogue, these and others came under the category of ‘abandoned’. It was not that the works in question had been left unfinished or unresolved – as that term might suggest – but that they were ‘abandoned’ in as much as Bacon did not bother to take them with him when he left 7 Cromwell Place in April 1951. In fact, Peter Rose Pulham’s photographs of works stacked in that studio show that at least some of those later recorded as ‘abandoned’ or ‘destroyed’ were considered finished enough to be framed and glazed. If these works were left in Bacon’s studio in 1951, they were presumably there in summer 1950 when Hunter recorded photographic material from the table.15 As has been suggested, we might deduce from Hunter’s inclusion of several relevant photographs of Nazis that the link between the photographs and the paintings on view close by was evident, if not discussed.16

Man Standing (93) is derived from Heinrich Hoffmann’s photograph of Hitler on a balcony in Prague, receiving the adoration of the masses below, an image in one of Hunter’s selections.17 The painting as a whole is derived from the photograph, although both figure and background are generalized. Formally, the work might seem unfinished and also retrogressive in relation to the more avant-garde experiments that Bacon had exhibited in the late 1930s. The greater naturalism and loose brushwork, and, indeed, the direct borrowing from a press photograph cumulatively suggest, however, that the art of Walter Sickert may have been a significant catalyst.18 Bacon had many opportunities at this stage to see work by Sickert, including pictures from the late 1920s onwards which were overtly based on photographs and popular engravings. The two versions of H.M. King Edward VIII (1936) provide striking precedents for Bacon’s decision to base the overall composition of a painting on low-grade press photography of a recognizable public figure.19 The same Sickert curiously foreshadows the imagery of Figure Getting out of a Car, discussed below, as well as the more obviously unfinished Man in a Cap (93), a puppet-like Fascist demagogue, strutting, screaming and gesticulating on his podium, which has been connected with specific photographs of Goebbels and Himmler from Picture Post that Hunter photographed. It might be noted, however, that the spread had only appeared in a 1947 issue, the visual connection is not that close, and the impassioned orator is a cliché of Nazi iconography.20

Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion has stood, almost from the moment of its first exhibition, as a singular work both in art history and in the narration of Bacon’s individual career. Its timely display in April 1945 secured its association with the post-war, post Holocaust world and led to its being seen as opening a new chapter in artistic representation. In the shape of Bacon’s biography, it has come to mark his re-emergence and, with his collusion, has become secure as Number 1 in any catalogue of the painter’s mature output. Nonetheless, it is in fact possible to position the triptych as part of a larger family of paintings from the mid-1940s, most of which are among those listed by Alley as either ‘destroyed’ or ‘abandoned’.21 For example, the same poorquality fibreboard support unites the triptych with Man in a Cap, Man Standing (and its now-separated verso), the unfinished street scene sold in 2008 as Untitled (Landscape), and Untitled (1943 or 1944; a variation on the right-hand panel of the Three Studies).22 These supports are also similar in size.23 The inscription ‘Petersfield’ on the reverse of the right-hand panel of the Three Studies probably does not relate directly to the image on the recto of that board but nevertheless does tie the use of the board support to Bacon’s occasional stays in the nearby village of Steep from 1941 to 1943.24 It can be argued that the Three Studies also possessed a strong wartime resonance for Bacon, rather than marking a simple continuation of pre-war concerns and influences, or a turn away from the specific contemporary circumstances registered in Man in a Cap and Man Standing towards a more universal imagery, both observations which are frequently encountered in the literature. The case can be elaborated on several levels.25 The triptych might, for instance, be seen to register a mindset described by historian Peter Calvocoressi: ‘As the Nazis recede into history they become objects of interest to historians, sociologists and psychologists, but they were in their own generation objects of pure horror.’26 Three Studies encapsulates that sense of revulsion, and a traumatic sense of humanity reduced through physical and psychological violence to a base, animal condition, although it is unclear whether we are confronted by the aggressors or by their victims. The gaping mouth to the right ambiguously conveys a scream of pain, a roar of exhortation to inflict pain on others, or even the yawn of some animal in the wild.

That visceral impact is reinforced by the work’s artistic affinities and thematic allusions. It possesses close stylistic parallels with the concurrent work of his friend Graham Sutherland, whether produced independently or as official war artist, work which was indeed conceived and enthusiastically received as a distillation of the atmosphere and emotional impact of the war. Moreover both Bacon and Sutherland drew inspiration from Guernica and related work by Picasso, which had demonstrated how art might convey in uncompromisingly modernist terms the violence and tragic tenor of contemporary life. Picasso’s use of animal imagery as surrogates for human feelings and sensations informed the bestial suggestions, adapted from photography, which Bacon incorporated within the triptych; reproductions of Picasso’s Crucifixion drawings enhanced the appeal of that subject as an epitome of tragic suffering and man’s capacity for cruelty. In making reference to the theme in his title, Bacon exemplified the widespread recourse to Crucifixion imagery in wartime art and literature. The existing triptych of figure studies was nevertheless associated in Bacon’s own mind, as he said several years later, with the Eumenides, otherwise known as the Furies, or The Kindly Ones, the Oresteia narrative’s agents of divine retribution against those guilty of committing especially heinous crimes. Bacon’s engagement with Greek tragedy is again both appropriate to the times and inconceivable without the currency of classical myth in the writings of Sigmund Freud and in the iconography of Surrealism and Picasso’s art of the 1930s. Bacon scholars have also focused on the inspiration of particular passages in the Aeschylus play, evoking the physical loathsomeness of the Eumenides, on the impact of W.B. Stanford’s 1942 book Aeschylus in his Style, and on the catalyst provided by T.S. Eliot’s recent play The Family Reunion, a contemporary reworking of the Oresteia.27

Those are the standard observations, but the question remains as to why Bacon was drawn to that specific classical theme. Accentuating the wartime dimension of the triptych suggests a more straightforward way of making sense of its Eumenides overtones. The argument hinges on a reading of the settings in which Bacon’s creatures are placed, and which unify the work visually. The backdrops were clearly added at a late stage, and consist of bright orange paint, flatly applied, which Bacon then articulated in a minimal way by superimposing black lines that seem to recede in perspective and to suggest symmetrically arranged spaces across the triptych. The right-hand panel also contains a passage suggesting grassy scrubland, reinforcing the animalistic connotations of the monstrous hybrid occupying the space. The visual evidence is supported by documentation implying that the background was completed at the last minute. On 21 March of an unspecified year Isabel Lambert (later Rawsthorne) reported to Peter Rose Pulham that she had visited Francis ‘two days ago in his Millais room’, recording the works she saw in his Cromwell Place studio: ‘One large landscape with headless figure impressed me. Lovely colour, open air, etc. Really most mature in every way. I did not care for the various forms on red ground (three paintings which I know you like).’28

As Lambert seems to describe Figure in a Landscape (1945) and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) – the works that Bacon exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in April 1945 – her visit presumably came only a couple of weeks before that show. It is noteworthy that, a painter herself, she recalls the Three Studies as ‘red’ rather than the hot orange that is so memorably a characteristic of them. There is evidence that the very lean orange paint was added over another layer of redder hue and so, if we accept the speculative dating of the letter to March 1945, it suggests that such a change was only made shortly before the paintings were dispatched.

Aside from their role as foils for his figurative inventions, what associations did Bacon have in mind for the backdrops? Russell described the three figures as ‘confined in a low-ceilinged, windowless and oddly proportioned space’, and this has become the standard description.29 But that may be an overly literal interpretation of the visual evidence. Bacon could equally well have intended a schematic reference to more specific spaces, exterior as well as interior, which he chose to indicate simply by means of linear contours, eliminating detail and any differentiation of texture and colour between, say, the ground plane, architecture and the sky. Conceivably, he had in mind the monumental, not to say bombastic, exercises in classicizing architectural rhetoric, many designed by Albert Speer, which had been constructed (taking advantage of slave labour) in pre-war Germany. Though functioning buildings, such structures had also generated iconic images of Nazi power that were then widely disseminated in propagandist books and photographs. In Bacon’s triptych, one might see the centralized tunnel-like space as a simplified rendition of, say, the great marble gallery in Speer’s monumental Chancellery building in Berlin, which is indeed an interior (Figure 4). But the oblique perspective in the left-hand panel perhaps evokes perspectival street scenes with exterior views of the same building (Figure 5). The right-hand panel gestures towards similar Berlin imagery, but also in its emphatic near-symmetrical perspective towards the open, vast, yet highly structured spaces devised for the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg (Figure 6).

On this reading, Bacon’s Three Studies imagined that the Eumenides had taken up residence at the very heart of Nazi Germany. The embodiments of vengeance against those who have committed the worst of crimes had now come to haunt Berlin and the Nazi leadership. The idea is an apt commentary on what was actually happening in 1944, the year within which Bacon realized his triptych, as the war turned with the D-Day landings and Soviet advances from the east, and with bombing wreaking cataclysmic destruction on German cities and on the Nazi war machine. Projecting the avenging Furies in the Nazi heartland offered a compelling allegorical distillation of current events. While the imagery of the Three Studies is allusive and open to speculative interpretation, many of the destroyed and abandoned works appear less ambiguous in their intent and can be more readily associated with source photographs. The bestial monstrosity of the panels finds its closest echo in Figure Getting out of a Car, a work subsequently overpainted by Bacon (Figure 7). The picture echoed the widespread imagery of Nazi leaders, moving like gods in their chariots amidst crowds or vast armies. In particular, the slender forms emanating from either side of the body strikingly recall a Hoffmann photograph of Hitler reaching out to well-wishers as he arrived at Nuremberg in 1933 (Figure 8). Bacon acknowledged to Alley that Figure Getting out of a Car was based on a picture of Hitler getting out of his car at one of the Nuremberg rallies.30 A recently discovered unpublished image by Hunter proves that the details of the car derive from a photograph of Hitler standing in his infamous Mercedes saluting the Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg in November 1938 (Figure 9, bottom left), a close relative of the image that had featured in one of Hoffmann’s books (Figure 10).31 Curiously, the head and hand of Hitler are cropped by what might at first sight appear a random diagonal cut or passage of overpainting. If we look at the original photograph, however, this cropping turns out to coincide exactly with the base line of the background architecture, a view of Speer’s Principal Tribune building at Nuremberg in a steep perspective typical of the photography of Nazi architecture. One can infer that Bacon carefully extracted the architectural background before proceeding to recycle and magnify it as the first stage of the unfinished Untitled (Landscape) (Figure 11).32 The process Bacon employed provides an early instance of the physical manipulations of a photograph as a form of preliminary drawing, a method of working that requires further research.33

In the sequence of events, it is likely that this purposeful editing of the photograph occurred well before the making of Figure Getting out of a Car. The use of a smaller-scale fibreboard support suggests that the newly emergent picture was executed earlier, perhaps around 1943–4. Coincidentally, this reinforces the argument that Bacon had Nazi architecture specifically in mind during the period when he conceived the settings for the Three Studies. Despite its conventional dating, Figure Getting out of a Car was probably executed a year or two later, after rather than before the triptych.34 The serpentine neck of the creature standing in the open-top motor car reaches down for the mouth to speak into a bank of microphones. Such an array of microphones appears not only in Study for Man with Microphones but also in the formally related Painting of the same year, 1946. These both share the same motif of a white-collared, suited male figure under an umbrella. While the umbrella motif links them both to Figure Study II, a comparison of compositions reveals a close relationship between all three and Figure in a Landscape (1945), and serves to emphasize in the latter the penumbral mouth that emerges from the blackness of the figure’s absent head snarling into a bank of microphones. The very particular background of Figure Getting Out of a Car is a characteristic shared with other paintings: the ‘destroyed’ Figure Study shows a similar arched architectural feature, and both they and Figure Study I share the weathered surface that runs horizontally across the background as if below a sort of dado. Photographs of the time showed all three in close proximity.35

The pair of pictures shown in London in summer 1946 turn out likewise to be steeped in Nazi imagery. The most literal instance, which may be why Bacon eventually rejected and drastically overpainted it, was Study for Man with Microphones, which includes references to the ubiquitous image of the Fascist orator and his stereotypical attributes such as the podium, microphones, floral bouquets, and curtained backdrops, all serving in propaganda photographs to confer a spurious aura of civilization and moral dignity onto the proceedings, even an air of ecclesiastical celebration (Figures 12 and 13). Hoffmann published several photographs of Hitler receiving bunches of flowers from adoring children and a similar view of him being handed a posy as he approaches the podium appears in Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (Figure 14). The ironic juxtaposition of symbols of brutal Nazi power with the colour and transience of flowers might also be seen in the alternative versions of the side panels of the Three Studies, in both of which the howling figures plunge their snouts into bunches of flowers.36 If these show such scented, strongly coloured flowers as roses and hydrangeas, a particular, sharp-leaved palm sprouts abundantly from Figure Study II, Study for Man with Microphones and the second state of Figure Getting out of a Car. It is tempting to speculate that the specific source for Bacon’s use of these leaves is another Hoffmann photograph of Hitler, in Austria following the Anschluss, visiting the highly adorned grave of his parents in Linz (Figure 15). Like many Hoffmann images, the picture of Hitler at the parental grave was issued as a postcard.37

Painting (1946) has often been taken to evoke the vile dictators who had recently strutted the world stage, suggestively fused with intimations of the abattoir and the Crucifixion. According to Bacon’s recollection, the firststate of the picture, an image of a bird based presumably on wildlife photography, ‘suddenly suggested’ both ‘an opening-up into another area of feeling altogether’ and the ‘whole image’ that he then brought to fruition.38 The final painting has a montage-like discontinuity. The figure seems especially to evoke the features of Mussolini, who also appeared in numerous podium and balcony images. The swags at the top were inspired not just by the decorations in a butcher’s shop but also, according to Martin Harrison, by ‘the decoration on a canopy above Hitler speaking at a rally’.39 No evidence is offered, although it is not hard to find pictures of platforms decorated in this manner. But a more specific point of reference for the picture was again, in our view, architectural photography. The initial bird imagery could even have triggered associations with a pervasive Nazi symbolism, which featured in photographs of, say, the Hall of Honour in the Berlin Air Ministry, dominated appropriately enough by the vast image of an eagle, flanked by a pair of undecorated panels. Such imagery may at some level have become transmuted into Bacon’s symmetrical splayed carcass, flanked by window blinds. Particularly suggestive in relation to Painting (1946) is a Hoffmann photograph of Hitler posed in front of a symbolic Nazi eagle (Figure 16).40

Equally, he may have been thinking of the mosaic hall that Speer had designed for Hitler’s Chancellery building, which had been widely disseminated in colour photographs before the war, often devoid of human occupation (Figure 17).41 The iconic general view of this space can be compared with the hieratic symmetry of the Bacon, the perspective construction of the floor plane (as in the Hall of Honour), the central decorative and symbolic focus of the smaller, stylized golden eagle, as well as the dominant pink colouration, with the two tones of marble inlay transformed into walls and blinds (Figure 18). The perspective lines describing the lower edges of Bacon’s blinds echo the upper edges of the inlaid panels, although the relationship of dark and light pink is reversed. The swags in the painting evoke the inlaid cartouches decorating the top of the panels, and one might even speculate that the paired bones standing in for microphones could have been triggered by the twin eagles in the lower sections. Even the repeated comma-like marks just above the black diagonal to the right of Bacon’s umbrella echo the patterning above the door in the righthand wall of the marble hall. There are sufficient close correspondences to suggest that in realizing Painting in 1946 Bacon was feeding off such photographic imagery. The resulting collisions of dissonant imagery might be taken to evoke the Fascist dialectic of gruesome violence and neo-Roman cultural rhetoric.

Moreover, it was precisely the pink Marble Hall of the Chancellery that witnessed the ceremony of the funeral of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia assassinated in Prague in May 1942. There Nazi leaders – including Hitler himself – came to pay their respects before Heydrich’s coffin surrounded by mounds of floral tributes. Himmler delivered the eulogy and Hitler bestowed a military honour posthumously, stepping through the flowers to place it on the coffin. An already-established aesthetic of Nazi oratory was thus extended by an iconography of heroic martyrdom, a highly ritualized display of the celebration of death.42 One might speculate that the flowers that so dominate the images of this occasion made an impression on Bacon. The protagonist in Figure Study I bending amid blue hydrangeas and bunches of some other pink flower recalls those men who bow in tribute to Heydrich. The destroyed Figure Study replicates the same motif of herringbone greatcoatfur-trimmed coat similar to that just discernible in Standing Man.

Another recurring motif is the umbrella that covers the figure in three of the paintings of 1945–6: Figure Study II, Study for Man with Microphones and Painting. Several sources for Bacon’s use of umbrellas more generally have been proposed. Degas’ Beach Scene has been related to his Triptych (1974–6) and Harrison has observed that ‘umbrellas were a common sight on film sets in the 1920s’.43 There is a more apt potential source for Bacon’s 1940s umbrellas than those previously proposed; it is indeed from a film set, being an image from the book documenting the making of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia (Figure 19).44 This shows not only the cameraman sheltering from the rain under a raised umbrella but also his camera to his right and draped in such a way that echoes very closely the disposition of the greatcoats in the three 1945–6 Figure Study paintings. The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games were a crucial moment for Nazi propaganda and Riefenstahl’s Olympia was a major contributor to the construction of the Games as part of a neo-classical age of power and athleticism. It conceivably provided Bacon with a model of an artist using the physical prowess of the human form as a visual metaphor for a political will to power on which he would draw later.

References to Nazi imagery run alongside, and are interwoven with, allusions to Christian symbolism. Bacon’s scant correspondence suggests a continuing fascination with the theme of the Crucifixion deeper and more far-reaching than hitherto thought. We have seen that the Figure Studies of 1945–6 could include visual references to supplicants at Heydrich’s funeral, to Nazi orators, to Hitler at his parents’ tomb, or to Riefenstahl’s documentary of the Berlin Olympics. Soon after their completion, however, Bacon was insistent that ‘[t]hese paintings are studies for the Magdalene and the smaller of the two was the first studie [sic] and I would like them entitled as such in the catalogue’.45 The pictures themselves do not evoke obvious analogies with the image of the Magdalene, especially given that the prominent items of clothing, the tweed coats and hat, are not only contemporary rather than historical but also masculine rather than feminine. Nevertheless, the evidence that Bacon did indeed envisage a Magdalene reference in this pair of pictures reinforces the visual affinities with traditional imagery of this figure, who played a prominent role in the narrative of Christ’s passion.

As an embodiment of human grief, Mary Magdalene, often viewed side on, features in various narrative contexts. She is encountered washing Christ’s feet, as in the treatment by Poussin in the Seven Sacraments. She assumes the most dramatic emotive role in Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, serving as a counterpart to the more restrained figures of Mary, the mother of Christ, and John. This seems the direct precedent for Sutherland’s Weeping Magdalene of 1946, a convergence of imagery that adds another dimension to the artist’s dialogue with Bacon at this period.46 In the biblical narrative, Mary subsequently encounters the risen Christ, who enjoins her not to touch him when she reaches out to him in wonder (Noli me Tangere). The treatment of this episode in Giotto’s Arena Chapel offers a striking parallel to Bacon’s Figure Study I, which echoes the simple, monumental curve of the back in the Giotto, and takes even further the veiling of recognizable human features by means of drapery. The arm in the Bacon, edited out with a dark glaze to the point of near invisibility, recalls the outstretched arms of Giotto’s Magdalene, who, like Bacon’s figure, is juxtaposed with flowers (Figure 20).47 Moreover, there are models in tradition for Bacon’s more iconic presentation of a single figure. The naked arm and upper torso in Bacon’s second version is reminiscent of images that allude to the myth of Mary’s fallen, sexual nature, which she subsequently renounced, as, for example, in Guercino’s Mary Magdalene and Two Angels (1622, Pinacoteca, Vatican), where she is attended by angels and leans in a comparable manner to the Bacon figure on an altar-like structure. One might also recall Gustave Dore’s distillation of her role and narrative in his engraved image of Mary Magdalene Repentant, juxtaposing the figure with a skull symbolizing death. Visually, this image strikingly prefigures the combination of straight lines and flowing curves in the configuration of the drapery in both Bacon’s variants.

As with his references to the Crucifixion or the Eumenides, Bacon evidently valued the metaphorical and expressive charge of such ‘mythic’ imagery. The image of the Magdalene may have epitomized for Bacon the state of extreme grief or mourning, an appropriate enough reflection on the traumatized mood that lingered well after the formal cessation of wartime hostilities. Perhaps this appropriation of a traditional iconographic type or personification was gradually subsumed by a more generalized evocation of imagery associated with a funeral, such as outdoor clothing and flowers, the harsh physicality of which offsets the psychological frailty, and even the virtual visual absence in the first version, of the inner self contained within the outer garb.48 By such means, Bacon conceivably wished to assert the contemporary resonance of the Magdalene image, as elsewhere the allusion to the Crucifixion, verbal in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and visual in Painting (1946), served to distil the currency in the present of sadistic cruelty and violence.

The Passion continued to preoccupy Bacon. Writing from Monte Carlo in summer 1947, he told Colin Anderson that he was working on ‘a large crucifixion group’.49 On the same day he delivered the same news to Duncan McDonald at the Lefevre Gallery: ‘I shall have a group of three large paintings about the size of the one which went to the Contemporary Art Society . . . They want to be hung together in a series as they are a sort of Crucifixion. I am finishing the second, and the colour is a sort of intense blue violet.’50

In a subsequent undated letter to Anderson, Bacon reported: ‘I have a painting I am working on now it is in size about 2 ft 6’’ by 3 ft 4’’ I hope to have it finished in about a week or 10 days it is a study for a much larger picture I hope to do of ‘‘Christ shown to the people’’ ’.51 It has been observed that the only painting of that period of those dimensions is Head I (1947–8), the first of the series of heads and the first instance where Bacon superimposed an ape’s mouth onto the remnants of a human head.52 The idea that this image of an animal bursting out from the human might be a reworking of the Ecce Homo is tantalizing, but one cannot assume Head I (102) is the work discussed with Anderson (that correspondence refers to numerous works which seem never to have seen the light of day). In the context of Bacon’s fascination with Nazi iconography, Pilate’s presentation of Christ to the people is an intriguing subject to tackle only a year after the Nuremberg Trials, images of which were widely disseminated.

Bacon’s recurrent conflation of the iconographies of Nazi public ceremony and Christ’s Passion continues in his relatively prolific production after 1949, which continued to incorporate more frequent references to Fascist imagery than critics have allowed. Study for a Portrait (1949), for instance, seems to recall the more recent spectacle of the once all-powerful leaders turned captives at the Nuremberg Trials.53 But pre-war propaganda images remained Bacon’s prime point of departure, sometimes allied to religious themes. In Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950, 83), the cross clearly began life as an image of a wall with two windows.54 It has an affinity with press photographs of Hitler acknowledging his adoring supporters, whether from buildings or from train windows (Figure 21). Bacon then seems to have read this imagery as a cross, and merely added the two creatures, a cat-like tormentor and the bat or owl-like Fury who stands in for the crucified Christ.

It was, however, imagery of the Nuremberg rallies that especially obsessed Bacon. He may, for instance, have known the substantial, beautifully produced volumes published in Germany before the war to commemorate the annual spectacles.55 The numerous images of soldiers marching in formation past the Nazi leadership are echoed, for instance, in Untitled (Marching Figures) from around 1950.56 Matthew Gale has related Bacon’s use of vertical striations to images of the extraordinary nocturnal light shows Speer conceived for the ‘Day of the Political Leaders’ at Nuremberg, which have been described as follows:

After sundown 110,000 men marched onto the review field while 100,000 spectators took their places in the stands. At a signal, once darkness fell, the space was suddenly encircled by a ring of light, with 30,000 flags and standards glistening in the illumination. Spotlights would focus on the main gate, as distant cheers announced the Fuhrer’s approach. At the instant he entered, 150 powerful searchlights would shoot into the sky to produce a gigantic, shimmering ‘cathedral of light’ . . . the essence of the ceremony was one of sacramental dedication to Fuhrer and party. Encased in a circle of light and dark, the participants were transported into a vast phantasmagoria.57

In the numerous photographs of this utterly photogenic event, parallel beams of light register as densely packed, parallel stripes of light and dark. Those included, for example, in the 1937 Nuremberg volume offer a striking visual parallel with the backdrops that Bacon started to use in 1949, as an elaboration of the more literal motif of curtains (Figures 22 and 23). An early instance is Head VI (1949, 104), the last in the series of heads that seems to mark a new way of working and a new visual vocabulary and is the first surviving instance where Bacon brought together the motif of a gaping mouth and the bust of Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X. The parallel striations of dry black paint against bare canvas seem not only to pass behind the clearly outlined cope of the figure, as well as the transparent space frame, but also to hover in front of the throne, except for the gilded finials, and to erode the upper half of the figure’s head, so that only the screaming mouth remains.58 In this and related works, we seem to confront absolute power dissolving into despair and non-being; ritual celebration transmuting into apocalyptic dissolution; the beams of light intimating defensive searchlights and conflagration, a visual metaphor, one might be tempted to say, for collective self-immolation.

There is a direct continuum between Nazi and papal imagery in Bacon’s work. The pope pictures from 1949 onwards made more overt the appropriations from the Innocent X portrait, arguably already embedded in Study for Man with Microphones and Painting (1946). Interestingly, those pictures, with their strong undertones of Fascist demagogues, were then immediately followed by the variations on the Velazquez that Bacon is  known to have been working on during his initial months in the south of France that summer, though the results were destroyed.59 Moreover, in Head VI a tassel-ended cord hangs, as if closer to the viewer, in front of the skull-like black cavities that replace the eyes. This would become a recurring motif in Bacon’s painting, and one must surely draw some conclusions from the sources from which he chose to take them. In this instance, close examination of Hunter’s third montage reveals its source to be a blind cord that hangs in front of Hitler in Hoffmann’s photograph of the Fuhrer surveying the vanquished Prague.60 It is a detail which would, surely, be lost on viewers of the painting. And yet, we cannot ignore the fact that in a reworking of Velazquez’s great portrait of the pontiff, made four years after the opening of the concentration camps, Bacon has inserted an overt reference to Hitler, like a cipher for the Fuhrer, perhaps. The detail recurs in the series of eight popes from 1953. As much as Velázquez’s portrait, these seem to relate back to the 1951 trio of paintings which derive from the photograph of Pius XII carried in the sedia gestatoria that appears in one of Hunter’s montages.61 That Bacon is interested in the contemporary pope as well as Velázquez’s painting suggests it is the subject as well as its rendering in art that fascinates. The fact that Pius XII was thought by some to have appeased the Nazis may not be irrelevant.

Imagery from Nuremberg may even be relevant for Painting (1950), with its disquieting juxtaposition of a figure seemingly in a shower, adapted from Muybridge, and the shadow that reads as another, menacing figure.62 Both elements owed something to a drawing by Sickert relating to the Camden Town Murder series, as Rebecca Daniels has shown.63 Late on, however, Bacon inserted the black outer framework, which has been compared formally to Matisse but which may rather have embedded an allusion to another of the photographs recording the 1937 Cathedral of Light, this time viewed from much further away, so that individual shafts barely register within the larger funnel of light (Figure 24).64 From that recognition, one might start to associate imagery of taking a shower with what happened in the death camps, though goodness knows if this is what Bacon had in mind. Subsequently, the parallel striations feature regularly, as in the 1953 study after Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X and ‘Man in Blue’ series and Two Figures in the Grass (1954, 134), serving compositional purposes but also providing a specific association, again if only for Bacon himself, with the existential backdrop against which his figures strive for some intimate human contact.65 They also feature in The End of the Line (1953), ornamenting an image of railway lines leading towards a shed, within which a clothed arm seems to grasp or drag a partial naked figure.66 Bacon surely intended here a distillation of the photographic imagery and unimaginable events associated with Auschwitz.

Study after Velázquez (1950, 112) and Study of a Dog (1952, 113) look very different, but their one common feature provides another dimension to Bacon’s fascination with Nuremberg imagery.67 The symmetrical red planar framework in Study of a Dog, describing a perspectival hexagon, can also be discerned in the 1950 picture, partially obscured by the curtain-like vertical grey and black streaks within which the papal figure is enmeshed. The two pictures evidently started from identical beginnings, adapted to different effect again in Sphinx I (1953).68 Alley remarked of these works, prompted by the artist, that ‘the setting was partly suggested by the gigantic stadium prepared for the National Socialist Party’s annual conventions at Nuremberg’.69 The triangular forms at the front recall images of Nuremberg’s Zeppelinfield and the German Stadium, while the hexagonal plan in perspective echoes the vast open spaces of the adjacent city stadium (Figure 25). The setting in Study of a Dog (1952) – ‘the flower-bed and the coast road’ – was said to derive from ‘colour picture-postcards of Monte Carlo’.70 In fact, the flower bed also recalls the circular motif at the centre of the gridded area the Zeppelinfield and the theatrical ritual of the conventions. In one sequence, one sees it approached by a triumvirate of Nazi leaders. Again, one can only speculate on what specific allegorical connotations or expressive undertones were guaranteed, for Bacon, by such subliminal architectural references.

It is evident that Bacon’s paintings are densely inhabited by references to Nazi visual propaganda, in a manner probably without parallel in the art of the post-war decade. We might note that the photographs to which Bacon was responding can be located at the opposite end of the scale from journalistic snapshots. Indeed high-production books, conceivably acquired in Germany before the war, look to have been a continuing resource. It is interesting that he should later have referred to ‘documentary books’, in conjunction with ‘books of wild animals’, as his principal points of reference for photographic imagery, rather than newspapers and magazines.71 Bacon’s sources comprised highly formalized images of architectural stage sets, sometimes featuring Nazi ceremonials that were in themselves ritualistic and stage-managed, created with a view to their impact on actual audiences and then on the much larger audiences who consumed their photographic records. One might also describe such images as ‘painterly’, in that they frequently employed such features as symmetry, spatial frontality, emphatic and orderly linear perspective, and dramatic contrast of light and shadow. In that sense they were especially compatible with Bacon’s art-historical references: Picasso, Sickert, Velasquez. The affinities are comparable to those Bacon perceived between Muybridge’s images of the body and representations of the nude by artists he especially admired, such as Michelangelo, Degas or, again, Sickert. Moreover, as we have also seen, the specific Nazi images from which Bacon chose to work meshed with his desire to gesture towards archetypal themes and patterns of imagery embedded within cultural tradition, whether the tragic narratives of Christianity and Classical Greek drama, or the articulation of political power within the conventions of portraiture.

Such conflations were bound up with Bacon’s deeply rooted concern to engage the viewer in an imaginative response, rather than in the decoding of some hidden ‘message’. His insistence that we should not try to pin down intended meanings too narrowly was implicit in decisions he made about preserving or discarding pictures, framing titles, and generally refusing to let determinate meanings congeal around his paintings. The possible associations conveyed by his adaptations of found imagery were probably not preconceived, or programmatic in symbolic or ideological terms, or indeed overt and readily decipherable by the viewer. In practice the paintings were highly improvised, and the process might at any stage involve working from photographs that ‘haunted’ him. In 1949 a journalist quoted Bacon as denying, in a characteristic feint, that his pictures were supposed to ‘mean a thing: They are just an attempt to make certain type of feeling visual . . . Painting is the pattern of one’s own nervous system being projected onto canvas.’72 A review of his 1950 show transmitted a variation on this characteristic standpoint:

The artist has told me that his motives are purely aesthetic. That is, his obsession is with formal qualities, with forms at once concrete and dissolving, with the substance and texture of pigment, with the belief that every stroke of paint laid down ought to be a self-sufficient expression of the artist’s idea. His reading, especially of Greek Tragedy, has influenced his attitude and inevitably shaped his patterns; but he would have us judge his paintings simply as works of art without seeking to read into them a symbolism never consciously premeditated.73

As time went on Bacon sought to obscure the more direct references to Nazis; one might speculate that the greater openness of meaning of the Three Studies is what Bacon sought to preserve while downplaying the more specific imagery of the related works that he wished to excise from his canon. Similarly, one might see his later identification of the three figures as the Eumenides of Greek myth as in part a strategy to downplay or complicate the Christian iconography that was always registered in the work’s title. Recently we have been told how Bacon informed the American critic J.T. Soby that in the left-hand panel of the 1962 Three Studies for a Crucifixion ‘the two figures on the left are Himmler and Hitler opening the doors of the gas chambers’. ‘You may quote that,’ Bacon continued – but he then denied saying or at any rate meaning it, and ended up pulling the plug on Soby’s projected monograph.74 It was entirely typical of Bacon to want the implications of his pictures to seep through to the viewer, without having to be spelled out.

It seems unlikely that Bacon’s motivation for addressing the horrors of the Third Reich is the typically liberal one of horror and guilt. Nor, surely, does it indicate a desire to elevate Hitler and his followers to a quasireligious status. What we can discern is an obsessive fascination with the relationship between the sacred and the profane, with the baseness of human behaviour and the depths of human cruelty, with the phenomenon of power and its translation into ceremony and ritual and into ideas of sacrifice. As Bacon’s comment to Soby suggests, when he turned back to the crucifixion theme, reference to National Socialism also reappeared. Much has been made of the figure in the right-hand panel of the triptych Crucifixion (1965). Bacon famously denied any descriptive significance in the swastika armband, regretting its inclusion and insisting it was added merely to bring a spot of red at that point in the painting.75 The trivial observation that a spot of red was hardly necessary against the hot terracotta of the background may embolden our dismissal of this denial. Indeed, photographs of the painting when it was first received by the Marlborough Gallery show that Bacon subsequently toned down the swastika, perhaps when the triptych was sold to a German museum.76 By implication, of course, Bacon failed to take the opportunity to remove the motif altogether. In its twisting movement, the muscular, nude male figure appears to be strangling a victim – a ghostly, green figure that seems to slide down towards the bottom of the picture. The image in the central panel is of a flayed carcass. Again, then, Bacon conflates the idea of crucifixion, the butcher’s shop and Nazis just as he had in Painting (1946) and, more obliquely, in the Three Studies. Moreover, a turning figure similar to that in the 1965 Crucifixion recurs several times (though with at least one outstretched arm) and has been associated with the classical Greek sculpture of the Discobolos. 77 Interestingly, the opening sequence of Riefenstahl’s Olympia shows the Olympic flame travelling from ancient Olympia to modern Germany and moves on to a sequence in which classical Greek sculptures morph into modern Aryan athletes. In one section, the Discobolos fades into a German discus thrower, and in the book after the film the two images sit side by side (Figure 26).78 Riefenstahl’s use of physical prowess as a symbol for a wider, political will to power may have operated as a further catalyst for Bacon.

What, then, do Bacon’s allusions add up to as a comment on the times? In terms of content, what ideas were triggered by Bacon’s imaginative contemplation of Nazi photographs? John Russell asserted that ‘the great subject which Bacon always has at the back of his mind [is] ‘‘The History of Europe in My Lifetime’’’.79 More than once, Bacon observed that he had witnessed directly some of the violence of the twentieth century: the Irish troubles, the rise of the Nazis, the London Blitz.80 A letter of December 1954 provides insight into how Bacon might have seen this in relation to his art. Friends had suggested he might compile an illustrated book, a model for which he acquired in Rome:

There is a wonderful book of photographs of the last 50 years called Il Mondo Cambia compiled with a foreword by Longanesi . . . they are nearly all photographs which I have already got through collecting them over years, but I think a sort of life story which sees underneath of the events of the last 40 years, so that you would not know whether it was imagination or fact, is what I could do, as the photographs themselves of events could be distorted into a personal private meaning, or in fact it could be a book about the history of the last 40 years but so interlocked with what one imagines has happened and what one believes has happened from the records we know of, but interlocked with history exerted through that time perhaps we could make something nearer to facts truer – and more exciting as though one was seeing the story of one’s time for the first time.81

Bacon’s ambitions for the book, which was never realized, can readily be transferred to the paintings, where photographs are indeed referenced and distorted, public events and private feelings interwoven within what felt like the projection of a specific nervous system. The notion of unearthing solipsistic meanings in Nazi imagery could lead in the direction of ‘Fascinating Fascism’, the 1974 essay in which Susan Sontag spiralled out from the work of Leni Riefenstahl to a discussion of ‘the natural link’ between Fascism and sadomasochism.82 The argument seems more directly relevant to manifestations of a more recent revival of interest in Fascism, but one cannot discount its pertinence to Bacon, given his own sexual preferences. At any rate, the sentiments in Bacon’s letter to Orwell remind us that he was a child of his time, who, for instance, enjoyed ‘reading Freud very much because I like his way of explaining things’.83 Sigmund Freud’s late books, such as Civilisation and its Discontents, which extended psychoanalytical concepts beyond the personal to more collective realms, might have stimulated him on a more cerebral level to explore the psychoanalytical significance of Fascism, exactly the approach taken in a contemporaneous essay by Theodore Adorno exploring ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’.84 One way of describing his photographic appropriations would be that Bacon wished to expose the brutal, animalistic instincts that constituted the unconscious forces operating beneath the conscious façade projected by the Nazi state, with its smart uniforms bedecked with medals, its flower- and insignia-covered platforms, its choreographed mass rallies and its grandiose pseudo-classical architecture. To adapt Bacon’s own terminology about reading photographs, his paintings may invite us to ‘unlock’ the underlying ‘reality’ of contemporary life, the glimpse that such pictures provide, through the ‘slight remove from fact’ within photographs, which then became far greater in his own pictorial transformations, of the will to power and sadistic violence lurking beneath the veneer of political ritual that pervaded public life in Nazi Germany.

A related perspective on Bacon is provided by Walter Benjamin who, in 1936, famously decried the Fascist aestheticization of political life:

The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to its knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values’.85 Bacon likewise seems fascinated by something akin to the ‘aestheticization of political life’ inherent in Fascism, but whereas Benjamin had recognized, as a theoretical proposition, that this was bound to culminate in war, Bacon witnessed the actual destructive and self-destructive cost of Fascism, and could revisit the earlier propaganda imagery from the distance of knowing the real horrors that ensued. It was Benjamin’s admirer Hannah Arendt who famously remarked in 1945 that ‘the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe – as death became the fundamental problem after the last war’.86 Yet, as Tony Judt has noted, ‘while the courts were defining the monstrous crimes that had just been committed in Europe, Europeans themselves were doing their best to forget them . . . Far from reflecting upon the problem of evil in the years that followed the end of World War II, most Europeans turned their heads resolutely away from it.’87 The findings presented here suggest that we might start to see Francis Bacon as a rare exception to that general rule.

 

 

 

 

 

         

         Figure 19. Photographer sheltering from rain; illustration from Leni Riefenstahl, Beauty in the Olympic Struggle, 1937.

 

 

 


 

 

  

 

                                           Francis Bacon, Figure Study II (1946–1947)


 

 

 

Notes

1 Maurice Collis, ‘Art. The Lefevre Gallery’, Time and Tide, 10 August 1946, 752.

2 John Russell, Francis Bacon, 3rd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 10.

3 John Russell, ‘Round the Art Exhibitions’, The Listener 33, no. 848 (12 April 1945): 412.

4 In particular, Jonathon Littell, The Kindly Ones (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009); Littell’s allusions to the Oresteia and the French literature of transgression, from de Sade to Bataille, invite direct comparison with Bacon and are discussed in Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘Transgression’, The New York Review of Books 56, no. 5 (26 March 2009). Littell has a long-standing interest in Bacon and is currently working on a book of essays about the artist.

5 For an overview of the neglected dark underside of these years, see William Hitchcock, Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2008).

6 Russell, Francis Bacon, 20.

7 Ronald Alley (with introduction by John Rothenstein), Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964).

8 Sam Hunter, ‘Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror’, Magazine of Art 95, no. 1 (January 1952): 12.

9 Prints from original negatives in Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, eds, Francis Bacon (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 18, 170 and 171. The suggestion that Hunter chose photographs that resonated with paintings was made in Chris Stephens, ‘Animal’, in ibid., 92.

10 David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 30.

11 ‘Francis Bacon: I Painted to be Loved’, The Art Newspaper 137 (June 2003): 28.

12 David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 236 (extract from 1982 interview).

13 Stephens, ‘Animal’, 91. Reproduced in ibid., 47.

14 Alley, Francis Bacon, 33.

15 While two of these were first reproduced in Hunter, ‘Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror’, all three were reproduced for the first time in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 16, 170 and 171.

16 Stephens, ‘Animal’, 92. By the time he abandoned them at Cromwell Place, Bacon had repainted Figure Getting Out of a Car as Landscape and Car (Alley A4 revised state, exhibited Gagosian, London, 2006) and Man with Microphones (Alley A5), where the first and revised states are transposed, positing the latter as the earlier state. The painting was re-acquired by the artist c.1989, which explains why it now resides, cut into pieces, amongst the material from his studio at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane.

17 The image was used, for example, on the dust jacket of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler in Bohmen-Mahren-Memel (Berlin: Zeitgeschichte, 1939).

18 On post-war admiration for Sickert by Bacon and others, see Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), 75–79; James Hyman,

Legacy of Walter Sickert’); Rebecca Daniels, ‘Francis Bacon and Walter Sickert: ‘‘Images which Unlock Other Images’’’, Burlington Magazine 151, no. 1273 (April 2009): 224–230.

19 See Wendy Baron and Richard Shone, eds, Sickert Paintings (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 332–335, with early exhibition histories.

20 Reproduced in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 93.

21 In 1964 Ronald Alley listed sixteen images (thirteen objects) under his ‘Appendix A: Abandoned Pictures’ and nine works under ‘Appendix B: Destroyed Pictures’, in Alley, Francis Bacon.

22 Man in a Cap: Alley A1; Man Standing (and its now-separated verso): Alley A2; Untitled (Landscape): reproduced in Sothebys, Contemporary Art Day Auction, London, 28 February 2008, lot 152; Untitled, 1943 or 1944: reproduced in Francis Bacon: The Human Body, Hayward Gallery, London 1998, cat.1.

23 X-ray evidence that the right-hand panel of the triptych was cut down from a larger composition and turned through 90 degrees might seem to complicate the significance of their common size and, in fact, the Three Studies are visibly different in size.

24 That the inscription is truncated by the edge of the board might suggest that it relates to a larger, earlier image. Dates from Harrison, In Camera, 2005, 38. The same inscription is found on the reverse of Man in a Cap, Alley A1.

25 Martin Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005), Chapter 2 (‘Devastation’).

26 Peter Calvocoressi, Total War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 546.

27 See Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 103–106; Stephens, ‘Animal’, 22 and 92.

28 Isabel Rawsthorne papers, Tate Archive 9612.1.3.21; Bacon’s ‘Millais room’ was his studio at 7 Cromwell Place, London.

29 Russell, Francis Bacon, 10.

30 Alley, Francis Bacon, A4.

31 Heinrich Hoffmann, Parteitag Grossdeutschland (Berlin: Zeitgeschichte, 1937), a record of the State Party Day staged at Nuremberg in September 1938.

32 This source identified by Chris Stephens, lunchtime lecture, Tate Britain, 19 September 2008; the painting was also recovered from 7 Cromwell Place by Robert Buhler but did not emerge onto the market until early 2008 (see note 22).

33 The topic is touched on in Rachel Tant, ‘Archive’, Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 166.

34 The problematic dating of this picture is discussed in Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 94–5, where a dating around 1945 is proposed, whereas the work had usually been attributed to either the early or middle part of the war (on the basis of Bacon’s recollections, cited in Alley, Francis Bacon, A4). The background of Figure Getting out of a Car is very close to a lost Figure Study, which in other respects recalls, and was photographed alongside, Figure Study No. 1 of 1945-46 (ibid., D3). The fact that it is on canvas supports a later date; Figure in a Landscape was painted on canvas in early 1945.

 35 Alley, Francis Bacon, D3.

36 There is evidence that similar flowers were painted out of the central panel of Three Studies. For reproductions of the others, see Untitled, 1943 or 1944, Hayward 1998, cat.1 and Study for a Figure, c.1944, Alley A3.

37 Old Pcture Postcard

38 Sylvester, Interviews, 11.

 39 Harrison, In Camera, 50.

40 Used on the dust jacket cover of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Baut Grossdeutschland (Berlin: Zeitgeschichte, 1938).

41 Die Neue Reichskanzlei [The New Reichschancellery], Franz Eher Nachfolger, Munich, 1939. There are many images of the building in journals of the time, such as Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, Berlin, September 1939. 42 We are grateful to David Alan Mellor for highlighting the importance of Heydrich’s funeral in the history of Nazi ceremonies.

43 Harrison, In Camera, 52.

44 Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia (Cologne: Taschen, 2002), 289 – a republication of Schonheit Im Olympische ¨ Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Struggle] (Berlin: Deutschen Verlag, 1937), where the image is on page 275.

45 Bacon to Duncan McDonald of Alex. Reid & Lefevre Gallery, n.d. [?January 1946], Lefevre Gallery Archive, Tate Archive 200211. This disproves Alley’s note that Figure Study I had ‘sometimes been incorrectly and misleadingly known as ‘‘Study for the Human Figure at the Cross II’’’ (the first presumably being the destroyed Figure Study, c.1945), and that Figure Study II was ‘sometimes incorrectly known as ‘‘The Magdalene’’, but the artist says that he never thought of the figure as the Magdalene and never associated it in any way with the Crucifixion’.

46 Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 131–133.

48 For an analysis of the picture, see Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland 137–8.

49 Adrian Clark, ‘Francis Bacon’s Correspondence with Sir Colin Anderson’, British Art Journal 8, no.1 (2007): 40.

50 Bacon to Duncan McDonald, Lefevre Gallery Archive, Tate Archive 200211. We have no way of knowing whether Bacon destroyed the works or if the story was a fabrication to support requests for money.

51 Bacon to Anderson, published in Clark, ‘Francis Bacon’s Correspondence’, 42.

 52 Ibid., 40. 53 Reproduced in Harrison, In Camera, 235. The picture especially recalls photographs of Herman Goring ¨ as he sat in the defendant’s box.

54 Reproduced in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 83.

55 For example, Hanns Kerrl, Reichstagung in Nurnberg 1937. Der Parteitag der Arbeit ¨ (Berlin: C.A. Weller, 1937). The British Library has a run of the Reichstagung in Nurnberg volumes from 1933 to 1938.

56 Reproduced in Harrison, In Camera,13.

 57 Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock and New York: Overlook, 2003), 66.

58 Reproduced in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 104.

59 See Bacon’s letters to Graham Sutherland, 19 October and 30 December [1946], reprinted in Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 237–238.

60 The cord has been edited out of many published or online versions of this image.

61 Pope I – Study after Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez (1951), Aberdeen Museum & Art Gallery (Alley 34, 114); Pope II (1951), Mannheim Kunsthalle (Alley 35); Pope III (1951), destroyed (Alley 36).

62 Reproduced in Harrison, In Camera, 101.

63 On the relationship to Sickert’s drawing Conversation (c.1909, Royal College of Art, London), see Daniels, ‘Francis Bacon and Walter Sickert’, 225.

64 Alley claimed that this was Bacon’s first direct borrowing from Muybridge (Alley, Francis Bacon, 48), and this has recently been reiterated by Daniels (‘Francis Bacon and Walter Sickert’, 228), although Study from the Human Body (1949) seems a better candidate (Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 47–8). For the Matisse suggestion, see Harrison, In Camera, 98–101.

65 Reproduced in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 132–4.

66 Reproduced in Harrison, In Camera, 131. The accompanying commentary on the work is unpersuasive. The work was recorded as ‘destroyed’ by Alley (Francis Bacon, D9), but has re-emerged since Bacon’s death.

67 This connection is also noted, but interpreted more thematically, in Matthew Gale, ‘Zone’, in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 107.

68 Reproduced in Harrison, In Camera, 227.

69 Alley, Francis Bacon, 63.

70 Ibid., 58.

71 Sylvester, Interviews, 199.

72 ‘Survivors’, Time 54 (21 November 1949): 44.

73 Neville Wallis, ‘Francis Bacon’, Observer, 29 September 1950, 6, cited in Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland, 103.

74 Martin Harrison, ‘Bacon’s Paintings’, in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 45.

75 Sylvester, Interviews, 65.

76 Martin Harrison, Keynote Lecture at Francis Bacon conference, Tate Britain, London, 23 October 2008.

 77 See, for example, Triptych March 1974 and Figure in Movement (1978).

78 Riefenstahl, Olympia, 40–1.

79 Russell, Francis Bacon, 55.

80 Bacon (1971–3), in Sylvester, Interviews, 81; Hugh Davies, ‘Bacon Material’, unpublished typescript, 1973, collection Sam Hunter.

81 Bacon, letter to Sonia Orwell, 13 December 1954, Orwell Archive, Library, University College, London. The letter was composed in a hotel in Rome. Some punctuation has been inserted for the sake of clarity. The text here provides a more accurate transcription than the version published in Bacon and Sutherland (97–98). An extract subsequently appeared in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 21. The reference is to Leo Longanesi, Il mondo cambia. Storia di cinquant’anni (Milan: Rizzoli, 1949). For a surviving sheet worked on by Bacon, see Harrison and Daniels, Francis Bacon: Incunabula (London: Thames and Hudson), 62. The Ann mentioned in the letter may well be Ann Fleming, wife of the novelist Ian, who was a close friend of Bacon’s and Orwell’s and the previous month had remarked to Evelyn Waugh: ‘I thought you might have some small unpublished work of a morbid character that could be illustrated by Francis Bacon’ (Mark Amory, ed., The Letters of Ann Fleming [London: Harvill Press, 1985], 147). In encouraging Bacon to do a book, the two women were doubtless inspired by his conversation, and an impulse to help Bacon with his perennial money problems.

82 A Susan Sontag Reader (London: Penguin, 1982), 324.

83 Francis Bacon in Conversation with Michel Archimbaud (London: Phaidon, 1993), 84.

84 Theodore Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, in The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991), 132–57.

85 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations (London: Jonathon Cape, 1968), 243.

86 Hannah Arendt, ‘Nightmare and Flight’, Partisan Review 12, no. 2 (1945), reprinted in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, Jerome Kohn, ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 133–5.

87 Tony Judt, ‘The ‘‘Problem of Evil’’ in Postwar Europe’, New York Review of Books 55, no. 2 (14 February 2008).

 

 

 

 

 

Cat’s Cradle – Francis Bacon and the Art of ‘Isabel Rawsthorne’

 

 

 

 

CAROL JACOBI   |   VISUAL CULTURE IN BRITAIN   |   VOLUME 10   |   NUMBER 3   |   DECEMBER 2009

 

 

This first critical article on the art of Isabel Rawsthorne (Fig. 1) will introduce her career and offer a glimpse of its implications for Francis Bacon during and after the war.1 Since Hugh Davies pioneering work on Bacon’s work during this period, it has remained at best relatively obscure and at worst incorporated into reductive myths of autonomy and instinct. Recent and current research is, however, identifying a proliferation of sources and associations, suggesting that we can think of these years as an accelerated engagement with painting, and paint, through painters.2 The destroyed canvases, forgotten liaisons and legends of self-taught, spontaneous transformation arise precisely because the transformations were neither spontaneous nor unschooled.3 They were an opportunist, magpie multiplicity of intersections, a tussle to come to terms with the state of the art through other artists, to which Rawsthorne was key.

It is a measure of Bacons ingenuity and skill that this phase of investigation quickly resolved into, and was publicized as, a dialogue with only the very great, a dialogue, moreover, that was presented not as influence, but as an exchange between equals. By 1946 he was already being compared to Velázquez.4 Such virtuoso self-fashioning was orientated towards the production of a singularity which I shall not challenge. Neither do I intend to diagnose influence between Bacon and Rawsthorne. I wish, rather, to dramatize debate, to set Bacons painting more vividly within the risks, experiments and discoveries that were taking place during and following the war.

Rawsthorne married three times and has therefore been known by four names during her life. Although she was born Isabel Nicholas, this text will revert to the professional name under which she worked and exhibited:
 Isabel Lambert.

 

Two figures

Francis Bacon (1909-92) was three years older than Isabel Lambert (1912-92). Where his family’s background was military, her father was a captain in the merchant navy, but both men dealt in animals: Edward Bacon bred horses and Philip Nicholas traded exotic breeds to British zoos.5 Neither child enjoyed a great deal of paternal care. The incompatibility, violence and eventual rejection delivered by Eddy Bacon to some degree matched Nicholas long absences at sea and death during Lamberts teens. Although she had a happier youth, being loved, healthy and allowed to run wild, her mothers sudden loss of financial support and unsympathetic Edwardian values led Lambert to leave home at anearly age.6 Like Bacon, she was living on her own by seventeen, reliant on painting and studying at Liverpool School of Art. In 1930, she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy and went to London, but found the institution dilatory, stifling and less tolerant of her independent lifestyle. After two years she left for a place in the studio of Jacob Epstein, then at the height of his reputation as a controversial modern.

Lambert worked, modelled and lived with the Epsteins, sharing a bedroom and friendship with their teenage daughter, Peggy Jean, as well as a relationship with Epstein himself.7 This interweaving of pragmatic and real relations, independence and patriarchal protection, echoes Bacons early years with patrons such as Roy de Maistre and Eric Hall.8 Although it could be argued that Lambert gained training and found her way to the heart of the avant-garde more efficiently than Bacon, both artists exhibited for the first time in mainstream galleries between 1933 and 1934. Bacon showed at the Mayor Gallery and Lambert at the Arnold Haskell. Lambert was required to leave the Epsteins the following year to hide a pregnancy; the child returned to be brought up by Margaret Epstein, and Lambert moved to Left Bank Paris. From September 1934, she studied in the Acade mie de la Grande Chaumiere, lived with the painter Balthus and his wife, and modelled and painted in the studio of Andre Derain. At twenty-four, financial independence of a kind (and her own studio) was secured by marriage to a dashing Daily Express journalist, Sefton Delmer.9 Lambert resided in luxury on the Right Bank, but continued her Left Bank life and fond relationships with earlier protectors. Two liaisons would become especially important, one with Harpers Bazaar photographer-turned-artist Peter Rose Pulham, and the other with the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Both men lived bohemian existences and neither was in a position to offer Lambert security when she returned, single, after the war.10 She became involved with a series of composers, living briefly with Rene Leibowitz in 1946, returning to London the following year to marry Constant Lambert, the English Diagalev, at thirty-five, and, at forty-two, wedding Alan Rawsthorne. The intimacy with Rose Pulham and with Giacometti would last, however, constant, discreet and mainly platonic, until their deaths in 1956 and 1966, respectively.

Bacon and Lambert could have been aware of each other as early as the1930s, when they exhibited in London. Her unpublished memoir is vague on the timings and details of relationships, and particularly reticent on Bacon, saying simply that she met him in Paris with Peter.11 They may have met during Lamberts first sojourn there before the war, rather than during her second, as from 1945 Peter Rose Pulham was living in Norfolk, then in Valmondois, Val-dOise. In 1934, Lambert stayed in the same Montparnasse hotel as Bacon had in 1928, the Delambre, just behind the Cafe Dome. If Bacon returned to Paris in the 1930s, their paths may have crossed there or in arty cafes and clubs, albeit with Bacon on the fringes of a society in which Lambert had quickly found a place. If he was there he left Paris during these six years. Valmondois was only forty kilometres from Paris, so Rose Pulham, Lambert and he may have met up there after the war. Whether or not Lambert and Bacon were aware of each other before the war, they certainly knew each other during it. The repeated roll-call of characters, streets and pubs that pepper the memoirs of the war period confirms Martin Hammers estimate that the London artistic avant garde comprised no more than a few hundred persons artists, collectors, gallery owners, supporters circulating around an equally restricted array of places.12 Lambert exchanged Paris for London on 14 June 1940, the day the Germans invaded. She lived an up-market life in Lincolns Inn, but Rose Pulham moved out of the Cavendish Hotel into Lawrence Street, parallel to Glebe Place, where Bacon had a studio.13 Lambert was a frequent visitor, of course (she and another Paris comrade, the civil servant/spy Donald Maclean, sunbathed on the roof). It is possible the artists met in one of the local pubs, which were important congregation points during the Blitz. They were certainly mixing in the Soho clubs by late 1942.14 Between 1942 and 1943, Lambert and Bacon were in London only occasionally; he was with Hall in Petersfield and she was sequestered at Woburn, adapting her skills to botanical illustration, printing, forgery and pornography in a secret house devoted to black propaganda. They returned to London in 1943; she was working at Bush House when Bacon took on Millais studio in Cromwell Place. He and Lambert were part of the arty/bohemian/media set that congregated around the West End and the BBC, as well as Kensington and Chelsea. This included Lamberts particular friends such as Rose Pulham, the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi,15 poets Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas (recorded in an effervescent portrait, c.1947-9),16 old Parisian comrades such as Maclean, Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson (backer and editor of Horizon magazine), and Mechtild Nawiasky (editor of Lilliput).17 Rose Pulham temporarily had a photographic studio in Ebury Street and took pictures in Bacons studio that year.18

Lambert probably drew and painted more consistently than Bacon in the period before and during the war but, like his, almost none of her work from this time survives, possibly destroyed, but more likely lost. Their shared circumstance is hinted at by the fact that both artists had their next important solo shows in the same year and at the same venue, Erica Brausens newly established Hanover Gallery. Lamberts opened in February 1949 and Bacons in November. Both painted for follow-on exhibitions, including London Paris at the ICA in 1950, although only Lambert participated in the Festival of Britain. Often together, they shared a scintillating social life, matching each other in magnetism, wit and debate. In August 1950, for example, Bacon went to Gertrude Stein’s Wedding Bouquet (spoken by a fully made-up Constant), followed by a party with Margot Fonteyn, Frederick Ashton, Elizabeth Lutyens and other luminaries. He left last, at 7 a.m., with Alan Rawsthorne.19 By 1951, Constant had banned Bacon and Connolly from their home.20 They socialized with the Horizon circle elsewhere; a typical Soho dinner at the French Club with Bacon, Paolozzi, Watson, the philosopher A.J. Ayer and Stephen Spender was paid for by Watsons lover, Norman Fowler.21 Christmas of 1948 and of 1950 was spent together in the country, at Bradwell, the home of Labour politician Tom Driberg.22 Lambert sums up a weekend there in the summer of 1949, with the politicians Aneurin Bevan and Jenny Lee, as consisting of fast, pointed, conversations on many subjects including Arts, Greek theatre.23

The Horizon network was useful to Bacon, but he also won the admiration and affection of other key figures in the art world such as Herbert Read and Graham Sutherland, to whom Lambert, with her connections and perspective from Paris, showed little respect. She preferred the company of less establishment characters, such as Paolozzi, Rose Pulham and Bacon himself. She did not hold back from disagreeing violently with Matthew Smith when at his studio with Paolozzi and Bacon, and on other occasions argued with Roland Penrose and Henry Moore.24 Smith and Penrose remained loyal friends, as did Michael Ayrton (though his art annoyed her too), but Lambert and Moore never got on: he does tend to say the MOST NAIVE, outrageously juvenile statements such as the test of a painting is if you could turn it into a sculpture . . . I’ve been used to better conversation!25 The deciding factor in the advance of Lamberts reputation was, however, unconnected to her esprit de contraire.26 In 1950 she put off exhibitions in Paris and Milan and her second solo show at the Hanover, in favour of designing the Covent Garden ballet Tiresias.27 Although the controversial scheme won success, she regretted the distraction and declared it would be her last. Bacon, by contrast, dropped his idea of designing Jean Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches around this time.28 By 1951, Bacon and Brausen had established his work with major collectors and galleries, including MoMA and Tate, while Lambert had become known as a designer. The untimely death of Constant in August 1951 and the disappearance of most of their money induced Lambert to reappear as a decorator, creating the opera Electra and the ballet Blood Wedding for 1953. She did further ballets, Madame Chrysantheme in 1955 and Jabez and The Devils in 1961.

The loss of Constant left Lambert distraught, but freer to paint. The more she focused on art, however, the less she cared about the art world. She returned to Paris again and worked in a tiny garret until she was persuaded to exchange some independence for a cottage and studio with Alan Rawsthorne in the village of Little Sampford in Essex. She continued to see friends at gatherings in London and Paris, but spent more and more time in the country, not re-exhibiting at the Hanover until 1959 and letting nearly a decade elapse before her show at the Marlborough in 1968. Many artists dislike exhibiting, but Lambert hated it; this word is triple underlined in a letter to Rose Pulham: it takes months off my work . . . BUGGER.29 When asked in later life if she had plans to exhibit, she replied simply: Don’t you ever dream that you’re walking stark naked through Piccadilly Circus?30 During this period Bacon won his first Tate retrospective, began his interviews, and, as Peppiatt has remarked, passed from . . . brilliant outsider to a successful artist of international stature.31 Lambert gained less fame or financial independence. Painting was always a process of experiment, and she became impatient with any approach that she had mastered, embarking on a new project which took many years to bear fruit. Admiring though she was of Bacon, she was critical of periods of his career when she felt he was repeating himself.32 The variations between each of her phases wrong-footed the critics, however, making it difficult for her to establish a name. Her last departure, the monumental Migrations series painted in her seventies, remains uncelebrated.

 

Thinking around

Lambert’s relationship with Bacon conforms to a pattern marked by experimentalism and disdain for convention, but most of all by passion for ideas. Her life and letters suggest that she and Bacon knew each other from 1943, were particularly intimate between 1948 and 1950, and were close friends thereafter. He painted her between 1963 and 1983. Her copy of John Russell’s 1971 book was given to her by Bacon with an affectionate dedication and she stayed with him at his hotel on the occasion of his retrospective at the Grand Palais that year. There is more than one account of a physical dimension, including Bacons claim in an interview with Paris Match in 1985.33 A letter from Lambert to Rose Pulham written in 1950 makes breathless reference to news that she is longing to tell, of a weekend at Faringdon with Francis.34 Biddy Noakes, a close friend of Lamberts (and custodian of her estate), has suggested that sex was in part a way of getting to know someone beyond the usual barriers.35 Rose Pulham, Giacometti, Georges and Diane Bataille and Michel Leiris, to select a few examples, shared with Lambert similarly vividly affectionate and intellectual friendships (Leiris regularly sending her manuscripts, for instance) long after any sexual relations had ceased. An understanding of this connection changes our image of Bacon in his thirties. We find him already privy to a network of artistic and intellectual activity focused on Paris. Key encounters ascribed to the 1960s through Sonia Orwell or Anne Fleming had already occurred by the late 1940s. This probably included meeting Anne Fleming herself, with whose husband-to-be, the writer Ian, Lambert socialized, as well as Patrick Leigh-Fermor and his future wife, Joan.36 The latter, a photographer, was Lamberts closest girlfriend and was at that time married to Lambert’s lover, John Rayner (Joan had met Leigh-Fermor during the war and married him in 1963). Leiris, an important critic and friend of Bacon’s, was known to Lambert from the 1930s and was close by 1946.37 Bacon’s social network the writers and intellectuals who would remain important through his career maps exactly onto Lamberts wartime circle.

More important still is Lambert herself, one of the last to leave Paris in 1940, one of the first to return in May 1945, bilingual and in continual dialogue with the Parisian avant garde. She represented for Bacon not a certain set of ideas that can be shown to have influenced (or not) his art, but an artist and art in process. A wartime friendship with her and Rose Pulham, associates of Pablo Picasso, Giacometti, Balthus and old hands such as Derain,38 as well as British artists such as Ayrton and Smith (whose studio was in the same building as Rose Pulham’s flat),39 would chime with Bacons quite sudden integration into mainstream artistic circles and engagement with studio practice after 1943, analysed by Hammer in Bacon and Sutherland. Where Sutherland was older and relatively established, Lambert and Rose Pulham, passionate, bohemian, iconoclastic refugees from the Left Bank, must have seemed exemplars of the coming generation, and the possibility of being a part of it.40 Between 1943 and 1949 Bacon began to paint in a more sustained way, to present himself as a major voice and relaunched himself with his masterpiece Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c.1944), exhibited in 1945. An examination of intersections between his and Lambert’s careers at this time can cast light on the set of decisions that brought this about. Bacon’s Three Studies was famously based on the Eumenides or Furies of Aeschylus The Oresteia, informed by T.S. Eliot’s updating of it in The Family Reunion (1939) and William Bedell Stanfords newly published Aeschylus and his Style: A Study in Language and Personality (1942). Lambert, like Bacon, was fascinated by myth, read the classics and sought opportunities to discuss them with those who had had a classical education notably, Rose Pulham and Lamberts wartime lovers, Rayner41 and MacNeice. The latter had created a new translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, the play that introduces the Furies, three years before, and Lambert kept with her a sketchbook containing Cassandras invocation to Apollo from the Agamemnon.42 Her nickname was, moreover, harpy, bestowed, probably, by Rose Pulham owing to her frequent shrieks of laughter, outrage or delight, or possibly by Giacometti, who liked to stress her reputation as a devourer of men.43 She was very particular about identifying the Furies as Erinyes, not Eumenides (their kindly manifestation in the Orestes story).44 In 1947 she wrote of herself to Rose Pulham: two texts for a HARPIE that is provisionally Cosmopolitan: You profit from all that you take and give back all you get. A harpie in the hand is hard to hold but a harpie in the home is a haven from harm.45

Bacon’s Furies were adapted from a range of reproduced Surrealist imagery such as Picasso’s biomorphs and Ernsts harpy image: Reve dune Petite Fille Qui Voulut entre au carmel Marceline-Marie: Sous mon Blanc Vetement venez avec moi, pies et Harpies, Prenez des Charbons Ardents dans vos Bec et . . . (1929-30 collage), and Schrenck Nomings se ance photographs.46 Lambert, by contrast, was aligned with the embattled minority position of figurative painters of the period, specifically Giacometti (the other being Balthus), and worked mainly from nature. Her earliest drawings took as their subjects creatures she came across in the countryside or that were kept by her parents in the house: throughout her life she collected, drew and painted skeletons and corpses, especially birds. She sketched at zoos from the 1930s and drew the wildlife of Australia in 1977. Her first oils for example, Skeletons of Two Birds and a Fish (c.1945-48) (Figure 2) synthesize ideas of the harpy with bird skeletons (which nearly everyone who knew her assumed she identified with herself),47 several of which accompanied the poem in her sketchbook. In the series of works put before the public at her first Hanover show, they rear and stalk, with fish, bats and shells, in ephemeral cages. They evoke Giacomettis sculpture Palace at 4 am (1932),48 which he described as a dorsal column in a cage and skeleton-birds flying high up above the pool of clear, green water in which very fine, very white skeletons of fish were swimming.49

Lambert’s interest in animals, zoology and anthropology (and, in later life, ecology) was complemented and catalysed by her contact with the ethnographic ideas of Leiris and Bataille and their respect for data established with a minimum of approximation.50 Giacometti had a full set of the journal Documents, 1929-30, edited by Bataille, and he and Lambert visited the Galerie dAnatomie Compare e and the Galerie de Paleontologie in the Jardin des Plantes.51 Elizabeth Cowling has argued that Palace at 4 am evokes memories of the Galerie de Paleontologie: great windows, streaked with their black armature of bars, still glittering with the last rays of sunlight, still disoriented.52 The erotic frisson she detects in the history of life and death laid out in the museum, and the skeletal evidence of death in the living, surely informs Lamberts ghostly figures. The bird motif also synthesizes thoughts offered by Bataille on the origin of art and man. He kept a folder of material concerning Georges Montandons theories on the descent of man, including layer diagrams, famous photograph of Dr Francois de Loys dead ape, temporarily argued to be the missing link. With the items in Batailles folder was an article in a 1929 copy of lAnthropologie which suggested that a bird incised in a stone from the Upper Palaeolithic period, also reproduced in Documents, represented the first work of art.53 Batailles later essay, Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice (Hegel, death and sacrifice, 1955) clarified the connection between the origins and essence of man and the origin and essence of consciousness through art, and returned to this motif: For Hegel, it is both fundamental and worthy of amazement that human understanding (ie language, discourse) should have had the strength (an incomparable power) to separate its constitutive elements from the Totality . . . (this tree, this bird, this stone).54 Lambert’s isolated birds, at once detached signifiers and anatomical actuality, explored Bataille’s understanding of the origin of consciousness and knowledge as well the animal descent of man. Bataille’s 1929 piece on Apocalypse in Documents 2 might appear to have provided a common source for Bacons harpies and Lamberts stalking birds (Figure 3). The anti-idealism of the essay was shared by Bacon and Lambert. The idea of atheistic sacrifice, and the winged murderers in the Apocalypse of Saint Sever manuscript that illustrated it, synthesized classical and Christian myth in a similar way to Bacons blurring of the Eumenides (Erinyes) with the attendants at the Crucifixion.55 The gridded superimposition of rearing winged creatures is like Lamberts birds, and their grotesque hybridity is reminiscent of Bacons Furies. Bataille’s description of them as butchers, with the physical optimism and enthusiasm for their work that characterises the killers of the abattoir, also looks forward to Bacon’s mysterious Painting 1946, which began, so he claimed, as a bird or chimpanzee, only to become a beaming butcher.56

Rosalind Krauss has pioneered a rethinking of Bataille’s relation to the art of this period and Dawn Ades has noted that Bacon owned copies of Documents and that he acknowledged a debt to the pictures of slaughter-
houses by Eli Lotar in its pages.57 Ades goes on to demonstrate a crucial connection between his imagery and Batailles entry La Bouche, particularly with respect to Three Figures. Bataille’s assertion, later in the same passage, that human beings do not have a simple architecture like animals, and it is not even possible to say where they begin and that strictly speaking they start at the top of their skulls, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part58 also evokes the heads that dwindle above the mouth in Bacons Painting 1946 (1946), Head I (1948), and Head II and Head III (1949). There were, however, thirteen years between the publication of Documents and the manifestation of these ideas in Bacons work and it seems likely that this was catalysed by Lambert. An acknowledgment of her role is interesting because it reinforces the likelihood that Bacon was reacting to French text as well as imagery and raises the possibility that he was responding to both old ideas and recent ones, perhaps not even published. More importantly, the lively, discursive nature of the letters exchanged between Leiris and Bataille during this period, as well as those between Lambert and Giacometti and Rose Pulham, reminds us that Bacon’s responses should be understood not as influence, but as participation in a debate in progress. Lambert’s lifelong focus on the skeleton and the corpse relates to the famous slaughterhouse images and a later article, Theory of Religion, written by Bataille in 1948, just after his closest intimacy with her.59 It is worth quoting at length:

The human attitude towards the body is formidably complex. In so far as he is spirit, it is man’s misfortune to have the body of an animal and thus to be like a thing, but it is the glory of the human body to be the substratum of the spirit . . . the body never ceases to be haunted . . . so much so that if death reduces it to the level of a thing, the spirit is more present than ever . . . In a sense the corpse is the most complete affirmation of the spirit. What deaths definitive impotence and absence reveals is the very essence of the spirit, just as the scream of the one that is killed is the supreme affirmation of life. Conversely, mans corpse reveals the complete reduction of the animal body, and therefore the living animal, to thinghood . . . a utility of the same nature as canvas, iron, or timber.60

Bataille unites the thinghood of body, corpse and canvas, predicating an art which evokes presence through absence, reflecting Giacometti’s distinction between sculpture as living presence and corpse. The scream partakes of the body, a spasm rather than a statement. Bacons cry and Lambert’s skeletons explore the theme they are the figure made figural to affirm life.61 Lambert’s familiarity with Documents at this time is exhibited in her playful emulation of its style in Il Mondo Libero (a propaganda magazine for newly liberated Italy which she edited between 1944 and 1945), particularly in her fondness for finding pretexts to introduce British bulls in unexpected combinations an anxious meaty specimen looks over Raphael’s Deposition, for example, while a pub sign is elevated on curlicues opposite his Ascension.62 The bull is, of course, a Bataillian motif, central to his novel Story of the Eye first published in 1928, which Bacon had read. Lambert reused the bull motif as an erotic totem, six times life-size, in her startling blue set for Tiresias (1950, Royal Opera House). Bacon seems to allude to these credentials in his inclusion of a bull form and brilliant blue ground in Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967). The year 1943, in which Bacons engagements with Lambert’s circle, with myth and with Bataille’s ideas about the body seem to be coming about, also marked the beginning of his interest in representational painting and technique, a practice which was to take him away from mainstream modernism for the remainder of his career. The change is in marked sympathy with Lambert’s minority commitment to the figure, human or animal, in its most material sense, particularly her interrogation of appearance. At the Liverpool School of Art she was a part of a small group of students who drew each other to maximize study from the nude (although these works had to be hidden), a subject she came back to whenever she had models, in the 1930s and 1940s at la Grande Chaumiere or at male artists studios; from the 1950s she had friends or paid sitters and was given unprecedented access to moving bodies in the mirrored practice room at the Royal Ballet; in 1961 a visit to Africa offered posed and unposed models. Bacon’s bodies after 1943, such as Man Standing, begin to build up partial appearance with cumulative marks, akin to Giacometti’s recent style or Lambert’s Portrait of Dylan Thomas, or Walter Sickert.63 His grisaille suggests a desire to address form, although it is only superficially like the work of Lambert or Giacometti, deriving largely from monochrome photographic sources.64 More revealing is Bacons engagement with space. Lambert and Rose Pulham conceive of setting or landscape as environment. Works such as Bacon’s Figure Getting out of a Car, recorded in Rose Pulham’s 1943 photograph, feature architectural detail similar to Balthus or Rose Pulham’s interiors, and its reworked version, Figure in Landscape (c.1945) was the first to locate the figure within the famous space frame. Balthus, who knew all the parties, was convinced Giacometti’s Palace at 4 am was its source, but this could have been mediated by Lambert’s networks.65 Her 1940s grids, derived from Giacometti, zoo cages and the scaffolds of post-war buildings, place her figures slightly out of place as they slip outside the lines.66

Lambert lived in France from 1945 to late 1947, while Bacon spent most of his time in Monte Carlo. In the first two weeks of November 1946 he stayed at her hotel, the Hotel St Romain, Rue St Roche. It is significant that apart from a Unesco exhibition featuring his own work, uppermost in his correspondence was an intention to see Balthus figurative show at the Wildenstein Gallery.67 The visit marked a revision of his negotiation with the figurative, however. Lambert was sceptical about Balthus ideas and preferred Giacomettis struggle with figuration per se. Bacon was perhaps reflecting an accord found with Lambert when he reported to Sutherland his reaction to what he had seen in Paris. The enthusiasm for Picasso had gone, he was impatient with the Unesco show and he had reconsidered Balthus. What had been marvellous and so disturbing became an interesting revelation of the limits of illustration. Bacon came to the famous conclusion that the tenderness which we would all love to get for a change . . . can’t be done that way it can only come as a technical thing. He was rejecting the terrible decoration we are all contaminated by in which he included his own work: I feel more and more that nothing matters or will happen until someone makes a new technical synthesis that can carry over from sensation to our nervous system.68

What did Bacon mean by tenderness in this context? I would suggest that he meant touching, in the sense of an intimacy, presence, an encounter with the real. His engagement with figurative technique had led to an engagement with figuration itself and a dialogue with those artists, writers and thinkers who were testing the limits of figuration (Giacometti) and of knowledge itself (Bataille, Leiris, Sartre). Ideas of human descent, ritual, sovereignty and essence went hand in hand with the arguments of phenomenology, linking being to the struggle to know and represent. The urgency of these issues lay in their responsiveness to recent events and their practical implications for the individuals self-definition, behaviour, and relation to a post-war world. Sartres dismissal of pre-existing moral codes and assertion that man’s responsibility lay in seeking his own essence, defining himself and his age by his actions, turned the artist (epitomized, for Sartre, by Giacometti) into the paradigm for authentic existence, and the figure into the pre-eminent subject of art.69

The application of the broad term Existentialism has positioned Sartre in such a way as to obscure the heterogeneity of this period. Recently, Robin Spencer has revealed Giacometti’s pre-war return to figuration, in which Lambert was involved, as a precocious exploration of philosophical and phenomenological ideas beyond Hegel, a decade before Sartre published in 1943.70 Bataille too was producing considerations of phenomenology and its existential implications from 1940.71 Giacometti met and became close to Sartre in 1941 and Lambert knew him and Simone de Beauvoir, but at the time of Bacons visit she was also seeing other players in the movement: Giacometti, Bataille, Ayer, Leiris, Merleau-Ponty and others of Les Temps Modernes.72 She lived a few doors away from the headquarters of the magazine with the avant-garde composer Leibovitz, another of its contributors. Earlier in the year the couple had gone to stay with the post-Hegelian philosopher Jean Wahl.73 She had known Francis Gruber, one of the figurative artists being embraced by the existentialists and exhibiting at the main venue for these, the Galerie Rene Drouin, since before the war.74 In 1946, bilingual Lambert, together with Bacon, was experiencing this moment as a debate in full swing. Their reactions were not instances of influence, the kind of connection that Bacon spent his life fending off, but participations, at the cutting edge of post-war culture.

The coincidence of Sartre’s celebration of Giacometti’s paradigmatic struggle in his humble studio/cave and the artists New York show might have spurred Lambert and Bacon’s adoption of similar practice and lifestyle (Lambert’s studio from 1953 to her death was as modest and accumulated with detritus as Giacometti’s and Bacon’s, though further from metropolitan life).75 Bacon’s decisive announcement of his desire to link technique directly to the nervous system complements the ideas behind his imagery of the cry, and takes on Giacometti’s various claims to want to give the nearest possible sensation, the matière painting of the artists exhibiting at the Galerie Drouin, and Jean Paulhan’s commentaries in Les Temps Modernes. The details of this dialogue cannot be done justice here, but Bacon’s in camera motifs and their development within the enclosed privacy of the small studio can be understood as an application of the phenomenological bracketing technique, epoche. Lambert lightly adopted the term Quintessentialism for the phenomenological approach, a cats cradle to be slung between reality and /the/ transformation of it into terms of paint and a flat surface. She goes on: all the difficulties of this art reach their summit in the human form. / For me all the problems are practical and the implications, are included in their execution. [Francis . . . seems to agree about this tho, as you know, fascinating as his conversation is, it is very difficult to understand EXACTLY what he means . . .]76

Bacon had far less training in life drawing than Lambert and approached immediacy through different routes; photography was one way, and another was sophisticated representational painting by other artists.77 Lambert eschewed photography, but shared Bacons curiosity and respect for the qualities of uncanny presence in certain works of art of the past, particularly Egyptian, Roman and Northern Renaissance. Her attempts to capture this in versions of the Roman double portrait A Baker and his Wife in her Portrait of a Pompeian Couple (c.1949) (see Figure 1) recall Bacons contemporaneous exploration of Velázquez’s Innocent X. Bacon essayed a painting from life in 1951, Portrait of Lucian Freud. Lambert commented in 1950:

What a curious figure he is! He now wants to paint portraits of living people. Is going to do one of Lucian for the Festival competition they are bound to look at it if it’s Lucian even Kenneth Clarke.78

The picture was modified, brought away from the real to return to it more forcefully, as Bacon tended to put it, through a photograph of Franz Kafka. Lambert’s 1952 Portrait of Muriel Belcher (Figure 4) used the double portrait and Egyptian art in a similar way, anticipating Bacon’s later characterization of Belcher as a sphinx. She depicted the sitter as a pale, archaic bust, with an oracle-like gaze, but curtailed at the shoulders and placed on a table, accompanied by its reflection gazing elsewhere. Bacon always claimed, like Lambert and Giacometti, that Egyptian art was supreme79 and his first sustained work from a seated model, Sketch for a Portrait of Lisa (Lisa Sainsbury, 1955) is similar to Lambert’s Belcher and Giacometti’s white plaster head of Lambert, the so-called Egyptian Portrait of Isabel (1936). The Sainsburys were, interestingly, also patrons and models to Giacometti. They later purchased a bronze of Isabel. In 1955 Bacon is, however, unlikely to have seen it in anything other than a photograph, and synthesizes Lisa’s likeness with the slanted features from another reproduction of Queen Nefertiti (1340 BC). Lambert and Bacons most conspicuous collaboration after 1947 was in their investigation of the working qualities of materials. Lamberts letters between 1948 and 1951 reveal extended struggles with and discussions about supports, paint and additives that complemented their experiments with consistency and the retention of gesture and accident, with surface, pastel, sand and low relief. A letter to Rose Pulham of Christmas 1950 is typical; she lists her problems, including:

How to make ones [sic] paintings really visible. How to eliminate the excess of oil and how to retain the freedom of the brushstroke while producing a surface that will reflect the light rather than absorbing it.80

Bacon’s extraordinary technical achievements have been extensively analysed by many commentators, particularly Sylvester and Deleuze, and are currently undergoing scientific research.81 Lamberts search for presence in paint successfully materializes in her baboons, Male Baboon (Figure 5) and Female Baboon and Child, made immediately after the first Hanover show. The allocation of gender in the titles, the fact that the animals are not it, is significant. The male crouches like a primal Adam, or Newton (William Blake, 1795/c.1805), to remind us of Montandons missing link. The figure wavers between representation and its lack. He emerges illogically from almost random strokes, barely out of the dust (what Bataille called the totality), and nearly absorbed back, erased by the very marks that signify him. His face, simultaneously in profile and turned towards us, is at once alienated, aggressive and appealing. His distressed surfaces communicate a sense of existential embattlement, Bataille’s scandal of matter or the lines of Antonin Artaud: We are not yet born, we are not yet in the world, there isnot yet a world, things have not yet been made, the reason for being has not yet been found.82

It is likely that Bacon accompanied Lambert to London Zoo, given records of his frequent visits to her home at Albany Terrace, Regents Park and the appearance in his output at this point of simian imagery, blended into Head I (19471948) and Head II (1949), isolated in Study of Baboon (1953) and Chimpanzee (1955). Although Lambert’s method relied on observing these models and Bacons did not, they shared Batailles ideas on the common denominator of the figure, an embodied consciousness in the world, in dialectical existence with it, prior to or beyond mediation, sovereign, articulated by the cry or the animal body. Their related ethnographic, phenomenological, materialist slant will reward further research.

 

Telling tales

Absence of narrative became a talisman of Bacons art and his statements about it, and a central creed of Bacon studies. Paintings crafted to enhance the facts of their constituents (fluids flow, emulsions clog, canvas, pinioned to wood, stretches into encrusted, soaked or raw planes) smuggle signs deftly past language directly to the nervous system. Absence of speech is commonly ascribed to seeing a Bacon painting.83 Such works exist beyond the single encounter, however, and speech and text have been spectacularly forthcoming. As Marc Shell has shown, the social value of most art lies not in its material constituents, but in its shared signifying potential, its stories.84 My point is that however much we celebrate non-illustration in theory, illustration is present, essential, in practice, necessary for images to be represented and exchanged, within specialist academic communities as well as commerce, the media and popular culture. In the case of Bacon, elaborative narratives from outside the frame fulfil the function of those absent on the canvas.

Lambert, by contrast, never told her story. Late interviews disappointed visitors in search of celebrity and her autobiography was unfinished. Until now, the hundreds of pictures that she left at her death have been
represented only by catalogues and reviews. The sense of risk she experienced in showing her work was connected to this reluctance to mediate; a commitment to the necessity of an art that will communicate for itself, to art as affect rather than illustration. She asked Rose Pulham and Leiris to write catalogue notes because she knew they shared this philosophy and would omit explanations.85

Art that excluded itself from the grand narrative of abstraction during its heyday and also eschewed straightforward illustration was, however, particularly in need of mediating myths. Bacon turned this to his advantage, constructing an image of absolute singularity (untutored, instinctive, gambler with paint) and unimpeachable authenticity (pursuer of the unvarnished real). This was amplified by anecdotes about his life so vivid that it is now nearly impossible to approach the works without them.86 The phenomenon has suited art history, which is after all a discipline devoted entirely to transforming objects into texts. Although Lambert shared Bacon’s commitment to non-illustrational figurative art, she did not address the professional problems it raised. Her talking and writing about art were no less copious: nights in Saint-Germain with the foremost intellectuals of her day, fierce debates within the cultural elite of London, and long epistolary exchanges with Giacometti and Rose Pulham but they remained private. As a result, while Lamberts illustrational decors for ballet and opera were discussed, celebrated, and in use until the 1990s,87 her scrupulously enigmatic paintings remained only paintings; without narrative frameworks, their silence generated silence. Lambert’s diffidence might yet have gathered its own cultural myths, if her likeness and persona had not been so fabulously commandeered by others: by the paintings, sculptures and biographies of Epstein, Derain, Giacometti, Picasso and Bacon, as well as those of her three famous husbands. Accounts of other artists naturally supplement the works of their protagonists, so Lambert is recorded mainly as a sitter. In 2008 her name became the occasion of a joint exhibition, Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers: Portraits by Giacometti and Bacon, that contained nothing by her hand.88 In the absence of regular shows she grew better known for her appearances in Bacon’s story, his carnivalesque gatherings, the pictures he painted and the photographs he commissioned from John Deakin. She participated in his post-existential Camelot, while allowing her own famous glamour to lapse. Daniel Farson’s 1993 book The Gilded Gutter Life of Bacon, and its 1998 off-shoot, the film Love is the Devil, describe her laughing, shrieking, imbibing exemplar of the always-open Baconian mouth. These images have passed into popular culture, along with a host of animal metaphors associating her with appetite and carnality. Giacomettis biographer, James Lord, to whom the Piccadilly Circus remark was addressed, finds it no more difficult to imagine her striding stark naked in the street than lurking in a lush Sumatran jungle . . . unafraid and menacing.89

Lambert became a vanitas, a validation of Bacons mortal themes. Signs of maturity, conflated with signs of dissipation, were constantly and cruelly compared with the siren, Schiaparelli-clad figure of her youth, a life of uninhibited exuberance until the onslaught of old age.90 This picture, like that of Dorian Gray, promotes an image of Bacon as perpetually young. Time and again journalists and writers return to his uncanny perpetuation of protean energy and good looks. The myth of Bacon’s heroic expenditure requires transference of its losses onto others. His risks and consumption remain exhilarating only in so far as the abuse, the addictions are manifested elsewhere Lambert, Deakin, Peter Lacy, George Dyer, Henrietta Moraes and others become ciphers of cost.

This formula is a characteristic exaggeration (it is always surprising to remember that Moraes outlived Bacon, dying at sixty-seven), at least in the case of Lambert. After the hedonism of her glittering marriage to Constant, she was grateful to withdraw to the country and more at home there than in the Colony Room.91 Bacon, too, had various rural addresses, including a house in Essex, about forty-five minutes drive from her thatched cottage. Muriel, characterized most frequently as the sphinx-like keeper of the Colony code, was a friend outside the club, a visitor to Lambert’s home and studio from the late 1940s.92 The stress on drinking and wit in popular accounts obscures the attraction of established relationships, genuine conversation and social habits developed in the dangerous and depleted days during and after a war. The mutually complementary legends of Bacons and Lamberts alcohol consumption are also over-determined. Both were hard drinkers, even for their generation, but this rarely went without an equally enthusiastic pursuit of good food. They shared a lifelong love of cookery, encouraged by Lambert’s determination to bring French finesse to wartime rations. There were problems with alcohol, but they were also known to feign drunkenness when it suited them. Lambert tells a story of doing this to get out of an all-too-predictable orgy at the Batailles,93 and a particularly good performance of Bacon’s has been immortalized on the South Bank Show.94 More significantly, both artists watched two of their three partners, and many friends, succumb to alcoholism. Constants death from diabetes and delirium tremens in 1951 was followed in uncanny mimicry by Alans in 1971, only three months after the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer. Other intimates, Rose Pulham, MacNeice, Thomas and the poet Randall Swingler, died in their fifties from similar causes. The fact that Lambert and Bacon outlived so many who were close to them and worked until their deaths (despite operations to their eyes), at 79 and 82 respectively, three months apart, suggests a degree of control over their lives and bodies.

Although it is beyond argument that Lambert’s narrative became an important supplement to Bacon’s, it is difficult to know how far the appropriation of her persona was deliberate on his part. Certainly it seemed to suit him to publicize her role as muse rather than maker, telling Paris Match in 1985: You know, I also made love to Isabel Rawsthorne, a very beautiful woman who was Derains model and Georges Bataille’s girlfriend.95

However reliable this statement may be, it does reveal the importance to him in later life of Lambert’s linking role to other great men. In promoting her pedigree as muse, Bacon helped to obscure her history as artist. Bacon and Lambert attended each others openings with loyal punctuality (Figure 6), but seem to have been restrained in their praise of each other’s work, comfortable about disagreement and common ground, concentrating on practical problems. Lambert is probably the deliverer of the criticism that Bacon tells David Sylvester he has found so much more helpful than praise. She is also likely to be the exception to the majority of his artist friends, whom he feels he cannot criticize, but her name is not mentioned in the interview.96 As a painter she received identical treatment to any figure who might disturb Bacon’s carefully constructed singularity.

Her fate is paralleled by that which William Vaughan ascribes to John Deakin, an acknowledged and successful photographer whose association with Bacon left him with a reputation as a low-life snapper. Vaughan notes the way Bacon’s famous descriptions of photography as mere illustration and the images he commissioned from Deakin as data for his paintings subtly diminished the photographers creative input.97 Bacon’s marginalization of Lambert took another form. From 1963, he entitled pictures of her Isabel Rawsthorne. Lambert had chosen not to take her third husbands name. She had built up her reputation as Isabel Lambert and continued to sign her work IAL, only scrawling her married name in longhand on a few pictures in the 1990s. Bacon’s nineteen pictures of her eclipsed the Lambert persona. Late interviews and obituaries presented her as Rawsthorne, Bacon’s model and Alans wife, and featured images of her rather than by her. She became also a designer and painter, or only a designer, her art barely described and never named.98 The most dramatic instance of this is a posthumous exhibition at the Michael Parkin Gallery in July 1998. It was entitled Isabel Rawsthorne Painting the Ballet and was introduced not by any account of the work in the show, but by Paolozzi’s memoir which celebrated her entirely as model and beauty.99

It is unlikely that Bacon’s gallery was responsible for changing the name; Lambert did not exhibit in her lifetime as Isabel Rawsthorne and her Marlborough show was no exception. It may or may not be significant that a note on the back of one of the many photographs of Lambert found in Bacons studio after his death underlines the surname: Isabel Rawsthorne,100 and she was always known as Mrs Rawsthorne at Bacon’s favourite restaurant, Wheeler’s. Farson and Peppiatt cite instances of Bacon’s manipulation of models, friends and enemies alike, and several commentators have typed George Dyer as the victim-muse, doomed, like a latter-day Lizzie Siddall, to fulfil a self-destructive role fabricated by the artist. Love is the Devil isolated this trait for dramatic impact. Vaughan warns against this over-simple reading, however, and I agree. Such negative characterizations are themselves a product of the courtly logic of the dominant Bacon narrative, the idea of Bacon as originator and centre of all things. Inevitably, other players are over-simplified and not given credit for their own sovereignty or their own stories. An independent look at Lambert’s tale might replace the Camelot model with something more like a cats cradle, a weave of intersections.

 

Acknowledgement

This research could not have been done without the support of the National Portrait Gallery and the Leverhulme Trust, who far-sightedly inaugurated and funded this investigation. I am also grateful to Martin Harrison and many colleagues, to friends of Isabel, Juliet Ryan, Edward and Judith Williams and Pattie Lambert and most of all to Biddy Noakes.

 Notes

 


                                                                   Francis Bacon, Triptych: Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne on White Ground, 1964

 


 

 

      

                         

                            Isabel Rawsthorne, Francis Bacon, Michel Leiris
 

 

 

 

 

 

Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body

 

 

 

 

DARREN C. AMBROSE  |  DELEUZE STUDIES  |  VOLUME 3  |  ISSUE 2  |  DECEMBER 2009

 

One of Deleuze’s ambitions in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is to outline an experimental conceptual analogue of Bacon’s paintings that demonstrates a genuine fidelity to the specificity of his work. His book represents an attempt to produce a philosophy of painting where Bacon is conceived as one of the great painters of immanence, a painter of the body-without-organs. His figural paintings are understood to repeatedly explore the vital intensities and sensations associated with the dynamisms of becoming, processes of individuation and the destratification of the organism, subject and individual. Deleuze suggests that a brutal form of realism is  manifested by Bacon’s art, but it is not a realism associated with the violence of appearance but a violence of sensation associated with a spiritual realism of the body. Bacon’s paintings depict, he claims, a visceral topography of embodied sensation that is profoundly non-representational and spiritual.

One of the most complex and creative sections of the book is his philosophical analysis of the triptychs. In just a few dense pages he arguably provides one of the most powerful accounts yet written about triptychs in relation to the questions of what they are, how they function, and what the operative principles governing their production are. In this paper I wish to develop a reading of Deleuze’s philosophical understanding of the triptychs that incorporates his arguments regarding their non-narrative status within the claims he makes about their capacity to express a spiritual sensation of the eternity of time.1 I will briefly demonstrate that the notion of eternity being elicited from Bacon’s triptychs is largely derived from Spinoza’s Ethics, namely, the eternity of substance and the eternal cycles of becoming. However, in order to fully grasp the significance of Deleuze’s claims regarding the eternal time of triptychs it is necessary to re-examine his initial analysis of classic religious painting which forms much of the context for his argument. Despite the fact that religious art still labours under the auspices of obvious narrative content, Deleuze will claim that it is still capable of conveying intense spiritual sensations associated with the celestial and abstract realm.

Once we develop an understanding of how this was achieved in the past, the significance  of Bacon’s liberation from the constraints of narrative has upon his ability to embody a Spinozistic sense of eternity within the mechanism of triptychs can be explored.

In an interview from 1981 Deleuze talked explicitly about the role intuition played in developing his own understanding of the triptychs when writing:

‘I was looking at the triptychs and had the feeling that there was a certain internal law, forcing me to jump from one reproduction to the other to compare them...’ (Deleuze 2006; 184)

Some initial remarks on the triptychs are contained in the preface to the English translation of the book2, where he clearly identifies the broad shape of his subsequent, more detailed reading. From the very beginning Deleuze aligns himself closely with Bacon’s own remarks on triptychs, which were made in an interview from 1962 with David Sylvester. (Sylvester 1987) Deleuze recognises an inherent quality in Bacon’s triptychs, which he terms their ‘internal law’. Triptychs are composed of three distinct sections, with the separation between panels serving to effectively negate any imposed narrative meaning across the different parts. However, for Deleuze it is precisely this separation which provides the means for linking the three panels in new and unique ways. He argues that there has to be some kind of relationship between the separated parts of each triptych, but that this relationship cannot be narrative or logical in any straightforward way. As he identifies in his subsequent analysis, there is a definite logic but it is of a profoundly irrational order – it is a ‘logic of sensation’. The triptychs establish a common unifying fact for the diverse and separated figures within each of the three panels, but it is a unity radically removed from narrative meaning. Figures present in triptychs become reconceived as ‘rhythmic characters’ rather than agents or subjects operating within a narrative. Triptychs exhibit a ‘brutal’ unity where an array of complex forces and sensations, rather than stories, are distributed across the separated panels. Each triptych operates like an infernal machine producing novel circulations and rhythmic interplays of these characters, forces and sensations.

Somewhat enigmatically, Deleuze identifies a mysterious, unifying force, which is captured by the arrangement of the triptychs but which is also, simultaneously, the force operating to structure and unite the triptychs. This force acts to separate figures, both within and across the panels, and the panels themselves. Deleuze suggests that this unifying and separating force is the force of eternal time.

Before progressing with an analysis of Deleuze’s complex reading of the triptychs, I think it is necessary to question the legitimacy of his emphasis on the non-narrative status of Bacon’s triptychs. One might take the view that Bacon’s insistence, when in conversation with Sylvester, on there being no explicit straightforward narrative is in fact mendacious, that it is part of his effort to control and conceal inconvenient biographical truths and sources in favour of constructing an elaborate mythological artistic persona. Whilst this is probably the case, it remains possible that his broader non-narrative ambitions indicate a more significant philosophical and artistic ambition that is indeed worth taking seriously. For Deleuze, Bacon’s work instantiates a profoundly anti-narrative spiritual dynamic of matter. Nevertheless, by focussing on the non-narrative element I do not believe that Deleuze is altogether denying residues of narrative content that might be clearly present and form an important factor in fully understanding a specific composition. Bacon’s deeply personal obsessions, experiences and inspirations form and shape the voluntaristic intentions that guide his hand at a primary pre-pictorial level and at the ‘first level’ of figuration on the canvas.3 Deleuze is not necessarily denying the existence of this type of intentionality, rather he is bracketing it off, suspending explicit consideration of it, in order to concentrate upon the ’involuntaristic’ aspect of Bacon’s practice or the ‘second order’ of figuration. It is here, within what he calls ’the diagram’, that Bacon’s particular range of visual motifs are injected into a metamorphic, transformative and liberating realm (or experimental amphitheatre) of paint on the canvas.

A significant clue to understanding Deleuze’s attitude towards specific narrative residue emerges from his treatment of religious painters whose figurative innovations are linked to Bacon’s own. When discussing the structural and historical underpinnings of Bacon’s practice, Deleuze discusses one of Bacon’s operative propositions (that are in fact derived from Andre Malraux) that is almost a truism within modern art, and would seemingly necessitate a move within painting towards a form of total or absolute abstraction. This is the supposed conditioning of painting by ’religious possibilities’ or imperatives which simply no longer apply, given that we arguably exist within an atheistic milieu. Deleuze contests whether this historical proposition is really adequate. Such contestation is only the first of a series of critical contestations of Bacon’s ideas outlined in the Sylvester interviews, many of which go some way towards countering the idea that Deleuze is guilty of the most crude and naïve intentional fallacy, and of slavishly adhering to Bacon’s point of view. I want to argue that Deleuze’s remarks on religious painting are critically incisive and do genuinely illuminate an important aspect of Bacon’s work. More importantly, for my purposes, they provide useful insight into Deleuze’s concentration on the non-narrative character of Bacon’s triptychs. When writing of Bacon’s proposition regarding the way painting’s representational function was largely confined by religious or theological sentiment, Deleuze responds by arguing that ‘the link between the pictorial element and religious sentiment...seems poorly defined by the hypothesis of a figurative function that was simply sanctified by faith.’ (Deleuze 2003, 9) To support his argument Deleuze analyses El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz. He notes the presence of a horizontal division separating the painting into two distinct sections – the terrestrial and the celestial. In the lower section of the painting there is figurative and narrative content (albeit unorthodox and already displaying a degree of figural distortion) as the Count’s terrestrial dead body is laid to rest in the Earth. However, in the upper section where the count’s living spirit is being received by Christ, there is an astonishing figural liberation – ‘the Figures are lifted up and elongated, refined without measure, outside all constraint.’

 (Deleuze 2003: 9) The figures in this section of the canvas are relieved of their representative (earthly and bodily) role, and are placed upon an entirely different, spiritual register (they are being put ‘into relation with an order of celestial sensations’ (Deleuze 2003: 9)). Deleuze uses this particular painting to demonstrate how a Christian painting that was ostensibly governed by the historical task to represent and communicate a sacred narrative discovered startlingly aberrant painterly means for expressing non-representational and sensational affects. Here ‘lines, colours and movements’ are freed from the demands of representation and narration, and express celestial, infernal, immaterial and spiritual sensations. This is particularly true if one spends any time at all looking at the different ways Christ’s body is depicted within the history of Christian painting as a means of expressing the broadest range of intense and extreme sensations, ranging from Cimabue to Grunewald.4

Deleuze’s argument suggests that great religious narrative paintings, marked by representational imperatives, provide the conditions of possibility for an essential liberation of figures, i.e. the emergence of Figures 5  freed from figurative constraints and able to become the vehicles of sensation. He notes that ‘Christianity contains a germ of tranquil atheism that will nurture painting; the painter can easily be indifferent to the religious subject he is asked to represent.’ (Deleuze 2003: 124) In Christian painting representational and narrative space is placed into a direct relation with not only accidents but also an aberrant non-representational space (an any-space-whatsoever), a spiritual space, the realm of the immaterial and the invisible. Intriguingly, Deleuze returns to the theme of Christian painting at the end of the book with a discussion of ‘pictorial fact’ (as opposed to representation, thematisation, and narration) in Michelangelo’s work. With Michelangelo pictorial fact’ emerges in its purest state from Christian art where ‘the forms may still be figurative, and there may still be narrative relations between the characters’ – but these constitute the residues of the primary act of figural painting which are supplanted by the properly ‘pictorial fact’. (Deleuze 2003: 160) With Michelangelo Christian painting achieves an extraordinary level of pictorial facticity which ‘no longer tells a story and no longer represents anything but its own movement, and which makes these apparently arbitrary elements coagulate in a single continuous flow.’ (Deleuze 2003: 160) His figures realise, within the realm of Christian art, a form of proto-Baconian pictorial fact where organic figuration provides a painterly vehicle for the ‘revelation of the body beneath the organism’ (i.e. the body-without-organs).6 This body beneath the organic figure causes it to ‘crack or swell’ and imposes a spasm’ on it forcing it into a relation with  ‘forces’ –  ‘sometimes with an inner force that arouses them, sometimes with external forces that traverse them, sometimes with the eternal force of an unchanging time, sometimes with the variable forces of a flowing time.’ (Deleuze 2003: 160-1)7

If the extraordinary manifestation of bizarre figural metamorphoses in classical religious art (Cimabue, El Greco, Tintoretto) are functions of a religious sentiment being explicitly narrated, figured and represented in the paintings of this time, then one cannot legitimately abstract the religious sentiment from them, despite recognising within modernity that such ‘truths’ no longer hold. Religious sentiment and narration (for example, Christ’s passion, the Creation, the Apocalyptic, visions of Hell) animate and inform not only the efforts within painting to ‘represent’ them as events in space and time, but also the efforts to express them as intensities, sensations, and extreme modes of affectivity (a divine realm seen and a divine realm felt). The affective register of religious painting remains locked into a causal relationship with the narrative content of the Christian religion. Such art might aim to represent a particular event in Christ’s life (e.g. the crucifixion of Christ) as a type of religious or spiritual portrait, however to do this it is not enough to merely illustrate it as a discrete event in time. Rather, it is important to utilise the depiction of such events to communicate the affective force of the ‘spiritual’ depth associated with them. This affective quality, informed by religious sentiment, operates as a disruptive modulator to ‘good’ stable representational form and the earthly body becomes subject to deformation by invisible celestial forces. Bacon’s own practice inherits much of this dynamic structure insofar as his work displays repeated motifs seemingly borrowed from (or almost certainly analogous to) traditional religious art – i.e. crucifixions, death and physical dissolution, bodies in the process of becoming immaterial (a process of ‘becoming-indiscernible’), bodies confronting spirits, and bodies placed in relation to animals (a process of ‘becoming-animal’). However, the religious sentiment and concrete theological concerns have been extracted and are no longer being represented or narrated. For Deleuze  Bacon’s paintings operate like great religious paintings evacuated of their religious narrative and representation. Such content is simply of no relevance to Bacon – his work signifies an accelerated form of pictorial atheism, the very roots of which Deleuze identifies as being present in great Christian art itself. This explains the insistence upon the non-narrative quality of Bacon’s triptychs – first and foremost Figures become the vehicles of sensation (rhythmic characters) and survive to serve as representative characters in a depicted narrative only in a residual and secondary manner, as in Michelangelo’s work.

Deleuze’s account is not incompatible with the idea that certain residues of narration remain as inevitable, irreducible or deliberate traces. Indeed, his account allows for the insistence that the primary narrative content (insofar as any can be adequately and accurately established) forms an important framework in the overall germination, negotiation and sculpting of forms in space and time on the canvas. What Deleuze does insist upon, and in this he is absolutely aligned with Bacon’s own statements, is the subsidiary status of such content. Bacon’s paintings involve an evacuation of religious content, theological narrative and spiritual drama, and the effort to replace it with an elaborate and audacious attempt to translate elements and events drawn from his own physical existence and filter them through his particular nervous system onto the canvases as figured sensation. The historical specificity of Bacon’s life becomes reconfigured through art into the grandeur of elemental eternity. This clearly fits with Deleuze’s recognition of how the ‘eternity of art’ remains a constant reference for Bacon’s practice – ‘Like Rodin, he [Bacon] thinks that durability, essence, or eternity are the primary characteristics of the work of art.’ (Deleuze 2003: 123)

In my reading of Deleuze an understanding of Bacon emerges as a ‘spiritual’ painter (a mystical atheist). He enacts a similar dialogue between the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’ as  El Greco had explored  between the material and the spiritual, or the terrestrial and the celestial. Following the pictorial facticity of Michelangelo, Bacon’s paintings pursue a hyperbolic form of pictorial hysteria where he is directly attempting, again and again, to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation. His paintings repeatedly attempt to make such overwhelming and intense presence immediately visible. When discussing Bacon’s renunciation of represented violent spectacles in favour of excavating the invisible forces beneath or beyond appearance as sensation, Deleuze comes close to identifying Bacon’s ‘spiritual’ thematic, his spiritual conviction, as ‘a kind of declaration of faith in life’. (Deleuze 2003: 61) He considers statements from the interviews with Sylvester (particularly the remarks about cerebral pessimism and nervous optimism), and asks why choosing to paint ‘the scream more than the horror’, the violence of sensation, more than the violence of the spectacle, is an act of vital faith. In his clearest and most unambiguous passage Deleuze writes of Bacon’s indomitable and visceral spirituality which has supplanted hoary old religious truisms and transcendental myths:

‘But why is it an act of vital faith to choose ‘the scream more than the horror’, the violence of sensation more than the violence of the spectacle? The invisible forces, the powers of the future – are they not already upon us, and much more insurmountable than the worst spectacle and even the worst pain? Yes, in a certain sense – every piece of meat testifies to this. But in another sense, no. When, like a wrestler, the visible body confronts the powers of the invisible, it gives them no other visibility than its own. It is within this visibility that the body actively struggles, affirming the possibility of triumphing, which was beyond its reach as long as these powers remained invisible, hidden in a spectacle that sapped our strength and diverted us. It is as if combat had now become possible. The struggle with the shadow is the only real struggle. When the visual sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, it releases a force that is capable of vanquishing the invisible force, or even befriending it. Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-too-visible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life detects, flushes out, and makes visible through the scream. Death is judged from the point of view, and not the reverse, as we like to believe. Bacon, no less than Beckett, is one of those artists who, in the name of a very intense life, can call for an even more intense life. He is not a painter who ‘believes’ in death. His is indeed a figurative miserabilisme, but one that serves an increasingly powerful Figure of life...In the very act of ‘representing’ horror, mutilation, prosthesis, fall, or failure, they have erected indomitable Figures, indomitable through both their insistence and their presence. They have given life a new and extremely direct power of laughter.’ (Deleuze 2003: 61-2)

This ethos is clearly linked to Bacon’s efforts, following Michelangelo, to render life and time visible through the material of the body. For Bacon there is the chronomatic force of changing time which he depicts through the allotropic variation of bodies, and which involves a degree of figural deformation; and then there is the force of eternal time, the eternity of time, which is established through the uniting-separating that reigns in the triptychs, a pure light. One can begin to discern the reason for Deleuze’s insistence upon the complete evacuation of represented narrative from Bacon’s work (as he insists is evident within Michelangelo’s work too), or at least its relegation to secondary traces or residues. What Bacon’s work ultimately tries to figure is an expression of something fundamentally inexpressible, what it brings to visibility is something which is usually invisible, what it attempts to figure is the un-figurable. His work cannot be simply reduced to a matter of what is straightforwardly representational or narrative, since these imply the prior existence of things, events and ideas to be merely represented as such. It presupposes that all the things in Bacon’s paintings exist prior to the work as something to be represented or narrated. For Deleuze, Bacon’s ultimate theme lies outside all such coordinates, in much the same way as the divine celestial realm had for the classic Christian painters. There, a sensation (an affective element) of these realms could be allied to the familiar representational coordinates of the religious or theological dogmas of the time. With Bacon no such scripture exists apart from his own lived reality in time, his own nervous system, which he transmutes into figures resonating and hystericised by the invisible forces and intensities of the virtual in matter and the eternity of time.

Having established  the ‘spiritual’ dynamics and thematics of Bacon’s work, this paper will now proceed with an analysis of how Bacon’s work specifically functions to encapsulate a certain sensation of time, namely of eternity. Deleuze initially establishes the key elements in their structural mechanics. Underpinning their mechanics is the principle of rhythm. In the triptychs, he argues, rhythms become characters and objects. By initially focusing on their rhythmic characteristics, Deleuze identifies three basic rhythms being circulated across the separated panels of many triptychs.

 

         1.   A steady or attendant rhythm

         2.    Crescendo or simplification

          3.  A diminuendo or elimination

 

Referring to Bacon’s triptychs, Deleuze attempts to uncover each of their rhythmic elements and demonstrate the full complexity of their actual interplay across the panels. The attendant rhythmic character does not necessarily always signify a straightforward visible observer or spectator/voyeur despite their frequent appearance in triptychs (for example, the presence of a voyeuristic figure in the right panel of Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Poem ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, 1967; a sinister cameraman in the right panel of Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, 1970, and the spectators in both the left and right panel of the Crucifixion Triptych, 1965). Rather the attendant refers to a constant function, a steady measure or cadence in relation to which spectators are able to discern or distinguish rhythmic variation. This function can have multiple objects which might include, but not be restricted to, the circular arena, photographic apparatus, photographs of figures, faces or objects which are flattened out onto two dimensional mirror-like surfaces, or it can be presented in several figures. Deleuze claims that it can be figured through flat hysterical smiles, the prone bodies of sleepers, and/or coupled or copulating bodies. These are defined as attendants because of their steady and almost constant horizontality. This horizontal quality defines a rhythm without increase or decrease, augmentation of diminution. However, the attendant function is anything but simple, and Deleuze goes some considerable way to further developing an account of its apparent complexity. Whilst the attendant function can initially be seen as something deliberately imposed upon certain visible characters in the paintings, it actually abandons them to become an autonomous rhythmic character which emerges into existence at different points throughout the three panels of a triptych. It does this by being assigned as that character by the active rhythmic characters in other parts of the painting. This dynamic, autonomous and self generating character of the work is clearly something that resonates deeply with Bacon’s own understanding of the process of auto-composition and auto-figuration. In an interview with Sylvester from 1979, Bacon said:  ‘I don’t really think my pictures out, you know; I think of the disposition of the forms and then I watch the forms form themselves.’ (Sylvester 1987: 136) This auto-formation of forms explains the type of emergence of the attendant rhythmic character in triptychs that Deleuze indicates. Attendant function might subsequently emerge from figures in full context which, if isolated from the entire composition, might actually appear to have either active or passive rhythms. For Deleuze this is why some of the prone sleeping characters in the triptychs have an odd trace of activity or passivity – so although explicitly situated across the horizontal they retain certain heaviness or vivacity, relaxation or contraction that comes from elsewhere. Equally, attendants can be seen as assuming other functions – as on the brink of turning to an active rhythm or passive rhythm – thus linking themselves to one or the other and ceasing to be an attendant. This fluid autonomy creates not only great tension and instability but is also indicative of an extraordinary mobility within triptychs, what Deleuze terms their ‘great circulation.’ It is as if the triptychs function like musical machines possessing a range of different rhythmic permutations.

Having introduced the attendant rhythmic character, Deleuze proceeds with an explanation of the two vertical directions of active and passive rhythms. The simplest variation consists of descending or rising opposition (for example, Triptych–Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962) or perhaps a diastolic/systolic opposition. Occasionally the opposition at play is between being naked or clothed, or an augmentation/diminution of the flesh. Throughout different triptychs there exists an extraordinarily subtle and diverse process of additions and subtractions. The example which Deleuze talks about in most detail is Bacon’s Triptych – August, 1972 depicting George Dyer, which he claims is Bacon’s most ‘profoundly musical painting.’ (Deleuze 2003: 79) Across this triptych Bacon uses figural mutilation and prostheses in ‘a game of added and subtracted values.’ (Deleuze 2003: 79) The triptych is like an assemblage of hysterical sleepings and wakings affecting diverse parts of the body. Here, the attendant couple in the centre panel are accompanied by organic elongations and a clear and well defined mauve oval. On the left panel the figure has a diminished torso, having had a significant portion of its body subtracted; while on the right the figure is in the process of being built up or added to. However, everything changes if one looks at the legs. In the left panel one leg is completed while the other is being subject to further addition and definition, while in the right panel, it is just the opposite – one leg has been amputated and the other is apparently flowing away. Correlatively the defined mauve oval in the centre panel changes its status within the other two panels – on the left panel it is transformed into a pink liquid pool lying next to the chair, and then becomes a red liquid discharge flowing out from the figure’s leg in the right panel.

For Deleuze this profoundly musical triptych is emblematic of the degree of rhythmic complexity and variation achieved by triptychs. The diverse oppositions across different panels are never logically equivalent in any normal sense and their different terms never quite coincide. What triptychs represent is a radical combinatorial freedom where multiple permutations can be produced. Each and every element can coexist in a unified way – share a simple matter-of-fact – yet the different oppositions set up can vary in diverse ways or even be reversed depending on the perspective or viewpoint that one adopts as a viewer. One cannot assign a single univocal role to the centre panel, since the constancy they seemingly imply can change depending on the case at hand. Hence, the horizontal of the constants govern extremely variable terms from the viewpoint of both their nature and their relation. The dynamic circulation is always composed of variable, opposable rhythms (where each operates as the retro-gradation of the other) offset against a common and constant value in the attendant rhythm.

At this point, in developing his understanding of the active rhythm, Deleuze insists upon the primacy of ‘the fall’ in Bacon’s triptychs. However, it is not a sense of descent which should be identified with any straightforward spatial notion. The active is a fall in the sense of it being a descending passage of sensation, a passage indentifying variation and difference of level within sensation. He claims that differences of intensity in sensation are often experienced and figured in Bacon’s work as a fall. Flesh descends from bones, the body descends from arms and thighs. Sensation develops though this fall by falling from one level to another. The fall thus exists to affirm a variation in level. Whilst Deleuze reiterates Bacon’s view that one shouldn’t confuse the violence of sensation with the violent spectacle, he also indicates that the so-called fall of a sensation should not be confused with a fall through spatial extension. Rather the fall records variation and change and is simply what is most vital and alive in sensation. The fall is that which is experienced as the sensation of living. This does not of course preclude the possibility that it could coincide with a spatial descent. But equally it could coincide with a rise. It could also be expressed through a variety of different movements in the paintings – diastolic or systolic, dilation or dissipation, diminution or augmentation. In this sense, the fall as the measure of variation in sensation is precisely what is meant by the active rhythm in the triptychs. Again, this active rhythm is fluid and variable, and the degree to which it is assigned to a particular figure or object within the painting rests upon which viewpoint or perspective one chooses to adopt. It thus exchanges its function with the passive rhythm.

 

Having established  the ‘spiritual’ dynamics and thematics of Bacon’s work, this paper will now proceed with an analysis of how Bacon’s work specifically functions to encapsulate a certain sensation of time, namely of eternity. Deleuze initially establishes the key elements in their structural mechanics. Underpinning their mechanics is the principle of rhythm. In the triptychs, he argues, rhythms become characters and objects. By initially focusing on their rhythmic characteristics, Deleuze identifies three basic rhythms being circulated across the separated panels of many triptychs.

 

         1.   A steady or attendant rhythm

         2.    Crescendo or simplification

          3.  A diminuendo or elimination

 

Referring to Bacon’s triptychs, Deleuze attempts to uncover each of their rhythmic elements and demonstrate the full complexity of their actual interplay across the panels. The attendant rhythmic character does not necessarily always signify a straightforward visible observer or spectator/voyeur despite their frequent appearance in triptychs (for example, the presence of a voyeuristic figure in the right panel of Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Poem ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, 1967; a sinister cameraman in the right panel of Triptych – Studies from the Human Body, 1970, and the spectators in both the left and right panel of the Crucifixion Triptych, 1965). Rather the attendant refers to a constant function, a steady measure or cadence in relation to which spectators are able to discern or distinguish rhythmic variation. This function can have multiple objects which might include, but not be restricted to, the circular arena, photographic apparatus, photographs of figures, faces or objects which are flattened out onto two dimensional mirror-like surfaces, or it can be presented in several figures. Deleuze claims that it can be figured through flat hysterical smiles, the prone bodies of sleepers, and/or coupled or copulating bodies. These are defined as attendants because of their steady and almost constant horizontality. This horizontal quality defines a rhythm without increase or decrease, augmentation of diminution. However, the attendant function is anything but simple, and Deleuze goes some considerable way to further developing an account of its apparent complexity. Whilst the attendant function can initially be seen as something deliberately imposed upon certain visible characters in the paintings, it actually abandons them to become an autonomous rhythmic character which emerges into existence at different points throughout the three panels of a triptych. It does this by being assigned as that character by the active rhythmic characters in other parts of the painting. This dynamic, autonomous and self generating character of the work is clearly something that resonates deeply with Bacon’s own understanding of the process of auto-composition and auto-figuration. In an interview with Sylvester from 1979, Bacon said:  ‘I don’t really think my pictures out, you know; I think of the disposition of the forms and then I watch the forms form themselves.’ (Sylvester 1987: 136) This auto-formation of forms explains the type of emergence of the attendant rhythmic character in triptychs that Deleuze indicates. Attendant function might subsequently emerge from figures in full context which, if isolated from the entire composition, might actually appear to have either active or passive rhythms. For Deleuze this is why some of the prone sleeping characters in the triptychs have an odd trace of activity or passivity – so although explicitly situated across the horizontal they retain certain heaviness or vivacity, relaxation or contraction that comes from elsewhere. Equally, attendants can be seen as assuming other functions – as on the brink of turning to an active rhythm or passive rhythm – thus linking themselves to one or the other and ceasing to be an attendant. This fluid autonomy creates not only great tension and instability but is also indicative of an extraordinary mobility within triptychs, what Deleuze terms their ‘great circulation.’ It is as if the triptychs function like musical machines possessing a range of different rhythmic permutations.

Having introduced the attendant rhythmic character, Deleuze proceeds with an explanation of the two vertical directions of active and passive rhythms. The simplest variation consists of descending or rising opposition (for example, Triptych–Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962) or perhaps a diastolic/systolic opposition. Occasionally the opposition at play is between being naked or clothed, or an augmentation/diminution of the flesh. Throughout different triptychs there exists an extraordinarily subtle and diverse process of additions and subtractions. The example which Deleuze talks about in most detail is Bacon’s Triptych – August, 1972 depicting George Dyer, which he claims is Bacon’s most ‘profoundly musical painting.’ (Deleuze 2003: 79) Across this triptych Bacon uses figural mutilation and prostheses in ‘a game of added and subtracted values.’ (Deleuze 2003: 79) The triptych is like an assemblage of hysterical sleepings and wakings affecting diverse parts of the body. Here, the attendant couple in the centre panel are accompanied by organic elongations and a clear and well defined mauve oval. On the left panel the figure has a diminished torso, having had a significant portion of its body subtracted; while on the right the figure is in the process of being built up or added to. However, everything changes if one looks at the legs. In the left panel one leg is completed while the other is being subject to further addition and definition, while in the right panel, it is just the opposite – one leg has been amputated and the other is apparently flowing away. Correlatively the defined mauve oval in the centre panel changes its status within the other two panels – on the left panel it is transformed into a pink liquid pool lying next to the chair, and then becomes a red liquid discharge flowing out from the figure’s leg in the right panel.

For Deleuze this profoundly musical triptych is emblematic of the degree of rhythmic complexity and variation achieved by triptychs. The diverse oppositions across different panels are never logically equivalent in any normal sense and their different terms never quite coincide. What triptychs represent is a radical combinatorial freedom where multiple permutations can be produced. Each and every element can coexist in a unified way – share a simple matter-of-fact – yet the different oppositions set up can vary in diverse ways or even be reversed depending on the perspective or viewpoint that one adopts as a viewer. One cannot assign a single univocal role to the centre panel, since the constancy they seemingly imply can change depending on the case at hand. Hence, the horizontal of the constants govern extremely variable terms from the viewpoint of both their nature and their relation. The dynamic circulation is always composed of variable, opposable rhythms (where each operates as the retro-gradation of the other) offset against a common and constant value in the attendant rhythm.

At this point, in developing his understanding of the active rhythm, Deleuze insists upon the primacy of ‘the fall’ in Bacon’s triptychs. However, it is not a sense of descent which should be identified with any straightforward spatial notion. The active is a fall in the sense of it being a descending passage of sensation, a passage indentifying variation and difference of level within sensation. He claims that differences of intensity in sensation are often experienced and figured in Bacon’s work as a fall. Flesh descends from bones, the body descends from arms and thighs. Sensation develops though this fall by falling from one level to another. The fall thus exists to affirm a variation in level. Whilst Deleuze reiterates Bacon’s view that one shouldn’t confuse the violence of sensation with the violent spectacle, he also indicates that the so-called fall of a sensation should not be confused with a fall through spatial extension. Rather the fall records variation and change and is simply what is most vital and alive in sensation. The fall is that which is experienced as the sensation of living. This does not of course preclude the possibility that it could coincide with a spatial descent. But equally it could coincide with a rise. It could also be expressed through a variety of different movements in the paintings – diastolic or systolic, dilation or dissipation, diminution or augmentation. In this sense, the fall as the measure of variation in sensation is precisely what is meant by the active rhythm in the triptychs. Again, this active rhythm is fluid and variable, and the degree to which it is assigned to a particular figure or object within the painting rests upon which viewpoint or perspective one chooses to adopt. It thus exchanges its function with the passive rhythm.

Having analysed the different rhythmic characters associated with the triptychs, Deleuze establishes what he describes as ‘the laws of the triptychs’.

 

         1.  There are three distinguishable, rhythmic figures.

         2.  There is the existence of an attendant rhythm which circulates fluidly through the panels as both visible attendant and rhythmic attendant.

         3.  There is a determination of an active and passive rhythm with all of the variations that depend on the character chosen to represent the active rhythm by the spectator.

 

Having set out these formal laws, Deleuze concludes by claiming that they broadly embody a profoundly irrational logic, a logic of sensation, that constitutes the art of painting in general. By stressing the power and vitality of this non-normative logic and non-voluntaristic means of composition, Deleuze instinctively aligns his own account again and again with Bacon. In 1979 Bacon told Sylvester:

‘One of the things I’ve always tried to analyse is why it is that, if the formation of the image that you want is done irrationally, it seems to come on to the nervous system must more strongly than if you knew how you could do it. Why is it possible to make the reality of an appearance more violently in this way than by doing it rationally? Perhaps it’s that, if the making is more instinctive, the image is more immediate.’ (Sylvester 1987: 121)

The full complexity of the formal elements now established, Deleuze crucially shifts his attention to the question of what forces correspond to the triptychs. What precisely is this complex machinic apparatus a means of capture for? And in what way does this force impact upon the structure of the triptychs? In the triptychs the question of the relation between the different Figures becomes extremely significant. Figures are violently projected onto the field and are often governed by the simplicity and clarity of uniform colour or naked light. In many cases, the figures look like trapeze artists whose milieu is nothing but light or colour. The particular methodology identified by Deleuze within triptychs is again something Bacon talks about with Sylvester. Particularly in relation to the question of precision and clarity:

‘I’ve increasingly wanted to make the images simpler and more complicated. And for this to work it can work more starkly if the background is very united and clear. I think that probably is why I have used a very clear background against which the image can articulate itself.’ (Sylvester 1987: 121)

Deleuze observes that if this unity and clarity of light or colour immediately incorporates and unifies the relationship between Figures and the Field, the result is that Figures also attain their maximum separation in light and colour. A force of separation or division sweeps over them, placing them within an almost spiritual milieu of eternity. This separation is therefore the unique principle of the triptychs (their pictorial fact) – maximum unity of light and colour for the maximum division of Figures. It is the force of this separating light and colour that engenders the distinct yet interrelated, rhythmic characters. The separation of bodies in universal light and colour becomes the common fact of the Figures – their overall rhythmic being – a disjunctive synthesis – a union that separates. A joining-together acts to separate the Figures and colours. Such, Deleuze claims, is the quality of light. Figures separate while falling into black light; colour fields separate while falling into white light. In the triptychs everything becomes aerial – the separation itself is in the air. Here time is no longer simply expressed in the apparent chromatism of bodies via the broken tones across flesh – it has become a monochromatic eternity. In the triptychs an immense space-time unites all things as if in a fourth temporal dimension. Deleuze writes of how triptychs, evacuated of any straightforward narrative linkage, unite things only by introducing between them ‘the distances of a Sahara, the centuries of an aeon. Within the triptychs there resides the mysterious force of the eternity of time. The three canvases remain separated, figures within them remain separated, yet they are no longer isolated. They are united within the eternity of time. The frames or borders of each panel and the outlines of each figure no longer refer to the limited unity of each but represent and figure the distributive unity of all.’ (Deleuze 2003: 85)

In Bacon’s triptychs a profound sensation of eternal time is being figured, producing brilliant aberrant figural spaces which resonate historically with the greatest achievements in religious art to figure the divine celestial realm. Bacon’s rhythmic characters flow with an extraordinary dynamism across the vast spaces of the monochromatic eternity presented within the triptychs, each expressing a new spiritualism of matter, a new spiritualism of the body, as they perform their small embodied feats upon the grand amphitheatre of nowhere, all playing their different roles in the musicality of becoming. Deleuze’s most complex and controversial claim about Francis Bacon in the Logic of Sensation is thus to reconfigure him as a Spinozistic mystic, engaged in the profoundest of spiritual revaluations of existence through art. In the Ethics Spinoza defines eternity as that which stands outside all duration or time – ‘Eternity can neither be defined by time nor have any relation to time.’ (Spinoza 1992: 214) True eternity stands outside of all temporal categories whatsoever. ‘Before’, ‘after’, ‘now’, ‘later’ and all such ascriptions are completely inapplicable to what is eternal.

According to Spinoza God and Substance are both eternal, and even individuated and singular things as instances of substance are eternal. Despite the fact that we have no recollection of our own bodily emergence from eternity ‘we feel and experience that we are eternal.’ (Spinoza 1992: 214) For individuated bodies to be seen as eternal they must be considered not in their temporally and spatially bound state, where they are in relation to other finite things in their normal durational existence, but from a more abstract perspective as atemporal essences – what Spinoza terms sub specie aeternitatis. Thus, according to Deleuze’s reading of Bacon’s triptychs, what Bacon ultimately manages to elaborate is a profound spiritual mechanics for displaying Figures under the aspect of eternity.

 

 

Notes

 

1 It is the ’revelation of the ’spirit’ immanent to the body which Deleuze suggests as being the entire ‘spiritual’ thematic of Bacon’s work. This point is clarified in the chapter on ‘Hysteria’ where Deleuze links the spiritualism of Wilhelm Worringer’s Gothic line to Artaud’s Body-Without-Organs – ‘It [the Gothic Line] attests to a high spirituality, since what leads it to seek the elementary forces beyond the organic is a spiritual will. But this spirituality is a spirituality of the body; the spirit is the body itself, the body without organs.’ (Deleuze 2003: 46-7)

2 This text first appeared in Artforum in January 1984, and is republished (with minor emendations) as a preface to the English translation of The Logic of Sensation.

3 See Deleuze’s remarks on pp. 97-8 of The Logic of Sensation regarding first and second order figuration in Bacon’s work.

4 This would seem to call for a rigorous study of Hegel’s remarks on the history and development of Christian painting in the second volume of his Aesthetics. When writing of how certain painters had depicted Christ’s suffering on the cross, he notes how ‘some masters discovered an entirely peculiar tone of colour which is not found in the human face. They had to disclose the night of the spirit, and for this purpose fashioned a type of colour which corresponds in the most splendid way to this storm, to these black clouds of the spirit that at the same time are firmly controlled and kept in place by the brazen brow of the divine nature.’ (Hegel 1975:824) Hegel writes at length about how painters had to betray the verisimilitude of representation in order to express ‘spiritual’ depths and sensations. Deleuze’s own remarks on what he calls the ‘accident’ and the depiction of Christ’s body in the history of Christian painting recall Hegel’s remarks. Deleuze notes how ‘Christ is besieged, and even replaced by accidents’. (Deleuze 2003:124)

5 This differentiation is marked in Deleuze’s text with the capitalised form of ‘Figure’.

6 Note Deleuze’s use of the specifically religious notion of ‘revelation’.

     7  In a footnote to this passage Deleuze cites Luciano Bellosi’s work on Michelangelo, which ‘has shown how Michelangelo destroyed the narrative religious fact in favour of a properly pictorial or sculptural fact.’ (Deleuze 2003:196)

8 Of particular note here are the two spectral figures in the left panel of Triptych–Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962.These two figures hover and resonate with an ambiguous rhythmic character that is extremely disturbing and affective.

  

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and the practice of painting

 

 

MICHAEL JARVIS  |  JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE  |  VOLUME 8  |  ISSUE 3  |  1 DECEMBER 2009

 

What makes painting such a determined survivor and insistent practice in our contemporary world and culture? What causes such a handmade practice to be still relevant? Why does it persist in so many guises, especially given the multiplicity of media available to the contemporary artist? It is, perhaps difficult for us to appreciate the extent to which painting practice was a key focal point of contestation in the nineteenth century. Indeed Clark (1982) argues that, ‘For a while, in the mid-nineteenth century, the state, the public, and the critics agreed that art had a political sense and intention. And painting was encouraged, repressed, hated, and feared on that assumption’ (Clark 1982: 249).

In addition to the broader cultural and political importance of painting in the nineteenth century it is also necessary to look carefully at the very means and materials of painting in order to ascertain why it has continued to persist as a vital practice. As painting was perhaps the significant artistic practice of the early nineteenth century, then any attempts to subvert it were viewed with distinct suspicion. In 1840 for example, the painter Paul Delaroche had announced that with the new and revolutionary appearance of the photographic image, ‘from today painting is dead’ (Crimp 2002: 96). Such anxieties were understandable as the new photo[1]graphic technology and the photographed image with its smooth surface and texture, was perceived as capable of supplanting the similarly smooth, almost featureless brushwork of academic painters like Delaroche and his peers, and could be executed much more quickly.

However, painters like Courbet can be seen to actively challenge such misgivings because of their recognition that a painting could still achieve and aspire to a vision of the world that was not as readily accessible in a photograph. In a way, Courbet’s painting can be viewed as an affirmative statement made about the efficacy of ‘painting’ over and beyond any questions of social and political context. For example, if Courbet’s arrangement of figures in A Burial at Ornans (1849–50) had been photographed (provided that the technical means were sufficiently capable to depict such a large group) then the same arguments about the importance of the social context and its depiction of the different classes as intermingling would still prevail. Wherein lies the continuing significance of painting practice?

The answer to this can be found in a number of key factors, one of which is the utilization of the material stuff of paint and the other being the persistence of the handmade and bodily origin of painting as opposed to the more mechanical technologies coming into prominence. The specific practice of Francis Bacon and the way he embodied the material of paint into his images can allow us to address the continuing persistence and significance of painting. James Elkins (2000) sees the process of painting as one of alchemy and as a transforming of base materials into something transcendent; that although a substance like earth pigments mixed with oils is a lowly and basic material, it can also ‘be unnatural and divine’ (Elkins 2000: 188). Elkins argues that:    

What matters in painting is pushing the mundane towards the instant of transcendence. The effect is sublimation, or distillation: just as water heats up and then suddenly disappears, so paint gathers itself together and then suddenly becomes something else – an apparition hovering in the fictive space beyond the picture plane.

(Elkins 2000: 188)

It is this quality of transformation that gives the practice its alchemical character. How does paint act upon us in this way? A key aspect of the physical and often revelatory power of painting lies in its capacity to bypass and short circuit our normal cognitive perceptual mechanisms, to enact itself directly upon us and our bodies, instantaneously overriding all the ‘clearing house’ mechanisms of intellect and reasoning. As Francis Bacon remarked, the peculiar resonance of a painting lies in the attempt to bring it ‘up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’ (Sylvester 2002: 12). Even for the most experienced practitioner it is a process fraught with difficulty and a practice constantly eluding one’s control and mastery. Bacon talks repeatedly about the processes of painting and it must seem astonishing to non-painters that so much of what he is describing can be ascribed to accidental discoveries more than systematic analysis. As he expresses it,

You know in my case all painting – and the older I get, the more it becomes so – is accident. So I foresee it in my mind, I foresee it, and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I use very large brushes, and in the way I work I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.

(Sylvester 2002: 16)

It is as if the paint has an independent life and can conjure up all kinds of effects unintended by the painter. As Bacon points out, much of the process is accidental and the artistry then can come down to a question of what one leaves out, destroys or includes. It is little wonder that Stephen Newton (1998) contends that, ‘the early, primitive stages of a painting can provoke intolerable feelings of persecutory anxiety and guilt in the painter’ (Newton 1998: 16), or that the over anxious painter, ‘who is unable to tolerate the raw and fragmented nature of the early creative stages, might be too constrained to make even the most rudimentary of marks’ (Newton 1998: 16).

This quality of accident is key to Bacon’s practice and, from the experience of looking at other painters, is more important than is normally recognized. This is because it becomes a habitual part of the discerning painter’s armoury. The skill and knowledge comes not so much from knowing how to paint something – a head, skull or hill etc., but from one’s discernment in accepting (or rejecting) what one has done with an open mind and little regret, so that something can genuinely surprise you. This tacit mastery comes from an instinctual perception of how to utilize and somehow ‘cash in’ upon something found, perhaps some unruly aspect or behaviour of the pigment, which is accidentally revealed during the process.

As Susan Rothenberg admits; ‘I’m not a clear thinker, but I find things out by stumbling upon them’ (Whitfield 2003: 3). Similarly, Bacon discussed his early work Painting (1946), and said ‘I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another’ (Sylvester 2002: 11). He talks about the difficulties of painting because ‘it is really a complete accident […] Because I don’t know how the form can be made’ (Sylvester 2002: 12). In a significant passage he describes painting a head in which

The sockets of the eyes, the nose, the mouth were, when you analysed them, just forms which had nothing to do with eyes, nose or mouth; but the paint moving from one contour into another made a likeness of this person I was trying to paint

(Sylvester 2002: 12)

It is as if the visual impression of someone or something can only be real[1]ized or brought into being, by means of configurations of paint moving from one contour to another. Bacon then talks about his feelings in front of the painting:

I thought for a moment I’d got something much nearer to what I want. Then the next day I tried to take it further and tried to make it more poignant, more near and I lost the image completely.

(Sylvester 2002: 12)

In his attempt to bring the image into being (Bacon’s frequent use of the word ‘poignant’ registers a more emotional engagement with his subject than the blandness of ‘real’) the image was lost. Bacon describes the process as being like ‘a tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction’ (Sylvester 2002: 12). The process of trying to depict something in paint which acts as an equivalent or something closely resemblant to what is seen, touched or felt, is an experience commonly felt by most painters.

When Bacon talks about ‘abstraction’ he is, I would argue, referring to the general abstractness and indifferent structure of the brushstroke and collection of brushstrokes which create the factural presence of the painting and which, as an ensemble goes to constituting the required subject matter. What is significant for Bacon is the ‘attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’ (Sylvester 2002: 12). When he talks about the ‘figurative thing’ he is referring to the pre-existing subject of head, body or object being rendered by the ‘abstract’ materials of paint and its inherent factural qualities of thickness so closely to that pre-existing ‘image,’ that it resonates with a jolt of recognition which reverberates throughout the whole bodily system.

In Bacon’s Seated Woman (Portrait of Muriel Belcher) (1961) (Figure 1) the composition is closely related to a sketch of a seated woman with the right hand side of the body almost in profile, with the head turned to her left and attached to a longer left leg and foot which twists and turns towards the other leg (Figure 2). In the painting, however, there are two conjoined profiles constituting the head. The basic composition is similar, with the shapes of body and legs roughly the same. The woman is seated upon a long sofa with three cushions projecting obliquely. Her feet ‘rest’ on the surface of a green floor. The body of the woman seemingly ‘crouches’ before us. The shapes of left leg and thin right arm echo one another and contribute to the overall awkwardness of the pose. There is space around the figure. Behind the furniture is a flat background lilac colour. The oblique angles of cushions and horizontal lines of the sofa are unruly accents undermining the stability of the figure and accentuating the feeling of incipient movement, emotion and energy.

A close up of the head and body sections reveal a key aspect of Bacon’s technique. There are rich and complex textures across the painting. The arms and legs contain mechanical imprints of a cloth or perhaps, scrubbing brush which has been covered in paint and ‘printed’ onto the surface. The head contains marks tracing the course of a loaded and large paintbrush being dragged across the surface in quick, rapid movements. This dragging of, in places, ‘dry’ paint across different passages of underpainting accentuates the rapidity of a movement of a head or body arrested in its own corporeal movement.

It is the transformative power of paint in the construction of such typical images that continues to make painting so valuable and resonant. Bacon describes the difficulty of this because as any painter knows, it is sometimes problematic to reason out why some passages of painting ‘work’ or are more effective than other passages. Often it is a matter of instinctive feeling rather than a process of logical reasoning. Bacon talks about this being the difference between what he terms as ‘paint which conveys directly (i.e. onto the nervous system) and paint which conveys through illustration (i.e. which is prosaic, dull and meaningless)’ (Sylvester 2002: 18), and that,

It is something to do with instinct. It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.

(Sylvester 2002: 18)

Here, the acknowledgement of the importance of ‘feel’ for paint and of the instinctive knowledge which derives from familiarity with the material, is seen to take precedent over and above any kind of logical reasoning thought process. The sensory responses for the painter and for the viewer must be activated immediately or else it will not be effective. If one has to rationalize the process or to somehow explain the procedure or ‘story’ to oneself, then the painting has basically failed.

Martin Hammer states that, ‘this impulse towards technical experiment, in the pursuit of conveying feeling without the mediation of the intellect, continued to be a pressing concern’ (Hammer 2006: 17). An example of such an impulse is the literal ‘throwing’ of paint onto the canvas that is described by Bacon as almost a last resort when an image resists more conventional means (Sylvester 2002: 160).

Now clearly, Bacon’s particular impulse will not be necessarily shared by every painter, especially in a postmodern context when the medium of paint is part of a whole repertoire of effects and techniques available to any artist. However, I would contend that Bacon’s idea about conveying emotion through the material of paint is fundamental to how painting as a practice continues to be of crucial importance, and is a philosophy shared by a whole lineage of painters going back to Giotto and beyond, even to icon painters. For example, Stephen Newton (1998) refers to the analogy made by Didi-Huberman between the painted panels of the early Renaissance and abstract expressionism:

In effect the altar is a portable work of abstract expressionism for personal spiritual usage. To the early religious painter, the abstract, wildly painted panel, which might be juxtaposed alongside, or incorporated within figurative narratives and iconography, embodied the psychic experiences which were then symbolised in the figurative parables of the Passion. (Newton 1998: 20)

There is a belief here that to be successful, painting must touch the nerve of the body, must engage with the body and that this can only be manifested through the material itself. The notion of embodiment would suggest that the material becomes the body itself, in a process akin to transubstantiation. In order for this to occur in practice there needs to be a conjunction of technical awareness and imagination the feelings towards things and objects of the world which are not only ‘seen’ but ‘felt’ bodily, and so strongly that it can bypass the intellectual, rational side of thinking altogether. In an interesting criticism of some paintings by Balthus, Bacon laments what he sees as a failure of this conjunction between a technical awareness and the feeling world of the painter.

They are no good. He is trying to get the tenderness which we would all love to get for a change, but it can’t be done that way, it can only come as a technical thing and not as illustration or at least I feel that. I feel more and more that nothing matters or will happen until someone makes a new technical synthesis that can carry over from the sensation to our nervous system. (Hammer 2006: 17)

A good comparison can be made here with Merleau-Ponty’s (1993) analysis of Cezanne’s working procedures when he demonstrates how an interpretation should not be distinct from the act of seeing, but rather how the actual technical means should create the act of seeing. He quotes Cezanne saying about a portrait:

If I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I capture and convey his glance. Who gives a damn if they have any idea how one can sadden a mouth or make a cheek smile by wedding a shaded green to a red.

(Merleau-Ponty 1993: 66) Merleau-Ponty argues that Cezanne is making a point not only about how one perceives something in the world but how, in painting, that act of seeing is bound up with the technical mechanisms for seeing and recording it, that One’s personality is seen and grasped in one’s glance, which is, however, no more than a combination of colours […] Cezanne returns to just that primordial experience from which these notions are derived and in which they are inseparable.

(Merleau-Ponty 1993: 66)

Bacon’s quest for painting might appear to be an existential one, a lament and nostalgia for the passing of time with the realization that, for the painter, the possibility of cheating time and death with the material certainties of pigment is, at least temporarily, a possibility.

Bacon’s thoughts about painting continue to have relevance as he is referring to the way we humanly perceive the world. His painting might, like Cezanne’s, be defined as ‘phenomenological’ in that it goes beyond a superficial description of appearance, to a description of the way the things and objects of the world are ‘originally given’ (Wentworth 2004: xiii). Robert Sokolowski (2000) defines phenomenology as an all embrac[1]ing process, ‘which recognizes the reality and truth of phenomena, the things that appear’ (Sokolowski 2000: 14). He contrasts this with the traditional Cartesian approach whereby things and objects of the world are perceived only with the mind: ‘It is not the case, as the Cartesian tradition would have us believe, that “being a picture” or “being a perceived object” or “being a symbol” is only in the mind’ (Sokolowski 2000: 14).

He argues that their ‘being’ encompasses more than the intellect and must embrace that of bodily perception and orientation as well; They are ways in which things can be. The way things appear is part of the being of things; things appear as they are, and they are as they appear. Things do not just exist; they also manifest themselves as what they are.

(Sokolowski 2000: 14)

Through such a perceptual schema, ‘when we make judgements we articulate the presentation of parts of the world; we do not just arrange ideas or concepts in our mind’ (Sokolowski 2000: 14). Brendan Prendeville (2004) notes that, ‘Phenomenology has special relevance for visual art, which more expressly than the other arts addresses us in corporeal terms’ (Prendeville 2004: 41). Painting is an activity that articulates itself from within the body, an act whose physical manifestation of the ‘painting’ is a visualization of a fundamentally bodily and ‘felt’ apprehension of the world. Merleau-Ponty talks about how ‘we cannot imagine how a mind could paint’ (1993: 123) and that,

It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body – not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.

 (Merleau-Ponty 1993: 123–4)

Frederique Desbuissons (2008) underlines the connections that can be made between the bodily experience of the artist and the visual products of his labour. He argues that, in speaking about the ‘figure’ of the artist, such a discourse must encompass a wider frame of reference than that of the reception and visual analysis of particular works. He states that, ‘if the artist personifies the art which he produces his body becomes the most eloquent allegory of this’ (Desbuissons 2008: 258). Although Desbuissons is focusing upon the ways in which contemporary criticism associated Courbet’s art and its production (for example, his use of the palette knife as a predominant tool for painting) with the actual uncouth persona and personal habits of the man, the overriding connection between a painter’s everyday practice and his or her holistic bodily engagement with the materials of that practice, is of significance. Wentworth (2004), for example sees that our ‘perceptual experience is primordially of ourselves as a body situated in the world, one that extends all around us, and through which we move’ (Wentworth 2004: xiv). It is as if our capacity for reasoning and organizing our perceptions comes after this initial ‘primordial’ perceptive experience of the world. Therefore, with phenomenology the key lies in The nature of our experience as it is originally given prior to reflection – what can be called pre-reflective experience, [and] is thus quite different from the nature of our experience once we start to reflect upon it.

(Wentworth 2004: xiv)

It is this quality of pre-reflective experience which, I believe Bacon continually struggled to achieve in his painting. For him, once the mind too literally took over the process (as he felt with Balthus) and began to tell a story, then this sense of original perception was lost and with it the potential of the paint to ‘embody’ the authentic perception.

Merleau-Ponty’s description of a body being lent to the world (1993: 123) tends to indicate that the painter’s activity is somehow involuntary and not willed, but rather an act whereby one’s apprehension of the world is some how heightened by the act of painting, that it is an act of sensitive appreciation rather than a self-conscious willing of something into existence.

It is interesting that Cezanne was so much the focus of Merleau-Ponty’s writing about art because, ironically, his was a deliberately logical and determined quest to render the things of the world according to how these objects were apprehended. Basically there was nothing ‘involuntary’ about his practice but contrarily it was a painting practice demanding an extreme discipline and self-will to be articulated. Similarly, Bacon’s practice demanded a discipline about what could and could not be accepted during the painting process, and maintained a tenuous balance between success and failure. He mentions modestly that in his perception of how the ‘accident’ can be used, ‘one becomes more alive to what the accident has proposed for one’ (Sylvester 2002: 53). That is, his experience of painting allowed him a greater sensitivity to how critical moments and passages can be exploited, and he was attempting in painting, ‘to set a trap with which one would be able to catch the fact at its most living point’ (Sylvester 2002: 54).

A discussion about how paint operates and behaves is extremely important in locating reasons for its continuing relevance, and for that reason, Bacon’s analyses during his interviews with David Sylvester (2002) remain pertinent. Although Bacon eschews abstraction and is at pains to discuss his figurative intentions he is, at the same time acutely aware of the visceral effect which a material like paint can potentially arouse, and how it can become a potent vehicle for expressing emotion. Through his own appreciation of how emotive the material of paint can be ‘in itself’, Sylvester maintains that ‘the thing that’s difficult to understand is how it is that marks of the brush and the movement of paint on canvas can speak so directly to us’ (Sylvester 2002: 58).

Bacon rejects abstraction on the grounds that ‘it always remains on one level’ (Sylvester 2002: 59), and that it ‘is an entirely aesthetic thing’ (Sylvester 2002: 58), which does not emanate from a scrutiny of the lived, corporeal world. Bacon’s view of painting is that it should have a duality and that the aesthetic qualities of paint and facture should serve an end of expressing something felt and seen, of what is perceived as the ‘facts’ of the world and its objects. When he says that, ‘I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks’ (Sylvester 2002: 58), he is coming near to explaining this odd duality which resides in the irony that one’s success in achieving a more ‘real’ or visceral image, one which impacts directly upon one’s nervous system, might be dependent upon the psychological impact of the way in which the material of paint is placed and transformed upon the surface of the painting, and that what is most ‘real’ can be activated by a material substance that is, in itself wholly without meaning.

In discussing technical issues so much, Bacon might be seen to be focusing his attention very much on the artist as ‘author’ because it is the painter’s sensibility which is continually ‘on a tightrope’ and, in his case, always on the watch for the ‘trap’ which he describes. However, if painting is able to be derived from one’s primordial and prereflective responses to the world then it is reasonable to assume that the viewer’s responses can be engaged as well, and that the painting can somehow become part of the viewer’s whole lived and embodied response to the world in turn. This idea is developed further by Parveen Adams (1993) when she opens out the discourse between the painting as made object and the painting as received by the viewer. In her psychoanalytical reading she starts from ‘Lacan’s insistence on the fact that perception is not just an issue of vision but an issue of desire’ (Adams 1993: 53). The bringing forth of a painting into the world must necessarily elicit a reciprocal process of vision for the potential viewer and,

The question of perception must take up the problem of what I want to see, and the way in which it structures the gaze which captures me. Instead of thinking of perception as just a visual field, it must be thought of as the field that is structured by the relations and forces of objects and desires. (Adams 1993: 53) 

Barbara Bolt (2004) also opens out the discussion about the larger field of perception. She argues that what Bacon describes as ‘fact, or rather, “matters of fact”, emerges out of the thickness or fuzziness of the practice’ (Bolt 2004: 144). She maintains that, ‘the work of art exceeds its own structures in a radical performativity’ (2004: 190), and that ‘in the heat of practice, the body has the potential to become language and the work may take on a life of its own’ (2004: 190). She locates the potential reciprocity of such a process, between artist and object, artwork and viewer, artist and viewer and so on, to the ways in which the artwork can create its own signifying field. ‘Through process, the outside world enters the work and the work casts its effects back into the world’ (Bolt 2004: 190).

It is the painting that constitutes this ‘field’ of relationships. So what relevance has Bacon’s comments for painting now? I would argue that, with the ending of abstraction as the primary modernist idiom for painting in the 1960s, that the potential for all kinds of painting were released and enhanced. Bacon’s comments about abstraction and figuration and the ‘accident’, if only at the level of helping to detach painting techniques from their modernist connotations, can be seen as instrumental in enabling contemporary painters (like Fiona Rae for example) to joyously embrace the myriad technical possibilities that painting can now legitimately offer.

As I have indicated above, a number of writers have drawn attention to Bacon’s ideas about painting as the locus of different claims that can be made about the practice. Gilles Deleuze (2004) makes perhaps the most complex analysis where he discusses different aspects of Bacon’s art; themes of athleticism, body, meat and spirit, painting and sensation, and the diagram, among others. A recurrent motif and one which makes a discussion of Bacon so relevant to our contemporary world, is the problem for the painter of how to handle the plethora of images already in the world, especially the ubiquity of photography, both in terms of its own history and stock of images, and the way in which the photograph as an entity both mediates our perception of the world but also our perceptions of art. As Deleuze puts it,

Not only has there been a multiplication of images of every kind, around us and in our heads, but even the reactions against clichés are creating clichés. Even abstract painting has not been the last to produce its own clichés. (Deleuze 2004: 89)

The recent history of painting can bear this last point out, as we have seen a succession of painters like Richter, Tuymans, Peyton, Carnegie and Raedeker using photographs as source material for their work and virtually presenting the ‘photograph as painting’ as a philosophical proposition, while many others, like Jason Martin, Bernard Frize and Ian Davenport utilize the traditional tropes and gestures of modernist abstract painting as a starting point for their own compositions, without the need to insert any mark or ostensible features of individual authorship, which would make their work engage ‘in’ painting as opposed to ‘with’ painting as a practice (see Whiteley 1998). 

One can detect in Bacon’s attitude towards photography something of the same feeling he has towards abstraction; that fundamentally, although photographs have an aspiration towards the aesthetic, they cannot compete with painting

Because he thinks the photograph tends to reduce sensation to a single level, and is unable to include within the sensation the difference between constitu[1]tive levels. (Deleuze 2004: 91)

It is as if the viability of painting must lay elsewhere, and that, in the avoidance of cliché and of falling into the trap of mere ‘illustration’ the painter must go beyond, or at least supersede the total reliance on another image.

Bacon’s comments are critical in that they refer to the practice of painting as a continuing discourse. In discussing the primacy of the painter’s awareness of his or her technical means and how the very ‘accidents’ as well as ‘deliberateness’ can be exploited, he focuses upon how this technical awareness and sensitivity can be brought to bear in the expression of something which is almost intangible and eludes their mere description in words. In his case it is something to do with emotion and feeling, an awareness that the material of paint can express the deepest feelings which makes painting potentially such an important practice and tradition.

A close scrutiny of painting practice reaching back to the pre-Renaissance and the subsequent western tradition of painters like Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, Courbet, Manet, Guston and Baselitz reveals a connected lineage of fascination with, and utilization of the material substance of paint. With all of these painters the viewer must come to terms with the signature qualities and array of markings and factural characteristics which animate the surface of different paintings, and which ultimately allows the subject matter to be expressed. In looking at these painters of this long modernist tradition we scrutinize carefully how the materials of paint, brushstroke, and rendered surface correspond or cooperate with the specific subject being depicted, be it figure, object, landscape or abstraction. It is perhaps the extent of the correspondence, or the duality mentioned above, between content and material, that enables us to judge whether a painting is finally a success or failure.

In a postmodern climate, however, it could be argued that painters are freer to explore to the limit the entire formal (and informal) repertoires of painting, to make painting about painting, to juxtapose various stylistic characteristics altogether, or to use painting to describe their own confes[1]sional and frankly autobiographical positions in the world. It is not even necessary for there to be a conjunction between content and material as was the case before. As such, we can see that Bacon’s two essential areas of exposition, the technical and the emotional, as affective aspects of painting, are both available for painters to develop and exploit to their limits. What is perhaps at stake however, is the extent to which painters feel compelled to express their ideas and emotions in paint or whether, in fact, paint is the only vehicle through which, and by which, such emotion can be supplied.

 

References

Adams, Parveen (1993), ‘The Violence of Paint’, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts: The Body, Special issue, pp. 53–59.

Bolt, Barbara (2004), ‘Shedding Light for the Matter’, Art beyond Representation – The Performative Power of the Image, London and New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd

Clark, Timothy J. (1982), ‘On the Social History of Art’, in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds.), Modern Art and Modernism: A critical Anthology, London: Open University and Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd., pp. 249–258.

Crimp, Douglas (2002), ‘The End of Painting’, in Frances Colpitt (ed.), Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University press, pp. 89–104.

Deleuze, Gilles (2004), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London and New York: Continuum.

Desbuissons, Frederique (2008), ‘Courbet’s Materialism’, Oxford Art Journal, 31:2, pp. 251–260.

Elkins, James (2000), What Painting Is, New York and London: Routledge.

Hammer, Martin (2006), ‘Clearing Away the Screens’ [Catalogue essay], ‘Francis Bacon Portraits and Heads Exhibition’, (National Galleries of Scotland, in association with the British Council), pp. 15–27.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1993), ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, in Galen A. Johnson and Michael Smith (eds.), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics reader: Philosophy and Painting, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, pp. 59–75; pp. 121–149.

Newton, Stephen J. (1998), ‘Guilt in Painting’, Art Criticism, 13:2, pp. 16–24.

Prendeville, Brendan (2004), ‘Varying the Self: Bacon’s Versions of van Gogh’, Oxford Art Journal, 27:1, pp. 25–42.

Sokolowski, Robert (2000), ‘What is Intentionality and Why is it Important’, Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 8–16.

Sylvester, David (2002), Interviews with Francis Bacon, London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Wentworth, Nigel (2004), The Phenomenology of Painting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Whiteley, Nigel (1998), ‘Re-Evaluating Abstraction in the 1990’s,’ in Slow Burn (Meaning and Vision in Contemporary British Painting) Warwick, Mead Gallery and Lancaster University, pp. 11–16.

Whitfield, Sarah (2003), ‘The Roaming Eye’ [Catalogue essay], Susan Rothenberg Exhibition, (Waddington Galleries, London), pp. 3–9.

 


 

 

 

Francis Bacon’s Studio

 

 

 

By M.G. STEPHENS  |  NONFICTION  |  THE MISSOURI REVIEW  |  VOLUME 32  |  NUMBER 4  |  WINTER 2009  

 

Francis Bacon moved into 7 Reece Mews in 1961 and spent the next thirty years living and painting there. Reece Mews was a London block of Victorian coach houses in South Kensington, former horse stables transformed in the twentieth century into homes that, however cramped, were deemed quaint and artsy. The mews house was a small warren of rooms up a narrow flight of stairs, where some of Bacon’s finest paintings were done. At the time, he was already considered one of the greatest living artists. In 1961, the building had two floors, but the ground floor was a garage for storage. To get to the living quarters, one climbed a narrow staircase so steep that a rope was strung alongside it in order to hoist oneself upwards. The top floor consisted of the studio — separated from the rest of the space by a door — and a living area with a small bedroom, a kitchen with a bathtub, and a water closet. The living space resembled a ship’s quarters, with low ceilings and small windows. But the studio had high ceilings and a skylight, and it was a workable space. By contrast, the kitchen was modest, with a bathtub and a bathroom sink located in it. As to the wash closet, Bacon made it famous in several of his paintings, showing a man sitting on the toilet, looking as if he were about to throw up. The bedroom also served as a living room, where he drank in the evening with friends. The “bedsitter,” as he called it, was furnished simply but also included a circular bed, which figured in many of his paintings. Bacon found the claustrophobic atmosphere to be part of its charm, almost like being inside a closet. He told the story of a nanny who had locked him in a cupboard when he was a boy.

“That cupboard was the making of me,” he often said.

Reece Mews was his bolt-hole, the place where his paintings were made. It was Francis Bacon’s cupboard in London.

Bacon used to say that the door and the walls to his studio were the only places where he was an abstract painter. The door, the walls and old, discarded canvases were his palettes where he mixed colors before becoming, if not realistic, then figurative on his canvases. He mixed the colors on the door, creating a profusion of pastel shapes, blotched, dripped and scumbled on. The pinks, blues, reds and greens dripped over the door frame and down the walls, appearing almost like a field of abstract flowers in bloom. But the studio suggested a space inhabited by a lonely, even desolate drinking man who had finally lost his bearings. Besides the clutter of paint brushes and cans and artist’s materials, there was an extraordinary number of photographs everywhere. The photographs were like aide-memoire, but they also remind one of the spools of tape in Samuel Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape, in which Krapp tries to recall his forgotten past by playing back tapes he made earlier in his life. This is done despite his inability to remember the definitions of a lot of the words he used in the recordings. This sense of impending doom that the mess in the studio created was ameliorated by high ceilings, though. Amid the profusion of discarded objects everywhere, the room was nonetheless full of an inviting light from the skylight.

“I cannot work in places that are too tidy,” Francis Bacon once said. “It’s much easier for me to paint in a place like this, which is a mess. I don’t know why, but it helps me.”

Art is a game of light and shadows, and the studio was a place of such chiaroscuro. The shadows were filled with an assortment of objects: a Rembrandt pastel set, a thousand little colorful chips of crayons and chalk in a wooden box, or a Maxwell House coffee jar stuffed with brushes. Bacon often didn’t bother to clean the brushes after he used them, thus rendering them useless thereafter. Next to these discarded brushes, cardboard boxes lay in heaps, often thrown into the studio after the contents, bottles of champagne — Francis’s drug of choice — were consumed elsewhere in the house. The champagne boxes were then used to store photographs. The boxes, brimful of photographs of friends and lovers, had become painted over and water-logged. The photographer John Deakin had taken many shots of Bacon and his friends, in order for Francis to paint them. There were photographs of Isabel Rawsthorne, Muriel Belcher and Henrietta Moraes, all of whom Bacon painted. At the top of one pile of rubbish, there was a photo of Bacon himself, looking younger and reflective. In another pile, there were photos of the artist Lucian Freud, an old friend, and Peter Lacy, one of Bacon’s former lovers. Not surprisingly, the artist had a lifelong fascination with early photography, particularly Eadweard Muybridge’s  motion-studies series. Bacon constantly referred to all of these photographs while he was painting, so it was not his indifference that placed them in seemingly haphazard piles; it was his unfaltering attention. These are the images that appear obsessively throughout his paintings. Bacon saw images falling into his mind “like slides into a projector.” The studio was therefore a kind of messy slide show of the mind, a necessary part of the creative process for Francis Bacon.

Some of the photographs were of George Dyer, Bacon’s penultimate lover. Many of Bacon’s great paintings were of George, a Soho tough guy who supposedly burgled the mews house shortly after Bacon moved into it. There was a torn, paint-smeared head shot of George in profile-gangster pompadour of slicked-back dark hair, bushy eyebrows, prominent nose, not movie-star handsome but all the same, handsome enough, a man’s man. There was also a photo of George in his underwear, muscular and brooding. Another photograph of Dyer’s head was pricked with pinholes, so that Bacon could trace the image onto a canvas. Through light and shadow, through mess and clutter, Francis Bacon rendered one painting after another, whether of George Dyer or his other friends.

In the profusion of things in the studio, an old round mirror catches the eye. Bacon may have designed this piece in the early 1930s, before turning to painting. After he settled in London, Francis worked as a furniture designer, the mirror being a possible example of his early craft skills. The mirror’s position in the studio was important because it allowed him to look at work in progress from another point of view: backwards and from a different perspective. It was so fogged over and pocked with black dots that it only gave back shadowy images of the paintings, the shapes and overall balance instead of the details. Still, the mirror had been with him for as long as anyone could remember; it connected to his work in other ways, too. His settings were not realistic — a bedroom like a stage set, a living room like a wrestling pit. Certainly his figures weren’t realistic either. But the furniture was realistically drawn, suggesting the modernism of the 1920s. The furniture also showed Bacon’s training as a designer. The chairs look like chairs, the sofas like sofas, the circular bed, like a bed.

Amid the art supplies, photographs and a few radiators in the middle of the room, one or two lights hung from plain cords, almost the way light bulbs appear so desolately in Philip Guston’s later, cartoony paintings. Francis Bacon took to painting such singularly desolate light bulbs dangling from wires in his later paintings too. The studio was a bit like a collage — patches of color on the door, doorframe and the walls; paint splattered over the shredding photographs; postcards of Francis’s own paintings; letters; and stacks of paint-stained art books. A book on Velasquez lay under papers and other books — about Munch, Rodin, bullfighting, cricket, muscle building and poetry. Though influenced by Picasso and the Surrealists, Francis Bacon had a lifelong fascination — an obsession, really — with Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. He once told a friend that it was “the magnificent color of it.”

Bacon’s own “Study after Velasquez’s Portrait of Innocent X” is one of the painter’s finest works, and he also painted a series of screaming popes, their mouths opened wide in primal rage. As terrifying as some of Francis Bacon’s paintings were, he admitted: “I have never tried to be horrific.” He went on to say: “I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.” Yet the screaming popes seem more reminiscent of the Northern Irish Unionist clergyman Ian Paisley. It was Paisley who once shouted down Pope John Paul II as he spoke to the European Parliament in Strasbourg; there were no Monet sunsets there. Bacon’s paintings were often violent and disturbing:  men fighting in the grass or with their faces exploding from their dismembered bodies. Like Leonardo in another era, Francis saw beneath the flesh to the muscle and gristle of the human form. “Well, of course we are meat,” he said. “We are potential carcasses.” If the studio more resembled a butcher’s abattoir than an artist’s garret, this fit with Francis Bacon’s sensibility.

Francis Bacon lived to paint and drink. Until his death in 1992, he drank in arty, bohemian drinking clubs in Soho. But for living and working, he preferred his South Kensington neighborhood to anywhere else. In Bacon’s day, South Kensington was still shabby-elegant and bohemian. He referred to it as “gilded squalor.” He was known as a good cook, and so shopped for food and wine locally. He took his bed sheets and towels to be laundered in nearby Harrington Road, his shirts locally to a place in Glendower Place. Outside of the studio, Bacon was a smart, stylish dresser, casual and elegant, wearing skin-tight trousers, tight shirts and a short, tight leather jacket. He wore his dark hair in a kind of 1940s wave, jazzy and dramatic, street-tough, very bohemian. His living quarters were like his clothing, casual, elegant and simple. The mess was restricted to the studio and nowhere else; it was a kind of by-product of his creativity.

Though he preferred to live in “South Ken,” as his last partner, John Edwards, called it, Bacon was a drinking man in Soho, frequenting clubs like the Colony Room. From early on, he established a routine in which he painted early in the day, then went off drinking late into the evening. He painted his triptych, Crucifixion, in a fortnight, “in a bad mood of drinking,” he said, “under tremendous hangovers and drink.” He did not see it as revelation; rather “you could call it despair.” One cannot help but recall the Auden poem about the Old Masters never being wrong about suffering. The studio was a blueprint of such suffering. All grace and beauty, all spiritual uplift and tragic circumstance went into the creation of paintings.

Despite the gay life of drink and sociability in Soho, Francis Bacon endured the loss of one lover after another, first Peter Lacy in the early 1960s, then George Dyer in the early 1970s when Dyer killed himself in a hotel room in Paris, moments before Bacon was to open a major show there. His relationship with Dyer was known to be violent and drunken, not unlike the violent scenes in his paintings. Francis Bacon might have been a world-renowned artist, full of the grandiosity such a mantle confers. But he was also an alcoholic who suffered from issues of low self-esteem, fear and uncertainty. He was reputed to have told the barman at the Colony Room: “When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter.” His relationships were one manifestation of that lack of self-esteem; the studio itself might be deemed another. The studio was a visual example of the alcoholic mind, its chaos and uncertainty, and also its sublime and contradictory brilliance. Reece Mews looked more like a skip, a tip, a dumpster, than an artist’s studio.

When John Edwards and Francis Bacon first met in 1976, the painter invited Edwards to Reece Mews. Francis told his future and final long-term partner: “People think I live grandly you know, but in fact I live in a dump.” Edwards had to agree once he saw the place. But it was the door to the studio that first caught his attention, and behind it, the studio itself, where he saw what John called “an unbelievable mess.” Edwards noted that the studio had become “so messy and chaotic that he [Francis] couldn’t move around to paint properly.” In the week that followed, John filled ten dustbin bags with detritus, including what he said were “newspaper cuttings, magazines, old books and tins of old paint hardened by the years and beyond use.” Bacon once said, “I feel at home here in this chaos because chaos suggests images to me.” Yet Francis seemed to appreciate the new freedom of movement in the studio, once some of the debris was cleared away.

Throughout his long career, Bacon had engaged in a kind of artistic cull to reduce, if not the clutter and mess, then his creative inventory. He would cut out the faces on his small canvases and slash the big paintings into pieces. When John Edwards came along, he was assigned the task of slashing the larger canvases. They performed this cull regularly in the nearly two decades of their relationship. At the end of his life, a series of large stretched canvases were piled in front of a window, blocking the light. One unfinished work rested on the easel, revealing the artist’s underpainting. Red, black, and gray lines swirl, circle and crisscross around the beginnings of an emerging portrait of the late George Dyer, the great love of Francis Bacon’s life.

Yet it was John Edwards to whom Bacon bequeathed his entire estate. At the time of Bacon’s death (1992), the estate was worth about 11 million pounds, and today one painting alone might be worth ten times that amount. In making him the executor, Francis had encouraged John to clean out the studio and build a third floor to make the house more attractive. John never built a third floor, but six years after Francis died, he brought in a team of forensic archaeologists and the photographer Perry Ogden, and they recorded and numbered, classified, and accounted for every object in the studio. The findings were incredible — the inventory included literally thousands of items, including 1500 photographs; over 100 slashed paintings; 70 drawings (even though Bacon claimed never to draw); over 500 books, including Richard Ellmann’s biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; poetry collections by Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Stephen Spender; Joyce’sDubliners; art, language and travel books, including a book by Bruce Chatwin; an early Martin Amis novel; books on ancient Greece; and a biography of Sigmund Freud. One result of this archeological dig was Perry Ogden’s book of photographs entitled 7 Reece Mews-Francis Bacon’s Studio (2001). Even more remarkable is the fact that once the studio was inventoried in 1998 John Edwards donated the entire contents of the house to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. The Hugh Lane is the oldest gallery of modern art in the world, opening in 1908, a year before Francis Bacon was born. How would Francis Bacon have felt about this uprooting and displacement of his beloved studio, heaving it, lock, stock and barrel from London to Dublin?

“I think it would have made him roar with laughter,” John Edwards said.

Both gallery and painter were products of Dublin, so the studio going to Ireland is not as odd as it might first seem. Francis Bacon was born on Baggot Street in Dublin on October 28, 1909. Most of his early life was spent in rural County Kildare, where his father bred and trained race horses. His mother’s family was Anglo-Irish, Protestant not Catholic; gentry not working class. They were well off but not wealthy. Francis was a frail, sickly, asthmatic child; indeed, he was allergic to animals, making his father’s enterprise nearly unbearable. His father was a disciplinarian, and Francis did not get on well with him. This tension was compounded by Francis’s attraction for his father. One has to presume that the dark-haired, brooding, muscled men of his paintings were often stand-ins for that patriarch. At any rate, when Francis was sixteen, the father found him wearing his mother’s underwear and banished him from home.  His years away from Ireland included stints in Berlin and Paris and then eventually his long tenure in London. In Paris, while still in his teens, he saw several exhibitions that would have a lasting influence on his life. One of these shows was on the Surrealists, the other a Picasso exhibition. Francis Bacon, though a painter, followed in a long line of Irish literary figures who chose exile over the native soil. The studio being recreated in Dublin, therefore, was a kind of homecoming.

Finally, I found myself in Dublin, and I had to visit the Hugh Lane to see the studio. My only experience of it was Perry Ogden’s book of photographs. I was expecting to see an antiseptic version of the book’s astonishing images, but nothing quite prepares you for Francis Bacon’s studio. Everything is there: the paint-splattered door and walls, the slashed paintings, the endless piles of photographs and magazine clippings-even the giant dust balls, some of them turned pink and orange from the raw pigments. The only distancing comes from the Plexiglas openings onto the studio. Otherwise, you are there at Reece Mews in South Kensington, London, amid the flotsam of Francis Bacon’s creative life-which added to the jetsam of his paintings. I am not a particularly neat person myself, so the studio is a bit of a revelation, a candid camera view, as it were, of how creativity really looks and operates.

The contemporary British artist Tracey Emin has become famous for an art installation of her own bed, its unmade sheets and duvet, books and food and papers and cigarettes everywhere, almost a miniature version of Francis Bacon’s mess in the studio. But mess is not the only element necessary to make such installations artistically viable. There is an installation at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh that reconstructs the backroom of Max’s Kansas City, the massive artists’ and writers’ bar from the 1960s on Park Avenue South, just beyond Union Square, where Warhol’s own Factory was located. Almost nightly he and his entourage trooped into Max’s to drink, hang out, carry on, act out, misbehave, melt down and go insane. How apt that a room in Warhol’s museum should recreate that venue. There is another art installation from the 1960s that suggests not only a precedent but a tradition for something like Francis Bacon’s studio as a work of art, and that is Edward Kienholz’s 1965 installation called The Beanery, a satirical take on the West Hollywood bar Barney’s Beanery. In Kienholz’s installation, the bar is reduced to a space of about 20 feet by 7 feet by 6 feet; the place smells of beer, which he spilt everywhere; and there is a soundtrack of people chattering and glasses clinking. Instead of faces, the patrons of the Beanery have clock faces that have stopped.

When Marcel Duchamp submitted a readymade urinal entitled Fountain as a sculpture to the Society of Independent Artists Exhibit in 1917, he changed how we look at art, how we make art, and even how we define what art is. Thus, given its context, Tracey Emin’s bed becomes an art installation just as Edward Kienholz’s Beanery was another kind of art installation. Francis Bacon’s studio is also a work of art, a transcendent space full of the rhythms of creative enterprise, a statement, a testament in which the purely ugly becomes somehow beautiful. The studio at 7 Reece Mews — transformed in Dublin — fits in well with this strand of modern art, where the readymade and discarded become transcendent objects of artistic desire.

Yet it was not Francis Bacon’s intention for his studio to be deemed a work of art. The purpose of the studio, however artful its mess, was for Francis Bacon to paint. How he did this only the artist knows because the clutter and mess of the studio would have defeated most people. I have seen many artists’ and writers’ rooms and flats and houses and studios, including friends’ studios in places like Provincetown and New York, and while clutter and mess is often de rigueur, Francis Bacon took both clutter and mess to new heights.

The epitome of the hard-drinking Soho bohemian artist, quintessentially of his time and place, Francis Bacon was a most British artist and person. I now realize, seeing his studio in Dublin, that the art is British but the studio is Irish. The studio may be the closest you will ever get to seeing inside the mind of the creative imagination — the imagination inchoate, without the trappings of form and function. The unfocused imagination is like an engine off the rails; it is a maelstrom. Yet even in the tornado of an alcoholic’s life, there are markers suggesting the desire for order. In Francis Bacon’s case, order came from the canvases he created. The studio is not so much afterthought as pre-formed idea, the floating anxiety that surrounds all genius, the nightmare landscape of the mind before imagination shapes itself artfully.  It is a trope for the energy and destructiveness that accompanies all creation. I suppose the studio is a bit too close to home, too truthful of what lies behind the civilized veneer all of us manufacture in order to function in the world. How apt then that it should be divorced from its original location and plunked down in Dublin, suggesting that it is now more metaphor than actual studio, more art installation than a functioning artist’s space.  It is a powerful example of how art can be made from the ugliest details. Francis Bacon‘s studio possesses, as Yeats might say, a terrible beauty.

 

 

Sources:
 

7 Reece Mews Francis Bacon’s Studio, photographs by Perry Ogden, foreword by John Edwards, captions by Dr Margarita Cappock (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001)

“Great Interviews of the 20th Century-Francis Bacon,” interviews by David Sylvester, foreword by Damien Hirst, pamphlet (London: The Guardian News and Media, 2007)

Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980)

“The Real Francis Bacon” by Peter Conrad, The Observer, Review, Sunday 10 August 2008

Francis Bacon, catalogue, Tate Britain show, curated by Chris Stephens and Matthew Gale, 11 September 2008 – 4 January 2009

“A Homecoming for Bacon to His Seductive Madrid” by Victoria Burnett, International Herald Tribune, Global Edition, International Life, Wednesday, February 25, 2009

 

 

 

                                   Francis Bacon moved into 7 Reece Mews in 1961


 

 

 

 

 Hirst, Renaissance man? Obviously not

 

 

Britart’s bad boy gets his paints out again, but the results arenot exactly Bacon

... more like a dog’s breakfast

 

 

 

 Nothing Matters

 White Cube, London

 

 

CHARLES DARWENT  |  VISUAL ART  |  THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY | 29 NOVEMBER 2009

 

Lest you are newly back from Mars, something in the nature of a miracle has happened in British art: Damien Hirst has begun to paint. In Hirst’s work, the artist’s hand became a metonym of the flesh and the flesh of mortality. Rid art of the hand and, vampire-like, it might never die.

Yes, I know about the Spot paintings, but Hirst’s new works, on show at both branches of White Cube, were made, not by a fleet of assistants with spray guns, but by the artist’s own hand and brush. This marvel has been met with all the hype his gallery can muster – Jolson Speaks! Hirst Paints! – so that you half expect Jay Jopling to hand out tots of restorative brandy as you emerge, dazed, from a visit.

And how amazing is all this? Well. Even if installation and concept have hogged the headlines for the past quarter century, I’d guess that something like 90 per cent of art made in Britain has consisted of painting. It was Hirst himself who led to the remaining 10 per cent being dubbed “Britart” , as though there was no other kind. Much of the power of Hirst’s work lay in its being anti-painterly, made by assistants, taxidermists and vitrine-builders. This was hardly new – Duchamp’s readymades became Hirst’s madebysomebodyelses – but something in the clinical nature of his art caught the public mood. In Hirst’s work, the artist’s hand became a metonym of the flesh and the flesh of mortality. Rid art of the hand and, vampire-like, it might never die.

So the insistent hands-on-ness of Hirst’s new work is historically significant, whether you like it or not. And frankly, I don’t. Who could? Underlying this work is the belief that you can, in middle age, take up painting and have the results shown at the most important contemporary gallery in London as if by right. And guess what? If your name is Damien Hirst, you can. But, other than as historical curiosities, will paintings made under such an assumption ever be worth looking at? Can they in any sense be good?

Let me say that “good” here is not another word for polished or skilled: Bad Painting, done well, has a solid place in 20th-century art. But there is Bad Painting and bad painting, and Hirst’s work is the second.

In the ground floor space at Mason’s Yard are canvases done largely in blue. Hirst’s Blue Period – he has been painting for nearly two years now – echoes not so much Picasso’s as Francis Bacon’s, particularly the Savile-Row-blue images Bacon made of his lover, Peter Lacy, when he, like Hirst, was 44. Downstairs are Bacon-ish triptychs in Bacon-ish frames surrounding such Bacon-ish things as anatomised bodies and empty staircases.

Of course, Hirst has also made anatomical figures, most famously the 20ft bronze doll, Hymn. I suppose the frame of his trademark shark-in-a-box might explain the sketchy white lines, apparently lifted from Bacon’s pope-cages, that score the surface of Walk Away in Silence – the shark jaws in Insomnia and Time Will Tell certainly refer less to Bacon than to a Bacon-like tendency in Hirst. And then there are the smaller (and, to my mind, better) paintings of the object with which Hirst is most closely identified as an artist, namely the human skull.

All of which raises a great many questions, the most obvious of which is why? Hirst, with his vitrines of flyblown meat, has always been a Baconite. Why does he now feel the need to work like Bacon? A triptych called How Did We Lose Our Way? may suggest an answer. Bacon died mid-way between Freeze and Sensation, the two shows that made Hirst’s name. Could the younger man’s return to paint on canvas mark an admission that the Britart experiment has, in the end, been a failure? Seen like this, the dreadfulness of Hirst’s painting might be excused as intentional, a sign that something has been lost in British art and that that loss is irreparable.

I certainly prefer this possibility to the other, which is that Damien Hirst feels he can paint by dint of being Damien Hirst. This, appallingly, is not the case. I went to White Cube determined not to fall into the British trap of thinking that artists can only do one thing well, that installationists and conceptualists can not also be painters. Look at Michelangelo. I left with a sense of sadness that a man whose pills and diamond-covered skull will remain icons of his time should have been laid so low.

White Cube, London N1 and W1 (020-7930 5373) to 30 Jan 2010

 

 

 

 

                                Francis Bacon, Man in Blue IV , 1954

 


 

 

 

 

Sizzling attack on Bacon

 

 

 

 

A transatlantic row has broken out over a stinging profile of the artist

 

 

 

 

 

RICHARD DORMENT  |  ARTS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2009

 

 

THE huge reputation of some artists in their own country is often baffling to art lovers in another. Which might explain why an article on Francis Bacon by John Richardson, the art critic and celebrated biographer of Picasso, has raised hackles over here.

 

Though Richardson is English by birth, he’s lived in New York so long that it is not surprising that his forthcoming essay on Francis Bacon in the New York Review of Books reflects an American assessment of the painter’s stature, not the much more reverential attitude we have towards him in this country.

 

Richardson was reviewing a show of Bacon’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that has received a mixed reception from New York critics who basically just don’t “get” Bacon. From across the Atlantic, Bacon looks like an over-rated neo-Romantic, a good colourist whose pictures of junkies and toilets amount to little more than a good old wallow in self pity.

 

 Richardson is certainly right that much of the later work is weak, the notorious example being those risible paintings of a humanoid wearing only cricket pads, which are said to have been inspired by Bacon’s fantasies about a then-famous blond hunk who captained England. Richardson is a distinguished art historian and, just as he did in his magisterial biography of Picasso, he can speak about Bacon with authority because they were friends. But a lot of what he has written about the violent, sado-masochistic nature of Bacon’s relationships with his lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer is already in the public domain. Richardson’s insight, that Bacon’s best work is fuelled by anger and pain, sounds right, but then even the Bacon biopic Love is the Devil connected his creativity to his penchant for violent sex.

 

I have only read a filleted version of what may well be a much more balanced piece in the New York Review, but friends who knew Bacon tell me that the version I saw gives a distorted picture of a man who, when not being hurled through plate-glass windows by his boyfriends, was courteous, cultured, highly educated and possessed of extraordinary moral courage. But that’s OK. Richardson is writing as a critic, not a biographer, and the official biography, which is in preparation, will give us a more rounded portrait.

 

Richardson makes much of Bacon’s inability to draw. That’s absolutely true, but perhaps the really interesting thing is that Bacon is a rare phenomenon — a painter who didn’t feel the need to draw at any stage in his creative process, apart from rough notes that are more like ideas for paintings than studies.

 

In taking the formidable critic David Sylvester to task for defending Bacon, what Richardson may be forgetting is that when Sylvester became the artist’s champion in the late Forties, Bacon needed every defender he could get. As often happens when a critic has been writing about the work of a particular artist for many years, Sylvester was too kind and included paintings in his exhibitions that should never have seen the light of day. As this volley from John Richardson suggests, the inevitable reappraisal has already begun.

Richard Dorment

 

 

 

 

 

        

                                          

                                                         Francis Bacon: Cultured

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The sado-masochistic relationships that

drove Bacon to create his best works

 

 

 

 

ROSS LYDALL  |  THE LONDON EVENING STANDARD  |  MONDAY 23 NOVEMBER 2009

 

Francis Bacon was once thrown through a plate-glass window by an enraged lover, damaging his face so badly that his right eye had to be sewn back into place, according to a biographer.

Art historian John Richardson also argues that Bacon’s best work was inspired by sado-masochistic relationships – with his “goading” of one lover, George Dyer, eventually leading to the latter’s death. The fatal end, in a hotel room lavatory, on the eve of a retrospective of the artist’s paintings in Paris in 1971, was immortalised by Bacon in one of his most famous works.

Richardson, 85, who is completing the final volume of his biography of Picasso, uses an article in the forthcoming edition of the New York Review of Books to reveal secrets of Bacon’s life – a man he knew since the Forties when the artist was in his early twenties.

Richardson recalls that Bacon, who died in 1992, revelled in a “most heinous assault” by an earlier lover, Peter Lacy.

He writes: “In a state of alcoholic dementia, he hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place. Bacon loved Lacy even more. For weeks he would not forgive Lucien Freud for remonstrating with his torturer. Mercifully, Lacy moved to Tangier.”

In the article, Richardson said there was a direct link between Bacon’s desires and his artistic output.

“Bacon would goad George [Dyer] into a state of psychic meltdown and then, in the early hours of the morning – his favourite time to work – he would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system.”

Richardson recalled spending a drunken evening with the pair in New York in 1968, after which Dyer was found by Bacon unconscious on the hotel room floor, having washed down sleeping pills with a bottle of whisky. "The goading worsened, the imagery intensified, Richardson said of Bacon’s subsequent work.

Bacon’s studio in the Forties was a place of "ramshackle theatricality where martinis were served in huge Waterford tumblers and a paint-stained garter belt was kicked under a sofa.

Bacon enlisted his blind nanny’s help in his shoplifting exploits, when he would steal groceries, cosmetics and Kiwi boot polish for his hair.

 


 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon ‘nearly lost eye in

assault by psychopathic lover’

 

 

 

By MATTHEW MOORE  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  MONDAY 23 NOVEMBER 2009

 

Francis Bacon nearly lost an eye after being thrown through a glass window by his “psychopathic” over Peter Lacy, a biographer has recounted.

The art historian John Richardson has disclosed new details of his friend Bacon’s tempestuous relationship with Lacy in an article arguing that the painter’s creative impulses were rooted in sexual pain and humiliation.

Richardson, who has written a multi-volume biography of Bacon, also claims that the painter pushed his more well-known lover George Dyer to suicide by goading him “into a state of psychic meltdown”.

Dyer took his own life in a Paris hotel bathroom in 1971 – a tragedy that Bacon memorialised in Triptych, May-June 1973, which is considered one of his finest works.

In the article Richardson claims that Lacy and Dyer were crucial to Bacon’s style because they provoked his sadomasochistic desires.

“Unfortunately, drink released a fiendish, sadistic streak in Lacy that bordered on the psychopathic,” he writes in The New York Review of Books.

“In a state of alcoholic dementia, he hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place.

“Bacon loved Lacy even more. For weeks he would not forgive Lucian Freud for remonstrating with his torturer. Mercifully, Lacy moved to Tangier.”

Richardson also describes spending evenings with Bacon and Dyer in the 1960s during which the artist would taunt and bully his fragile partner.

“Bacon would goad George into a state of psychic meltdown and then, in the early hours of the morning – his favourite time to work – he would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system,” he writes.

Richardson argues that the quality of Bacon’s work declined after Dyer’s death when he started a new, more stable relationship “seemingly free of sadomasochistic overtones” with a younger man called John Edwards.

While praising Bacon’s more tortured works, Richardson contends that he had little artistic ability and struggled to draw complex objects such as hands. He dismisses some of his most renowned paintings – including his series of Popes – as “magnificent flukes”.

Bacon, who died in 1992, is considered one of the greatest British painters of the 20th Century.

During his lifetime he earned a reputation as a dissolute libertine, heading a coterie of hard-drinking cronies including fellow painter Lucian Freud and journalist Jeffrey Bernard.

 

 

 

              

                                                Francis Bacon by Arnold Newman 1975


 

 

 

 

 

 Americans don’t ‘get’ Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

 John Richardson’s article on Francis Bacon suggests

 the inevitable reappraisal of his work has begun.

 

 

 

 

  ART NEWS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  MONDAY 23 NOVEMBER 2009               

 

 

The huge reputation of some artists in their own country is often baffling to art lovers in another. Which might explain why an article on Francis Bacon by John Richardson, the art critic and celebrated biographer of Picasso, has raised hackles over here.

Though Richardson is English by birth, he’s lived in New York so long it is not surprising that his forthcoming essay on Francis Bacon in the New York Review of Books reflects an American assessment of the painter’s stature, not the much more reverential attitude we have towards him in this country. Richardson was reviewing a show of Bacon’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that that received a mixed reception from New York critics who basically just don’t ‘get’ Bacon. (The same thing happened to Lucian Freud a few years ago). From across the Atlantic Bacon looks like an overrated neo romantic, a good colourist whose pictures of junkies and toilets amount to little more than a good old wallow in self pity.

Richardson is certainly right that much of the later work is weak, the notorious example being those risible paintings of a humanoid wearing only cricket pads, which are said to have been inspired by Bacon’s fantasies about a then-famous blonde hunk who captained England.

Richardson is a distinguished art historian and, just as he did in his magisterial biography of Picasso, he can speak about Bacon with authority because they were friends. But a lot of what he has written about the violent, sado-masochistic nature of Bacon’s relationships with his lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer is already in the public domain. Richardson’s insight, that Bacon’s best work is fuelled by anger and pain, sounds right, but then even the Bacon biopic Love is the Devil connected his creativity to his penchant for violent sex.

I have only read the a filleted version of what may well be a much more balanced piece in the New York Review, but friends who knew Bacon tell me that the version I saw gives a distorted picture of a man who, when not being hurled through plate glass windows by his boyfriends, was courteous, cultured, highly educated and possessed of extraordinary moral courage. But that’s ok. Richardson is writing as a critic, not a biographer, and the official biography, which is in preparation, will give us a more rounded portrait of the man.

Richardson makes much of Bacon’s inability to draw. That’s absolutely true, but perhaps the really interesting thing isn’t that Bacon didn’t draw, but that he is a rare phenomenon – a painter who didn’t feel the need to draw at any stage in his creative process – apart from rough notes that are more like ideas for paintings than studies. In taking the formidable critic David Sylvester to task for defending Bacon, what Richardson may be forgetting is that when Sylvester became the artist’s champion in the late 1940s, Bacon needed every defender he could get. As often happens when a critic has been writing about the work of a particular artist for many years, Sylvester was certainly too kind and definitely included paintings in his Bacon exhibitions that should never have seen the light of day. As this volley from John Richardson suggests, the inevitable reappraisal has already begun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old queens, Krays and champagne

 

 

 

JOHN RICHARDSON  |  ART & DESIGN  |  THE OBSERVER  |  SUNDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2009 

 

“In 1950, Bacon’s studio would become the focus of attention for a three-day celebration that, in retrospect, was the coming-out party for a new variety of bohemia. In its excess it could also be seen as Bacon’s debut as a star. The occasion was the wedding of his close friend Ann Dunn … Francis painted the chandeliers red to match his maquillage; an old queen belted out campy versions of popular songs.

A woman known as s ‘Sod’ (real name Edomy), who lived on a bus, helped to welcome the guests: these included members of parliament and fellows of All Souls, as well as ‘rough trade,’ slutty debutantes, cross-dressers, and the evil Kray brothers. The consumption of hundreds of cases of champagne would have left Francis broke had he not had the support of a rich and indulgent lover.”

Extract from John Richardson’s forthcoming piece in the New York Review of Books

 

 

 

 

 

Sado-masochism and stolen shoe polish: Bacon’s legacy revisited

 

 

 

Art historian John Richardson’s revelations on the troubled artist he knew as a young man

 

 

 

 

 

CHARLOTTE HIGGINS  |  CHIEF ARTS WRITER  |  THE OBSERVER  |  SUNDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2009

 

Francis Bacon’s was a life lived to extravagant extremes. His drunken excesses in the Colony Room Club in Soho; his carnivalesque, ruinous generosity; the formative occasion on which, as a teenager, his father found him wearing his mother’s underwear and beat the living daylights out of him – all this is almost as celebrated as his riotously tortured paintings.

But now the art historian John Richardson, whose multi-volume life of Picasso has been called the best artist’s biography ever written, and who knew Bacon from the 1940s, has argued that the best of Bacon’s art stemmed precisely from his sadomasochistic sexual relationships at their most intense, which also led directly to the death of at least one of his lovers.

It was that early beating by his father to which Bacon attributed his taste for masochism – desires that were played out in adulthood with his lover Peter Lacy.

Richardson describes Lacy’s “most heinous assault”: “In a state of alcoholic dementia, he hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place. Bacon loved Lacy even more. For weeks he would not forgive Lucian Freud for remonstrating with his torturer. Mercifully, Lacy moved to Tangier.”

Writing in the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books, Richardson calls Lacy “a dashing 30-year-old … He owned an infamous cottage in the Thames valley, where Francis would spend much of his time – often, according to him, in bondage”.

Richardson adds: “Unfortunately, drink released a fiendish, sadistic streak in Lacy that bordered on the psychopathic. Besides taking his rage out on Bacon, he took it out on his canvases. To his credit, however, he inspired some of his lover’s most memorable works, among them, the Man in Blue paintings: a menacing, dark-suited Lacy set off against vertical draperies.”

The best-known of Bacon’s lovers is George Dyer – partly because Bacon immortalised in paintings Dyer’s 1971 suicide in a hotel bedroom lavatory, on the eve of the artist’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris.

Richardson describes the directness of the relationship between Bacon’s desires and his artistic output. “Bacon would goad George into a state of psychic meltdown and then, in the early hours of the morning – his favourite time to work – he would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system.” Richardson argues that these are among his best works.

Richardson describes the evening he spent in New York with the pair in 1968. After a lunch during which Bacon called Jackson Pollock an “old lace-maker” they went out drinking. Dyer left, after an argument, and in the early hours Richardson received a call from Bacon who had found his lover passed out on the floor of their room in the Algonquin hotel, “unconscious from having washed down a handful of his sleeping pills with a bottle of scotch”.

According to Richardson: “The goading worsened, the imagery intensified,” and finally, after another unsuccessful suicide attempt in Greece, Dyer killed himself in Paris.

Richardson argues that Bacon’s art went rapidly downhill when, after Dyer’s death, he entered a relationship with John Edwards, which was “seemingly free of sadomasochistic overtones. This may explain why Bacon’s work lost its sting and failed to thrill. Paintings inspired by Edwards, as well as a Formula 1 driver and a famous cricketer the artist fancied (fetishism survives in the batting pads), reveal that in old age Bacon managed to banish his demons and move on to beefcake. His headless hunks of erectile tissue buffed to perfection have an angst-free, soft-porn glow”.

Richardson is an unusually stern critic of Bacon – who was the subject of a Tate retrospective last year and is revered by such artists as Damien Hirst. The problem, argues Richardson, is that Bacon simply could not draw. “Painting after painting would be marred by his inability to articulate a figure or its space.” The critic David Sylvester – who helped cement Bacon’s reputation – let him off too lightly for this “fatal flaw”, he argues. "His celebrated variants on Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X are either magnificent flukes or near-total disasters. In the earliest of this 10-year series, Bacon famously portrays the pope screaming. He’s good at screams but hopeless at hands, so he amputates, conceals, or otherwise fudges them.”

Richardson describes his first visit to Bacon’s studio in the late 1940s. “Bacon struck me as being exhilaratingly funny … Everything about his vast, vaulted studio was over the top: martinis served in huge Waterford tumblers; a paint-stained garter belt kicked under a sofa … The ramshackle theatricality that permeated the studio also permeated the three iconic mastershockers – scrotum-bellied humanoids screaming out at us from the base of a crucifixion – that were about to make the artist famous.”

The sight of Bacon’s blind old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, knitting in a corner “came as a surprise”. She slept on the kitchen table, and “provided cover for Francis’s shoplifting sprees (groceries, cosmetics, and Kiwi shoe polish for his hair)”. She also helped provide an unusual source of income for Bacon: when the artist held illicit roulette parties, she would extort huge tips from visitors desperate to go to the loo. According to Richardson: “I remember Francis echoing his nanny: “They should bring back hanging for buggery." He was certainly not the only gay Englishman for whom guilt was intrinsic to sex.”

 

 


 Demons and beefcake – the other side of Francis Bacon

 

 

Senior art historian John Richardson has now laid down his views and recollections of the artist

 

 

 

 

CHARLOTTE HIGGINS  |  CHIEF ARTS WRITER  |  THE OBSERVER  |  SUNDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2009

 

 

The territories of  Francis Bacon’s soul have been explored widely; they have been the subject of a film, books and endless speculation. But the senior art historian John appraisal of his life and work.

Writing in the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books, Richardson argues that Bacon’s sado-masochistic relationships lay at the heart of his best work, but with terrible consequences for his lover George Dyer, whose fragile mental state Richardson attributes to Bacon’s endless “goading”.

Having provoked Dyer into “a state of psychic meltdown” he “would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system”. This “goading” resulted in Dyer’s suicide, writes Richardson.

An earlier relationship, with Peter Lacy, was violent to the extent that "he hurled Bacon through a plate glass window. His face was so damaged that his right eye had to be sewn back into place”.

Bacon’s art went rapidly downhill when sado-masochism ceased to be a part of his life, argues Richardson, who describes the “angst-free, soft-porn glow” of his later work.

Richardson, who has hitherto held back from revealing his full memories of Bacon since the artist’s death in 1992, also pours scorn on critics, such as the late David Sylvester, who attempted to defend the self-taught Bacon’s “inability to draw”. He calls the celebrated Screaming Popes series “either magnificent flukes or near-total disasters” and refers to Bacon’s failure to convey “subjects that call for graphic skill, subjects, for instance, that include hands”. Richardson also refers to Bacon’s early adventures as a rent boy; his shoplifting, using his elderly nanny as an accomplice; and the vividly bohemian life around him, including a three-day party in 1950, whose guests “included members of parliament and fellows of All Souls, as well as ‘rough trade’, slutty debutantes, cross-dressers, and the notoriously evil Kray brothers”.

 

 

 

 


Tormented Caravaggio and Bacon connect in Rome show


 

 

 

 

BY ELLA IDE  |  ARTS  |  REUTERS  |  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER, 12 2009

 

ROME (Reuters) – Portraits by Italian master Caravaggio and Irish-born 20th-century painter Francis Bacon stand side-by-side in new exhibition connecting their tormented views of humanity despite contrasting approaches to realism.

The show at Rome’s Galleria Borghese marks 400 years since Caravaggio’s death and 100 years since Bacon’s birth and at its heart lies their shared fascination with the human form and their predilection for the expressive portrait.

Both were radical for their times: against the distorted idealism of high mannerism, Caravaggio was driven by obsessive attention to the real, while Bacon was derided for his refusal to relinquish the human figure in favour of abstraction.

"Bacon can be compared to Caravaggio above all in terms of intensity," said art historian Michael Peppiatt, co-curator of the exhibition and Bacon’s close friend and biographer.

Both painters have been seen as icons of gay, tormented genius and their tragic natures and lives marked by violence – Bacon’s lover committed suicide and Caravaggio was condemned to death after killing a man – are echoed in their works.

"They were both conscious of the shortness of life and of the fragility of humanity, and each powerfully conveys this consciousness through his art," said Peppiatt in a statement.

Seventeen works by Bacon are featured alongside 14 paintings by Caravaggio, six of which, including the Madonna with the Serpent and the Sick Bacchus, belong to the Borghese’s permanent collection.

Many of the works by Bacon, including Head VI, the result of his studies of Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, are on loan from London’s Tate Gallery.

The lavish entrance to the Galleria Borghese is devoted to Bacon’s triptychs, painted after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, with chilling scenes of distorted, semi-naked male figures whose life oozes from them to form flesh-coloured puddles.

The show runs until January 24, 2010 and has already attracted well over 67,000 visitors, with the record numbers forcing the Borghese to extend its open hours and increase the number of tickets available for the daily tours by 30 per cent.

 

 

           

  

  Italian master Caravaggio and Irish-born 20th-century painter Francis Bacon stand side-by-side at the Galleria Borghese in Rome on November 11, 2009.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS A THING TO BEHOLD

 

 

 

 

 

The enigma of Francis Bacon lights up the new Hugh Lane show

 

 

 

 

 

BRUCE ARNOLD  |  ARTS  |  REVIEW   |  IRISH INDEPENDENT  |  SATURDAY 7 NOVEMBER 2009

 

 

The Francis Bacon show, at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin’s Parnell Square, rounds off more than a decade of devoted attention to his work and working life by a team of people led by Barbara Dawson. She is to be congratulated for the dedication involved and for the inspiration that has now laid before us, in almost infinite detail, the life of this strange and complex artist.

It began in 1998 when John Edwards, the artist’s sole heir, donated his studio to the gallery. This gesture represented a huge challenge. Other studios have been acquired for public institutions and recreated with dedication and skill. One thinks of Mondrian’s studio in New York, a spare, white room in which that painter of abstract works produced his succession of rectilinear statements in primary colours bordered in black.

 

My own favourite studio is that of the Italian painter, Morandi, which is part of a museum dedicated to his work in Bologna. At first seeming like the scrupulous gathering together of old bottles, it becomes an intense intrusion into the mind of one of the great painters of the last century.

 

Bacon’s studio, for the last 10 years in Parnell Square, is chaos by comparison with these two. He worked for much of his life in Reece Mews, a tiny enclave off the Old Brompton Road in South Kensington, in a relatively small room with limited light from two windows and a skylight and with hardly space enough to swing a cat. He lived partly above the studio in spartan circumstances.

 

He spent his leisure time largely in Soho with a bohemian group of friends who are recovered in the innumerable photographs now on display as part of the exhibition, entitled A Terrible Beauty, after, though not quite in, the spirit of this phrase from Yeats.

 

What has now been added, in this exhibition, is a vast array of tangential material that enriches and further explores the enigma of the man. A room in the gallery is dedicated to Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneering photographer whose book, The Human Figure in Motion, is an important aid to any figurative painter. This study, originally published in 11 volumes in 1887, laid some of the groundwork for motion pictures, depicting, as it does, human movement recorded at one-fifth of a second intervals. The last edition in Muybridge’s lifetime was owned by Bacon and its frequent use is clearly indicated by the rough treatment given to the pages, torn out, folded, splashed with paint.

 

Much the same fate is visited on other rich gleanings from the studio and now spread out, almost with too much generosity, in the show. Photographs of his friends, of historical events, of the works of other artists, appear again and again, and their distortion by folding and cutting indicates something of how the artist worked.

 

His library, or part of it, similarly subjected to the same rough treatment, is also on exhibition. Given the permanent display of his studio as he left it, this vast extension of the paraphernalia recording the people and things that surrounded the artist, is a fascinating exploration and rightly claimed as putting the gallery at the centre of Bacon archive resources.

 

The second achievement is a significant showing of his work, some of it from major public and private collections, some of it from what the gallery has been given to augment the original gift of the studio. This also includes mutilated paintings, mainly where Bacon has cut out the central feature, often the head of a figure, leaving a tantalising display of intended creativity that went wrong.

 

Bacon’s own view on this relates to his self-taught status and his confession that this, from time to time, led him to overwork his canvas and then to abandon it. Joanna Shepard deals with this and with his painting technique in the final essay of the detailed and fascinating catalogue.

 

The exhibition raises as many questions as it answers. In a literal sense, President Mary McAleese was right when she said that the gallery deserved “a big thank you for bringing this man home”, but she was a bit wide of the mark when she went on to claim for Francis Bacon that he was “the defining figure in Irish visual art generally and one of the greatest of the twentieth century”.

 

Bacon did not see himself as Irish. He was nurtured and promoted as an English painter at a time, the early 1960s, when his work would have been difficult to put on in Dublin or elsewhere in Ireland. He declined to be included in surveys of Irish art, despite being born in this country and brought up here. He was probably relieved to get away and to discover the freedom enjoyed by artists in their lives and in their work that he then experienced in Berlin and other European cities but found most appealing in his natural home, which was Soho.

 

He defined nothing in Irish art that was recognisable at the time of his rise to fame and his impact was more liberating than creative. Without knowing it, and without many people in this country knowing that he was born here, his achievement as a painter had some influence in shifting Irish artists towards international themes and figurative experimentation.

 

The problem of his impact in this area of thought and critical examination is that it will distort our understanding and evaluation of the body of work we call Irish, and the body of people who are concerned with new ways of expressing their Irish identity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                          John Deakin’s photo of the painter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon comes alive in an Indian setting

 

 

 

SHARMISHTA KOUSHIK  |  BANGALORE  |  THE TIMES OF INDIA  |  MONDAY 2 NOVEMBER 2009

 

BANGALORE: Francis Bacon is considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, alongside Pablo Picasso. And in his centenary year, a group of Bangalore artists pay homage to him with an art exhibition The Open Cage, Curated by Giridhar Khasniss, it features works by artists Yusuf Arakkal, C F John, B Devaraj and M S Prakash Babu. 

“He’s an iconic figure of the 20th century. I was researching him for an article early this year. It’s also his birth centenary year. That interested me. As I went along, I thought, why not have a group of Indian artists from Bangalore pay homage to him through their works. I broached this idea to Yusuf Arakkal. He warmed to it, and also agreed to lend his work,” says Khasnis.

The painting in question is a diptych – Bacon’s Man and Child and Bacon’s Man and Priest, which incidentally, won the gold medal at the Florence International Biennale in 2005.

As for the other artists, Khasnis wanted a small group of just four. The figures in Bacon’s works are characterized by a sense of despair and loneliness. And Khasnis developed a vision for the show. “I felt the paintings shouldn’t copy Bacon’s works, but rather inspire artists to render them in an Indian way,” says Khasnis. That brought up his first challenge of choosing artists who could draw from this vision. Eventually, he zeroed in on B Devaraj, C F John and M S Prakash Babu, in addition to Yusuf Arakkal.
 

“Devaraj’s works have stark images, but are also meditative. His figures are calm, collected, but the environment around is harsh and violent. Prakash Babu is also a film-maker, and Bacon wanted to be one too. He was inspired by the film Battleship Potamkin by Sergei Eisenstein, and one of his paintings was inspired by a particular scene on the Odessa steps, of a wounded nurse. Yusuf Arakkal’s paintings are also stark, but have a humanist quality to them,” he says. To counterbalance these sensibilities, he wanted a gentle rendering of struggle.
“C F John came to mind for his works are gentle and, yet, as powerful as Devaraj’s paintings,” he says.

Six months of discussions led to 27 paintings that comprise The Open Cage. The cage is a Baconian concept. It connotes a sense of being enclosed and crumpled. But Khasnis wanted to bring in a positive element. And hence, The Open Cage. “It’s a paradox. Although it’s a cage, there is a sense of something opening up, that there is a possibility of freedom,” he says.

The works depict not just different approaches, but are also of different sizes. There are some diptychs and triptychs, which, says Khasnis, are also part of the Baconian process.

The exhibition opens tomorrow at Galerie Sara Arakkal, and is on till November 14 from 11 am to 6 pm.

 

 

 

Francis Bacon

 

 

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

 

 

 

DONALD KUSPIT  |  ART FORUM  |  VOLUME 48  |  NUMBER 3  |  NOVEMBER 2009

 

With photographs of and information about his two long-term lovers and various statements about his abusive parents supplementing the “twisted” relationship of the perversely intertwined figures in many of his triptychs and his use of “universal” Christian iconography, above all the crucifixion, this exhibition offered a good deal of evidence to support the idea of Francis Bacon as a homosexual, sadomasochist “outlaw,” someone obsessed with violence and suffering, his own and humanity’s in general.

One room in this exhibition contained six of the 1950-53 studies after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X–works that are stunning both in their single-mindedness and fixation, as though Bacon was determined to expose the inner truth of this human horror whose face bears such a ruthless expression in the Velazquez. The power Bacon finds in the colour black here counteracts the power of the pope, and lets the artist tell the emotional truth about social power. Throughout his oeuvre, in fact, Bacon was able to use black simultaneously as a colour, as Matisse said it was, and a non-colour signaling death, as Kandinsky said it was. Bacon gives it presence, even as he uses it to convey abysmal absence. In the “Men in Blue” series, the dark palette of flat “unmarked” planes functions similarly, accentuated by its contrast with the canvases’ scumbled, striated details.

There are no smiles in Bacon’s paintings, only screams, most famously the image of the screaming nurse he borrowed from Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925). In Bacon’s self portraits, his face is divided into irreconcilable halves–one tending to be dark and mangled, the other more or less luminous and with more or less intact features–suggesting deep inner conflict and maladaptive social identity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott described how, in these paintings, it is as if Bacon “is seeing himself in his mothers face, but with some twist in him or her that maddens both him and us.”

Bacon’s mastery of texture is evident not only in the controlled energy of such gestural distortions, but also in his rendering of the subtleties of physical objects, from the coat, hat, umbrella and plants in the Figure Studies of 1945–46, to the floor, furniture, and rolled-up sleeves of his black shirt in Self-Portrait with a Watch, 1973. That work reminds us that the relentless movement of time, documented in Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of moving bodies–a marked-up sheet of reproductions of which, from Bacon’s archive, was on view here in the one room devoted to ephemera–is as much a part of his art as the interplay between the rectilinear “space box”  in which he encloses his figures and the curvilinear space of the rooms in which they sit.

Color and texture come together in the broad colour field frames in which Bacon sets his figures, confirming that his paintings are essentially abstract–for the figures also are abstract signifiers of pure gestural painting, however “meaty.” Even when Bacon sometimes uses uncoloured raw canvas as a “picture plane,” he always uses it in a refined way, juxtaposing if with areas of pure colour, confirming that his pictures are formal constructions. Their board, flat, impassive expanses seem to encapsulate the abstract sublime: They transcend the figures, even as they reveal their inner emptiness (their storm and stress finally signal nothing; their abstractness is a projection of the “death within”)–however emotionally raw, ugly, and outspoken their uncanny subject matter.

 

–Donald Kuspit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tribute to Bacon

 

 


 Considered to be among the most powerful artists of the 20th century, Francis Bacon (1909-1992),

the Irish-born British painter, became a legend in his own lifetime.

 

 

 

EVENT  |  SUNDAY HERALD ART & CULTURE  |  DECCAN HERALD  |  SATURDAY 31 OCTOBER 2009

 

His prolific output included many compelling, mysterious and violent paintings. Shockingly and chillingly distorting the human body and placing it in mysteriously seductive cots, brutal chairs, or boxlike enclosures, Bacon created a unique visual universe where human emotions and passions were embedded within the harsh realities of the flesh.

The Open Cage curated by art writer Giridhar Khasnis and featuring four Bangalore-based artists Yusuf Arakkal, C F John, B Devaraj and M S Prakash Babu, who pay homage to the art and life of Francis Bacon, by revisiting his paintings and interpreting them.

Yusuf Arakkal’s award-winning painting Bacon’s Man, Priest and Boy which received the Gold Medal at the prestigious Florence International Biennale 2005, is a five-feet-by-ten-feet diptych rendered principally in monochromatic hues and takes a cue from Bacon’s well-known painting, Self-Portrait (1973) showing a man seated on a chair.

John, who studied philosophy before opting to take up a career as an artist, comes up with a body of softly coloured paintings; his paintings lyrically render poignant moments of a dancer’s life in a Baconian cage.

In contrast, Devaraj’s paintings are powerful allegories with sturdy characters located in somewhat harsh environs. The protagonists are often surrounded by squealing and squeaking Baconian half-human, half-animal creatures; yet they remain calm and contemplative.

Prakash Babu shows his characteristic inspiration derived from the cinematic idiom where elements of suspense and intrigue are interestingly intertwined. The artist locates Bacon himself in several pictures, but deliberately moves the frames, cuts and chops the edges, and dramatically alters the perspective. The Open Cage will be on display at Galerie Sara Arakkal, Bangalore, from November 3 to 14.

 

 

 


 ‘Francis Bacon. A terrible beauty’

 

 

 

The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 28 October 2009-7 March 2010;

Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 27 March-20 July

 

 

‘Francis Bacon: Early works’

 

Room 8, Tate Britain, London

 

 

ADRIAN CLARK  |  THE BRITISH ART JOURNAL  |  OCTOBER 2009

 

 Francis Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 (the same year that Sir Hugh Lane was knighted) at 63 Lower Baggot Street. He was the child of middle – or even upper-middle-class Protestant English parents and there was nothing Irish or even Anglo-Irish about him. After he left Ireland at the age of about 16, he hardly returned, almost certainly never after 1939. Many British artists (a number of them friends or acquaintances of Bacon) visited Ireland to paint after the War, including Freud, Vaughan, Burra, Agar, Hillier, Colquhoun and Macbryde, Weight, Bawden, Uhlman, Piper, Ayrton, Lewis and Craxton; but not Bacon. He certainly does not seem to have expressed any interest in or affection for Ireland and it is a nice quirk of fate that now yokes him to Dublin through the arrival of his studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery. (I note that a photograph of the few books on Bacon’s bookshelf showed that he had a biography of Oscar Wilde.)

Just as with the long-running saga over the Hugh Lane pictures and the competing claim on them between Dublin and London, there now, since the arrival of his studio, seems to be some sort of cultural imperial battle opening up between Dublin and London over who can claim Bacon the most – before that Dublin did not concern itself with him too much, apart from a show in 1965. Now we have seen the Tate’s third great retrospective for him, in 2009, following those in 1985 and 1962, closely followed by the Hugh Lane’s second big exhibition about him in recent years – the previous one being called ‘Francis Bacon in Dublin’ in 2000. No sooner has the latest show opened in Dublin than the Tate responds with a very unusual little show in its Room 8, showing very rarely seen early works from the 1920s and 1930s.

The battle also seems to extend to the written word, in the analysis of the contents of the studio. Our own Martin Harrison has developed his platform with ‘In Camera: Francis Bacon, Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting’ in 2005 and ‘Incunabula’ in 2008; whilst Barbara Dawson (director of the Hugh Lane) and Margarita Cappock (Head of Collections at the Hugh Lane) have published ‘Francis Bacon’s Studio at the Hugh Lane’ in 2001 and Margarita Cappock has published ‘Francis Bacon’s Studio’ in 2005. In any event, Barbara Dawson and Martin Harrison have come together on this occasion by co-curating the exhibition and both featuring in the accompanying book. Delving into the archaeology of the studio, whether by Irish or English writers, is simply never going to end and books trickle out based upon an increasingly detailed analysis of the detritus of that studio. Whilst this has produced many interesting insights into Bacon’s sources and methods, one sometimes steps back to wonder which other 20th century artist gets analysed like this? Does anyone care which magazines Freud has read, if any, over the years, or whether he wrote lists on the endpapers of his books? If these sorts of analytical techniques are so relevant to a study of Bacon, why are they not employed by students of other artists to the same extent? It would surely be possible to pursue the working conditions of some other 20th century British artists in this way, where studio conditions or archive material have survived, but I am not aware that it is being done.

Still, historiographers of the Bacon industry are going to thrive for many years, as one can begin to look forward to writing about those who write about Bacon almost as much as writing about the man himself. It would, for example, be possible to torture David Sylvester’s writings on Bacon, and his fixation with him, to make them reveal something about their relationship and the extent of the rôle played by Sylvester in inventing the Bacon myth. There has not been too much seen in that direction yet, but it is fruitful ground. Will all the footling things which Bacon said about art and about his work – all of them – turn out to be thoughts of Sylvester, shaping up his man to be the thinking artist of 20th century Britain? I fear so. I also suspect that Sylvester put the virtually uneducated Bacon into contact with the sort of middlebrow classics he liked to quote for ever afterwards, such as little bits of Aeschylus in translation and so on. Bacon the profound thinker is really a hard Bacon to swallow.

 

Anyway, as I have said before when reviewing things about Bacon, some of those working on him are astute and careful critics and they produce work worthy of respect and attention. Martin Harrison is co-curator of the Dublin exhibition and has developed a large and well-deserved reputation as a man of ruthless factual accuracy and carefulness. (He is also an extremely generous man when asked for help, as this writer can vouch.) I long for the day when he allows him-self to go into print with comments on the aspects of Bacon’s past which do not stand up to too much scrutiny. It can be done without impugning the work. It has to be done sometime by somebody.

 

For all the frustrations generated by the industry growing up around Bacon, the work is always fascinating. The Hugh Lane show is a great treat in this respect. There are works with which I was not familiar (and which were certainly not at the Tate last year) and the room with the damaged pictures is extremely novel – interesting, as are the paint samples used to explore his technique. Bacon destroyed lots of pictures, but the archaeologists found in the studio that he sometimes left the cut-out bits lying about. And so in some cases they have the cut-up pictures and some of the missing bits. It can never be possible to be sure in each case why he defaced a picture, but studying the damage inflicted in particular cases is surely a legitimate way of trying to engage with his creative thinking: to glimpse the creative process through the artist’s own eyes.

 

There can be little doubt that Bacon was a passionately engaged creative thinker working deceptively hard at his pictures to produce effects which he planned and developed and which, in the end, left little to chance, despite what he nonsensically claimed.

 

Room 8 is interesting in a different way, with early works and some rugs and a screen painted by him. In the 1920s and ’30s he was signing his work. It would, of course, be fascinating to get more material about his painting activities in the years leading up to the first great triptych exhibited in 1945. Where did it spring from? What kind of work led up to it? For the things in Room 8 predate but do not presage what might be called the mature Bacon style that burst into the Lefevre Gallery in April 1945. The possibly influential role layed by the Australian artist, Roy de Maistre, has not been fully explored. There are tantalising glimpses of early works by Bacon in the background of some of de Maistre’s own pictures from the pre-War period. Unfortunately, until Sylvester came along at the end of the 1940s, and especially the 1950s, and gave Bacon something to say about his thoughts on art, we have nothing substantial from the artist himself to say what he was about, although there are glimpses in the Bacon letters which survive from the 1940’s.


 In 1953 Bacon was made to pretend that he was impressed by Matthew Smith’s work, in the infamous ‘Painter’s Tribute’ at the front of the catalogue to a big Smith retrospective at the Tate. It was almost certainly written by Sylvester and basically amounted to a sort of manifesto of what Sylvester would make Bacon say about his own work over and over again ad infinitum (at the Hugh Lane Gallery there plays on an endless loop the Bacon/Bragg interview of 1985 in which Bacon is still mouthing the same old stuff over 30 years later).

 

The book which accompanies the Hugh Lane show has essays by a variety of people, as well as a thorough catalogue of the pictures on display. It is striking how a number of those writing comment on how inconsistent and unreliable were many of the things Bacon said about his own work. How his attitude towards apparently key aspects of his work did not so much consciously change, but more slid about, depending upon the impression he wanted to give. Examples are his varied responses to questions as to whether his work contained elements of ‘violence’: sometimes he said it did, sometimes he said it did not. He liked to say the elements of his paintings came by chance, but the technical analysis of his painting style, which is extremely revealing, shows that, while this may have been an important element to his work in the early days, it quickly became irrelevant. Bacon became a master of technique and clearly understood and controlled the outcome of his efforts on the canvas very carefully and effectively, but one would never know this if one relied upon the nonsense which he uttered to interviewers. He was also a master of obfuscation.

 

There are various reasons why Bacon the talker was so unreliable. It may have been a deliberate game intended to confuse analysis. He probably thought that art criticism could come to its own conclusions without his telling it what to think. He may also have believed that obscurity did no harm to reputation and, therefore, sales. There is also the rather sad thought that – barely educated and totally without artistic-training as he was – he wanted (and was encouraged by Sylvester to want) to be regarded as an intellectual artist, fizzing with creative and necessarily obscure thoughts about the indefinable nature of the creative process. Well, maybe he succeeded in whatever he wanted to achieve. Certainly during his life he seemed to keep a tight grip on the way in which he wanted his work to be received, but the critic who ignores much of what he said may produce a more balanced view of his work, approaching more closely an objective assessment of Bacon’s achievements.

 

This is a good book to accompany the exhibition. All the different contributions are crisp and to the point and all have interesting things to say about the different aspects of Bacon’s art that they are writing about. The area of Bacon commentary has become extremely crowded, with one’s bookshelf already groaning from the weight of Bacon studies, and so contributing anything original is in itself a fine achievement.


 The older artist always mentioned as being someone whose work Bacon admired was Matthew Smith. The Guildhall Art Gallery in the City is not normally associated with 20th-century British art, but, by a quirk of fate, it holds an enormous collection of Smith’s work. In total it has over 1,000 paintings, drawings and watercolours by him, comprising the work left in the artist’s studio on his death in 1959 and presented to the City of London Corporation by his heir, Mary Keene, in 1973.

 

The exhibition was certainly extensive, and quite fascinating. The fact that it consisted of work from his studio probably skewed it a little towards his later work, rather than being a genuine attempt to cover his long painting career, but the overall effect was impressive.

 

 

 

 

Artist’s anniversary marked

 

 

AN EXHIBITION marking the 100th anniversary of artist Francis Bacon’s birth opened

at the Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, yesterday evening, writes AIDAN DUNNE

 

 

AIDAN DUNNE   |   THE  IRISH TIMES   |   THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2009

 

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty puts on display many of the contents of Francis Bacon’s studio, which the gallery received in 1998.

Opening the exhibition, President McAleese paid tribute to Hugh Lane director Barbara Dawson, her staff and Brian Clarke, the executor of the artist’s estate.

“They deserve a big thank you for bringing this man home,” she said, describing Bacon as “the defining figure in Irish visual art generally and one of the greatest of the 20th century”.

Commenting on the famous messiness of Bacon’s studio, the President said he was lucky he had never had to receive a presidential visit there because, as her daughter had told her after an official visit to her school: “A visit from the President is like having your mother visit your bedroom, so a visit to Bacon’s studio would clearly have been a disaster for everyone concerned.”  

Brian Clarke also commented on the studio’s state of disorder. He first visited it late at night, when the artist was still alive and without his knowledge. “It was,” he said, “both exhilarating and repulsive.”

Clarke and the late John Edwards, Bacon’s heir, gave the studio to the Hugh Lane, who sent in an archaeological team to survey and catalogue it. It inventoried more than 7,000 items, all of which were shipped to Dublin. The recreated studio can be seen in the Hugh Lane now.

Also on view is a selection of Bacon’s paintings, many of them only rarely exhibited in public before, including a picture from Damien Hirst’s personal collection. The studio contents, including unfinished and partially destroyed canvases, sketches, photographic prints and photographic reproductions in books and magazine, has been a treasure trove for scholars of the artist’s work.  

 

 

 

 

   Hugh Delap, from Clontarf, and Jenny Fitzgibbon, from Rathmines, with Study for Portrait (John Edwards) 

   by Francis Bacon, at the opening of A Terrible Beauty yesterday. Photograph: Matt Kavanagh

 

 

 

 

 

HQ VISITS...

 

THE BACON REPORT

 

 

 

SUE CONLEY paints a new portrait of the artist

Francis Bacon on his centenary

 

 

 

SUE CONLEY   |  HQ  |  EVENING HERALD  |  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2009

 

It’s the centenary of Francis Bacon’s birth, and one feels obliged to write about it. But when one looks – or I look, if you’re going to be casual about it – at a body of work only to go, "Ugh" ... well, one wonders what the hell one is going to come up with.

If you write about a certain subject for a living, you can’t always like everything that you write about – but there is something so unappealing about Bacon’s work that it created quite a dilemma. He is deemed too important by the powers-that-be to fob off with a mention at the bottom of the arts pages. So, what’s a girl reporter to do?

She can start with the truth: I don’t like the work of Francis Bacon. It is revolting, violent, not only grotesque but gross; it is frightening and nightmarish. It’s emotional terrorism, like being forced to watch torture, as the bulk of his imagery is either all screaming popes or carcasses of cows, or distortions of the human figure so subtle that it takes a while to figure out what is so disturbing.

However ... there’s got to be something fairly powerful going on to provoke such a reaction. So, rather than just react all over the place and settle into my off-put opinion, I decided to let someone try to convince me otherwise. I hired myself to the Hugh Lane Gallery, which has mounted A Terrible Beauty, marking Bacon’s 100th birthday with a presentation of objects and research materials from the gallery’s extensive Bacon archive; once there, I just about dared one of the curators, Padraic Moore, to convince me of the merits of an artist whose work I disliked so thoroughly.

To his great credit, he didn’t blink an eye when I told him of my aversion. "When you approach the later paintings," he agreed, "they have all the qualities that you were talking about, this visceral, aggressive, violent, even frightening energy. And they’re not necessarily aesthetically pleasing." Ha! I knew I was right!

Moore continues: "But they have a function, and I think that function is to provoke. It’s important to contextualise where he was coming from."

The context is illuminating. Born in Dublin to a British military family, Bacon Senior was horsey, and it was his equine capabilities that brought the family to Ireland. They returned to London during the First World War, and then moved back to Ireland for our own Civil War. Not restful times in which to grow up.

Bacon Junior was asthmatic, and arty; at 16 he was ejected from the family home when Dad found him dressed up in Mum’s clothes. He went to London and, with some education here and there, and no formal art training at all, took up life as an artist.

What a time to have lived. Two world wars, the atomic age ... "I think he was really only reflecting what he was bombarded with," says Moore, and I have to agree. I’m starting to understand something about the psyche of Francis.

Then there’s how his lover, George Dyer, died of an overdose the night before the opening of Bacon’s first retrospective in the Grand Palais in Paris. The gallery’s archive yields several photographs of Bacon attending the showing despite his grief, although in one image clearly shows the devastation Dyer’s death has wrought.

Oh, dear. He’s becoming human. "The work is very human," Moore insists. "And humanity is violent, and it is sexual, and it is about suffering and vulnerability and isolation."

Oh. Yes. That’s true. It’s not all water lilies and Madonnas and child and dogs playing poker, is it?

Now I begin to question what it is I look for in an artwork. Am I happy enough with impressionistic light upon the water, or am I up for a challenge? Moore takes me for a tour of the exhibition, and he points out some of the things that he values in the paintings: the formal structure, the palette of luscious colours, the recurring body language of the figures.

There’s a portrait of Francis’ last lover, John Edwards, from 1988: the figure sits on a cane chair in his underpants, against a black and olive background. It’s simple, it’s direct, and it echoes, painfully, mournfully, many of the portraits that Bacon did of Dyer. "Something that’s left out of the reading of his work is love, and affection, and the suffering that this causes," says Moore.

"If you are the sort of person who is attached to people, as soon as you make the decision to attach yourself to another human being, you are instantly vulnerable, and there’s the potential for suffering."

I feel my heart creak open, just a crack, to allow in comprehension of the sadness of the artist. And then I get freaked out by the shadow of Edwards that Bacon has painted in the foreground: it is flesh coloured.

I have no idea why that freaks me out, but it does – all the way. It is just plain nasty. And yet I’ve learned a lot about the man, and I’ve allowed myself to take in his work, so I’m not totally repulsed.

Bacon may not make my lifetime hit parade of favourite artists, but getting glimpse of his work process, through the gallery’s presentation of its archival materials, has humanised him. I don’t hate his work any more, and I can appreciate its power to push buttons and evoke tumultuous emotions.

It is, after all, only paint on canvas – but in the right hands, paint on fabric becomes explosive, and disconcerting, which says everything about the power of art. And the most powerful art is often the least lovely. But don’t ask me to appreciate that Italian dude who put his own excrement in tins and sold it for buckets of money. I’ve got to draw the line somewhere. 

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, runs ’til March 2010 at the Hugh Lane Gallery

 
 

 

 

 

                       FIRST LOVE: George Dyer, photographed by John Deakin, 1964


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty

 

 

 

Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane – 28 October to 7 March 2010

 

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty celebrates the centenary of Francis Bacon’s birth in 63, Lower Baggot Street, Dublin. This exhibition comprising paintings, drawings, photographs, unfinished works and slashed canvases will offer the viewer an astonishing new look at Francis Bacon, the great figurative painter of the 20th century. It will provide an opportunity to reappraise his oeuvre through the selected paintings, several of which haven’t been on public exhibition for many years. The mastery of Francis Bacon is revealed through these works and will be fully supported by an extensive and previously unseen selection of items from Bacon’s Studio.

Following on the donation of the Studio to the Hugh Lane by John Edwards in 1998, the 7,000 plus items retrieved from the studio were archived by The Hugh Lane. Francis Bacon’s Studio has been on permanent exhibition at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane since 2001. It is acknowledged as one of the most pioneering and successful realisations of preserving and displaying an artist’s studio and contents. The database is unprecedented, documenting every item retrieved, thus providing fascinating insights into Bacon’s working processes.

The exhibition is co-curated by Barbara Dawson and Martin Harrison. It is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that presents important new research on the artist.

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty is one of the major European cultural events of 2009. The exhibition will tour to Compton Verney, Warwickshire, England, in 2010.

Admission is free.

 

Sunday 25 October 2009, 1.30pm 

 

Lecture & Film Screening: Francis Bacon and David Cronenberg. The Inner Beauty and other aspects.

Curated by Katharina Günther, Bacon Scholar

 

Film criticism suggests a connection between the paintings of the Irish artist Francis Bacon and the films of the Canadian director David Cronenberg, well known for movies like Scanners (1979), The Fly (1986) or Dead Ringers (1988). Those comments are mostly based on the fact that both oeuvres are often characterized as controversial, shocking or horrific, but very few research has been done on their actual similarities. In an interdisciplinary approach, this screening will explore both artist’s imagery, regarding common motives and concepts.


After discussing selected paintings and film scenes, David Cronenberg’s The Fly (95 mins) will be shown in full length.

 

Public Lecture – A Game of Chance
15 November 2009

Sunday 15th November 2009, 1.30pm

Public Lecture: A Game of Chance: The Media and Techniques of Francis Bacon

Lecturer: Head of Conservation, Joanna Shepard

 

Francis Bacon was a self-taught painter who created a range of astonishing effects with his materials. He created a personal mystique centring on claims that his paintings came about almost entirely by chance.  Head of Conservation, Joanna Shepard, presents important new research that contradicts these claims and reveals some remarkable discoveries about Bacon’s practice.


Part of a series of vibrant lectures that will illuminate this extraordinary exhibition and will give the opportunity to debate and explore issues raised by the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue.

 

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty
28 October 2009

Published by Steidl on the occasion of the exhibition, Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 28 October 2009 – 7 March 2010. Includes essays by the co-curators, Barbara Dawson and Martin Harrison, along with texts by Rebecca Daniels, Marcel Finke, Jessica O’Donnell, Joanna Shepard, and Logan Sisley.

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

                                                                Scanners (1979) David Cronenberg 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

Unveiling the myths of Bacon

 

 

 

His London studio has been in Dublin for some years, but a new centenary exhibition

of paintings and archive material explores Francis Bacon’s influences and tragedies,

and helps re-evaluate the artist.

 

 

AIDAN DUNNE   |   THE IRISH TIMES   |   SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2009

 

LATE IN OCTOBER 1971, just a few days short of his 62nd birthday, the painter Francis Bacon was in Paris, where the president, Georges Pompidou, had decided to personally open a retrospective of his work at the Grand Palais. The presidential imprimatur, the prestigious venue and the scale of the exhibition amounted to an extraordinary accolade for Bacon. And, although he habitually made light of just about everything, he was enormously pleased. Not least, the event finally put him on a par with the artist who, more than any other, he saw as the figure he had to measure himself against: Pablo Picasso. Picasso had been similarly feted in the Grand Palais a few years earlier.

Contemporary accounts note that Bacon was in ebullient form, and seemed to genuinely revel in the fuss and the attention. There was a lot of attention: the great and the good turned out in their droves to attend the opening. As the artist’s biographer Michael Peppiatt records, the evening was crowned with a banquet in the ornately decorated brasserie Le Train Bleu in the Gare de Lyon, organised – and indeed paid for – by Sonia Orwell, Zette Leiris and Marguerite Duras.

In the Hugh Lane Gallery’s exhibition Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty Terrible Beauty, opening next week, you can trace a surprisingly detailed account of that evening through photographs taken at the time. In one image, caught at a quiet moment, Bacon looks thoughtful, slightly withdrawn from the throng. We don’t know what was on his mind, but it’s reasonable to guess that he was thinking about his lover, George Dyer. The previous evening, while Bacon was out doing an interview about his exhibition, Dyer had killed himself in their room at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères.

News of Dyer’s death was not released immediately, but by the time of the banquet the next night, word had spread. The confluence of events was extraordinary and distressing in many ways. For one thing, on the opening day of his Tate Gallery retrospective almost 10 years earlier, Bacon had learned of the death of his ex-lover, Peter Lacy, in Morocco. He had been rejected by Lacy, and had been absolutely devastated by the news of his demise. At the same time, he seemed to think Lacy’s sad end was almost calculated to detract from his enjoyment of his own success.

Now, at perhaps the crowning moment of his career, in Paris, the same thing had happened with Dyer. Professional, public triumph was inextricably linked to, and symbolically eclipsed by, personal disaster. More, life was uncomfortably imitative of art. Commentators on Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais could not help but note the work’s preoccupation with emotional and physical extremity. It depicted a world of personal cruelty, isolation and despair. At the same time, while the imagery, in its level of distortion and vehemence, its rawness, suggested something extreme and unusual, something beyond the comfort of familiarity, what lent Bacon’s work its exceptional power was the fact that his subject was in fact nothing more than ordinary, everyday life.

BY BACON’S OWN account, at the time of the Grand Palais exhibition he and Dyer were no longer even close. Their relationship, always acrimonious, had foundered some time previously. Yet, just as Lacy became an important, stubborn presence in Bacon’s work after his death, so Dyer too became a central preoccupation in a series of works that culminate in a chilling triptych, re-enacting the circumstances of his death. Bacon was clearly not without feelings, and there is immense affection as well as cruelty in the painting. But he could not have been a great artist without possessing a streak of utter ruthlessness that enabled him to take the most painful aspects of his own and others’ experience and lay them bare on canvas. It would be wrong to suppose, though, that his work was always as painfully autobiographical as were the pictures about Dyer’s suicide.

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty goes some way to illuminating the links between the personal and the public in Bacon’s art and world.

The exhibition marks the centenary of Bacon’s birth and is the most extensive display derived from the archive since its acquisition. In effect, as in elaborating on the opening at the Grand Palais, it also sets up a dialogue between Bacon’s life, his work practices and the paintings he produced. From the moment it was announced that the Bacon studio was to come to Dublin, the implicit question has been whether actual paintings would follow in its wake. The studio, the undoubted wealth of its research material notwithstanding, is a bit like Hamlet without the prince in the absence of a representative collection of paintings by Bacon to set alongside it.

While it would certainly have been nice if the studio had come with such a stock of paintings in tow, that was never on the cards. Huge financial interests are involved. There are unfinished paintings, generally very unfinished in the sense that they look as if they were never destined to be finished. Several of these are on view. There are also many destroyed canvases. They have been described as “slashed canvases” which sounds quite dramatic, as if the artist set about them in a fit of rage. In fact, slashed canvases in that sense are very rare. Usually Bacon hacked out sections of an abandoned work, presumably to use them in another context. A whole room is given over to the display of canvases with excised sections. The effect is odd, because clearly it was never intended that they would be exhibited in this way. But it allows conservator Joanna Shepard a chance to investigate Bacon’s working methods in detail, and she provides an explanatory commentary.

To make up for the paucity of Bacon paintings in Irish collections, reinforcements have been drafted in from several sources, including the artist’s estate, private collections, the Tate Gallery and the Ulster Museum. Many of these works are outstanding, and hardly any is an obvious choice. The strange, dark-lit Untitled (Half-length Figure in Sea), for example, is credited to Damien Hirst’s personal Murderme collection: fascinating given its similarities to Hirst’s own recent paintings, now on view at the Wallace Collection in London. Head III and Head of a Woman, also from private collections, are classic portrait heads, as is Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, of late in a collection here in Ireland, now part of Christie’s stock. It’s a shame such a perfect little painting could not have stayed in the country permanently.

A whole room is given over to plates from Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion, which Bacon – and, it must be said, countless other artists, used extensively as references. Harrison is an authority on art and photography, and his book In Camera is an exhaustive and informative account of Bacon’s use of a vast range of photographic sources, including original photographs of friends, lovers and acquaintances, often commissioned from John Deakin (a room in the exhibition is given over to them), as well as mechanically reproduced images from magazines, art history books, medical textbooks and just about anything that caught his eye.

WE ARE WELL into a re-evaluation of the myth of Francis Bacon, which tended to downplay the role of photography and simply deny the use of preparatory drawings. Around 40 of the latter turned up in the studio, but in a way they confirm Bacon’s protestations. The sketches are minimal and rudimentary, more notes or memory aids than drawings in the usual sense. But on the other hand you could say that photographs, both original and reproduced, were his preparatory drawings, and they were absolutely vital to what he did. He collected and consumed them voraciously; editing, tearing, shaping and distorting them to create his own images.

This is one conclusion that emerges unmistakably from A Terrible Beauty. There was a time when artists couldn’t admit to using photographs in this way but, as David Hockney observed in his book Hidden Knowledge, painters have generally used any and every available means to make their work, and now photography is widely used and accepted. The exhibition should also deepen awareness of the relationship between life and art, and it’s hard to emerge from it without getting some sense of Bacon’s personal difficulties and tragedies, as well as his extraordinary resourcefulness, industry and inventiveness as an artist.

Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty is at the Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, from October 28th to March 7th, 2010. Tel. 01-2225550

 

 

    

 

         Setting the scene: preparations for Francis Bacon;

             A Terrible Beauty at the Hugh Lane Gallery.

 


 

 

 

International Art Festival debuts in Tel Aviv

 

 

 

BY DAVID BRINN  |  THE JERUSALEM POST  |  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2009  

 

Any film festival that brings together homages to Francis Bacon and Merce Cunningham, hosts a descendant of Felix Mendelssohn and presents a master class by self-confessed art geek Ben Lewis deserves to be called eclectic – or EPOS, the first International Art Film Festival, which will take place October 29-31 at the Tel Aviv Cinemateque.

Festival directors Micky Laron and Gidi Avivi are presenting over 40 local and international documentary and feature films on music, dance, literature and poetry; art and theater. In addition, the festival will host special guests and present events, including an evening dedicated to Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham, the great choreographers who passed away this year, and commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth and the 100th anniversary of the British painter Bacon’s birth.

Controversial American art critic and filmmaker Lewis, who prides himself on having been booted out of the famed Sotheby’s auction house, will offer a master class entitled: Art Safari: The Tantrums, Tears and Traumas of making Art Documentaries, in which he will explain the inner workings of making cult documentary films on the subject of contemporary art, focusing on his own feature The Great Contemporary Art Bubble.

In collaboration with the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, on October 31 the festival will present an homage to Bacon’s 100th birthday, featuring a lecture by Tal Lanir, Fragment of a Crucifixion – The Art of Francis Bacon, and a screening of the film Francis Bacon, which follows a day in the life of the painter. The event will take place at the museum. 

Time will also be set aside at the festival on October 29 to focus on films made by students at films schools and art colleges around the country.

For a full schedule of films and events and to order tickets, go to EPOS online.

 

 

 

    

 

                   

                     Francis Bacon’s Version No. 2 – Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe


 

 

 

 

 

British art’s biggest names reveal the work that set them on the road to fame

 

 

 

Michael Glover looks at the earliest efforts of some of the world’s greatest artists

 

 

MICHAEL GLOVER  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  FRIDAY, 23 OCTOBER, 2009

 

The beginning. The middle. The end. It is always fascinating and instructive to observe the trajectory of an artist, any artist. Beginnings can be particularly instructive. Is he or she to the manor born? Or is this foray into art a sudden flight into unknown and uncharted territory, at which the family now raises its collective eyebrows in a mingling of horror and consternation? 

 

Francis Bacon, like so many other painters, was self-taught. He worked as a furniture designer and interior decorator at first. It was, in part, Picasso’s paintings of the early 1930s, those weird organic forms in which man seems part human and part animal, which caused Bacon to invent a language for himself as a painter. Picasso revealed to Bacon a particularly repulsive, bestial vision of humanity, and Bacon recognised it to be his own inner truth. He stuck to it, from first to last, never seriously deviating.

 

This question of truthfulness to some wholly compelling inner vision would have been quite alien to the great majority of the painters of the Renaissance and the pre-Renaissance. Painting was a skill to be acquired. Painters were artisans, not wilful visionaries. It was a question of emulation, of learning in the environment of the workshop, the gradual acquisition of essential skills. And then it would be a matter of pleasing the patron, which would, more often than not, have been the Church, and, if the patron were displeased, then doing something radically different.

 

 


 

 

 

 

$40 Million Bacon Star in French Art Fair

 

 

 

 

BY KATYA KAZAKINA  |  BLOOMBERG  |  TUESDAY, 20 OCTOBER, 2009 

 

While London’s weeklong contemporary-art fairs trumpeted a $9 million Francis Bacon , this week Paris will serve up two Bacons with prices around $20 million and $40 million – plus Picasso, Leger, Mondrian, Warhol and other 20th-century heavyweights.

The Paris-based Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain has added a new section, The Modern Project, which offers select dealers a sumptuous display booth and lower costs. The result is that for the first time FIAC has attracted major galleries and their high-end art.

The dealers are expected to offer a total of 25 museum- quality artworks with multimillion-dollar price tags during the fair, which runs Oct. 22-25 underneath the glass-domed Grand Palais and in the Louvre’s courtyard.

The priciest works will include Andy Warlol’s 1963 Green Disaster, created the same year as his Green Car Crash, which fetched $71.7 million at Christie’s New York in 2007; Bacon’s 1966 Portrait of George Dyer Talking, priced around $40 million; and a 1921 Fernand Leger Le Grand Dejeuner, priced between $20 million and $25 million (a larger version of the work is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Bacon’s Head III (1949) will be offered at about $20 million, and Pablo Picasso’s Maternity (1921) around $25 million.

“It will create fireworks,” said Paris-based dealer Daniel Malingue.

 

 


 


 Take ‘an astonishing look at Francis Bacon’ in Dublin

 

 

 

 

LATE ROOMS  |  MONDAY 19 OCTOBER 2009

 

Those staying in hotels in Dublin over the coming months can celebrate the life of Irish artist Francis Bacon by attending an exciting new exhibition of his work.

Entitled Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, the collection goes on show at the Dublin City Gallery from October 28th to Match 7th 2010 and is expected to attract art lovers from across Europe.

The exhibition features dozens of items, including photographs, drawings, paintings and previously unseen items from his studio.

 

According to the gallery, visitors will be offered "an astonishing new look" at the artist. Born on Lower Baggot Street in Dublin, Bacon is widely considered to be one of the most important figurative painters of the 20th century.

Some of his most famous works include Figure in a Landscape, Study of a Dog, Figures in a Garden and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the last of which was painted in 1944 and is currently on display at the Tate in London.

 

 

 

 

Handiwork not the whole hog

 

 

 

Damien Hirst’s new paintings reek of Bacon but lack a visceral tug

 

 

BY JUDITH FLANDERS  |  THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH  |  SUNDAY 18 OCTOBER 2009

 

Poussin was one of the great draughtsmen of all time. Hirst, shall we say, is not. As an installation artist, that was no problem – we weren’t looking at his handiwork, we were looking at his ideas, rendered through the handiwork of his technicians. Now, however, there is nothing between us and Hirst. Nothing, that is, except Francis Bacon, who looms over this exhibition far more than any of Hirst’s skeletons can do.

Bacon used a glowing, Prussian blue. So does Hirst. Bacon created triptychs. So does Hirst. So does he use Bacon’s white, gouged-out grid to lock in his figures. So does he use similar-sized canvases. So does he use gilded frames, and reflective glass over the canvases. In two diptychs – The Birth of Medusa/Witness at the Birth of Medusa and Guardian I and II - he even uses Bacon’s bloody, papal red.

These two diptychs, though, are two of the best things in the show, more thought through, less fragmentary than smaller works such as Skull with Ashtray and Lemon, which attempt, through bubbles resembling his spot paintings, and a Baconian grid, to give a structure to what are otherwise simply random elements dotted about the canvas. But his brushwork is uncertain – here the paint is heavily applied, there the canvas shows through the thin paint – without any sense of a coherent rhythm. But all too often Hirst is let down by his technique – he sees, but he can’t show us, because his draughtsmanship is just not up to it, his application of paint too unpractised. These paintings are Bacon-lite – not the whole hog.

 

 

 


 Damien Hirst: No Love Lost, Blue Paintings

 

 

 

Wallace Collection, London W1

 

 

 

 

 

PETER CONRAD  |  THE OBSERVER  |  SUNDAY 18 OCTOBER 2009

 

Somewhat late in the day, Damien Hirst has decided to find out whether he can paint. So far, he has been able to do without such specialised, old-fashioned skills. When Andy Warhol transformed his studio into a factory, he announced that from now on art would be an industrial operation, dispensing with originality and relying on teams of toilers, proudly advancing beyond manual craft. With a frisson of dread, Hirst calls painting a “solitary practice”. He makes it sound as if he were obliged to revert to masturbation after the coital companionship of the production line that arranged the bottles on the shelves of his Pharmacy. When, I wonder, will Katie Price risk writing one of the books that are branded with her name?

The results of Hirst’s experiment with actual artistry aren’t encouraging. Twenty-five canvases installed in two galleries rearrange his morbid fetishes, wearily shuffling a pack of greasy, dog-eared cards. Most of the paintings contain skulls, sometimes accompanied by more contemporary emblems of mortality – a cigarette, a pink lighter, a filthy ashtray. Panicking a little, he creates a fussy diversion with cobwebs of intersecting lines that crosshatch the surface, a gimmick copied from Francis Bacon. But in Bacon, these are vectors of force, arrows of desire. Here, they serve to distract an eye that otherwise finds nothing to engage its interest in the bruised blue murk.

Occasionally, a lemon strays into the arrangement, probably because its shape makes it easy to paint. An iguana, which Hirst’s amateurish daubing turns into something like a crayfish, briefly scuttles on. In one painting, he attempts a facsimile of a nautilus shell, one of nature’s most intricate contraptions; it looks, when he’s done with it, like a scrofulous human ear. A vase of white roses buzzed by butterflies is a dithery fiasco, all the more pitiful because it’s hung not far from the Wallace Collection’s Watteaus and Fragonards, in which entire landscapes bud, blossom and frolic, alive with fertile delight.

Outside Hertford House, which houses the Wallace Collection, he has set up a sculpture of St Bartholomew flaying himself, entitled Exquisite Pain. As in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, the saint brandishes the blade with which he has performed the operation and dangles his limp skin over his arm like a dirty shirt. Is Hirst claiming to conduct the same internal inquisition, laying bare his fears? He shouldn’t claim such existential courage; his speciality is queasy horror, not tragic terror. And despite the rowdy bravado with which he jokes about mortality and welcomes the Apocalypse, he has the small soul of an interior decorator. The icy cobalt blue of the paintings in No Love Lost is, to use his prissy word, “exquisite”.

A few of the canvases re upstaged by the floral borders of their carved frames and they all look crass by contrast with the blue silk wall fabric behind them, commissioned by Hirst from a weaver in Lyons once patronised by Marie Antoinette. The young Turk and the decapitated tart make an apt couple: I can imagine them eternally yoked in the inferno. In our consumerist world, the nifty package matters more than the naff product inside and Hirst’s titles are often more interesting than the paintings they tag. One of his triptychs, featuring three more skulls plus the gaping, serrated mouth of a shark, is called The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth. I assume Hirst is mocking the Christian prophecy, because his own career demonstrates that things have turned out rather differently. In art at least, the pushy and the publicity-hungry, the self-aggrandising and the meagrely talented are the inheritors.

Bumptiously confronting Titian, Poussin and other venerable elders at the Wallace Collection, Hirst is enjoying his temporary ownership of the trampled, desecrated earth. But he’s not a legitimate heir and the Wallace Collection is playing host to a jumped-up pretender. 

 

 


 

 Tangled up in blue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Damien Hirst has installed his new paintings among the Old Masters

of the Wallace Collection. By Jackie Wullschlager

 

 

 

JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER  |  ARTS  |  COLLECTING  |  FINANCIAL TIMES  |  OCTOBER 17/18 2009

 

Every clown wants to play Ham let: Hamlet rarely aspires to act the clown. But Damien Hirst confounds most expectations. He began his career with grandly tragic works — "A Thousand Years", the installation of breeding, dying flies around a cow’s head, and his shark in formaldehyde "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" — which revolutionised art-making in the 1990s. Ever since, he has played for laughs. Last autumn’s auction Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, with its gold-plated calf and winged piglet, was a circus. His £50m diamond skull "For the Love of God" was a brilliant farce. Workshop-produced spin, spot and butterfly paintings were comic interludes, the funniest jokes being how quickly they flew off the walls.

It is anybody’s guess whether Hirst’s latest move, 25 paintings made with his own hand and now installed at the Wallace Collection, is a return to Hamlet or a double-bluff as clown. "Am I a sculptor who wants to be a painter, or a cynical artist who thinks painting is now reduced to nothing more than a logo?" Hirst asked a couple of years ago when he began the series.

No Love Lost, Blue Paintings deals exclusively in his familiar currency: skulls, sharks, ashtrays, butterflies are the images; death and transience the themes. "Skull with Ashtray and Lemon", Two Skulls", "Iguana with Skull and Shark’s Jaw" and the other similarly titled works here carry, like everything Hirst makes, a sense of inevitability. Unlike his great works, they are also predictable. All look like trademarks made for the export market: they have already sold to Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk. who displayed them in Kiev earlier this year.

As clearly, they are a sculptor’s paintings. Luminous skulls and sharks’ mouths float in space, on a dense blue-black ground that is the painterly equivalent of the formaldehyde solution surrounding dead animals in Hirst’s "Natural History" series. Across the surfaces Hirst superimposes a myriad of lines, irregular though suggestive of a grid; they cage and encase his objects, just as his vitrines do. Apart from a few livid yellow lemons, which appear incongruously as if pasted on like collage, we see everything through this network of lines and blue-black sheen the typical Hirst distancing effect.

Other, deliberate self-references abound: dots layered in imperfect patterns are hand-made antidotes to the high gloss order of the spot paintings; faintly outlined glasses of water, cigarettes, occasional plants, imply the cycle of life and death, recalling that the "Natural History" series injected narrative into minimalism.

Hirst is not the first artist to be arrested by his own youthful success, but the chief problem of the "Blue Paintings" is not self-parody. It is that they are so devastatingly, overwhelmingly, indebted to Francis Bacon that they fail to come alive as independent works. The restricted Prussian blue and white tonality throughout is that of Bacon’s early paintings. The crisscrossing lines anchoring objects are a variation of the frames with which Bacon fixed his subjects in empty space. The format of the two major pieces. "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth" and "Men Shall Know Nothing", replicates Bacon’s triptychs. In the quartet of other large paintings, the pairs "Birth of Medusa" and "Guardian", a deep red figure looms out of a black forest: a composition following Bacon’s luxuriant Popes emerging from darkness. Hirst is not the first artist to be arrested by his youthful success, but the problem here is not self-parody.

Hirst makes no secret of Bacon’s influ ence: in the catalogue he recalls trying painting decades ago, "then when I saw Bacon’s paintings, I thought fuck it; I gave up really, because I just thought that was what I wanted to do." What he did then was to translate Bacon’s meditations on mortality into a spectacular new sculptural language. His predatory, trapped, open mouthed sharks rework Bacon’s predatory, trapped, screaming popes, mediated through minimalism’s cubes and boxes and Jeff Koons’ pop vitrines. His slaughtered calves and sheep imprisoned in tanks — "Mother and Child Divided", "Away from the Flock" — evoke Bacon’s human flesh as dead meat, imprisoned in pictorial spaceframes.

The "Natural History" works have an exhilarated despair, a vitality crossed with vulnerability, a brutality of fact, that marked Hirst immediately as Bacon’s heir. The pieces here do not: neither eloquent nor commanding in their manipulation of paint, they merely go backwards, spelling out a derivation A natural minimalist, Hirst is strongest when his work is most pared-down — best here is the triptych depicting skulls, knife, glass of water. iguana, "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth". whose anxious diagrammatic lines echo the drawings of another sculptor of life’s fleetingness, Giacometti. The worst are small cluttered canvases such as the final "Skull", further hampered by its hideous wooden frame.

What is it all for? The Wallace setting emphasises Old Master vanitas resonance - the works hang in two long, blue-silk lined rooms, open so that the most lumi nous canvas, "Floating Skull", looks straight down to Poussin’s "Dance to the Music of Time".

Hirst must have known such juxtaposi tions would do him no favours. "I wanted to be stopped and no one stopped me. I wanted to find out where the boundaries were. So I’ve found that there aren’t any." he said back in 1995. Last year, sidestep ping his gallery White Cube for Sothebys. he took financial brinkmanship to the edge, and won. This show, replacing a white-walled contemporary gallery with an art-historical context challenging to even the greatest living painters, is his next gamble.

Or is it another joke, with Hirst — who paid for the Wallace installation — briefly buying himself a slot in painting’s history? Hirst’s other ancestor, of course, is Warhol. Both are simultaneously iconic and ironic. both made fame an art form. A.s he did so. Hirst created and sold a brand of chilly, impersonal conceptual art with such dazzie that his peers among UK artists still struggle to escape his stranglehold: so few of them became painters that there is almost a lost generation here.

But Hirst is now middle-aged, last year’s auction drew a symbolic line under his "Natural History" series, and the cohort of emerging artists born in the 1970s and 1980s, and freer of his influence, includes many exciting painters. "I don’t like conceptual art in the end." Hirst says in the catalogue here. "I’ve always thought that being a painter was better than being an artist or a sculptor. I always thought painting was the best thing to do." His sense of Zeitgeist is unfaltering, but so is his grasp of the market. That is why the Blue Paintings cannot escape, if indeed they want to, from their creator’s cold, calculating Midas touch.

'No Love tmmt. Blue Paintings' by Damien Hirst. Wallace Collection. London, to January 24

 

 

 

Close encounter

 

 

The modernist Francis Bacon is pitted against the 17th-century

master Caravaggio: Rachel Spence observes the contest

 

 

RACHEL SPENCE  |  ARTS  |  LIFE & ARTS  |  FINANCIAL TIMES  |  OCTOBER 17/18 2009

 
 

There has been a vogue recently for encounters between past and present masters. In Madrid, Paris and London, Picasso has been set in the context of influences such as Velázquez, Delacroix and Manet. Less successfully, Jan Fabre, the Belgian contemporary artist was let loose in the Richelieu wing of the Louvre: displayed alongside Rembrandt and Rubens, Fabre’s flimsy installations were grist to the mill of traditionalists who swear no contemporary artist can match up to the old masters.

The decision to confront Francis Bacon with Caravaggio is also fraught with risk. As the curators acknowledge, the 17th-century master exerted no direct influence on the Irish-born modernist. (Indeed, Bacon, who revered Velázquez, Rembrandt and Picasso, was influenced by Poussin, one of Caravaggio’s harshest critics.) What the pair do share is a revolutionary approach to the human figure, a fascination with anatomy, and a vision that is simultaneously sacred and profane. Both have been tagged as icons of gay, tormented genius whose decadent and violent lives – Bacon’s lover committed suicide; Caravaggio killed a man and wounded several others – fuelled the anguish in their canvases.

Yet it is the differences between them that make this show compelling. Caravaggio was a Catholic; Bacon an avowed atheist. Caravaggio was the flag-bearer of the Counter-Reformation, charged with seducing the faithful away from Lutheran temptation. In Bacon’s age, secularity was yesterday’s news and artists painted to please themselves. Bacon’s refusal to relinquish the human figure while artists all around him turned to abstraction looked quasi-reactionary. Surrounded by the distorted idealism of high mannerism, Caravaggio’s fidelity to the real – he transcribed every wrinkle, every hair, every frantic gesture – saw him pilloried as a radical.

At first, the encounter jars. Built around the ancient-to-baroque art collection amassed by the 17th-century Roman cardinal Scipione Borghese, the Galleria Borghese is one of the finest small museums in the world. But Bacon’s triptychs, August (1972) and Triptych inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981), are eclipsed by the combination of two mighty Caravaggio canvases, The Conversion on the Road to Damascus (1601) and The Resurrection of Lazarus (1609), and the jaw-dropping lavishness of the entrance hall, with its frescoes, statues and mosaic floors.

The display is partly to blame. Mounting the triptychs with their colour-field backgrounds against temporary panels in a pink that tones not only with Bacon’s own colours but also the ceiling fresco is a perilous reminder of Bacon’s original trade as an interior decorator.

But the real problem is the temporal leap demanded of the eye. Plunging a 20th-century artist with a predilection for deconstructing the human figure into a room devoted to classical beauty is an optical challenge. Painted in oil devoid of the sensuous impasto and tenebrous chiaroscuro that make premodern art so seductive, Bacon’s figures look like cartoons: cheeky, graphic teases cocking a snook at the grand old patriarch whose transcendent beauty puts him beyond threat.

After a few minutes, however, these visual hurdles recede and one becomes aware that a gripping dialogue across centuries and belief systems is taking place. What is at stake here is faith. Although he had a complex relationship with religion, repeatedly painting crucifixions, Popes, and triptychs, the imagery of Augusttells us that Bacon’s world was a redemption-free zone.

One of a cycle of “black triptychs” painted after the suicide of his lover George Dyer in a Paris hotel room, the work depicts two semi-naked male figures, leaking out their life force into sinister flesh-pink puddles. Flanked by this pair, a nebulous spillage in mauve, grey and white is Bacon’s chilly vision of a sexual coupling. These abject scenes are framed by a trio of black portals whose matt, merciless, impenetrable surfaces suggest nothing lies on the other side.

Caravaggio’s painting of Lazarus makes a powerful case for the alternative. As a divine glow plays across the scene – the nude torso of the beggar, Christ’s omnipotent, out-stretched arm – the cavern’s tawny-lit, deliquescent darkness truly seems the territory of miracles.

Other than Piero della Francesca, no artist knew better than Caravaggio that light was the Catholic painter’s greatest ally. In the Conversion of St Paul, a breathtaking image of Paul prone beneath the raised hoof of a piebald horse, he floods a dynamic, diaphanous glow on to the horse’s silky hide, making the animal the hero of the painting and reminding us that we are all equal under the eyes of God.

The contest is more equal in the room devoted to portraits. Here, two early Caravaggio canvases, Young Man with a Basket of Fruit (1593-1595) and Self-portrait as Bacchus (1593-1595), show Caravaggio developing the style that would ensure his lasting fame. Although often presented as “the first modern painter” for his refusal to idealise nature, the Lombard-born artist was steeped in the lessons of classical antiquity. Thus he renders every bloom, vein and blemish on his fruit basket in Flemish-style detail yet the boy who holds it, with his purple-shadowed throat and parted, rosy lips, possesses the sculpted perfection of a Michelangelo.

Bacon’s contribution is anchored by Head VI (1949),  one of more than 50 paintings based on Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X. Bacon was no draughtsman but Velázquez’s outline bestows a steely gravitas that is the perfect counterpoint to Bacon’s disfigurement. By dragging paint across an untreated canvas and adding that fathomless, shrieking mouth, Bacon creates an expression of such archetypal horror you sense all his demons – death, faith, masculinity, patriarchal authority – distilled into that single image.

Of course, these were Caravaggio’s demons too. In the the show’s finale, a clutch of marvellous works by the Italian – Madonna di Loreto (1604-1605), St Jerome (1605-1606), Madonna dei Palafrenieri (1605-1606) – include his David with the Head of Goliath (1610). One of Caravaggio’s final paintings, it’s said that the Philistine’s bloodless, open-mouthed visage is a self-portrait of the artist at the end of his life, when he was tortured by guilt and by the thought of his own mortality.

Bacon, who once described his crucifixion scenes as self-portraits, would have understood. A weakness of this show is that it barely contains any of the canvases – the Guggenheim’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962), for example – where the Irishman explodes the human body into viscous, blood-hued rubbles of flesh. Only one, Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), the Pope’s face dissolving into a garnet-red froth to match his robe, hints at the profound sense of revulsion – for death, self, the human condition – that animates his most powerful work.

Ultimately, the absence of a few masterpieces doesn’t matter. Although the curator Anna Coliva writes that the show is “not an exhibition of history”, that’s exactly what it is. But the lesson is made thrilling by the aesthetic power of the works.

Leaving Caravaggio and Bacon aside, the museum offers a whistle-stop tour from ancient art to Rubens, by way of Bellini, Raphael and Correggio. In this company, we see how Caravaggio’s determination to paint the poor, the old and the ugly heralded the slow disintegration of classical ideals of beauty. With modernity came the revelation that man was no longer “the measure of all things”. Bacon’s sorry, disfigured souls mark the final act of the tragedy. Perhaps he was lucky. If he had been born 50 years later he might, like Jan Fabre, be making art out of beetles.

Caravaggio Bacon, Galleria Borghese, Rome, until January 24 2010

 

 

 

 

                 Bodywork  Francis Bacon’s Study of George Dyer (1969)


 

 

 

 

But Can He Paint?

 

 

Leading Conceptual Artist Switches Mediums and Unveils the Results

  

 

BY ANDREW MCKIE  |  THE WALL STREET JOURNAL  |  THURSDAY 15 OCTOBER 2009

 

Damien Hirst’s stock-in-trade is shock, and he has always revelled in the surrounding hoopla. The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists, while calling him "probably the most famous and controversial British artist of his generation," attributed his success to his “flair for self-publicity" rather than to his work.

Now he has an exhibition of paintings at London’s Wallace Collection, a museum that includes works by Poussin, Titian and Velázquez in its permanent collection. Mr. Hirst seems amused by the idea that showing in a traditional setting, and working in oils, should have an equal capacity to draw attention.

I turned up in a tie based on a Bacon triptych, bought from John Pearse, the tailor whose shop stands just across from the Colony Room and Groucho clubs. There, during the 1990s, Mr. Hirst’s drink-and drug-fueled exploits became notorious even by Soho’s bohemian standards.

“Great tie," he says. “John sent me one, too." I mention that I used to see him knocking around pubs and the Colony Room, where Francis Bacon had once been a barman and where foul-mouthed abuse and vodka-driven hooliganism were the order of the day. Beside one of Mr. Hirst’s spot paintings behind the bar, there was a snapshot of him, wearing, if I remember correctly, only Wellington boots. "Well, there’s a lot of that time we all don’t remember," he says.

"It wasn’t a kind of planned thing," he protests. "A lot of what Bacon called, in painting, ‘happy accidents’ – well, I have that in my career. I mean Lehman collapsing on the day of my fucking auction and that still going well, that was unbelievable. But it’s more to do with chance than it is with my skill at marketing."

He dismisses, too, the suggestion that his move to traditional painting might have been prompted by the current financial climate, and its implications for the conceptual art market. "It wasn’t really a decision, because I’d started doing it before," he says. "But even with the market the way it is now I could definitely still sell spot and spin paintings. My gallery in New York said ‘Why did you have to kill the golden goose?’"

One suspects Mr. Hirst is just as concerned with growing up as an artist, and about securing his reputation. "In the back of my mind I was always flirting with it because I was afraid of it," he says. "And I always admired painters more than sculptors.

The shift to painting may be a symptom of Mr. Hirst’s maturity and a bid to erect a bulwark against mortality. But if it is to safeguard his artistic reputation, and dispel the view that he is essentially a clever set decorator with a flair for marketing, the question of technique arises. For his spot paintings, he employed an army of assistants, while the spin paintings were made by machines. Can he actually paint?

"I was always very dissatisfied with my paintings and thought they weren’t very good," he says. "I did two years of absolutely rotten paintings, then I started doing things that I did like: The first one was Floating Skull, that was 2006."

The influence of Francis Bacon, one of Mr. Hirst’s great heroes, is immediately apparent, especially in the triptych "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth," which even uses Bacon’s ghostly cages. "You can’t avoid comparisons," he says. "I’ve put Bacon frames on my pictures but you put them in here and everybody’s got a gold frame. But if I put it in one of my normal galleries it looks like a Bacon rip-off. You ask: Can I use that? But all great artists do that ... you go through being very heavily influenced."

Unfortunately, it can’t be said that, as paintings, they are very accomplished (most teenagers could paint a better lemon). The trouble for Mr. Hirst’s bid to be taken seriously as a painter, rather than as a conceptual artist, is that solutions in painting, most people would argue, ought to be about painting, not about maintaining the superficial glamour, commercial value and recognizability of the Hirst brand.

—Andrew McKie is a writer based in Cambridgeshire.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IT COULDN’T GET WORSE FOR HIRST

 

 

 

After a career built on conceptual art, Damien Hirst has turned to paint and canvas — and

the boos from the critics were unanimous. Mark Hudson fears he had it coming

 

 

 

MARK HUDSON  |  COMMENT & FEATURES  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2009

 

This week we may have witnessed one of the pivotal moments in the history of art. Not only has Damien Hirst, arguably the richest and most powerful artist in history, received the critical pasting of his life, but there’s a sense that our whole perception of what art is, or should be, may have subtly — or not so subtly — shifted.

In case you’ve been miles from the media over the past week, Hirst, the man who became famous by putting sharks and sheep in formaldehyde, who summed up the 21st century confluence of art and shameless materialism with a £50 million diamond-encrusted skull — none of which he actually made himself — decided to exhibit paintings executed with his own hand in one of Britain’s most august art institutions, the Wallace Collection.

Here, Hirst’s daubs have been hung on walls newly lined in blue silk at a cost of £250,000, close to, if not actually alongside works by Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Poussin. The result has been one of the most unanimously negative responses to any exhibition in living memory. Sarah Crompton, writing in this paper, was one of the kinder critics, finding the paintings merely “thin and one note”. “Deadly dull, amateurish”, wrote The Guardian’s critic. “Not worth looking at”, said The Independent. “Dreadful”, pronounced The Times.

Having observed Hirst’s career closely, I’m not the least bit surprised that he should have taken on a project of this nature, nor that the Wallace Collection should have agreed to show it — still less that the results were I’m not the least bit surprised he should have taken on a project of this nature 99 pretty terrible. What surprises me is the unprecedented unanimity of the response.

In the 21 years since Hirst launched the so-called Young British Artist phenomenon with the “Freeze” exhibition while he was still a student at Goldsmiths College, there has been endless carping in the popular press, occasional rumbles of dissent from the broadsheet critics, but never any concerted critical challenge. Bright, brash and British — though rarely, in truth, more than that — the YBAs represented the spirit of the time, when the Eighties boom rolled, with only the occasional minor recession, into the Cool Britannia years.

Not to like the display wild-card Tracey Emin, self-styled bad boys Jake and Dinos Chapman and the spectacularly vacuous Sam Taylor-Wood was simply to be out of touch. Never mind that most of their supposed innovations had been made by other artists, most of whom had stayed poor, decades before. Ordering his art to be made by other people over the telephone, which earned Hirst such admiration and notoriety in the 1990s, had been done by the Hungarian artist Laszlo MoholyNagy in 1924. Indeed, the very name is telling: while the names of other modem art movements, from Cubism to Pop, tell you about their intentions, the term YBA says nothing more than that they were young and British.

No, the groundbreaking aspects of the YBA phenomenon related almost exclusively to money and celebrity. When people look back to the initial “Freeze” exhibition, it’s to the fact that the catalogue of a student show was sponsored by property developers Olympia & York. The actual content of the exhibition is rarely mentioned. The entire meaning of Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull is embodied in its price. The title. For the Love of God, is meaningless spin.

And it seemed that the less the YBAs did in terms of creating the work — delighting in appearing to break the rules about skill and personal involvement — the more the noughts rolled on to their prices. Never one to shrink from brinkmanship honesty, Hirst declared that his mechanically produced “spin” paintings were “bright, cheerful, but basically meaningless”. Far from being put off, buyers appeared simply not to hear what he was saying. And once you’ve accepted that Tracey is the art world’s Chantelle or Jade Goody, famous largely for being Tracey Emin — and that that is part of her art — that none of Hirst’s spot paintings were done by him (anyone could have done them? Anyone did do them), you don’t really have anywhere else to go as a critic. You either accept the package or you don’t, and what is there to say about more spot paintings or more witless attention-seeking?

Indeed, if today saw a seismic shift in the art Zeitgeist, it wasn’t because Hirst hadn’t done the paintings, but because he had. He had put brush and oil paint on to canvas — an act that has been central to European art since the 15th century — and was found wanting.

The fact that he appeared to be attempting to align himself with the other great artists in,that gallery, by using Old Master imagery such as the skull, that he employed a dark blue-dominated palette reminiscent of the early works of his hero Francis Bacon, while making reference to Picasso’s Blue Period in the title of the exhibition, merely compounded the offence. Hirst’s presumption in comparison with the technical inadequacy of the work was simply unforgiveable. For once, chutzpah wasn’t enough.

Tom Lubbock, writing in The Independent, felt the need to preface his particularly acerbic remarks by reiterating — in an almost apologetic manner — one of the great mantras of contemporary art, that “skills needn’t matter”. Yet perhaps the great lesson of today’s responses to Hirst’s paintings is that skills most definitely do, should and always will matter.

And what’s most significant is that the people behind today’s apparent backlash aren’t the “a-child-of-four-could-do-that” brigade, but people who really know their stuff: writers with an understanding of the art of all eras who have had to pander to every kind of money-inflated idiocy in order to appear relevant in our ever more uncertain cultural market place — in order, simply, to keep their jobs. But now the critical worm has turned.

This isn’t the first time that technically inept oil painting has been elevated to the position of high art. Hirst’s paintings remind me of nothing so much as the lesser products of the so-called New Image Painting of the 1980s that gave rise to art world stars such as Julian Schnabel and Georg Baselitz. After the aridity of Minimalism there was a sense of relief in getting messy emotion This isn’t the first time technically inept painting has been elevated to high art 99 on to the canvas. And since you couldn’t hope to emulate the technique of the Old Masters, you might as well do it badly — if with plenty of heart.

No one has made such comparisons today, perhaps because they don’t want to dilute their observations, to fall back on the kind of relative judgment that would feel all too typical of our mealy-mouthed times, by looking at something that is outright bad in the context of something that is slightly less bad.

Reading Hirst’s comments in this Saturday’s Telegraph Review, in which he invoked his own name alongside those of genuine 20th century masters such as Bacon and Mark Rothko, you couldn’t help feeling you were living in a world that had lost touch with some fundamental reality. Perhaps, in our money-obsessed, YouTube watching, “skills don’t matter” world where nonentities dominate the airwaves and the consumer is king there really is no difference in worth between a real early Francis Bacon and one of the works of his technically challenged, multi-millionaire fan.

If today’s events do nothing else, they affirm that that is not the case.

Whether or not they strike a deeper note among artists themselves, there’s no doubt that a comer has been turned. While little difference may have been made to the overall trajectory of Hirst’s career — or more specifically his prices — it is heartening to see that the world, or those aspects of it represented by the British media, retains a lot more integrity than many would have given it credit for.

 

 

 

 

Damien Hirst abandons shock of the new for

 old-fashioned art — but it’s shockingly bad

 

 

Visual art Rachel Campbell-Johnston

 

 

 

BY RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNTSON  |  FIRST NIGHT  |  THE TIMES  |  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 14 2009

 

The paintings are dreadful. Think Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole. So why are these works now hanging in the Wallace Collection? What are they doing in the home of such masters as Rembrandt or Poussin, Titian or Fragonard?

The answer is simple: they are by Damien Hirst. And his is a name that curators must welcome. The artist who can transform a pickled bovine into a cash cow has the commercial touch that any cash-strapped museum needs, not least the somewhat sedate Wallace Collection. Plus, the Hirst show comes complete with a fully paid-for gallery refurbishment (the artist covered the entire cost of the £250,000 exhibition) including a silk wall fabric commissioned from Marie Antoinette’s preferred manufacturers at a cost that would leave most of us dreaming of off-cuts.

Hirst undoubtedly has an entrepreneurial talent. Ever since he launched his landmark 1988 Freeze show he has been upping the ante, testing the parameters of expectation and taste.

Now he makes his latest departure. In the conceptual milieu which he has done so much to make fashionable, what now counts as radical is a return to tradition.

Hirst has been painting. And by that he doesn’t mean employing a team of assistants to produce the paint-by-numbers-type canvases familiar from recent shows. Hirst has been alone in his studio working with palette and brush.

The result is No Love Lost — a show of 25 pictures. Seen from a, istance they don’t look too bad. Their dark expanses are seductively presented iri traditional gilt frames. They fill the galleries with an eerie blue Insect-O-Cutor-style glow.

But take a step farther and a pale, silk-papered boudoir transforms into what feels more like a teenage boy’s bedroom. You can almost smell the brooding odours of existential angst.

Here are all Hirst’s familiar obsessions: the skulls, the shark’s jaws, the ashtrays, the spots with the odd iguana or little O-level, “still life” lemon added to the mix. Hirst floats his images on the dark surface of the canvas, mapping out their spaces and relationships with a mesh of perspective lines.

These works are utterly derivative of Bacon (give or take a dash of Giacometti), but they completely lack his painterly skill. And their metaphors are as ham-fisted as the application of pigment.

Look to the end of the galleries and you will see Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time. Hirst appears to hope that his heavy handed memento mori will make him part of the line-up of art historical tradition. But the artist who has made his reputation with shock now produces works that are shockingly bad. And who knows, maybe this is his trick. Is his brand so strong that we can’t resist turning up to look — even at works on which we know no love will be lost?

 Exhibition runs until January 24

 

 

 

Back to the drawing board but ‘my kids are better than me’

 

 

Ben Hoyle Arts Correspondent

 

 

BY BEN HOYLE  |  FIRST NIGHT  |  THE TIMES  |  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 14 2009

 

The critics are lining up to point out that as a painter Damien Hirst is no Rembrandt, Velazquez or Rubens, even though, from today, his new work is hanging alongside theirs. But the artist himself has pre-empted them: he is not even as good a painter as his children, he said.

Hirst, who has three sons aged 4 to 14, has theatrically turned his back on most production-line artworks, closed two of his studios and is on his last formaldehyde project — “three crucified cows in marble tanks”.

He has two galleries next to the Wallace Collection’s Great Gallery, which includes paintings by Rembrandt, Titian, Velazquez, Van Dyck, Rubens and Gainsborough.

“I’ve digested the history of art. I know all these guys but I’m approaching [painting] from a completely different angle. I love Rembrandt but I don’t have the same abilities.” Even if Hirst did, he doubts that he could make the same impact as they did from pure painting.

“There’s too much going on [today]. When they were painting there were paintings. There was no Hollywood, there was no plastic surgery, advertising, TV. We live in such a crazy world Hirst is abandoning formaldehyde projects to return to painting now I think a mere painting on that level doesn’t really work.”

He gave up painting as a teenager because Francis Bacon “had covered it all”. Now he has taken it up again and "it’s something that I’ve started to feel very comfortable with”.

Having children had steered him back to bush and canvas. “You see kids painting and they just pick it up.”

Is he better at painting than his children? “Definitely not, especially the little one. My mum once said to me, ‘I’ve learnt a hell of lot more from my children than I could possibly teach them’. All children are artists. It’s just that most of them stop.”

 

 

 

 

Stop it, Damien Hirst, you’re embarrassing yourself

 

 

 

 

 

 

BY BRIAN SEWELL  |  CULTURE  |  EXHIBITIONS  |  EVENING STANDARD  |  WEDNESDAY 14 OCTOBER 2009

 

 

The Laughing Cavalier, painted by Frans Hals in 1624, is one of the greatest treasures of the Wallace Collection.

That this roguish anonymous gentleman is indeed laughing has been a matter of dispute since the title was coined in the later 19th century, but as it has become canonical and the image iconic, the questions “why?” and “at what?” have not been much asked in recent years.

Now, however, almost four centuries after his depiction, he has a wry reason for his laughter, for a guffaw must be the sane man’s immediate reaction to the puerile and maladroit paintings by Damien Hirst, newly installed in neighbouring rooms for the next three months or so.

These, I have no doubt, were painted with high seriousness, if for no other reason than that they must sell for millions (perhaps they should not be exposed to such a risk), for as original works from the very hand of Hirst himself, each must surely rank higher as a work of art than any such multiple workshop offering as the notorious diamond-encrusted skull.

Alas, however, these paintings are shoddy, slip-slop and derivative, not of Poussin or Frans Hals – the latter has a wonderful painting of a skull in the National Gallery – but to Francis Bacon, whose work Hirst crudely mimics but does not understand.

At vast expense, Hirst has provided new hangings for the gallery walls, striped moiré silk in an aquamarine blue that conjures the spirit of dix-huitième France in an attempt to influence our opinion of his daubs.

At vast expense, he has framed his canvases as Bacon did, primarily in silver and gold, sheet glass both obscuring the images with reflections and lending mysterious depth.

But, discounting these Baconian tricks of presentation and concentrating only on the canvases, we have nothing but the wretched incomprehensions of the first-year student cribbing from an acknowledged master.

Were Hirst’s canvases the work of a late teenager, we might take the random lines around the skulls as a clever allusion to the measuring-points of a sculptor of Canova’s generation, or as an illusion of cracked glass, and forgive the ugly clumsiness of inexperienced execution; but Hirst is nearing his half-century and should have a far higher level of skill than this rough daubing, with which he degrades his master, Bacon.

Is Damien his own worst enemy? He claims these caricatures of Bacon to be “deeply connected with the past”, but it is a past no earlier than the last quarter of the century in which he was born.

He is vain enough to proclaim that his work as Bacon’s shallow pasticheur belongs in the Wallace Collection with paintings by Rembrandt and Velázquez, Titian and Van Dyck, but one minute spent in the Great Gallery with these is enough to prove the arrogance of this delusion.

Are then his uncritical friends, allies and advisers his worst enemies – those who daily greet him with “Oh King, live for ever” and tell him he can do no wrong?

Has Ros Savill, directrice of the Wallace Collection, done him a great disservice in her foolish desperation to increase the number of the museum’s visitors by exhibiting so notorious and filthy-rich an artist? The exposure should do no good to either herself or Hirst.

The exhibition is supported by the usual events performed by the usual lackeys who can be trusted to “Praise him, praise him, praise him” – including Tim Marlow, a director of White Cube, the art dealership most closely associated with Hirst’s huge commercial success (only in the arts could so crass a conflict of interest be ignored).

It is accompanied by a catalogue in which all 29 canvases are illustrated, but in no way illuminated by the text of a conversation in The Pig and Whistle between Hirst and John Hoyland, the grand old bore of British bucket-and-slosh abstract painting.

In this the words most used and most superfluous are fuck and its derivatives – the fucking chair, fucking debris, fucking rectangle, fucking artist, fucking unbelievable.

I take this as licence, for this occasion only, to declare this detestable exhibition fucking dreadful.

No Love Lost, Blue Paintings by Damien Hirst is at the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, W1 (020 7563 9500) until 24 January. Admission free.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Damien Hirst: Dead on Arrival

 

 

 

 

 

RICHARD LACAYO  |  LOOKING AROUND  |  TIME  |  WEDNESDAY 14 OCTOBER 2009

 

After years of doing installation art, dead animals in formaldehyde and pictures painted entirely by his small army of studio assistants, work that made him one of the most famous artists in the world, Damien Hirst is showing paintings in London this week that he did all by himself. And the British critics are tearing him to pieces.

When I profiled him last year for Time, Damien Hirst was at an odd place in his career. As a market and media phenomenon he was bigger than ever. He was about to rake in an additional pirate’s treasure by cutting out his dealers and taking several years worth of his new work directly to auction at Sotheby’s in London. As we all now know, though the sale took place the same week that Lehman Brothers collapsed in New York, it brought in nearly $200 million — the perfect End-of-the-Gilded-Age blowout.

But he was also at some kind of psychological crossroads. He had made his name with work that had no trace of his hand, but his greatest hero was Francis Bacon, one of the most painterly painters of all time. And Hirst had come to a point where he seemed to feel that the only way to demonstrate his own authenticity as an artist was to paint — actually paint, meaning applying the stuff to the canvas himself. You got the feeling he was embarked on a sort of a one-man rappelle a l’ordre, like Picasso’s return to neo-classical figuration after Cubism. One difference, of course, was that Picasso could draw.

One day that summer at Hirst’s offices in London, with one of the several Bacons in his collection looking down from one wall, he showed me some large transparencies of the work he had begun. They were ghostly white-line figures and (of course) skulls, drawn in paint against dark blue backgrounds. It was pretty clear right away what work had inspired them, Bacon’s series of Blue Men of the 1950s, isolated businessmen in pinstripes painted against spare dark backgrounds.

They didn’t look very promising but I didn’t offer any judgments about them then and I won’t offer any now. You can’t make final judgments based on reproductions or transparencies. But I do remember thinking that when he finally exhibited them he was probably going to be slaughtered by the critics in London, who had gotten thoroughly sick of those endless dot and butterfly paintings being churned out in his name by his assistants, to say nothing of that diamond encrusted skull.

I was pretty sick of all that, too, but I was also sort of moved by Hirst’s predicament. He had become one of the most successful artists in the world without painting anything himself, but at the age of 43 he felt he needed to work in the great tradition to feel validated. It reminded me of the way Billy Joel and Paul McCartney keep trying to write classical music.

Well, Hirst is now showing those paintings, 25 of them, in an exhibition that opens today in London called No Love Lost. As an additional provocation he’s showing them at the Wallace Collection, an ornate old townhouse stuffed with works by Titian, Rembrandt and Poussin, which means he’s placing himself squarely in the long line of art history. And, as predicted, the British critics have taken out all the long knives.

Tom Lubbock, in The Independent, is typical:

They’re thoroughly derivative. Their handling is weak. They’re extremely boring. I’m not saying that he’s absolutely hopeless. But I’m not saying he’s any good either. ... Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student. He is in his mid-forties.

 

As a public service, on its website the BBC combines links to several of the reviews.

 

Hirst remains a very canny operator, and occasionally also an interesting artist, though not on canvas. I predict he’ll survive all this, though it will be interesting to see how long it takes before he shows paintings again.

 

 

 

 

   

        

           Francis Bacon, Man in Blue V, 1954  Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

 

 

 


 

 

 

Damien Hirst: Who’s fooling who?

 

 

 ‘Are Hirst’s paintings any good? No, they’re not worth looking at’

 

 

If it were not for his prodigious fame, would Damien Hirst’s canvases be

exhibited at London’s hallowed Wallace Collection? 

Of course not, says Tom Lubbock, the man simply can’t paint

 

 

 

 

TOM LUBBOCK  |  ART  |  FEATURES  |  CULTURE  |  THE INDEPENDENT  |  WEDNESDAY 14 OCTOBER 2009

 

A few quick questions. 1. Are these new paintings, painted by Damien Hirst himself, any good? No, not at all, they are not worth looking at. 2. So why are you writing about them at such length? Because he is very famous. 3. And why has the Wallace Collection decided to exhibit them? Because he is very famous. 4. And why did Damien Hirst even paint them in the first place? Because he is very famous.

Now let me put this at more length. Damien Hirst has painted some paintings, entirely by hand. So far he has made his name with other kinds of art: with assemblages, mainly involving dead animals and pills, and paintings, painted by other people. There have been the spot paintings, the spin paintings, paintings copied from photographs, all done by assistants. But now he has risked his fame, with some paintings done by his own hand.

Anyone interested in Hirst’s art to date, anyone simply interested in Hirst as a very famous artist, will probably take an interest in this radical turn in his work. What will they look like? There’s another thing. Even now we’ve learnt to accept that skills needn’t matter, still that old question seems to linger over any artist, whatever methods they employ: can they actually paint?

And if that wasn’t enough, there’s an extra attraction in where these paintings are being shown., The Wallace Collection is a distinguished, old-fashioned venue, and chosen precisely as a traditionalist setting, to stress the way these new paintings have a place in the great tradition. As the artist has said himself, he feels they are "deeply connected to the past." For the public, it’s intriguing. If you were expecting some outrage from the master of Brit Art shock, expect again.

Here they are, then, looking like history. In a long chamber, just off the Wallace’s main gallery of masterpieces, they hang on walls of sumptuous silk, and held in heavy old-master frames. There are 25 pictures, including two triptychs. Their collective title is No Love Lost, Blue Paintings. And they don’t look back that far. As you’d expect, they are most reminiscent of paintings by Hirst’s hero, Francis Bacon.

You see it at once. They take their effects, not from Bacon’s virtuoso exploding flesh images, but from the dourer Bacons of the 1950s. There’s little colour. Blue-ish whites glimmer out of blue-ish darkness. As in Bacon, but more so, the figures are contained within frameworks of straight white lines. The figurative matter consists (mainly) of Hirsty things – skulls, skeleton, a shark’s open maw, ashtrays, cigarette packets, flayed bodies, also lizards, thickets of wood. There are grid patterns of white dots. 

Like Bacons, they’re pretty big. Their themes come in repetitive sequences. There’s a series of very similar paintings of flayed bodies seen in a thicket, another series of skulls and ashstrays. The subjects may sound harsh, but the painting of them is neither violent nor graceful, simply unassertive and unconfident, caution suggesting uncertainty. There’s not a dash of virtuosity. There’s an attempt at blurry, glowy etherealness. There’s one picture of a vase of flowers with butterflies flying out of it in all directions, and some of the butterflies are quite neatly painted.

But come now. This is ridiculous. To talk in this considered way is to pretend that the paintings can be taken seriously. So let’s be clear. Many kinds of paintings get reviewed on these pages, and some of them (in my judicious way) I say are good, and some bad. But in a way they’re all quite good, or they wouldn’t be getting reviewed here in the first place.

These Hirst paintings are way outside that range. They’re thoroughly derivative. Their handling is weak. They’re extremely boring. I’m not saying that he’s absolutely hopeless. But I’m not saying he’s any good either. There are many degrees of painting. There are many painters in evening classes much worse than Hirst. On the other hand, you’d find quite a few who were better, too. To try to be accurate: Hirst, as a painter, is at about the level of a not-very-promising, first-year art student. He is in his mid-forties.

 

There are dozens of youngsters who turn up at our art schools each year, doing this turgid teen-angst stuff. And many of them are deluded enough, in their innocence, to think that their work is "deeply connected to the past." Their teachers have to scold and embarrass them out of these bad habits. These kids may come to something. At that point you can’t really be sure. But you can be sure that the Wallace Collection, in its kindness, wouldn’t offer them a gallery to display their work. And I too, in my kindness, wouldn’t write about this present show, if it wasn’t for the level of public interest.

As for what Damien Hirst thinks he’s doing, it’s not my business, but anyone may wonder. Yearning to be among the masters, and blinded by self-belief? Maybe. And I could imagine another famous artist, who had made their name in assemblage, and who decided to try their hand at painting – but when it turned out like this, realised it simply wouldn’t do, and sighed, and put it away, their fame not having warped their judgement.

And I could imagine another famous artist who did a similar thing, but who wasn’t quite sure, and realised that their fame was likely distort both their judgement and the public’s. So they submitted one of their new paintings, under a pseudonym, to the biennial John Moores Painting Prize competition, to see what would happen. Hirst could have done the same.

Well, the artist can make a fool of himself, and it doesn’t matter. I’m sure the pictures will sell for a packet anyway, and if the critics are rude – I jolly well hope they are – the buyers need only be reminded of Van Gogh, rejected by all in his time, now seen as great. (Ignore the slight circularity of this argument.) No, it’s our poor little art world that I feel sorry for. We just look so bloody stupid. 

I mean, here is the director of the Wallace Collection – no names, no pack-drill – and what she says is: Hirst’s paintings are "very classical in nature" and "his ethereal other-worldly treatment of the memento mori subject evokes centuries of great art... a comparison can be made to the Wallace Collection’s great Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time."

Actually, the Wallace thinks so highly of its great Poussin that currently it exhibits it with a statuette plonked directly in front of it, so you can’t see it properly. Never mind. You can see those Hirst paintings clearly enough, and then imagine what could have moved the mind of this director. Was she dazzled by stardom? Can she really not see anything?

We’re all blinded, I suppose, somehow. So many things obscure a pure attention to good art. The spectacle of blazing fame and self-delusion, the joy of people talking utter rubbish, and writing rude reviews: the freak show goes on. At least today I have detained you long enough.

No Love Lost, Blue Paintings, Wallace Collection, London W1 (020-7563 9500) to 24 January

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No one wants to take home the Bacon at art show

 

 

 

TARA LOADER WILKINSON   |   WEALTH BULLETIN   |   WEDNESDAY 14 OCTOBER 2009

   

A painting by Francis Bacon valued at $9m on sale at the Pavillion of Art & Design in London this week, could be a bellwether for the art market in a post credit crisis world.

 

The Monday night opening of the fair was attended by thousands of wealthy collectors and clients of the Pavilion’s sponsor, Swiss private bank EFG International.

 

Cheaper and mid-market works were the biggest sellers. While the pricier works of art were less popular.

 

Gerard Faggionato, a director of the Faggionato Fine Arts gallery, which was selling the Bacon, and also works by super-artists Andy Warhol and Gilbert & George, said he had sold little

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frieze Week to Lure Billionaires With $9 Million Bacon Nude

 

 

 

 

 

PREVIEW BY SCOTT REYBURN   |  BLOOMBERG  |  THURSDAY 8 OCTOBER 2009

 

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) — London’s contemporary-art traders are aiming to defy the recession in their biggest week of the year by offering works including a $9 million Francis Bacon painting. The Frieze Art Fair previews on Oct. 14, with 165 galleries bidding to win business from billionaire collectors. That’s up from 151 last year. Frieze found new exhibitors as 28 galleries pulled out. Other satellite events have shrunk or closed.

Frieze is still Europe’s biggest fair exclusively devoted to original works by contemporary and living artists. Demand for these works contracted during the financial crisis that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September 2008. Volumes of auction sales shrank between 70 percent and 80 percent, and prices of some artists more than halved, said the London-based research company ArtTactic in an e-mail last month.

London-based dealer Gerard Faggionato will be offering Bacon’s 1988 painting of a male nude, Study from the Human Body after Muybridge, with a price of $9 million at the satellite Pavillion Art & Design fair. The painting is from the estate of the artist, which Faggionato represents. “There’s been a change from galleries asking who they want to sell to, to collectors asking who they want to buy from,” Faggionato said in an interview. “People will wake up next week. Everybody’s waiting to see what will happen.”

 

 

   

 

 

1988 Francis Bacon painting Study from the Human Body after Muybridge. 

This work will be priced at $9 million at Faggionato Fine Art’s booth at the

Frieze Art Fair, London U.K. The fair previews on the evening of October 13.

 

 

 

 

 

Mystery over who made the “Francis Bacon” rugs

 

 

New research poses more questions than answers over possible

attributions for items that were withdrawn from March sale

 

 

JANE  MORRIS  |  AUCTIONS  |  THE ART NEWSPAPER  |  MONDAY 1 OCTOBER 2009

 

at two very rare hand-knotted rugs, designed by the artist Francis Bacon, had turned up in a saleroom near Salisbury generated widespread media excitement last February; excitement that rapidly turned to disappointment with the news they had been withdrawn by their consignor shortly before Netherhampton’s 12 March auction. The two rugs —featuring a distinctive green, angular, crosshatch design and signed boldly “Francis Bacon”—carried estimates of £50,000-£80,000.

The Art Newspaper has now seen research that raises questions about the attribution of these rugs. The technical examination by carpet experts Clive Rogers, of Clive Rogers Oriental Rugs, and Jean Manuel de Noronha, a Paris-based researcher, will be published in the December issue of the specialist carpet magazine Hali under the title “The Rugs of the Young Francis Bacon”.

The research has been timed to coincide with a rare showing of rugs known to be by Bacon at London’s Tate Britain (26 October-late February, 2010), allowing for comparison.

Bacon only made rugs and furniture for a very short period in the late 1920s—in his late teens—before turning to painting. His rugs and furniture were shown in exhibitions in 1929 and 1930, but this aspect of his work is rarely studied. According to Rogers and other experts, only seven rugs are known to be currently in existence, including one in the V&A and the three due to show at the Tate.

However—drawing on photographs of Bacon’s Queensbury Mews West studio, published in 1930 in Studio Magazine, and drawings and paintings of the studio by the Australian artist Roy de Maistre—Rogers and De Noronha’s study shows evidence of at least six more.

However, none of the rugs pictured in Studio Magazine or by De Maistre correspond with the two Netherhampton rugs, nor with a third, almost identical (but unsigned) rug in private hands, which has since appeared and been shown to Rogers. All three are narrower than the seven currently accepted as Bacons, at around 6ft x 3ft, as opposed to 7ft x 4ft.

Their place of manufacture is also a mystery: the authors state that “all three have the patina and structure of period products” but have difficulty attributing them to the Wilton Carpet factory at Wilton, near Salisbury, which has been clearly established as the maker of the seven known Bacon rugs. The authors’ research shows that the three green rugs are likely to have been made in England or Ireland but associations to either Bacon or one of Wilton’s rural satellites is problematic.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding of the research is about the design. The three “new” green rugs appear almost identical in pattern to a much larger carpet in a pinkish colourway, which has appeared three times at auction in Continental Europe. On each occasion (Sotheby’s Monaco, 23 April 1989; Boisgirard, 29 March 1990; Sotheby’s Monaco, 11 December 1995) that piece was attributed to the famous Paris-based Brazilian textile artist/rugmaker Ivan Da Silva Bruhn, probably around 1927.

 

However, the three green rugs are unlike Da Silva Bruhn’s construction, if similar in design. The authors note that Bacon spent time in Paris from 1927/28 and that his rugs do show the influence of Paris-based artist-makers including Eileen Gray and Fernand Léger. But so far, all the accepted Bacons “are unique”, they say, and there is no evidence of him copying directly from other textile artists

Dr Ian Bennett, the carpet expert at Netherhampton’s, declined to comment, except to say that, in light of the new evidence, he “no longer believes the rugs to be by Bacon”.

 

 

 

 

A rare glimpse into the artist’s studio

 

 

 

From the knee-deep litter of Francis Bacon to the artful order of Lucian Freud, a new

 exhibition explores how artists’ workspaces reveal more than their occupants expect

 

 

 

 

MAEV KENNEDY  |  ART  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  MONDAY 28 SEPTEMBER 2009

  

Between them the beautiful boy huddled over a small fire in his icy garret, and the beautiful naked girl stooping in front of window overlooking a tumble of Parisian rooftops, combine almost every popular cliché about what artists get up to behind the closed doors of their studios.

One is a little painting from 1845, by the otherwise almost entirely forgotten 19th-century artist Octave Tassaert, and the other Christopher Nevinson’s 1926 A Studio in Montparnasse. They hang among centuries of artists’ studios captured in paint, film and photographs, in a unique exhibition opening this week at Compton Verney, the country mansion gallery in Warwickshire. Both show us wonderfully plausible lies: the viewer assumes immediately that the poverty and romance of one studio, the glamour and hint of exotic pleasures in the other, must relate to the artists’ own lives. Which just proves how dangerous it is to take what artists say about themselves as the truth.

The Nevinson, for instance, doesn’t show his own studio but one borrowed from a friend – who was outraged by the painting and the suggestion that his handsome room was the kind of place you might find a naked woman hanging around the window seat.

Over a century ago the Strand magazine nailed the voyeuristic seduction of such images: “The sacred place ... a laboratory in which ideas are melted down and boiled up and turned out on canvas by magic.” Art historian, curator and deviser of the exhibition Giles Waterfield feels the seductive power of many of the images, but warns that the exhibition throws up more questions than it answers.

"For centuries people have taken the studio as a faithful reflection of the soul of the artist, but my question is – and it is one which this exhibition finally cannot answer: is it really?" Artists, after all, are by definition creatures of artifice, and they are exhibitionists. Many of these interiors are as carefully constructed as stage sets.

Waterfield and his co-curator Antonia Harrison spoke to Lucian Freud, whose studio is represented not only by his own paintings but in dazzling photographs by his assistant David Dawson, and by Bruce Bernard. Freud insisted there was nothing interesting or revelatory about his studio; it was just the place where he worked – but everything in the photographs suggests otherwise: a meticulously constructed space with almost surreal features including walls layered in impasto where he wiped his brushes. The paint is an inch thick in places – it must surely be easier to wipe a brush on a rag than risk damaging the voluptuous sculptural effect.

Another photograph by Perry Ogden shows the legendary litter of Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews, precisely matching the image of a haunted genius, which has now been reconstructed like the shrine of a saint in a Dublin gallery. It is shown beside the site drawing by the team of archaeologists who were sent in to record the stratigraphy of each individual object, before the move began. But there are also two more images of Bacon studios, which suggest the great man may have been playing to the cameras as he shuffled through the drifts of paper and rags; one dates from the period when he was still designing furniture, and it is as obsessively neat as a showroom window. Another little sketch by Michael Clark, from 1982, only two years before Ogden’s photograph, shows a cluttered interior – but with a perfectly clear working space in the centre.

Many of the earlier paintings in the show, such as Peter Tillemans’s handsome interior of 1716, depict not tormented souls starving, but elegantly dressed gentlemen entertaining more gentlemen, connoisseurs and potential clients, in interiors groaning with oriental carpets, leatherbound volumes and classical statues; these are artists marketing themselves as clubbable equals rather than social outcasts. Women artists, on the other hand, have their own very small section of the show, and if they’re not quite working on a corner of the kitchen table, very few have managed a room of their own – artist Gwen John has one but it’s as bare as a nun’s cell, and clearly no society clients will be calling.

A century later, and the fashion has changed. For a society in thrall to the romance of La Bohème and Trilby, it was more marketable to be suffering in a garret. Edward Burne-Jones, in letters to his patron the Earl of Carlisle, sketches himself as a shivering skeletal figure, and writes that his stacked canvases are so cold and damp they could be used for growing mushrooms.

It may be that the only truly honest images in the show – and that includes the immaculate working studio constructed in a corner of a beautiful Georgian room overlooking a lake, for the artist Sigrid Holmwood – are from Turner prize-winner Jeremy Deller and the self-destructive 18th-century painter George Morland. Deller ruefully admits that the “studio” – no jugs of brushes, no turpentine-steeped rags, just a room where he works hunched over a laptop – is really quite boring. Morland’s little painting, meanwhile, shows him at work on an idyllic landscape in a truly grim room. There are no swags of velvet drapery or classical busts here: it is almost bare of furniture, with sketches scribbled on the fireplace wall, presumably because all the paper has already gone up the chimney. His assistant is cooking four sausages in a pan over the fire – and there are two men and two hopeful-looking large dogs, so there won’t be much lunch for anyone. There’s an empty gin bottle on the floor, and presumably, one suspects, a half-full one nearby. Morland has fatally discovered that pub landlords would trade him drink for a new inn sign. He would be dead within two years of the painting, at the age of 39.

As for the beautiful boy painter starving in his garret, the artist Tassaert was 45 when he painted it. But if he was never quite so picturesquely young and poor, his own fate was tragic enough for the libretto of any opera. The painting is owned by the Louvre, and the image is now a bestseller worldwide on prints, greeting cards and even fridge magnets, but in life Tassaert was bitterly disappointed that he never achieved the success or recognition he felt he deserved. He became an alcoholic, sold everything left in his studio to a dealer at a knockdown price and gave up painting, and died in 1874 by gassing himself.

The show ended up much larger than the curators originally expected: there are hundreds of images, spanning more than three centuries. Some of the painters, including A-list celebrities of their day such as William Powell The Derby Day Frith, were rich and famous. While the view of one of the studios of GF Watts, a giant of his Victorian heyday whose reputation went into freefall after his death, shows that he worked in a space as luxurious as the lounge of a grand hotel. Others, like poor Morland, were barely scraping a living. Still, surprising similarities show up across the years: from Tillemans in 1716 to the spaces of Damien Hirst and Tom Phillips that have been photographed in the last 10 years, there’s usually a skull around somewhere, and often the artist is not working in splendid isolation but with a rabble of assistants, women, children, cats and dogs hanging about. Time after time, although the feeling of trespassing in a sacred space endures, we as visitors are clearly expected: there’s usually an artful still life in the foreground, or drawings, maps, bits of costumes and props – laid out to impress.

It’s the Morland I’d take home with me, for its shabby frankness, and as a spur to work harder myself. I’m pretty sure he’d have swapped it for an extra sausage all round for the men and the dogs.

 

 

 


From decorator to painter – Francis Bacon’s interior designs go on show

 

 

Rare rugs and paintings which Francis Bacon completed when he was working as aninterior

designer are to go on display for the first time.

 

 

 

BY ROYA NIKKHAH  |  ARTS CORRESPONDENT  |  THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH  |  SUNDAY 27 SEPTEMBER 2009

 

Hidden in private collections for decades, they escaped the artist’s attempts to destroy his early artworks which he believed were inferior to his later masterpieces.

Experts claim the pieces give a vital insight into how his interior design work influenced his more famous works.

To mark the centenary of Bacon’s birth on October 28, Francis Bacon: Early Work at Tate Britain will include three rugs and a painted screen dating from 1929 when the then 20-year-old Bacon was decorating homes in London.

On loan from a private collection, they will be shown alongside some of his earliest surviving paintings, including Composition 1933, which echoes patterns in his rug designs, and his 1944 breakthrough work, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

From 1928 to 1930, Bacon worked in London, Paris and Berlin, designing entire interior schemes together with individual pieces of furniture. He began to incorporate some of his interiors work into his first paintings, such as Watercolour (1929), his earliest surviving painting which appears to have evolved from his carpet designs.

Aged 19, his studio in South Kensington was featured in an interiors magazine in a piece entitled The 1930 Look in British Decoration.

His clients included the Australian painter Roy de Maistre, who later became his mentor, and Sydney Butler, the daughter of the art collector Samuel Courthauld, for whom he designed a dining table and set of stools for her London home.

Matthew Gale, the curator of Modern Art and Head of Displays at Tate Modern, said that the new display which opens on October 26 would come as a “tremendous surprise to a lot of people.”

He said: “Seeing where an artist comes from is always an incredibly intriguing and revealing thing. Not many people know that Bacon started out in interior design because he didn’t make a big thing about it in later life.”

“He tended to enforce the sense that the Three Studies... was where his career as the great British painter all began, but his design work was also a crucial moment.”

“These works show him linked to a European modernist tradition, with a debt to Picasso and building on cubism as he made the shift from decorator to painter.”

 

 


 

 

Francis Bacon

 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

 

ANETA GEORGIEVSKA-SHINE  |  NEW YORK  |  REVIEW  |  ARTUS  |  TUESDAY 22 SEPTEMBER 2009

 

Sometime around 1950, Francis Bacon (1909-92) wrote that he would like his paintings to look like “the track left by human beings—like the slime left by snails.” My first encounter with these snail trails happened back in 1985, at his retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery. Gripped by the contrary emotions they aroused, I returned the next morning, determined to grasp their visual and psychological slipperiness. So it’s not surprising that when I walked into the Metropolitan, the last stop on Tate Britain’s traveling centenary retrospective, I did so with some trepidation. What I especially feared were the years I have spent since looking critically at art.

As if to echo this concern, the catalogue, despite proclaiming Bacon the greatest British modern painter, also admits that his importance lies more in his “commitment to art itself than in any stylistic legacy.” Indeed, in accordance with the widespread belief that the proof of an artist’s success lies in his influence on art history, this statement reads almost like an admission of irrelevance. Yet no sooner had I entered the first gallery, all of these doubts proved groundless. None of the 130 exhibits, from the earliest 1930s Crucifixions to the works created around the time of his death, felt outdated either formally or in terms of their affective power. Nor has time made them any the less conceptually profound than when they were first made.

Bacon was well aware of his problematical status in the art world. Though remaining defiantly figurative when all serious modern art had gone abstract, he earned the praise of such renowned intellects as Herbert Read and Gilles Deleuze. At the same time, his dramatic pronouncements about the necessity of excess and suffering, and his professed admiration for writers such as Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Aeschylus, were often seen as incompatible with the undeniable beauty of his paintings. Formalist critics such as Michael Fried objected that his “conventional emotions” did not rise to the level of his “venturesome” and “shocking” forms. Conversely, while Roberta Smith has responded to the “psychological situation” of his work, she felt that its impact was severely eroded by Bacon’s formulaic devices concerning the figure/ground relationship, or the “relentless” gold frames he seemed to like so much. Those and other dissonances between form and content sometimes led to even outright dismissal of Bacon as the perfect existentialist painter for the new bourgeois salon. However, one could also propose something else—that this disparity of form and content is a willful aesthetic “failure” that highlights the impassable gap between raw human experience and its artistic after-effect. Be that as it may, Bacon would have keenly felt this fissure, since his combative dialogue with traditional art was clearly the means by which he tried to define himself. Indeed, his struggle to work within the tradition was the very reason he preferred Proust, whom he termed “the last tragic writer,” to, say, Joyce’s technical bravura. And like Proust or T.S. Eliot, Bacon recognized that while the canon anchored his individual gesture, its weight made any exit outside its frame all the more challenging.

Concerning the anxieties of his position, one of the most telling documents in “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” (through August 16) is a wall-sized fragment of Perry Ogden’s famous photograph of Bacon’s Reece Mews studio in London. As with most of his other studios, it presents utmost chaos as a necessary comfort zone. In fact, in the midst of this squalor one glimpses a monograph on Velázquez, perhaps Bacon’s most significant art hero. Its cover shows Juan de Pareja, the mixedrace servant who was trained by his “master” Velázquez to become a painter in his own right. Moreover, it was this very painting that the Spanish master showed to Pope Innocent X before being commissioned to paint his portrait. Velázquez’s goal, as in most of his other portraits, was to demonstrate not only his ability to capture the likeness of his servant, but also the innate dignity of a person capable of rising above his station. And it was this twofold grasp of the world of appearances and their underlying reality that made Velázquez so highly esteemed even in the eyes of this notoriously callous pontiff, who is said to have received his portrait with the words “troppo vero” (too real). 

Arrogant as he may have been, Bacon aspired to be the greatest “realist” painter of his generation—realist understood here as the ability to show both the outside and the inside of phenomena. This was one crucial reason why he preferred Velázquez to the exemplary modernist Cézanne, whom he ultimately found unable to convey the life force of his apples or sitters. The Spanish baroque master, on the other hand, could take a given situation and instill out of it “both fact and image.” That Bacon could go on to praise the portrait of the Pope as something “factual” and “powerfully formal” that was also able to “unlock valves of sensation at all different levels” is understandable. But that he at the same time likened the portrait to Egyptian art places Bacon back in the court of a more historically recusant position.

This latest Bacon retrospective reads as one continuous movement toward the ideal image that can project both rigorous formality and yet assault the beholder’s sensations in unexpected ways. Though the human drama lies behind most of his grand narratives, every once in a while his paintings seem to lack a human subject. Yet even in those instances, such as the Eliot-inspired A Piece of Wasteland (1982), or Blood on Pavement (1988), which evokes the painter’s favourite lines from Aeschylus about the smiling reek of human blood, he still manages to convey the slime of existence. We get another glimpse of this double strategy in a portrait appearing at the end of the show, his 1991 Triptych, in which the artist returns once more to the theme of his long-deceased lover George Dyer. The left wing of this “altarpiece” presents the dead “Muse,” while on the right we see his mourning “Pygmalion.” Their bodies seem turned toward each other, albeit in truncated fashion, with a centaur-like passion, while their tightly cropped monochromatic faces look directly at the beholder, ensnaring us in the ineradicable dichotomy between the mind and the body, between the “higher” appearances of self and its “lower,” uncivilized urges. And as in so many of his pictures, Triptych’s central panel shows a messy tangle of limbs, alluding in equal measure to love and death, to a desire to protect and mangle the other.

Bacon may well have over-reached in his ambition to secure his place in the pantheon of Western painters. Yet, even if his obsession with Eros and Thanatos may occasionally appear single-minded, his repeated statements about the difficulty of painting today deserve the benefit of doubt. And he was probably not just trying to impress Allen Ginsberg when he allegedly told this modern-day Dionysus that the only way one could successfully conclude a work was “with a chance brushstroke that locked in the magic—a fortuitous thing he could not predict or orchestrate.”

 

 

 

 

        BACON DUST

 

 

Sifting through the remnants of 7 Reece Mews

 

 

CHRISTOPHER TURNER  |  CABINET MAGAZINE  |  ISSUE 35  |  FALL 2009

 

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life

—Pablo Picasso
 

 

Several years ago, I met Francis Bacon’s cleaning lady. Bacon’s amanuensis, the art critic David Sylvester, referred me to her, as he had her to Bacon. Jean Ward, who had her grey hair swept back into a thin ponytail like a pirate’s, welcomed me to her flat on a housing estate in Tooting Beck, South London. In a raspy voice she told me about her decade working for the painter whose legendarily messy studio—layer upon layer of dust, paint, discarded imagery, champagne bottles, and other detritus—would not have provided her much of a recommendation for future jobs.

“I wasn’t daunted,” she said when recalling her first visit to 7 Reece Mews in the early 1980s, “because I had read certain things about how some artists have tidy studios and some don’t—so I wasn’t really shocked. I just looked at the nice colours on the door that he used to try out paint on.” (Bacon referred to these giant palettes as his “only abstract paintings.”) Traditionally, it was the sculptor who was necessarily slovenly for, as Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Treatise on Painting, “his face is smeared and dusted all over with marble powder so that he looks like a baker, and he is completely covered with little chips of marble, so that he seems as if his back has been snowed on; and his house is full of splinters of stone and dust.” The painter, in contrast, “sits in front of his work in perfect comfort. He is well-dressed and handles the lightest of brushes which he dips in pleasant colours. He wears the clothes he likes; and his house is full of delightful paintings and is spotlessly clean.”1

“I live in squalor,” Bacon once boasted of his own practice, “the woman who cleans is not allowed to touch the studio. Besides, I like the dust—I set it like pastel.” Bacon’s biographer Daniel Farson reported that the artist “never had the studio in the Mews cottage cleaned because it helped him to lift up dust from the floor and apply it to the canvas when painting his sand dunes; he also rubbed his fingers along the dust and then on to the wet paint.” Bacon did this in his portrait of his patron and lover, Eric Hall: “Actually there is no paint at all on the suit apart from a very thin grey wash on which I put dust from the floor,” Bacon said of Figure in a Landscape (1945). “I thought: well, how can I make that slightly furry quality of a flannel suit? And then I suddenly thought: well, I’ll get some dust. And you can see how near it is to a decent flannel suit.”

“He definitely didn’t like anyone going into his studio, that was his domain,” Ward confirmed. “I was never allowed to clean it. Occasionally, he and John [Edwards, Bacon’s companion for the last sixteen years of his life] would get together and clean out some of the clutter;2 otherwise it would get so high that you’d have to clamber over, and he did like to stand back and look at his paintings. … All that clutter, sometimes I would expect it to start moving with cockroaches!” Bacon was proud of his disorderly studio, which was a kind of metaphor for the creative act: “I feel at home in this chaos,” he said of his workspace, “because chaos suggests images to me. … I think it may be a spur to create order.” On another occasion he explained, “I like to live among the memories and the damage.”

When Ward first met Bacon, he had no cleaning equipment, apart from the odd can of Ajax, a domestic bleach he sometimes used to powder his face. He took Ward to Harrods department store so that she could help him choose his first vacuum cleaner. To use it in the South Kensington mews garret where the artist lived and worked, Ward often had to step over a drunk Bacon when she arrived in the morning (now and again, to celebrate a particularly successful night at one of Soho’s casinos, her employer would give her a generous wad of cash). The flat, up a steep flight of stairs from the street, had an eccentric arrangement. In addition to the studio, there were two other rooms—a kitchen which also held the bath, and a small bedroom that doubled as a living room. In Perry Ogden’s photographs of Reece Mews, taken after the artist’s death, you can see that these domestic spaces, unlike the studio, were modest, simply decorated, and, thanks to Ward, spick-and-span. “The dust wasn’t good for him,” Ward told me, “sometimes he could hardly breathe. I kept it down as best I could and when he went off on trips, then I would really go to town.” Ward likes to think her cleaning “helped him to stay alive a bit longer and do more work.”

The dust that he sometimes applied to his canvases was particularly dangerous to Bacon, who suffered from asthma so badly that he was declared unfit for military service during World War II. He volunteered for civil defense instead, working for Air Raid Precautions, but the fine dust of the London Blitz aggravated his asthma and he was discharged on medical grounds. He and Eric Hall rented a cottage in Hampshire where they sat out the war. “If I hadn’t been asthmatic,” the artist once commented dryly, “I might never have gone on painting at all.”

Dust for Bacon, therefore, contained a particularly poignant existential message. “The world is just a dung heap,” Bacon told Joshua Gilder in 1980, when he was seventy-one. “It’s made up of compost of the millions and millions who have died and are blowing about. The dead are blowing in your nostrils every hour, every second you breathe in. It’s a macabre way of putting it, perhaps; but anything that’s at all accurate about life is always macabre. After all, you’re born, you die.”

Bacon was an interior decorator and furniture designer before becoming an artist. His showroom at 17 Queensberry Mews West, also in South Kensington, was photographed for an article in The Studio magazine titled “The 1930 Look in British Decoration.” It is spotless, decorated with tubular steel furniture and Modernist rugs of his design. Only the circular mirror, which later had a prominent place in the painter’s studio, provides any sense of continuity with Reece Mews. An early pen-and-wash drawing known as Corner of the Studio (1934) depicts Queensberry Mews, making it one of Bacon’s first subjects, and it was here that he held the first exhibition of his paintings. Bacon thought that his previous career as a designer-decorator detracted from his prestige as a painter; his later messy workspace might be seen as an attempt to escape this past, even though the disarray itself can be understood as a form of décor.

It was while viewing an exhibition of Picasso’s paintings in Paris in the late 1920s that Bacon decided he too would paint. Picasso was often photographed in his studio for publicity purposes, and Bacon, who also liked to pose amid his own debris, might have self-consciously imitated Picasso’s bohemian clutter. In 1932, Brassaï met Picasso at 23 rue La Boétie in Paris. “I was expecting an artist’s studio,” Brassaï wrote in Conversations with Picasso, “but it was an apartment turned pigsty … filled with piles of pictures, reams of paper, stacks of books, packages, wrapped models for sculptures, all lying helter-skelter on the floor, everything covered with a thick coating of dust. … Except for a few friends, Picasso allowed no one in. The dust could fall and settle wherever it liked, without fear of some cleaning woman’s feather duster.” Picasso lived in the apartment below, which was very much his wife Olga’s domain, “no clutter, not a speck of dust.”

Picasso, whom Jean Cocteau called “the king of rag-pickers” because he never threw anything away, told Brassaı˙˙that his favorite outfit had been a grey suit because it best matched the dust (perhaps Bacon had this in mind when he painted Eric Hall). “I always forbade anyone to clean my studio,” Picasso said, “because I used to rely on dust for my protection … Dust was my ally. When I noticed that here and there the dust had disappeared, I would know at once that someone had been meddling with my things.”

Jean Ward was cleaning Reece Mews on 28 April 1992 when Bacon died of a heart attack in Madrid, age eighty-two. “I didn’t often switch the radio on but I did that morning. … It came over that he had passed away. I was half way through and I thought, well what do I do now? I was really upset, but I thought I’d better finish what I was doing.” After that, the studio sat empty, a shrine to its former occupant. “I kept on cleaning for a couple of years, once a month, after John inherited it. What used to worry me was that a few mice found their way into the studio. I had to inform them to watch that, because if they were hoping to keep anything, the mice would soon eat their way through and there’d be nothing left.”

In 1998, 7 Reece Mews, where Bacon had worked for thirty-one years, was dismantled by a team of archaeologists and transported in its entirety to Dublin, the city where Bacon was born but which he left at the age of seventeen, never to return. This was somewhat ironic given Bacon’s ambivalent relationship to Ireland: his friend, Lady Caroline Blackwood, who was married to Lucian Freud, once said that Bacon “developed a neurotic attack of asthma on the plane whenever he tried to get there.” Every time she tried to broach the subject of his traumatic childhood “he became agitated … he started to tug at the collar of his shirt as if he were trying to loosen some kind of noose which he found asphyxiating; for a moment he resembled the agonized figures in his paintings whose faces turn a truly dangerous shade of indigo purple.” In Dublin, the studio was reassembled as a permanent installation in the city’s Hugh Lane Gallery. Everything appears exactly as Bacon left it, including the dust.

Blaze O’Connor, one of the archaeologists who painstakingly reconstructed the studio (repositioning every scrap of paper, paint-smeared cashmere jumper, dog-eared book, and discarded tube of paint and brush), recalled: “The films of dust that lay upon the surfaces of the long shelves at the back of the studio were carefully curated. These ephemeral contexts had been lovingly but scientifically bagged, their precise provenance labeled, and archived along with all the thousands of other physical remnants.” These samples—“dust, fluff, minute and unidentifiable fragments”—were then painstakingly returned to their correct respective shelves.

After the London studio had been carefully emptied and its contents packed for shipping, the archaeologists had swept up all the remaining dust from the floor and put it in a bag that was simply labeled “Bacon dust.” The bag—which, like one of Ward’s Hoover bags, must have included Bacon’s own sloughed skin—was scattered like ashes over the final installation.

 

1. Cited in Sigmund Freud, Leonard da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), p. 10


2. In 1978, Barry Joule—Bacon’s handyman, chauffeur, and drinking partner—rescued three sacks of studio trash including unfinished canvases, diaries, and imagery culled from newspapers, books, and magazines that had been over-painted in ink and crayon. The so-called Barry Joule Archive is now in the Tate’s collection.

 

 

 

 

‘Please … just make it go away!’

 

 

New York vs. Francis Bacon: A Review of the Centenary Exhibition at the Metropolitan in New York”

 

 

GERRY COULTER  |  EXHIBITION REVIEW  |  EURO ART MAGAZINE  |  NUMBER 10  |  FALL 2009

 

“This painter of buggery, sadism, dread and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable, lyric artist in late twentieth-century England, perhaps in all the world. …Bacon is Ruskin’s antitype: in his ferocious sexual frankness, of course, but most of all in his denial that human life has any ‘higher purpose’, or that art and nature connect us in some way to God” (Robert Hughes, 2008)

 

I. Introduction

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective (66 paintings and 65 objects from his studio) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (MET) seeks to reevaluate the artist’s work based on new interpretations and archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992. The exhibition was organized by Gary Tinterow of the MET (along with Chris Stephens and Matthew Gale of the Tate Britain). The main point of the show is to demonstrate that Bacon did not lose his force and vitality as a painter after the 1960’s (he lived until 1992). The show, which succeeds in this goal, has already appeared at the Tate Britain, London, and the Prado in Madrid.

 A major Bacon retrospective is an event and an important part of such an event includes the critical reception of it. As such, I’ll not only discuss the show at the MET (in Section III) but also its critical reception (Section II). Most of New York’s leading art critics are so charged with predetermined vitriol for Bacon the man, and for his art, that it seems they would have preferred the show never took place. Bacon is a challenging artist and it appears that New York critics were not prepared to meet the challenges laid down by the exhibition.

 

II. Critical Responses to Bacon’s Centenary Shows
 a) New York

Taken as a whole, the response of New York critics to the MET show is at best unfortunate, and at worst, embarrassing. The most intelligent and sensitive of the New York reviewers was Roberta Smith (2009). She explained Bacon’s significant contributions to artistic representation, including his path-breaking images of male-male sexuality, but could not stop herself from referring to the artist’s best known works as barely paintings.

Howard Halle unfavourably compares Bacon’s works to popular American horror films (Jason and Freddy Krueger in particular). Halle finds Bacon’s work “hard to take seriously” and most of his review does not. We learn more about Bacon’s choice of lovers than his art in this review. Halle acknowledges that Bacon was among the first to foreground photographs as subject matter for painting but ultimately finds his canvases “a bit of a mess”. In the end Halle finds it all “oppressive”.

Lance Esplund (2009) calls the Bacon show “a histrionic horror show”. Like other critics it is the surface tortures on the body in Bacon’s painting that Esplund finds most objectionable. Bacon’s influence has been a bad one says Esplund as he has led a generation “to take the path of least resistance”. Like many critics labouring under the burden of American mythologies of abstraction from an earlier generation of critics (Rosenberg and Greenberg in particular), Esplund is bothered by Bacon’s “mannerism”. Why is it that calling an artist a mannerist today in America is as damning as calling a politician a “liberal” there? Is it such a terrible thing for an artist to find his or her idiom and to elaborate upon it in ways that show us how the work was made? I think even Barnett Newman would be amazed at his lingering influence on New York critics today. Must all painting be flat, abstract, and look as though any one artist could have produced all of the works in a room?

Jerry Saltz says that Bacon is more of a cartoonist than a great artist (Saltz, 2009). Bacon is “an illustrator of exaggerated, ultimately empty angst”. What seems to touch a nerve with Saltz, who claims to have also seen the Bacon show at the Tate and the Prado (for someone who dislikes Bacon’s work he certainly goes out of his way to see it), is the tortured nature of Bacon’s figures at which viewers “gape in wonder”. Americans are perhaps more sensitive about images of tortured figures since photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse by American GIs, at Abu Ghraib prison, grabbed headlines in the world’s magazines and newspapers. Perhaps Americans have not yet come to terms with being torturers and would rather that such things happen quietly, elsewhere in the night. The future of the naïve posture of American exceptionalism may depend on it.

Saltz offers up perhaps the most shallow critical comment of the year when he adds: “Bacon has no idea what to do with the edges of his paintings”. If Bacon’s edges trouble Saltz one can only wonder how he feels about all the edges of geometric abstraction. Ironically, British critic Adrian Searle (2008) notes that the edges of Bacon’s canvases are as controlled as those of Barnett Newman!

Saltz says Bacon stagnated after the 1960’s – a ludicrous claim as I show in Section III). Mark Rothko is invoked in whose shadow Bacon “seems mannered, conservative, simplistic”. The presence of Rothko is interesting here in that Saltz accuses Bacon of ceasing to innovate. That said Bacon’s Blood on the Sidewalk and a late Rothko sit rather well beside one another.

Jed Perl (2009) charges Bacon with “preferring to sacrifice pictorial sensibility to literary sensationalism”. Bacon produced, says Perl: “not paintings… [but] rectangles of canvas inscribed with noirish graffiti: angst for dummies”. Perl, who has erected for himself a lofty reputation as one of America’s foremost priggs, doesn’t like the “fact” (which is never established), that Bacon, like Caravaggio “is admired not because he was a good painter but because he was a bad boy”. To me this is utter nonsense. Bacon’s social “respectability” seems to still be an issue in New York – it is interesting that Perl chose the gay Caravaggio as another overrated “bad boy”. Perhaps what troubles Perl, and the right wing magazine he writes for, is that he might have to sincerely engage with Bacon’s homosexuality to take his art seriously. Perl, like many of the other New York critics, won’t allow Bacon the status of a painter and here he puts him in very good company as he has denied the same rank to Gerhard Richter (Perl, 2002).

If Bacon is aggressive it is only in shoving our face into an uncertain rendering of what we are – in all of our unspectacular, unholy, ignoble bestiality. Bacon’s Crucifixion represents not only his positive encounter with Picasso’s work but, in displaying the dead Christian God as Soutine presented a carcass of beef (Jesus as meat), the artist stresses the lack of holiness, nobility, and hence increases the kind of uncertainty that those who ascribe divinity to Jesus Christ attempt to stave off. Perl wants no uncertainty, no irony, nor anything unsettled – while living in a country up to its neck in all of these things. But that is the point isn’t it? Many American critics find Bacon so hard to take today because he painted unsettling and uncertain images which are like portraits of not only his own life – but the living life of history today. Many Americans have had enough of that history – it ended, they hope, with the beginning of the new order on the morning of September 12, 2001. For Perl Bacon leads a revulsion against painting and refuses to probe the meaning of Bacon’s remark that (like someone who has just finished eating a steak) “we live off one another”.

What is striking about most of the New York based reviews is that they do not often mention the paintings (if so only one or two) and objects on view. It is as though most critics attending the Bacon show at the MET had an axe to grind with Bacon and their mind was made up before going to the museum. I wonder if it is really Bacon the New York critics detest or is it the fact that he reminds us just how intolerable life has become – even in the freest and bravest of all nations. The isolated figures in “cages and boxes” make Perl, like so many other critics, uncomfortable. “Shock tactics” Perl says. Maybe so, but with all those gaping mouths on the gallery goer’s faces maybe what we have here is a genuine case of “shock and awe”.

 


 b) Critical Responses to Bacon at the Tate Britain

While London too experienced a horrific terror attack (7/7) the damage done to New York by the attacks of 9/11 may have done significant harm to the city’s aspirations to be a world cultural capital. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (New York’s famous 9/11 mayor) perhaps indicated best the damage done to New Yorker’s higher cultural aspirations when he called for censorship (a decency panel) in deciding what could hang on the walls on New York’s museums. Most of New York’s art critics would not openly support such a position of course but it is interesting that the response to the current Bacon show has come together as one loud and pathetic plea: “please… just make it go away!”

Unlike their American counterparts, the British critics tended to focus more sincerely on the paintings on display and to take seriously the new research on Bacon which the MET show also stressed. Unlike most American reviewers, who often went out of their way to deride Bacon the man and the painter, the British critics arrive at his work with an acknowledgement that his art is simply an accepted aspect of contemporary culture (as are the Rolling Stones, the Internet, Picassos, or Americans. The British critics write with an élan and cosmopolitanism that we once would have expected from now increasingly insular New York. To the Brits the fact that many view humanity as just another animal in a universe without God, subject to the same urges and violence (Bacon’s understanding), is an accepted (if intolerable) aspect of existence. The British responses to the Bacon show did not seek to protect the public from Bacon [the message of New York critics is clearly “avoid this show”] but rather to see him in a new light (the focus of the exhibition). It is not the case that the British critics like Bacon because he is British and the American’s dislike him as a foreigner. While a little of that may underwrite the position of the reviewers what is fundamentally different about the British reviews is their willingness to take Bacon seriously – something the American critics so refuse to do and it prevents them from penetrating the surface of his canvases.

Among British critics John McAuliffe (2008) is typical in his focus on the art on display rather than feeling uncomfortable with Bacon’s “bad boy” reputation or his images. McAuliffe demands a show that does more with the artist and his work – especially his relation to abstract art which Bacon came very close to at times despite the care he took to express distain for it. While the show does deal with abstraction McAuliffe is right – much more could have been done with this artist who straddled both figurative and abstract realms (but not necessarily realism).

John Molyneux (2008), writing from a leftist perspective, encourages the Left not to reject Bacon’s work. Molyneux goes on to make an interesting, if unconvincing, argument that Bacon is staring down alienation as a man who takes on the horror of the world. In Bacon Molyneux finds hope for resistance. In Britain, apparently, even the socialists approve of Bacon’s art. One can only wonder: Do New York socialists, their newspapers having long ago been forcibly closed down during a succession of communist witch-hunts, like Bacon too?

Rachel Campbell-Johnson (2008) tellingly, in strong contrast to her American counterparts, penetrates the shocking and disturbing aspects of Bacon’s oeuvre and finds in it philosophical depth and sumptuousness. The straightforward correlations between art and life which so occupied American reviewers are found to be reductive by Campbell-Johnson. Indeed, a key point of the show is that Bacon’s work derived from images he encountered and kept in his studio as much as from his life. Unlike the New York critics, Campbell-Johnson analyzes and penetrates her own biases and fears to take seriously the fact that Bacon offered us a unique depiction of the meaninglessness of life in modern times. Typical only of the British critics she isn’t embarrassed when she admires Bacon and his work.

Tom Lubbock (2008) notes [...] that mature critics and gallery goers have experienced a great change of view toward his art, and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Lubbock says that Bacon’s work, which “used to look like death” now “looks like life in abundance”. Lubbock, like none of the New York critics, delves into Bacon’s work to find not merely violence and things that disturb the faint of heart, but also comedy, tenderness, and the artist’s generosity. Like most London based critics Lubbock refuses to be distracted by the theatricality of Bacon’s images as most New York critics were (by their own admission they went looking for it). Lubbock though seems to anticipate precisely what may have been the biggest problem the Americans would have with Bacon: “He doesn’t have any puritan qualms about being gorgeous. He’s a vulgar entertainer”.

Charles Darwent (2008) focused on Bacon’s painterliness (no tirades about mannerism here) and his “liturgical” use of colour and its role in Bacon’s understanding of evil as generic. The American critics do not speak of evil. As far as colour is concerned Bacon came alive after the early 1960s – why don’t the New York critics (who normally speak to colour with great expertise) recognize this?

Finally, Adrian Searle (2008) weighs the reasons why we might admire Bacon’s work one moment, and dismiss him the next. Searle captures very well the ambivalence Bacon’s work arouses in some critics while not forsaking his job as a critic to assess the work on display. Searle believes that Bacon’s best work was behind him by the 1960s but he is willing to assess the work, make his case for and against it, and to present an understanding of its seductiveness, plausibility, and relation it holds to the horrors of the twentieth century. Searle’s review, while ultimately turning a thumb down to Bacon, does so in an analytical and sensitive manner which was lacking in the New York critics. What Searle is aware of is that one can be distracted by the artist’s life and hence he is very careful not to let this get in the way of his criticism of the specific paintings. Searle, unlike the New York critics, relishes the experience of being taken out of his comfort zone and this allows him to criticize Bacon in a much more convincing manner.

 

III. Bacon at the MET

For my part I did not know that we required a Bacon retrospective in order to demonstrate something which has long struck me as obvious – that Bacon does not lose force as he ages. Indeed, I have thought of it the other way around – if anything, his artistic powers strengthened and became slightly more polished with time. Witness his last great Triptych of 1991 and his Portrait of John Edwards, 1988 (both on display at the MET). There is a precision and an economy of means in each which tells us that we are dealing with a more mature version of the man who painted George Dyer in Three Figures in a Room (1964) or any of the popes for which he is so well known. Bacon’s great care over these late works is not surprising as they include the two men most important to him at the end. In the 1991 Triptych Bacon’s Spanish Lover [left panel] bears a remarkable resemblance to that of then Brazilian Formula-1 race car driver Ayrton Senna (whom Bacon painted from a magazine cover).

The 1991 Triptych is refined and accomplished and to me it is the last of his masterpieces – one that gathers up everything he ever knew about art and life and brings it to bear in these images. Bacon shows himself in the frame on the right – his face painted from a Polaroid of himself which he liked from the late 1960s. Interestingly, Bacon who was 82 when he painted this work, represents himself (and his significantly younger lover) as highly sexualized males. Two male figures are shown coupling in the middle frame. So much of Bacon’s severe philosophy (humanity is an accident – we live, we love, we die), is here in this extraordinary image. The whole story goes untold however and the enigma remains in all of Bacon’s triptych’s as Gilles Deleuze recognized three decades ago. Deleuze also saw the triptych as a form which allowed Bacon to engage in figurative painting without surrendering to conventional story-telling (Deleuze, 1981; see also Nochlin, 2008). The 1991 Triptych shows that Deleuze’s insight would remain relevant of Bacon’s painting to the end.

The Portrait of John Edwards is a painting of the man in London whom Bacon was closest to at the end – his illiterate heir and gentle companion. Edwards is an image of temporality – especially the unfixed nature of identity – a subject on which Bacon is the absolute master. The portrait of Edwards shows the man disappearing before our eyes. His left foot, and even the chair upon which he sits, have begun to dissolve into a puddle and his arms have evaporated. All that is solid melts into air, including all of our friends and loves, right before our eyes. Bacon understood that we capture, at best, only a fleeting glimpse of the real which is hidden under appearances which we rarely penetrate and then never for very long (see Coulter, 2007). Like so many of Bacon’s paintings the Portrait of John Edwards is painted from a photograph – the artist shifting his perspective to the left of an image which was originally taken straight on – of his former lover George Dyer.

Among the strengths of the MET show is the way in which it brings so much archival material (found in Bacon’s studio at the time of his death), to bear on his paintings. So many of these images have not simplified our understanding of Bacon but added a delicious complexity. This is only appropriate as Bacon’s paintings do not make our world more commonsensical, but rather, make it more enigmatic (Ibid). The MET show gave us a more complex Francis Bacon.

If Bacon’s work began to weaken in the late 1960’s (the dominant New York critical position), then you cannot see evidence of it in Bacon’s paintings of his friend and lover Isabel Rawthorne. His paintings of Rawthorne are not simply great; they are among the most sensitive images of woman painted by a man in the later half of the twentieth century. Rawthorne (who was also a model for Giacometti) is shown in one of her then fashionable outfits as a woman about town. She is shown looking cautiously (?) over her left shoulder at a bestial figure moving behind her in the street. We are left uncertain as to how she feels about this attention as that enigmatic swirl of paint representing unknowability appears in the middle of her face and she is just about to step out of the light into the darkness.

If, in a thousand years, this portrait of Rawthorne is the last surviving work by Bacon then people in the future will still know the artist. It will be possible for them to know what it was like to be a figurative painter while acknowledging the impossibility of realism. They will also know both the excitement and danger present for women in the streets of the great cities of the end of the second millennium.

If Bacon is exhausted by the 1960’s why then does his best portrait (of Michel Leiris) not appear until 1976? This is another way of asking why is it that critics cannot let go of the popes and heads of the 1940s and 1950s and realize that the portraits replaced them as a more sensitive and subtle (yet still highly evocative) form for Bacon? The portraits also signify that Bacon has moved on past Matisse who was very influential on Bacon at the time of the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) where Bacon shows his élan with Matisse’s way of isolating figures on a monochrome background. Leiris is a wonderful portrait which is a strong likeness. The rest, as in all of Bacon’s portraits, remains behind the mask. There is a significant epistemology of identity at work in this manner of representation for which Bacon has not received sufficient credit (see Coulter, 2007). Leiris is also indicative of Bacon’s deep admiration for Picasso. This portrait, an homage to Picasso, is as close as Bacon ever came to cubism – it is also a great tribute to Leiris (and old acquaintance of Picasso’s) whose wife was, for a time, the great cubist’s dealer.

If Bacon is “over” by the 1960s then why do we find so much innovation in his later works? This includes a move into landscapes which are, according to an insightful take by MET curator Gary Tinterow, Bacon’s way of engaging with abstraction on his own terms (see Tinterow, 2009). Perhaps his Jet of Water is the best of these works in the MET show.

Against the narrativizations of abstraction Bacon uses abstract elements to reference the unknowable and enigmatic. Bacon’s genius is for touching on temporality without narration. He pushes the swirl of unknowability out into the face and in Jet of Water across the surface of an everyday scene. That white splash is a portrait of time itself, frozen, in the act of wasting each of us.

 

IV. Conclusion

Bacon’s work doesn’t attempt to lift us up rather; it puts us in our place and forces us to look at ourselves. It does so with sympathy and a generosity of spirit.

Why do Bacon’s popes scream? Surely because, after World War II, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the pope realizes that only a few believe in God. Historically, even popes who believe in God are rare. Why do they wear purple and not red as in the Velasquez pope which inspired them? This is because the pope realizes that his churches are emptying out at one of the two most sacred times of the year for the Catholic Church – Easter, the time when priesthood wears purple in deference to the seriousness of the event of the crucifixion.

Bacon is not as violent as he is raw. I do not find him hysterical but he is very intense. When such a number of his works appear in one place the artist is humanized and it is a lack of recognition of this that makes so many of the words of the New York critics ring hollow. For them Bacon’s raw intensity cannot be just another view of us, he cannot be just like the rest of us – his vision cannot count as does “ours”. Besides, in New York these days, disliking Europeans is something of a popular if discomfiting sport.

he Metropolitan Museum has been attempting (with some success) to better serve contemporary culture over the past twenty years. The Bacon retrospective fits well into this programme and behind the show there has been some excellent curating and sound scholarship. I especially appreciate the way the MET show recreated previous showings of Bacon’s work (which were overseen by the artist in smaller galleries) specifically the artist’s popes (Durlacher Gallery, New York, 1953) and the heads shown in London (Hanover Gallery, 1949).

Every nasty thing the New York critics had to say about Bacon is true but only if you are willing to protect yourself in a prejudiced insular shroud before viewing Bacon’s work. Bacon does paint exaggerated figures, some of his work might be hysterical, it may not be gruesome but that’s a fair word, and his palate provokes the eye. Bacon is also not a better painter than Ingres, Velasquez, or Picasso – but he never claimed to be. Bacon had no illusions about his talent – far less than the New York critics managed to invent. When you are in the presence of his work, without prejudice, without the enormous weight of American modernism on your shoulders, you can simply relish the experience – the way Bacon’s paintings attract and repel at the same time. The ugly is as attractive as the beautiful – it is the lesson of fashion shows for the past fifty years.

Most intelligent people who find themselves with Bacon’s work, no matter how it may challenge them, realize how fortunate they are to be in its presence. This is something the British critics were very aware of unlike their American counterparts who fail, spectacularly, to explain why Bacon’s work is so compelling. While the New York critics attempted to convince everyone that Bacon’s work is a horror show, it isn’t good, it isn’t even painting, let alone compelling art – the people came in droves as to any major art event. In the rooms there were, as at all Bacon shows, many open mouths – not only the ones in the paintings – so many viewers transfixed and moving much more slowly than people tend to do in museums. The only horror actually present in the event was the embarrassing criticism. What irony that Bacon – the painter who understood and represented, perhaps better than anyone else in his century, the anxieties which swirl around seeing – is treated in this manner in the city Baudrillard described as “the epicenter of the end of the world” (2002:14).

Bacon’s work may suggest violence but no one is tormenting his characters more than they are themselves within the confines of the social. The social is the greatest terrorist the individual will ever face and Bacon, a gay man in London when gay men were put in jail, understood that very well. In 2009 he still isn’t acceptable among New York art critics. New York really is not the centre of the art world anymore and its critics show it to be, in the case of Bacon, no longer a cultural capital either. I think Francis Bacon would relish this kind of thing and would have gladly sacrificed his 100th birthday to the cause.

 

References
Baudrillard, Jean, and Jean Nouvel. The Singular Objects of Architecture, University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Coulter, Gerry. “Overcoming the Epistemological Break: Francis Bacon and Jean Baudrillard and the Intersections of Art and Theory,” Euro Art Magazine, No. 5, Winter 2007.
Campbell-Johnson, Rachel. “Francis Bacon at Tate Britain,” The Times of London, 9.9.2008.
Darwent, Charles. “Francis Bacon, Tate Britain,” The Independent, 14.9.2008.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sensation (1981), University of Minnesota Press, 2003
Esplund, Lance. “A Histrionic Horror Show,” The Wall Street Journal, 5.7.2009.
Halle, Howard. “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective,” Time Out New York, 2009.
Hughes, Robert. “Horrible!,” The Guardian, 30.8.2008.
Lubbock, Tom. “All hail a vulgar entertainer: Francis Bacon retrospective”. The Independent, 10.9.2008.
McAuliffe, John. “Francis Bacon – Tate Britain,” The Manchester Review, 21.11.2008.
Molyneux, John. “Francis Bacon at Tate Britain”. Socialist Review, 2008.
Nochlin, Linda, et al., “Francis Bacon,” Tate Etc. (Online), Issue 14, 2008.
Perl, Jed. “Slaughterhouse – Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective,” The New Republic, 17.6.2009.
Perl, Jed. “St. Gerhard of the Sorrows of Painting,” The New Republic, August 2002 (no longer available online).
Saltz, Jerry. “Francis Bacon at the MET”. New York Magazine, 25.4.2009.
Smith, Roberta. “If paintings had voices Francis Bacon’s would shriek: Francis Bacon, A Centenary Retrospective”. The New York Times, 2008.
Tinterow, Gary. Interview with Charlie Rose, 2009.

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                        Francis Bacon, photographed by Cartier Bresson

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and the practice of painting

 

 

 

 

MIKE JARVIS   |   JOURNAL OF VISUAL ART PRACTICE   |   VOLUME 8   |   NUMBER 3   |   SEPTEMBER 2009

 

What makes painting such a determined survivor and insistent practice in our contemporary world and culture? What causes such a handmade practice to be still relevant? Why does it persist in so many guises, especially given the multiplicity of media available to the contemporary artist. It is, perhaps difficult for us to appreciate the extent to which painting practice was a key focal point of contestation in the nineteenth century. Indeed Clark argues that,

 

For a while, in the mid-nineteenth century, the state, the public and the critics agreed that art had a political sense and intention. And painting was encouraged, repressed, hated and feared on that assumption. (Clark:1982:249)

 

In addition to the broader cultural and political importance of painting in the nineteenth century it is also necessary to look carefully at the very means and materials of painting in order to ascertain why it has continued to persist as a vital practice. As painting was perhaps the significant artistic practice of the early nineteenth century, then any attempts to subvert it were viewed with distinct suspicion. In 1840 for example, the painter Paul Delaroche had announced that with the new and revolutionary appearance of the photographic image, ‘from today painting is dead.’ (Crimp:2002:96) Such anxieties were understandable as the new photographic technology and the photographed image with its smooth surface and texture, was perceived as capable of supplanting the similarly smooth, almost featureless brushwork of academic painters like Delaroche and his peers, and could be executed much more quickly.

However, painters like Courbet can be seen to actively challenge such misgivings because of their recognition that a painting could still achieve and aspire to a vision of the world that was not as readily accessible in a photograph. In a way, Courbet’s painting can be viewed as an affirmative statement made about the efficacy of ‘painting’ over and beyond any questions of social and political context. For example, if Courbet’s arrangement of figures in the ‘Burial of Ornans’ of 1849-50 had been photographed (provided that the technical means were sufficiently capable to depict such a large group) then the same arguments about the importance of the social context and its depiction of the different classes as intermingling would still prevail. Wherein lies the continuing significance of painting practice?

The answer to this can be found in a number of key factors, one of which is the utilisation of the material stuff of paint and the other being the persistence of the handmade and bodily origin of painting as opposed to the more mechanical technologies coming into prominence. The specific practice of Francis Bacon and the way he embodied the material of paint into his images can allow us to address the continuing persistence and significance of painting. James Elkins sees the process of painting as one of alchemy and as a transforming of base materials into something transcendent, that although a substance like earth pigments mixed with oils is a lowly and basic material, that it can also ‘be unnatural and divine.’(Elkins:2000:188)

 

Elkins argues that,

what matters in painting is pushing the mundane towards the instant of transcendence. The effect is sublimation, or distillation: just as water heats up and then suddenly disappears, so paint gathers itself together and then suddenly becomes something else – an apparition hovering in the fictive space beyond the picture plane. (Elkins:2000:188) It is this quality of transformation that gives the practice its alchemical character. How does paint act upon us in this way? A key aspect of the physical and often revelatory power of painting lies in its capacity to bypass and short circuit our normal cognitive perceptual mechanisms, to enact itself directly upon us and our bodies, instantaneously overriding all the ‘clearing house’ mechanisms of intellect and reasoning. As Francis Bacon remarked, the peculiar resonance of a painting lies in the attempt to bring it ‘up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly.’ (Sylvester:2002:12)

 

Even for the most experienced practitioner it is a process fraught with difficulty and a practice constantly eluding one’s control and mastery. Bacon talks repeatedly about the processes of painting and it must seem astonishing to non-painters that so much of what he is describing can be ascribed to accidental discoveries more than systematic analysis. As, he expresses it, You know in my case all painting – and the older I get, the more it becomes so – is accident. So I foresee it in my mind, I foresee it, and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I use very large brushes, and in the way I work I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do. (Sylvester:2002:16)

It is as if the paint has an independent life and can conjure up all kinds of effects unintended by the painter. As Bacon points out, much of the process is accidental and the artistry then can come down to a question of what one leaves out, destroys or includes. It is little wonder that Stephen Newton contends that, ‘the early, primitive stages of a painting can provoke intolerable feelings of persecutory anxiety and guilt in the painter,’ (Newton:1998:16) or that the over anxious painter, ‘who is unable to tolerate the raw and fragmented nature of the early creative stages, might be too constrained to make even the most rudimentary of marks.’ (Newton:1998:16)

This quality of accident is key to Bacon’s practice and, from the experience of looking at other painters is more important than is normally recognised. This is because it becomes a habitual part of the discerning painter’s armoury. The skill, knowledge comes not so much from knowing how to paint some thing, a head, skull or hill etc. but from one’s discernment in accepting (or rejecting) what one has done with an open mind and little regret, so that something can genuinely surprise you. This tacit mastery comes from an instinctual perception of how to utilise and somehow ‘cash in’ upon something found, perhaps some unruly aspect or behaviour of the pigment, which is accidentally revealed during the process.

As Susan Rothenberg admits, I’m not a clear thinker, but I find things out by stumbling upon them.’ (Whitfield: 2003:3) Similarly, Bacon discussed his early Painting of 1946, that ‘I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.’ (Sylvester: 2002:11) He talks about the difficulties of painting because ‘it is really a complete accident…. Because I don’t know how the form can be made.’ (Sylvester: 2002:12)

 

In a significant passage he describes painting a head in which

the sockets of the eyes, the nose, the mouth were, when you analysed them, just forms which had nothing to do with eyes, nose or mouth; but the paint moving from one contour into another made a likeness of this person I was trying to paint. (Sylvester:2002:12)

It is as if the visual impression of someone or some thing can only be realised or brought into being, by means of configurations of paint moving from one contour to another. Bacon then talks about his feelings in front of the painting, I thought for a moment I’d got something much nearer to what I want. Then the next day I tried to take it further and tried to make it more poignant, more near and I lost the image completely. (Sylvester:2002 :12)

In his attempt to bring the image into being (Bacon’s frequent use of the word ‘poignant’ registers a more emotional engagement with his subject than the blandness of ‘real’) the image was lost. Bacon describes the process as being like ‘a tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction.’ (Sylvester:2002:12) The process of trying to depict something in paint which acts as an equivalent or something closely resemblant to what is seen, touched or felt, is an experience commonly felt by most painters.

When Bacon talks about ‘abstraction’ he is, I would argue, referring to the general abstractness and indifferent structure of the brushstroke and collection of brushstrokes which create the factural presence of the painting and which, as an ensemble goes to constituting the required subject matter. What is significant for Bacon is the ‘attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly.’ (Sylvester: 2002:12) When he talks about the ‘figurative thing’ he is referring to the pre-existing subject of head, body or object being rendered by the ‘abstract’ materials of paint and its inherent factural qualities of thickness so closely to that pre-existing ‘image,’ that it resonates with a jolt of recognition which reverberates throughout the whole bodily system.

In Bacon’s Seated Woman (Portrait of Muriel Belcher) (Fig 1) of 1961 the composition is closely related to a sketch of a seated woman with the right hand side of the body almost in profile, with the head turned to her left and attached to a longer left leg and foot which twists and turns towards the other leg. (Fig 2) In the painting, however, there are two conjoined profiles constituting the head. The basic composition is similar with the shapes of body and legs roughly the same. The woman is seated upon a long sofa with three cushions projecting obliquely. Her feet ‘rest’ on the surface of a green floor. The body of the woman seemingly ‘crouches’ before us. The shapes of left leg and thin right arm echo one another and contribute to the overall awkwardness of the pose. There is space around the figure. Behind the furniture is a flat background lilac colour. The oblique angles of cushions and horizontal lines of the sofa are unruly accents undermining the stability of the figure and accentuating the feeling of incipient movement, emotion and energy.

A close up of the head and body sections reveal a key aspect of Bacon’s technique. There are rich and complex textures across the painting. The arms and legs contain mechanical imprints of a cloth or perhaps, scrubbing brush which has been covered in paint and ‘printed’ onto the surface. The head contains marks tracing the course of a loaded and large paintbrush being dragged across the surface in quick, rapid movements. This dragging of, in places, ‘dry’ paint across different passages of under painting accentuates the rapidity of a movement of a head or body arrested in its own corporeal movement.

It is the transformative power of paint in the construction of such typical images that continues to make painting so valuable and resonant. Bacon describes the difficulty of this because as any painter knows, it is sometimes problematic to reason out why some passages of painting ‘work’ or are more effective than other passages. Often it is a matter of instinctive feeling rather than a process of logical reasoning. Bacon talks about this being the difference between what he terms as ‘paint which conveys directly (ie onto the nervous system) and paint which conveys through illustration (ie which is prosaic, dull and meaning-less),’ (Sylvester:2002:18) and that

                    it is something to do with instinct. It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain. (Sylvester:2002:18)

Here, the acknowledgement of the importance of ‘feel’ for paint and of the instinctive knowledge which derives from familiarity with the material, is seen to take precedent over and above any kind of logical reasoning thought process. The sensory responses for the painter and for the viewer must be activated immediately or else it will not be effective. If one has to rationalise the process or to somehow explain the procedure or ‘story’ to oneself, then the painting has basically failed.

Martin Hammer states that this

impulse towards technical experiment, in the pursuit of conveying feeling without the mediation of the intellect, continued to be a pressing concern. (Hammer:2006:17)

An example of such an impulse is the literal ‘throwing’ of paint onto the canvas that is described by Bacon as almost a last resort when an image resists more conventional means. (Sylvester:2002:160) Now clearly, Bacon’s particular impulse will not be necessarily shared by every painter, especially in a postmodern context when the medium of paint is part of a whole repertoire of effects and techniques available to any artist. However, I would contend that Bacon’s idea about conveying emotion through the material of paint is fundamental to how painting as a practice continues to be of crucial importance and is a philosophy shared by a whole lineage of painters going back to Giotto and beyond, even to icon painters. For example, Stephen Newton refers to the analogy made by Didi-Huberman between the painted panels of the early Renaissance and abstract expressionism, that,

in effect the altar is a portable work of abstract expressionism for personal spiritual usage. To the early religious painter, the abstract, wildly painted panel, which might be juxtaposed alongside, or incorporated within figurative narratives and iconography, embodied the psychic experiences which were then symbolised in the figurative parables of the Passion. (Newton:1998:20)

There is a belief here that to be successful, painting must touch the nerve of the body, must engage with the body and that this can only be manifested through the material itself. The notion of embodiment itself would suggest that the material becomes the body itself, in a process akin to transubstantiation. In order for this to occur in practice there needs to be a conjunction of technical awareness and imagination with the feelings towards things and objects of the world which are not only ‘seen’ but ‘felt’ bodily, and so strongly that it can bypass the intellectual, rational side of thinking altogether. In an interesting criticism of some paintings by Balthus, Bacon laments what he sees as a failure of this conjunction between a technical awareness and the feeling world of the painter.

they are no good. He is trying to get the tenderness which we would all love to get for a change, but it can’t be done that way, it can only come as a technical thing and not as illustration or at least I feel that. I feel more and more that nothing matters or will happen until someone makes a new technical synthesis that can carry over from the sensation to our nervous system. (Hammer:2006:17)

A good comparison can be made here with Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Cezanne’s working procedures when he demonstrates how an interpretation should not be distinct from the act of seeing, but rather how the actual technical means should create the act of seeing. He quotes Cezanne’s as saying about a portrait,

If I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I capture and convey his glance. Who gives a damn if they have any idea how one can sadden a mouth or make a cheek smile by wedding a shaded green to a red. (Merleau-Ponty:1993:66)

Merleau-Ponty argues that Cezanne is making a point not only about how one perceives something in the world but how, in painting that act of seeing is bound up with the technical mechanisms for seeing and recording it, that One’s personality is seen and grasped in one’s glance, which is, however, no more than a combination of colours….Cezanne returns to just that primordial experience from which these notions are derived and in which they are inseparable. (Merleau-Ponty:1993:66

Bacon’s quest for painting might appear to be an existential one, a lament and nostalgia for the passing of time with the realisation that, for the painter, the possibility of cheating time and death with the material certainties of pigment is, at least temporarily, a possibility. Bacon’s thoughts about painting continue to have relevance as he is referring to the way we humanly perceive the world. His painting might, like Cezanne’s be defined as ‘phenomenological’ in that it goes beyond a superficial description of appearance, to a description of the way the things and objects of the world are ‘originally given.’ (Wentworth:2004:xiii) Robert Sokolowski defines phenomenology as an all embracing process, ‘which recognizes the reality and truth of phenomena, the things that appear.’ (Sokolowski:2000:14) He contrasts this with the traditional Cartesian approach whereby things and objects of the world are perceived only with the mind.

It is not the case, as the Cartesian tradition would have us believe, that ‘being a picture’ or being a perceived object’ or being a symbol’ is only in the mind. (Sokolowski:2000:14)

He argues that their ‘being’ encompasses more than the intellect and must embrace that of bodily perception and orientation as well

They are ways in which things can be. The way things appear is part of the being of things; things appear as they are, and they are as they appear. Things do not just exist; they also manifest themselves as what they are. (Sokolowski:2000:14)  

Through such a perceptual schema, ‘when we make judgements we articulate the presentation of parts of the world; we do not just arrange ideas or concepts in our mind.’ (Sokolowski:2000:14) Brendan Prendeville notes that ‘Phenomenology has special relevance for visual art, which more expressly than the other arts addresses us in corporeal terms.’ (Prendeville:2004:41) Painting is an activity that articulates itself from within the body, an act whose physical manifestation of the ‘painting’ is a visualisation of a fundamentally bodily and ‘felt’ apprehension of the world. Merleau-Ponty talks about how ‘we cannot imagine how a mind could paint’ (Merleau-Ponty:1993:123) and that,

it is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body – not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement. (Merleau-Ponty:1993:123-4)

Frederique Desbuissons underlines the connections that can be made between the bodily experience of the artists and the visual products of his labour. He argues that, in speaking about the ‘figure’ of the artist, such a discourse must encompass a wider frame of references than that of the reception and visual analysis of particular works. He states that, ‘if the artist personifies the art which he produces his body becomes the most eloquent allegory of this.’ (Desbuissons:2008:258) Although Desbuissons is focussing upon the ways in which contemporary criticism associated Courbet’s art and its production ( for example, his use of the palette knife as a predominant tool for painting) with the actual uncouth persona and personal habits of the man, the overriding connection between a painter’s everyday practice and his or her holistic bodily engagement with the materials of that practice, is of significance.

Wentworth, for example sees that our ‘perceptual experience is primordially of ourselves as a body situated in the world, one that extends all around us, and through which we move.’ (Wentworth:2004:xiv) It is as if our capacity for reasoning and organizing our perceptions comes after this initial ‘primordial’ perceptive experience of the world. Therefore, with phenomenology the key lies in

the nature of our experience as it is originally given prior to reflection – what can be called pre-reflective experience, (and) is thus quite different from the nature of our experience once we start to reflect upon it. (Wentworth:2004:xiv

It is this quality of pre-reflective experience which, I believe Bacon continually struggled to achieve in his painting. For him, once the mind too literally took over the process (as he felt with Balthus) and began to tell a story, then this sense of original perception was lost and with it the potential of the paint to ‘embody’ the authentic perception.

Merleau-Ponty’s description of a body being ‘leant’ to the world tends to indicate that the painter’s activity is somehow involuntary and not willed, but rather an act whereby one’s apprehension of the world is somehow heightened by the act of painting, that it is an act of sensitive appreciation rather than a self conscious willing of something into existence.

It is interesting that Cezanne wass so much the focus of Merleau-Ponty’s writing about art because, ironically, his was a deliberately logical and determined quest to render the things of the world according to how these objects were apprehended. Basically there was nothing ‘involuntary’ about his practice but contrarily it was a painting practice demanding an extreme discipline and self will to be articulated. Similarly, Bacon’s practice demanded a discipline about what could and could not be accepted during the painting process, and maintained a tenuous balance between success and failure. He mentions modestly that in his perception of how the ‘accident’ can be used, ‘one becomes more alive to what the accident has proposed for one.’ (Sylvester:2002:53) That is, his experience of painting allowed him a greater sensitivity to how critical moments and passages can be exploited and he was attempting in painting, ‘to set a trap with which one would be able to catch the fact at its most living point.’ (Sylvester:2002:54)

A discussion about how paint operates and behaves is extremely important in locating reasons for its continuing relevance, and for that reason, Bacon’s analyses, during his interviews with David Sylvester remain pertinent. Although Bacon eschews abstraction and is at pains to discuss his figurative intentions he is, at the same time acutely aware of the visceral effect which a material like paint can potentially arouse, and how it can become a potent vehicle for expressing emotion. Through his own appreciation of how emotive the material of paint can be ‘in itself’, Sylvester maintains that,

the thing that’s difficult to understand is how it is that marks of the brush and the movement of paint on canvas can speak so directly to us (Sylvester:2002:58)

Bacon rejects abstraction on the grounds that ‘it always remains on one level,’ (Sylvester:2002:59) and that it ‘is an entirely aesthetic thing’ (Sylvester:2002:58) which does not emanate from a scrutiny of the lived, corporeal world. Bacon’s view of painting is that it should have a duality and that the aesthetic qualities of paint and facture should serve an end of expressing something felt and seen, of what is perceived as the ‘facts’ of the world and its objects. When he says that, ‘I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks,’ (Sylvester:2002:58) he is coming near to explaining this odd duality which resides in the irony that one’s success in achieving a more ‘real’ or visceral image, one which impacts directly upon one’s nervous system, might be dependent upon the psychological impact of the way in which the material of paint is placed and transformed upon the surface of the painting, and that what is most ‘real’ can be activated by a material substance that is, in itself wholly without meaning.

In discussing technical issues so much, Bacon might be seen to be focussing his attention very much on the artist as ‘author’ because it is the painter’s sensibility which is continually ‘on a tight rope’ and, in his case, always on the watch for the ‘trap’ which he describes.

However, if painting is able to be derived from one’s primordial and pre-reflective responses to the world then it is reasonable to assume that the viewer’s responses can be engaged as well, and that the painting can somehow become part of the viewer’s whole lived and embodied response to the world in turn. This idea is developed further by Parveen Adams when she opens out the discourse between the painting as made object and the painting as received by the viewer. In her psychoanalytical reading she starts from ‘Lacan’s insistence on the fact that perception is not just an issue of vision but an issue of desire.’ (Adams:1993:53) The bringing forth of a painting into the world must necessarily elicit a reciprocal process of vision for the potential viewer and,

the question of perception must take up the problem of what I want to see, and the way in which it structures the gaze which captures me. Instead of thinking of perception as just a visual field, it must be thought of as the field that is structured by the relations and forces of objects and desires. (Adams:1993:53)

Barbara Bolt also opens out the discussion about the larger field of perception. She argues that what Bacon describes as ‘fact, or rather, ‘matters of fact’, emerges out of the thickness or fuzziness of the practice.’ (Bolt:2004:144) She maintains that, ‘the work of art exceeds its own structures in a radical performativity,’ (Bolt:2004:190) and that ‘in the heat of practice, the body has the potential to become language and the work may take on a life of its own.’ (Bolt:2004:190) She locates the potential reciprocity of such a process, between artist and object, artwork and viewer, artist and viewer and so on, to the ways in which the artwork can create its own signifying field. ‘Through process, the outside world enters the work and the work casts its effects back into the world.’ (Bolt:2004:190)

It is the painting that constitutes this ‘field’ of relationships.

So what relevance has Bacon’s comments for painting now? I would argue that, with the ending of abstraction as the primary Modernist idiom for painting in the nineteen-sixties, that the potential for all kinds of painting were released and enhanced. Bacon’s comments about abstraction and figuration and the ‘accident’, if only at the level of helping to detach painting techniques from their Modernist connotations, can be seen as instrumental in enabling contemporary painters (like Fiona Rae for example) to joyously embrace the myriad technical possibilities that painting can now legitimately offer.

As I have indicated above, a number of writers have drawn attention to Bacon’s ideas about painting as the locus of different claims that can be made about the practice. Gilles Deleuze makes perhaps the most complex analysis where he discusses different aspects of Bacon’s art, themes of athleticism, body, meat and spirit, painting and sensation, and the diagram, among others. (Deleuze:2004) A recurrent motif and one which makes a discussion of Bacon so relevant to our contemporary world, is the problem for the painter of how to handle the plethora of images already in the world, especially the ubiquity of the photography, both in terms of its own history and stock of images, and the way in which the photograph as an entity both mediates our perception of the world but also our perceptions about art. As Deleuze puts it,

not only has there been a multiplication of images of every kind, around us and in our heads, but even the reactions against clichés are creating clichés. Even abstract painting has not been the last to produce its own clichés. (Deleuze:2004:89)

The recent history of painting can bear this last point out as we have seen a succession of painters like Richter and Tuymans, Peyton, Carnegie and Raedecker using photographs as source material for their work and virtually presenting the ‘photograph as painting’ as a philosophical proposition, while many others, like Jason Martin, Bernard Frize and Ian Davenport utilise the traditional tropes and gestures of modernist abstract painting as a starting point for their own compositions without the need to insert any mark or ostensible features of individual authorship which would make their work engage ‘in’ painting as opposed to ‘with’ painting as a practice.

One can detect in Bacon’s attitude towards photography something of the same feeling he has towards abstraction, that fundamentally, although photographs have an aspiration towards the aesthetic, they cannot compete with painting

because he thinks the photograph tends to reduce sensation to a single level, and is unable to include within the sensation the difference between constitutive levels. (Deleuze:2004:91)

It is as if the viability of painting must lay elsewhere, and that, in the avoidance of cliché and of falling into the trap of mere ‘illustration’ the painter must go beyond, or at least supercede the total reliance on another image.

Bacon’s comments are critical in that they refer to the practice of painting as a continuing discourse. In discussing the primacy of the painter’s awareness of his or her technical means and how the very ‘accidents’ as well as ‘deliberateness’ can be exploited, he focusses upon how this technical awareness and sensitivity can be brought to bear in the expression of something which is almost intangible and eludes their mere description in words. In his case it is something to do with emotion and feeling, an awareness that the material of paint can express the deepest feelings which makes painting potentially such an important practice and tradition.

A close scrutiny of painting practice reaching back to the pre-Renaissance and the subsequent Western tradition of painters like Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, Courbet, Manet, Guston and Baselitz reveals a connected lineage of fascination with and utilisation of the material substance of paint. With all of these painters the viewer must come to terms with the signature qualities and array of markings and factural characteristic which animate the surface of different paintings and which ultimately allows the subject matter to be expressed. In looking at these painters of this long Modernist tradition we scrutinise carefully how the materials of paint, brushstroke, and rendered surface correspond or co-operate with the specific subject being depicted, be it figure, object, landscape or abstraction. It is perhaps the extent of the correspondence, or the duality mentioned above, between content and material, that enables us to judge whether a painting is finally a success or failure.

In a postmodern climate, however it could be argued that painters are freer to explore to the limit the entire formal (and informal) repertoires of painting, to make painting about painting, to juxtapose various stylistic characteristics altogether or to use painting to describe their own confessional and frankly autobiographical positions in the world. It is not even necessary for there to be a conjunction between content and material as was the case before. As such, we can see that Bacon’s two essential areas of exposition, the technical and the emotional, affective aspects of painting are both available for painters to develop and exploit to their limits. What is perhaps at stake however, is the extent to which painters feel compelled to express their ideas and emotions in paint or whether, in fact, paint is the only vehicle through which, and by which, such emotion can be supplied.

 

Works cited

Adams, Parveen. (1993) ‘ The Violence of Paint’, in Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts: The Body, Special issue, pp53-59

Bolt, Barbara. (2004) ‘Shedding Light for the Matter’, in Art beyond Representation – The Performative Power of the Image London and New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd.

Clark, Timothy J. (1982) ‘On the Social History of Art,’ in (eds) Frascina, Francis and Harrison, Charles Modern Art and Modernism: A critical Anthology London: Open University and Paul Chapman publishing Ltd. pp249-258

Crimp, Douglas. (2002) ‘The End of Painting,’ in (ed) Colpitt, Frances Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century Cambridge: Cambridge University press, pp89-104

Deleuze, Gilles.(2004) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London and New York: Continuum Desbuissons, Frederique. (2008) ‘Courbet’s Materialism’, in Oxford Art Journal Volume 31 No 2, pp251-260

Elkins, James. (2000) What Painting Is New York and London: Routledge Hammer,Martin. (2006) ‘Clearing Away the Screens’, catalogue essay, Francis Bacon Portraits and Heads (National Galleries of Scotland, in association with the British Council,) pp15-27

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1993) ‘Cezanne’s Doubt’, in eds. Galen A Johnson, and Michael Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics reader: Philosophy and Painting, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press) pp59-75

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1993) ‘Eye and Mind’, in eds. Galen A Johnson, and Michael Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics reader: Philosophy and Painting, (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press) pp121-149

Newton, Stephen J.(1998) ‘Guilt in Painting’, in Art Criticism, Volume 13 No. 2 pp16-24

Prendeville, Brendan. (2004) ‘Varying the Self: Bacon’s Versions of van Gogh’, in Oxford Art Journal Volume 27 No 1, pp25-42

Sokolowski, Robert.(2000) ‘What is Intentionality and Why is it Important’ in Introduction to Phenomenology, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,) pp8-16

Sylvester, David. (2002) Interviews with Francis Bacon London: Thames and Hudson Ltd

Wentworth, Nigel. (2004) The Phenomenology of Painting Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Whitfield, Sarah. (2003) ‘The Roaming Eye’ in Susan Rothenberg exhibition catalogue London: Waddington Galleries, pp 3-9

 

 

 

 

   Gaping Mouths and Bulging Bodies:

 

             Beckett and Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

PETER FIFIELD  |  JOURNAL OF BECKETT STUDIES  |  VOLUME 8, NUMBER 1-2  |  SEPTEMBER 2009
 

Embodiment and abstraction are a potentially problematic mix. Beckett’s statement that ‘Perhaps like the composer Schoenberg or the painter Kandinsky, I have developed an abstract language’ (Gruen, 210), sits uncomfortably with, say, the important contrast in the builds of Vladimir and Estragon or the audible mass of Mrs Rooney’s 200lbs of fat. With Beckett’s taste for abstraction and embodiment in mind we might consider an oeuvre of contemporary painting that acts as a guide with which to consider Beckett’s rendition of the body, particularly as it is performed in the television version of Not I, first broadcast by the BBC in 1977. Rather than consulting Kandinsky, however, we would do much better to examine the resolutely fleshly example of Francis Bacon, the proximity of whose papal images after Velàzquez’s Pope Innocent X to Beckett’s Hamm are briefly noted in the Faber/Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (Ackerley and Gontarski, 36). When asked if he ever considered painting abstract pictures, Bacon admitted only of an interest in those Picassos, which, he says, use an ‘organic form that relates to the human image but is a complete distortion of it’ (Sylvester, 8). On the more conventional model of abstraction, when asked his opinion of the Rothko paintings in the Tate, he said, ‘I think they’re the dullest paintings in the world’ and complained that the American had not used brighter colours (South Bank Show, 1985). As such, it is in the OED’s sense of abstraction as ‘drawn, derived, extracted,’ or ‘distilled to its essence’ that we might call Bacon an abstract painter. He confirms this when he tells Melvyn Bragg that he seeks to make ‘not [an] illustration of reality but to create images which are a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation’ (South Bank Show, 1985). The methods of that concentration, which include contortion, mutilation and containment, bring the corporeality of Bacon’s distorted bodies to the forefront of his paintings. On show, then, is an abstraction based not on an abandonment of the subject but on an adherence to a central property of its being – that of its embodiment. If we are to take seriously Beckett’s claims for the abstract we must also give account of his irrepressible attachment to the human form. The space occupied by Bacon’s work stands to bequeath to us not an archaeology of imagery, but a painterly model that speaks eloquently to Beckett’s sarcoid figures.

 

It is a notably organic plasticity that fleshes out the figures of Beckett’s writing and Bacon’s painting. Rather than use the sort of geometric fragmentation of analytical cubism, which can only depict the sinuous curve of, say, a violin’s sound-hole by not dissecting it – by forsaking its very method – in Bacon and Beckett the human form is given through emphasis and exaggeration of the curved, the swollen and the bulbous. It is this attention to the arc that gives to the subject its fleshy roundedness; related to the masculine voluptuousness that Bacon so admired in Michelangelo’s drawings (Peppiatt, 225). We might recall the narrator of The Unnamable who, despite being unsure of the precise nature of his embodiment, stresses its tendency towards a featureless sphere. At one point he proclaims of his head, ‘no, no beard, no hair either, it is a great smooth ball I carry on my shoulders, featureless, but for the eyes, of which only the sockets remain’ (Beckett, 1994, 307). Later, in a sort of attendance register of physiological truancy the narrator says, ‘I don’t feel a mouth on me, nor a head, do I feel an ear, frankly now, do I feel an ear, well frankly now I don’t, so much the worse, I don’t feel an ear either, this is awful’ (Beckett, 1994, 386). Removing all that seems excessive or merely incidental in physicality, it is the spherical form that cannot be discarded. So, while embodiment is compulsively placed in doubt, if it does prove to be the case, its apparent form will be curved. Clearly, it is not the case that all the subjects painted or written by Bacon and Beckett are on the tubby side, or indeed are large cranial spheres; rather there is something about embodiment – any embodiment – that seems to elicit from both artist and author an account of voluminous roundedness, rather than flat, if precise, line. This is surely related to the fact that embodiment is what makes three-dimensionality into an experiential condition, that brings sense and sensation to the idea of spatiality. It is our bulging into 3-D – even of the slimmest figures – that is evoked with Bacon’s scoops and smears of paint and the unnamable’s gravitation towards roundness.

 

 

Moreover, the most basic form of the head and its necessary curvature, are repeated for the rest the body. Beckett writes, ‘For of the great traveller I had been, on my hands and knees in the later stages, then crawling on my belly or rolling on the ground, only the trunk remains (in sorry trim), surmounted by the head with which we are already familiar’ (Beckett, 1994, 329). Removing limbs with abandon, the condition of becoming a mere torso is specifically referred to as the trunk, evocative of a tree as well as a body. Consequently, it is given the characteristic motion of roundedness: it rolls. Whilst all of these profess a lack, there is, precisely because of this distorting focus, a gross emphasis on the fact of three-dimensional embodiment, like the bulbous view through a fish-eye lens. Indeed, it is the loss of limbs that uncovers and foregrounds the natural curvature of the body’s trunk. Like many of Bacon’s distortions of the human form, drawn from vivid photographs of invalids or bent and pinned photographs, the embodied form in Beckett’s work is thus pushed to the extremities of the humanoid. When we look at the Eumenides of Bacon’s 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, we see a grossly distorted human embodiment, rounded and limbless but not dissimilar to The Unnamable’s humanoid monster. In both, then, there is an emphasis not on the fixed form of the whole as constituted by its individual parts – limbs, hands, feet and so on – but on its underlying fleshliness; the essential meat of the matter.

 

Bacon draws particular attention to the practice of embodying a figure by distorting – by breaking – its body. He said to an interviewer, ‘You must know the beautiful Degas pastel in the National Gallery of a woman sponging her back. And you will find at the very top of the spine that the spine almost comes out of the skin altogether [. . . ] He breaks it so that this thing seems to protrude from the flesh. Now, whether Degas did this purposely or not, it makes it a much greater picture, because you’re suddenly conscious of the spine as well as the flesh, which he usually just painted covering the bones’ (Sylvester, 46–47). For Bacon the broken body is a striking, multi-textured body, the artist stating, ‘I’m always hoping to deform people into appearance’ (Sylvester, 146). The shiver one has at the sight of a vivid mutilation is surely an extension of that ‘shorthand of sensation’ sought by Bacon in his paintings. Without the blood and gore so characteristic of the artworks, Beckett’s figures are, of course, notably distorted by injury and bodily malfunction as well as the sort of strange embodiment seen in The Unnamable. In Beckett et le psychanalyste – which the artist himself read on the comparison (Archimbaud, 119) – Didier Anzieu aligns Beckett’s broken bodies with those of Bacon: ‘Bacon peint des portraits où les yeux, l’ouïe, la bouche, le nez, la marche, la peau, la posture sont dévastés’ (Anzieu, 151). Several characters, such as Watt and Clov, have the stiff-legged gait of an ataxic, as if malady had lent them their very substance. Molloy finds himself crawling through the woods, Hamm cannot stand, Nagg and Nell are again trunks, in cylindrical containers. The posture of May in Footfalls, over which Beckett laboured for so long with Whitelaw (Haynes, 43), is as contorted as many of Bacon’s figures. This brief list of pathological specimens recalls us to what James Knowlson calls Beckett’s ‘long-standing curiosity about medical matters [. . . whereby] Anything abnormal or macabre fascinated him’ (Knowlson, 668). This preoccupation with oddity is shared by Bacon, who also repeatedly turned to the clinically strange to establish the common, and so ‘at one time haunted medical bookshops in search of an ever greater precision in the portrayal of extreme states’ (Russell, 56). Michael Peppiatt confirms that the artist ‘loved to talk to scientists and doctors [. . . and] at one point he was a regular reader of The Lancet’ (Peppiatt, 221), whilst Russell records Bacon’s possession of the unpromising-sounding sourcebook Positioning in Radiography, which illustrated the advised poses for successful medical x-rays (Russell, 113). For both Beckett and Bacon the medical exception often provides the physiological exemplar; the distortion stresses the everyday condition of being clothed in tissue. In conversation with Michel Archimbaud between October 1991 and April 1992, Bacon responds at length to a comparison between his own works and those of Beckett. Betraying an extensive knowledge of Beckett’s work, he nevertheless denies any affinity, claiming, ‘I’ve always been amazed at this comparison between Beckett and myself’ (Archimbaud, 116). He admits to having ‘seen Waiting for Godot which I didn’t by the way find interesting, and some of his shorter plays which were, in my opinion, much better’ (Archimbaud, 117). Unable – or unwilling – to recognise the common attachment to renditions of embodiment and affect, he speculates of Beckett: ‘the idea may have been a good one but I wonder if, in his case, the cerebral didn’t take too much precedence over the rest [. . . ] there’s something too systematic and too intelligent about him, which is perhaps what’s always made me uncomfortable’ (Archimbaud, 118). He goes on to recall that,

 

There was a very good actress here in London who performed in them. Beckett often used to write for her. Unfortunately, I no longer remember her name. They were very short pieces, not more than half an hour long, barely twenty minutes, and they weren’t bad at all. (Archimbaud, 117).

 

While the name eludes the ailing Bacon, whose death was to cut short this series of conversations, he is clearly referring to Billie Whitelaw. The short works that Bacon may have seen in London thus include Play, Footfalls, Rockaby and, of course, Not I. It seems rather alarming that this artist for whom the mouth means so much would damn the singular vision of Not I with the faint praise of ‘not bad at all’, couched amidst copious denials of any similarity. But examination of other evidence shows this to be at least consistent with a contrary streak that often revealed itself around questions of comparison and influence. Indeed, this might be illustrated by the conflict in opinion given in two of Bacon’s biographies. Andrew Sinclair writes of the painter that ‘Beckett was one of the writers he particularly admired along with Pinter’ Sinclair, 302), which suggests not only general approval but a special fondness. Pulling in the other direction, however, Peppiatt claims that the artist ‘rejected any comparison between Beckett’s work (“all those ghastly dustbins”) and his own’ (Peppiatt, 341 n1), which indicates not merely indifference but outright hostility. It cannot be disputed that the dustbins of Endgame – another play that Bacon apparently saw – lack the violent sexual charge that characterises many of Bacon’s numerous forays into the seedy and the insalubrious. Even so, it seems likely Peppiatt touches a sore spot in his question, and that the painter’s objection is not to Beckett’s work per se but to assertions of its proximity to his own. Alternatively, Beckett’s may be simply one of the many oeuvres that could elicit from Bacon coos of approval or scornful calls according to his mood. Certainly, Peppiatt recalls the disdain heaped upon respectable targets who would otherwise have been lauded: ‘sweeping statements sometimes turned into venomous outbursts of pique, with Bacon insisting (about Matisse, for instance, whose sculpture he nevertheless admired): “I really hate those squalid little forms of his”, or again (about many people): “So you think he’s good, do you? Then just tell me this: what’s he ever invented? Nothing, you see”‘ (Peppiatt, 301). Just as with Matisse’s ‘squalid little forms’, Beckett’s ‘ghastly dustbins’ may well be the victims of a theatrical tirade, no more than bluff and bluster.

 

 

Analysis of Beckett’s awareness of Bacon is altogether more speculative. Indeed, I can establish by inference only one occasion that Beckett would have seen a painting by Bacon. The Museum of Modern Art in New York was among the earliest purchasers of Bacon’s work, buying the striking Painting 1946 two years after its composition (Peppiatt, 118). Beckett visited the museum with Sidney Meyers, the editor of Film, in 1964 (Knowlson, 525) where he would have seen in Bacon’s painting what resembles a sinister re-imagining of Winnie from Happy Days, here turned into the upper body of an umbrella-shaded dictator. Submerged in shadow rather than sand, the figure has an altogether more explicit relationship to death, surrounded not by domestic flotsam but by the fragments of one or many carcasses. Apart from this likely encounter we are restricted to the examination of Bacon’s Parisian profile and the run of exhibitions that Beckett may have attended.

 

To be sure, though, neither of these are inconsequential. In a poll conducted by the Parisian magazine Connaissance des Arts in the late 1960s, with Beckett also nearing the peak of his renown, Bacon was voted the most important living artist in the world (Peppiatt, 233). This trend in public opinion was confirmed by Bacon’s full retrospective at Paris’s prestigious Grand Palais in 1971, only the second living artist, after Picasso, to be accorded such an honour (Peppiatt, 232). Furthermore, this was only the most prominent of numerous acclaimed Paris exhibitions held during Beckett’s lifetime. These include shows at Galerie Rive Droite (1957), Galerie Maeght (1966–67) – which owned a significant number of Bram van Veldes (Knowlson, 452) – Galerie Claude Bernard (1977), Galerie Maeght Lelong (1984) and Galerie Lelong (1987). One might also consider the possibility that Beckett encountered Bacon’s paintings in London or in any of many German exhibitions. Although we have no record of Beckett’s attendance at any or all of these exhibitions, the extensive profile of Bacon in Paris could not have escaped Beckett’s notice. Nevertheless, the image, if not the fact, of influence is present in the many shrieking mouths and contorted bodies shown to such widespread acclaim in Paris only the year before Not I was begun.

 

The mouth is undoubtedly the most prominent fixation shared by both artists, whether it is the jabbering panic of Not I or the screaming gape of Bacon’s numerous popes. The television adaptation of Beckett’s play, starring Billie Whitelaw, was produced by Tristram Powell in February 1975 for the BBC (Knowlson, 1996, 620), who screened it as the third part of Shades – alongside Ghost Trio and . . . but the clouds. . . – on BBC 2 on 17 April 1977. It has a particularly obsessive focus, the omission of the shrugging figure of the auditor leaving only the mouth, whose slick sogginess, lubricating its own mechanism as it runs, is relished by the camera. The effect was so significant, Whitelaw recalls, that it elicited Beckett’s only comment on her work in her entire career. After watching the film, ‘out of the darkness, came one word, spoken with an Irish accent a whisper that just managed to float across to me: “Miraculous”‘ (Whitelaw, 132). Enlarged to fill the screen, the mesmerising motion of the lips as they manage the words, draws the eyes with the suggestive swell of an obscenity. Indeed, the transition to television quite literally bloats the mouth to new proportions, creating a spectacle of magnification that cuts against the manifest smallness of the isolated, spot-lit mouth on stage. Combined with this enlargement, the rhythmic thrusting and opening captures well what Bacon described in portraiture as ‘All the pulsations of a person’ (Peppiatt, 208). Indeed, that combination of pushing itself out towards its observers, and drawing inwards with that dark central cave is, as Billie Whitelaw notes, ‘strangely sexual and glutinous, slimy and weird, like a crazed, over-sexed-jellyfish’ (Whitelaw, 132). That mixture of protuberance and pull is reinforced by the adaptation for television, which has a valuable serendipity to its manufacture of the mouth’s volume. Although we are likely to forget it in an era of oversised, flattened plasma sets, the play was filmed for a screen that would not only be much smaller than is now normal – albeit larger than life – but curved. Maintaining that tendency towards the bulge found in both of the corpora, the very medium thus thrusts the image into one’s living room, holding the gaze with its own ocular curve. Indeed, the play’s titular pun thus gains an additional twist in its second format, for now the play makes the television’s dilated image return our stare: our gaze is held by that mesmeric tube whose detractors have bestowed the nickname the ‘devil’s eye’.

 

 

The sexual overtones of the orifice in Not I are also very much present in Bacon’s many mouths. Many of the rounded mouths in particular, whilst recognisably screaming, are sexually inflected ambiguous holes, both inviting and forbidding penetration. As Michael Peppiatt writes, ‘There can be little doubt that Bacon’s interest in the open mouth was due in large part to its sexual suggestiveness’ (Peppiatt, 142). Quite apart from the multiple functions of any bodily orifice, both Beckett and Bacon were influenced by the same psychologically and physiologically ambiguous oddity. Amidst his readings in psychology in 1935 (Knowlson, 178) Beckett encountered the folklore notion of the vagina dentata. Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth mentions the figure of the toothed vagina in reference to the neurotic male’s fear of intercourse (Rank, 49), a notion that Beckett added to his psychology notes (Beckett, 1930s). Embodying the dread of castration during – indeed by – the very act of coitus, it is the ambiguous orifice par excellence, at once mouth and genitals, site of pleasure and pain, desire and fear. This fundamentally enigmatic figure is also one of Bacon’s key sources. Rather than a psychoanalytic origin, however, Bacon’s source was already transmuted into painting. The vagina dentata emerges time and again in Picasso’s biomorphic paintings, where the head of the victim/subject is morphed into a ferocious, consuming sex. The Blessed Virgin Mary in Picasso’s 1930 Crucifixion (Richardson, 399) is an early and spectacular example of these cross-bred body parts, which the artist associated with his lover Olga as their relationship soured. They were painted in the middle of that period of Picasso’s work most favoured by Bacon (Archimbaud, 34–35).

 

 

Whilst this oddity is undoubtedly one root in the genesis of Beckett and Bacon’s mouths, one must also recognise the specifically oral fixation shown by both. Certainly, Not I makes clear the relish for the peculiarly wide-ranging types of corporeality of this particular orifice, with its combination of wet saliva, hard teeth, fleshy and flexible lips, muscular tongue and non-present hole. This is to say, there is a care not only for ambiguity and curiosity but for specificity and normality; a real captivation with what constitutes the mouth in particular. The fascination with this unique combination of forms – living and not-living, there and not – is also found in Bacon, as if it signifies a property of embodiment that no other feature can. Prominent among Bacon’s sources are photographs featuring, amongst others, the particularly active maw of Joseph Goebbels in full rabid rant; the various shapes, shifts and substances on show as if the extremity and diversity shown cut to the core of the mouth’s essential nature. As in Beckett, the contrast between the part of the mouth is significant, particularly between the flesh and what John Russell refers to in Bacon as ‘the magnificence and purity of the teeth’ (Russell, 56). And, although painting cannot reproduce that significant motion of Beckett’s Not I, it does seek to capture something of the quintessential mobility of the mouth, following Bacon’s statement that ‘I’ve always been very moved by the movements of the mouth and the teeth’ (Sylvester, 1987, 50). Most significant are a couple of distinctly oral mouths captured in artworks seen by both Beckett and Bacon.

 

 

The first is Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents, held in the Château de Chantilly, which Bacon thought no less than ‘the best human cry in painting’ (Sylvester, 34). He saw it in 1927 when living near tothe gallery with a family whose matriarch had first been fascinated by the flamboyant seventeen-year-old Bacon when in Paris, and who had then proceeded to befriend, house, and instruct him in French (Peppiatt, 32). Beckett also admired Poussin immensely, and spent a good deal of time looking at The Entombment in Dublin’s National Gallery (Knowlson, 58). On the 17 June 1934 he visited the Louvre with his brother to look at the extensive collection of Poussins and various Dutch works, and the following day had an outing to Chantilly, where he would have seen The Massacre of the Innocents (Knowlson, 195). The second prominent source for Bacon was the screaming nurse shot on the steps of Odessa harbour in the 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin, which he saw first either in Berlin in 1926 or the following year in Paris (Peppiatt, 30). A decade later the film’s groundbreaking director Sergei Eisenstein would have received an application from a rather optimistic Beckett asking to become his assistant (Knowlson, 226), an eagerness that indicates a similar enthusiasm. The esteem in which Beckett held both Poussin and Potemkin places some particularly striking mouths in the author’s extensive mental repository of images, either or both of which may have fed into the central image of Not I alongside the acknowledged Caravaggio canvas, The Decollation of St John the Baptist, which Beckett saw in the cathedral at Valetta whilst holidaying in Malta in 1971 (Haynes, 55; Knowlson, 588). Indeed, Beckett’s note to James Knowlson in 1973 perhaps implies sources other than Caravaggio: ‘Image of Not I in part suggested by Caravaggio’s Decollation of St John the Baptist’ (Knowlson, 588).

 

Moving on from questions of influence and origin, the better part of comparison lies in a notable agreement in method. In both oeuvres a curved emptiness, undoubtedly related to the cavernous mouth’s curious combination of fleshliness and non-embodiment, becomes a strange sort of non-present prosthetic, stressing the three-dimensionality of the bodies not by extending them, but by containing, restraining and framing them in space. In his book on Bacon, Gilles Deleuze draws attention to the similar settings used by both artists. He writes, ‘Beckett’s Characters and Bacon’s Figures share a common setting, the same Ireland: the round area, the isolator, le dépeupleur’ (Deleuze, 35–6). Evoking both the ‘flattened cylinder’ of The Lost Ones and the notion of a space that strips its occupants of company, the description also points to the curved walls of many of Bacon’s painted rooms, to which one might add the round bed that features so often in the canvases. Indeed, this figure of curved isolation is rarely repeated to better effect than in MoMA’s Painting 1946, which, as Beckett would have seen, contains – and thus gives volume to – its central figure by the use of multiple curved forms. The head is partially obscured by an open umbrella, the foreground is occupied by what look like circular rails, while the figure’s upper body is almost fitted entirely within the cavern of a butchered carcass, opened into a kind of cruciform backdrop. The repetition of such containing forms might even demonstrate a spatial sense to Beckett’s desire to ‘find a form to accommodate the mess’ (Graver and Federman, 219), just as for Bacon, the containers on the canvas contribute to the ‘very, very ordered chaos’ (Kaleidoscope, 1991) he preferred.

 

Deleuze’s reference, made in 1981, to a specifically Irish space appears to anticipate a comment made by Bacon to David Sylvester in 1986 – and again to Michel Archimbaud in 1992 (Archimbaud, 154) – recalling a particularly handsome house his father had bought from his grandmother. Bacon recalls that ‘Farmleigh was a beautiful house where the rooms at the back were all curved: I suppose one never knows about those things, but perhaps this may be one of the reasons why I have often used curved backgrounds in triptychs’ (Sylvester, 184). We might also note that the large Irish house of Beckett’s youth, Cooldrinagh, had curved windows both upstairs and down. One of these upstairs bays may have provided the infant Beckett’s very first light: emerging from his own fleshly confinement into a room illuminated by the arc of an oriel window. To suggest that these glazed curvatures influenced Beckett’s own curved spaces is perhaps to go too far – although of course not as far back as the author’s memories were said to stretch – but his predilection for containing figures in such bowed spaces is repeatedly put to work to figure and figure out his fictional bodies. Nagg and Nell in Endgame are contained in those ‘ghastly’ cylindrical bins, Winnie in Happy Days is trapped in a cone-like mound, Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape is shown in an illuminated circle given by the overhead light, the three figures in Play are in shapely, almost human-esque urns, and The Unnamable’s narrator tries to pass off its embodiment for a while by maintaining that it is propped up in an urn outside a restaurant. To consider the medium of television in this way, the multi-dimensional curvature of the screen – a distinct protuberance with curved edges – might be said to hold and frame the curves of the mouth in Not I, giving an actual volume to the image of the mouth on screen. (The television screen is also, of course, yet another curved window that appears to illuminate the dark confines of its interior.) In a similar vein, the visual persecution of the title character of Eh Joe is as much a product of containment as enlargement, the organic shape of the screen giving substance to both the character and, importantly, the harassment itself. The stronger Joe’s persecution grows, the more uncomfortably he is squeezed into and confined within the television’s box, gaining an increasing fleshliness as his face comes to occupy ever more screen space. Although cubes are present in the corpus, as they are in Bacon’s, it is the organic and swollen arc to which both particularly gravitate. To take an example of where curve and line meet, we might consider how in Imagination Dead Imagine each body lies within its own warped semi-sphere; that is, in a semi-circle on the horizontal plane and a semi-ovoid on the vertical. The position of these pleated creatures is described in the form of vectors, given in relation to the geometry of the rotundas they are placed in. This arrangement suggests strongly that they are embodied by their containment. Thus, after the mapping of one folded frame in the space ACB we are told there is ‘the white body of a woman finally’ (Beckett, 1995, 184), that ‘finally’ suggesting that the efforts of narrating the coordinates within the dome conjures the inhabitant herself. Like cowering or imprisoned versions of Da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man, the characters are given substance by their location within the geometry of the circle, albeit by an arrangement consisting of straight lines. This is also an important alteration of the unnamable’s bulbous hypothetical embodiment, as the later human frames are given substance by their points of contact with the curved lines of their circular habitat. So, while they become less curved themselves, turned into a series of vectors – head to arse, arse to feet – they are conjured, indeed fleshed out, by mapping this geometry within a curved space.

 

As a model for abstraction this is almost certainly not what Beckett had in mind when he compared his work to that of Kandinsky. But there is, even in Bacon’s resistance to analysis, a curious compulsion to place his work alongside Beckett’s, as Jane Hale has argued (Hale, 96). Thus it is with a resistance to classification and explication that the painter’s biographer records an inadvertent Beckettian echo, ‘Bacon reiterated throughout his life that his painting “meant” nothing, “said” nothing, and that he himself had nothing to “say.” “I’m not an Expressionist, you see, as some people say,” he would insist, sometimes adding as a last flourish: “After all, I have nothing to express”‘ (Peppiatt, 98). But the preponderance of bodies within both oeuvres demands an account of what, with their curious shapes and settings, they are doing here, in a space that, both have argued, has abandoned the task of expression. Beckett and Bacon share a process of modelling the body that includes reference to a broken or distorted model, and a predilection for swooping shapes in both the figure itself and its quasi-prosthetic containment. The repetition of these mutual acts of mutilation and distortion stresses (and distresses) the physical at the expense of conventional bodies and settings, forging a meaty mimesis of the atypical subject. Indeed, it is one of the paradoxes of the television Not I that the use of a medium that, unlike theatre, does not present embodiment itself creates such a striking rendition of substantial embodiment. The enlarged and isolated image displays the meat of corporeality down to the spit and dribble that theatrical scale would dissemble. The very insubstantiality of the medium – constituted of no more than dots of coloured light – becomes the means by which physicality is so strongly and viscerally created. There is, in Beckett’s increased use of television, surely a technological descendent of his call for visible artifice in Waiting for Godot, where acting ‘has got to be done artificially, balletically, Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality’ (Haynes, 108). In this taste too, his tactics are also common to Bacon, whose portrayal of the subject is rendered by the overt, artificial distortion of illustrative forms: ‘I would like to make my pictures more and more artificial [. . . ] The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you’ve got of its looking real’ (Sylvester, 146 and 148). The achievement of an art that is effective not despite its artifice but because of it is the talent and taste of both figures.

 

 

 

If Beckett’s creatures can be thought of as abstract, then, it is certainly not in the sense of being opposed to the concrete. On the contrary, abstraction here seems to mean the condensation of physicality; the obsessive, distorting focus not only on appearance but on the sensations of being clothed in flesh, and of bulging into three dimensions. It is to the notion of sensation, then, that we must finally appeal in this juxtaposition. In a letter to Alan Schneider – and repeated elsewhere – Beckett wrote that Not I is ‘Addressed less to the understanding than to the nerves of the audience which should in a sense share her bewilderment’ (Harmon, 283). Likewise, Bacon repeatedly described his images of faces in neural terms, as ‘an attempt to bring the figurative thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’ (Sylvester, 12). As both artists make explicit, then, their depictions of bodies signify not through reference to a bloodless or theoretical notion of physicality but through the observer’s own physical participation. Their aesthetic bodies work not because they resemble a particular person or even present an actual body, but because they depict the condition of embodiment itself, and because they excite through the sparking of our own synapses.

 

WORKS CITED

Ackerley, C. J., and S. E. Gontarski (eds) (2006), The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, London: Faber.

Anzieu, Didier (1992), Beckett et le psychanalyste, Paris: Archimbaud, Menthe.

Archimbaud, Michel (1993), Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud, London: Phaidon Press.

Beckett, Samuel (1930s), ‘Psychology Notes’, Trinity College Dublin, TCD MS 10971/8.

Beckett, Samuel (1986), Complete Dramatic Works, London: Faber.

Beckett, Samuel [1959] (1994), Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, London: Calder Publications.

Beckett, Samuel (1995), Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski, New York: Grove Press.

Deleuze, Gilles [1981] (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, London: Continuum.

Graver, Lawrence and Raymond Federman, eds. (1979), Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Gruen, John (1969), ‘Samuel Beckett talks about Beckett’, Vogue, 154:10, pp. 210–11.

Hale, Jane (1993), ‘Framing the Unframable: Samuel Beckett and Francis Bacon’, Beckett in the 1990s: 2nd International Beckett symposium: Selected Papers, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 95–102.

Harmon, Maurice (ed.) (1998), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Haynes, John, and James Knowlson (2003), Images of Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kaleidoscope: Francis Bacon. ‘I’ll go on until I drop’; Francis Bacon’s Last Interview, radio programme. London: BBC, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 17 August 1991.

Knowlson, James (1996), Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury.

Peppiatt, Michael (1996), Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, London: Phoenix.

Rank, Otto [1929] (1973), The Trauma of Birth, New York: Harper & Row.

Richardson, John (2007), A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917–1932, London: Jonathan Cape.

Russell, John (1993), Francis Bacon, London: Thames & Hudson. The South Bank Show, featuring Francis Bacon, television programme. London: LWT, 1985. 

Sinclair, Andrew (1993), Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times, London: Sinclair-Stevenson.

Sylvester, David (1987), Interviews with Francis Bacon, London: Thames & Hudson.

Whitelaw, Billie (1995), Billie Whitelaw . . . Who He? An Autobiography, London: Sceptre 

 

 

 

The Human Cry:

An Appreciation of Francis Bacon

 

 

 

BY DAVID REMFRY   |   CONTRIBUTOR   |   IRISH AMERICA MAGAZINE   |   AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009

 

If, in 1964, you were to have asked me which two things excited me most, aside of course from ‘The Siren Call of Sex’ as the poet Philip Larkin put it, I would have answered, the Ronettes and the paintings of Francis Bacon. Oh, and the fact that I was leaving Hull College of Art intent on a life of painting, so three things.

The first Francis Bacon paintings I saw were in reproduction, around 50 years ago. They had a great effect on me even in this diminished form. I recall my painting tutor, James Neill, being scornful of Bacon’s work. Telling me that Bacon was passé. The years leading to the current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York show how wrong he was. The works reverberate with the energy of the painting and the violent intensity of the imagery they contain.

Bacon said that one reason for the violent component of his paintings might have to do with his upbringing in Ireland. He was born in 1909, a century ago in Dublin, the son of a racehorse trainer. They lived quite near the Curragh where the British Cavalry Regiment was stationed. He remembered them using the drive to their house for practice manoeuvres, galloping up and down the drive. This was just before the 1914 war. The family moved to London in that period because his father was in the War Office and Francis was instilled with the possibility of impending danger. After the war he returned to Ireland and was raised during the period of the Sinn Féin Movement, living with his grandmother who was at that time the wife of the Commissioner of Police for Kildare. He remembered living in a sandbagged house, and some roads crossed with ditches dug, said Bacon, to trap the unwary car or horse and cart for the waiting snipers.

When he was 17 he moved to Berlin. He said the Berlin of 1927 was violent, not in the military sense that Ireland was, but in the emotional sense. One thinks of Christopher Isherwood who lived in Berlin around the same time and later wrote Good-bye to Berlin, which was made into the musical Cabaret. One thinks of the latent violence too soon to become a reality that Bacon spoke of. For a young gay man it must have been very exciting, and later very dangerous. He went on to live in Paris during “all those disturbed years,” as he put it until 1939 when the war started.

What Bacon said about the violence of his life, the violence he has lived amongst, is that it is different from the violence in painting, “that to speak about the violence of paint, it has nothing to do with the violence of war, it’s to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself.”

Bacon himself was obsessed with mortality and said that “If life excites you then its opposite, like a shadow, death, must excite you,” that one is aware of it like the flip of a coin between life and death. In an interview with the writer and art critic David Sylvester, Bacon said he was always surprised when he woke up in the morning. Sylvester asked if that didn’t belie Bacon’s view that he was an essentially optimistic person, and Bacon replied, “Ah well, you can be optimistic and totally without hope.” That seems pleasingly Beckett-like to me.

The visitor to this magnificent exhibition, if not already familiar with Bacon’s work, may be surprised, perhaps even a little shocked if that is still possible today, at the visceral quality of the painting. Near the beginning of the exhibit is a triptych “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,” painted in 1944. The phallic figures are against a stark orange background; one looks down while the other two with snarling and gaping mouths evoke menace or pain. Bacon said that he was influenced by Picasso’s paintings of organic forms relating to the human figure but distortions of it. But the mouths, full of teeth in the Bacons, make his work altogether more sinister.

Bacon said he did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry, but that he was not able to do it. He thought the best depiction of the cry was in the still from Eisenstein’s great film Battleship Potemkin of the screaming nanny. In painting, he felt the best human cry was probably in the “Massacre of the Innocents” by Poussin of around 1630.

Again and again one can see the importance of the mouth as an expressive vehicle in Bacon’s works. When young in Paris he bought a second-hand book with hand-colored plates of diseases of the mouth. He tried to combine the Potemkin image with the images from the book, but it never worked out.

A friend once gave me a textbook of reconstructive surgery of victims of traumatic injury (there is always someone wanting to cheer you up). One photograph showed a face with the flesh almost entirely lifted from one side revealing the teeth, jaw and skull. I always associated the image with Bacon – though Bacon’s paintings are neither horrific nor literal. Yet it is as if he reminds us of the skull beneath the flesh, reminds us of our mortality

‘The mouth’ paintings evolved during the 1940’s. The work entitled “Painting 1946” has a dark figure whose jaw and mouth emerge from the adumbration of an umbrella. A flayed carcass is behind, its limbs spread as if crucified. This, the first work by Bacon to be acquired by a museum, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1949 and it seems to point the way to the ensuing works sometimes referred to as ‘Scream Paintings’ of heads, figures and Popes, in the 1950’s.

“Study for Innocent X,” 1962, seems a culmination of these, being derived from a reproduction of the Velazquez portrait (widely regarded as one of the finest portraits ever painted) . Interestingly, Bacon, though he spent two months in Rome, never visited the Galleria  Doria-Pamphili to see the Velazquez painting. He said he probably feared seeing the original after he had tampered with it. He needed only the reproduced image for his purposes. Bacon certainly preferred to work from photographs as a starting point, rather than with models, partly as he said because he thought that models would be upset by what he did to them

There is a delicious painting called “Portrait of George Dyer riding a Bicycle,” 1966. Dyer’s face is turned to the viewer whilst surrounding it, a larger shadowy profile with a faint smile rides obliviously on. Dyer was Bacon’s lover, but their relationship was always tempestuous and in 1971 on the opening night of Bacon’s big retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, Dyer committed suicide in his hotel room.

I met Francis Bacon at the Chelsea Arts Club, London, which he occasionally came to in the late 1970’s, and in the 1980’s I’d occasionally see him walking in Kensington where I lived. He would nod but we never spoke. That was good enough for me. I met Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes too, but that is, as they say, another story.

David Remfry’s artistic career spans more than 30 years. A figurative painter born and trained in England, he is now living in New York City.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon’s Poetics of the Grotesque

 

 

 

 

SCOTTS JACKSON  |  REVIEW  |  GHOST ISLAND  |  FRIDAY 21 AUGUST 2009

 

Though Bacon seems to recycle the same sort of grotesque in his oeuvre to an extent that becomes exhausting there is something still powerful in his poetics of the grotesque. He reminds us of bygone times before the age of the laboratory and medicalization of illness when the temple was a site of ritual killings and sacrifice. As Yve Alain Bois remarks in his essay, “Base Materialism,” on Bataille and the photographer Eli Lotar: We live in an age where the slaughterhouse, just like the madman, is quarantined from everyday life.

In his triptych series titled after the T. S. Eliot poem Sweeney Agonistes, Bacon depicts enigmatic fragmented lumps of life matter. The extreme upward tilt of the paintings draws the viewer into the painting, while having the contradictory effect of flattening the picture plane. In portraying such liminal figures that hover between life and death and inserting them between flat and deep space, one confronts the return of the repressed. That which is repressed and sublimated inevitably intrudes as the signified momentarily catches up to and disrupts the signifier. The horror in these works is in their representing the repression of violence. As Bois argues: “To show violence purely and simply would be a way of incorporating it; it is more effective to underscore how it is evacuated.”

The retrospective for the twentieth century figurative painter Francis Bacon on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows Bacon’s belaboring exploration of the grotesque. He is fixated on both religious iconography such as in his paintings inspired by Velázquez, and malformed depictions of enigmatic carcasses.

Blood on Pavement similarly hovers between deep and flat space. The obscure blood stain is a trace of a violence and trauma that remains absent. The horror of Bacon’s imagery lies not in its portrayal of violence, but rather in its undefinability that places the viewer between the sublimation and intrusion of the trauma. It is a horror that remains truly other and resists incorporation and resolution in the quotidian. He reminds us that the comforting sanctity of our daily latte and other objects of commercial consumption is  continually haunted by wars, sweatshops, and environmental devastation. Bacon does not naively revel in the violence of the status quo, but rather exposes the ways in which we sublimate and expunge the traces of violence in presenting objects which remain liminal and resist foreclosure.

 

 

 

Francis Bacon at the Met

 

Francis Bacon’s virtual reality

 

 

 

ROBERT ZALLER  |  ART  |  BROAD STREET REVIEW  |  SATURDAY 15 AUGUST 2009

 

Francis Bacon, who died at the age of 82 in 1992, was the greatest British painter of the 20th Century, and by all odds the most notorious. His famous paintings of Baroque-era popes, distortedly rendering Diego Velazquez’s portrait of Innocent X as a succession of screaming funhouse faces, scandalized respectable opinion, while his treatment of gay life made him one of the first artists to unapologetically depict the gritty subculture of homosexual London. 

On a political level, Bacon’s postwar work seemed to decry violence, while on a personal one he appeared to embrace it. The result was an art that seemed both aesthetically disturbing and morally ambivalent. 

Bacon’s iconography is now familiar to us, and his bad-boy postures, after Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Greenaway, seem a bit old hat, not to say sentimental. We are really left, in the centenary exhibit of his work recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the art itself. There’s a cool, classical ironist behind the Romantic figure painter, and the tension between the two—the eye of a clinician observing a particularly messy operation—is what engages us now.

Yet there’s a deeper issue in Bacon’s work, the issue that besets modern art in general: how to represent the world in an age of photographic reproduction. 

 

Fine art’s dirty little secrets

Before photography, the artist looked directly at the world and depicted it through hand and eye. Afterwards, anyone with a camera could reproduce that same world with a click of the shutter. This easy appropriation included the world of art itself, as the digital camera flashes that have added a new level to the visual pollution of our galleries and museums attest. 

At the Met, guards were diligently shooing would-be picture takers away from the Bacons, but I think Bacon himself would have been highly amused. That painters had themselves often worked from photographs was one of fine art’s dirty little secrets, but Francis Bacon may have been the first to work only from photographs, film stills and other forms of reproduction. 

Even when painting his friends and lovers, he would never pose them, but have photographer friends such as John Deakin give him snapshots to work from. To have museum souvenir-hunters turn his paintings back into photographs might well have seemed a fitting completion of his work to him, or at any rate a reduction back to first principles.

 

A gambit taken to extremes

What were those principles? I don’t think Bacon was merely quirky in insisting on having a prefabricated image to work from (a Velazquez painting might serve too, but only itself in reproduction—Bacon claimed never to have seen the original). He was making a programmatic or, if you will, a philosophic statement— namely, that the modern world could be seen only in mediated form, never directly. 

This is a very classic modernist gambit, of course. But Bacon took it to the extreme. Photography had, as it were, usurped the natural world, and banished it to Kantian exile. The photograph was the primary datum of experience now, and art could only work off it, compete with it and, if successful, in some sense displace it. This displacement was the actual artistic gesture, the triumph of art itself.

This conviction, I think, was at the core of Bacon’s rejection of the dominant aesthetic of his generation, Abstract Expressionism. In photography, the image of a thing replaced the thing itself, but the Abstract Expressionists, by ignoring both, had retreated into what Bacon regarded as a sterile manipulation of form and color. 

 

Like tennis without a net

The Expressionists might say that, in rejecting the image, they freed themselves from the tyranny of representation in order to project emotions onto canvas directly. But to Bacon (not to mention Picasso and Matisse, among others), that was playing tennis without a net. The real issue was whether art could exist in what Walter Benjamin had called the age of mechanical reproduction, and any art that failed to engage the question— to grapple with the image, particularly the human image—was simply irrelevant.

The matter was not nearly so simple, of course. Picasso himself had broken up the conventional visual field with Cubism, and it was this gesture that made Abstract Expressionism possible, even if Picasso himself had chosen not to follow it. From this point of view, modern art was not about the image—temporality—but about space, reconfigured and reconceived. Photography had little to say about this issue, being in that sense an actually retrograde method for interrogating the world.

Bacon, too, despite his mock obeisance to the photograph, recognized this. The primary question in depicting the human image was, for him, not its color, outline or expression, but its placement in space. 

 

Baboons and the pope

I think the gaping or grimacing features that recur so regularly in his work attest to this spatial instability; they’re like the distortions caused by exposure to compressed air or a destructive wind. On a psychological level, one might say, Bacon’s gaping mouths are meant to reveal our animal kinship to other primates; thus, in the room that exhibits most of the papal images, figure studies of a chimpanzee and a baboon are included, as well as studies of dogs. 

But all the figures, human and animal, seem unlocated. The popes sit on their thrones, and there is no image more apparently grounded than a throne; but Bacon encloses them in the cage patterns characteristic of his early postwar work, thus making them appear suspended in a menacing void—menacing to them and to us. 

Or sometimes his figures are seen through drizzling screens of paint, like curtains that leave us uncertain whether the figures stand in front of or behind them (or are rather bombarded by them, like cosmic particles). Rain is spatially disorienting, especially when it appears without signpost or background; and Bacon’s existential rain—coming from no apparent source and proceeding to no apparent ground—is particularly riddling. 

 

The spoor of the human 

In his later work, these devices are replaced by large slabs of unbroken color, which, even when they suggest a pictorial referent (a bare room, for example), give us no real purchase. Bacon’s figures are as isolated, as ungrounded, as they can be, and the twists and gaps in the figures themselves leave them, too, at the margins of substantiality. It is as if Bacon (who adapts many of the devices of Expressionist space) wants to take the image as close to dubiety and unintelligibility as he can, while still leaving an inexpugnable trace, the spoor of the human.

This is a new kind of reality, but one that we can recognize about us everywhere today, and which Bacon was prescient in anticipating, particularly in his sensitivity to photographic processes—the chemical trace that leaves, mysteriously, a simulacrum of the object world. We live, increasingly, in this virtual reality, whose reach has been enormously extended by the computer and the world of video games and simulations that it has generated. Without noticing it, we have largely disappeared into this virtual reality, organized for us by unseen hands, which is now replacing the messy, unframed, chaotic natural world that, in our animal fear of it and our distrust of the instincts that once permitted us to navigate it, we are in the process of abandoning.

 

Paint itself as a victim

There is no reason why we ourselves should not some day be absorbed into this looking-glass, and that is the mirror Francis Bacon’s art holds up to us. Its ambiguity—and perhaps its violence, too—is born of the frisson we experience as we confront this brave new world, which fascinated Bacon himself as its prophet. 

One of the things we will lose in it, as he was well aware, is paint itself. A painter friend of mine, recently returned from Venice, remarked to me about how few paintings the Biennale contained, as opposed to videos and installations. What, look at a cloth canvas daubed with vegetable dyes and hung, immovably, on a wall? Titian is as far from us now as a cave dweller.

 

The one reality we can’t escape

Bacon, though, insisted upon paint, as he did upon the material core of humanity, distant and difficult though it had become to our perception (the difficulty was precisely his subject). Two paintings from the Met show may illustrate this for us. In one, his lover, George Dyer, is shown, nude and from the back, sitting on a toilet. He is surrounded by white space except for the piping that conducts Dyer’s waste away from him and toward us: a man, in effect, shitting in our faces. 

In another, Blood on a Pavement, a smear of blood is all that is left of the absent figure, and the background itself is rendered as three Rothko-like panels (another appropriation from the Expressionists, despite Bacon’s expressed disdain for Rothko). 

The Dyer portrait is, among other things, the ultimate send-up of the papal thrones; here, Bacon suggests, is where we all sit. We don’t see Dyer’s waste, but the image makes us inescapably conscious of it: shit is the one natural reality we can’t escape, however politely removed by modern plumbing, and however antiseptically white our bathroom walls and fixtures. 

Similarly, blood is also our trace: the one testimony to our existence when the murdered corpse has been removed from the scene of the crime. We live, and therefore shit; we die, and therefore bleed: however virtual our reality may become in between, these signatures reveal us.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon shutters at the Met

 

 

 

JAMES HORNER  |  MANHATTAN FINE ARTS EXAMINER  |  THURSDAY 13 AUGUST 2009

 

Filleted carcases, ghostly dogs, screaming popes, and wrestling men, all conjure up Francis Bacon: A Centenary which will close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday August 16. If you have not seen it yet, you should before it leaves. The Bacon retrospective is an amazing collection of his work and includes a curious display of photos and artifacts from his Chelsea studio. As you walk amongst his paintings, you become part of them — just as he wanted. Bacon requested that his paintings be presented behind glass so that his audience could be part of his twisted world.

Walking though the horror show, it’s hard to decide which works are more disturbing. The paintings that use shuttering, where the image fades in and out, or the works with minimal backgrounds. The simple ones take the cake. Although the canvases with shuttering were darker in appearance and more dramatic, the brighter and lusher colours of the minimal backgrounds put the terror into the everyday realm. Pain and suffering isn’t hiding in his cluttered studio in Chelsea, but out on the streets and in the landscape of the living.

Bacon painted a number of wrestling men, possibly to work out his “affliction” as he called it or homosexuality. Homosexuality was a no, no back in his day, punishable by law. The black-widow Bacon painted his lovers, two of whom committed suicide on his watch. Most of his lovers were thieves or transients, and he met one of them while being robbed in his home. Leaving the Bacon show you’ll be exhilarated with his take on the grotesque figure. He twist and turns them inside and out with smears and kicks to the guts, pulling you inside and out and sometimes leaving you a little weary and sick.

 

 

 

 

Love is the Devil 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 JD BELTRAN  |  SFGATE  |  SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE  |  TUESDAY AUGUST 11 2009  

 

Two weekends ago, I was in New York, where I’d gone specifically to view the Francis Bacon exhibition, a centenary retrospective of his work put on jointly by the Tate Britain in London, the Prado Museum in Madrid, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (through this weekend, August 16). Bacon’s paintings are few and far between – most appear to be in private collections – so it was a particular joy for me whenever I’d come upon one in a museum or gallery, since he is one of my favourite painters. I couldn’t miss something like this, an exhibition representing his entire life’s (which was organized to commemorate 100 years since his birth on October 28, 1909). And I am still thinking about it. Bacon continued to paint astonishingly powerful works even into his eighties, and died at 82 of a heart attack in Madrid.

As I wandered through the galleries, I was trying to figure out just why I’m so drawn to Bacon’s work. It’s probably partly because he represents my quintessential ideal of an artist -- one who clearly listened to his own, very unique (and sometimes controversial) drumbeat. And he was an absolute master of paint. Self-taught, he possessed the ability to render fantastic imagery within his works with just a couple of well-placed strokes of his brush – he clearly was someone who spent hundreds, thousands of hours learning his craft.

But he also was one who was not afraid to express his own vulnerability and sometimes horrific reality, and in doing so, highlight the strengths and vulnerabilities of our own lives. As French anthropologist and writer Michel Leiris remarked, "[Bacon’s paintings] help us, most powerfully, to feel the sheer fact of existence as it is sensed by a man without illusions."

I’ve been haunted by one particular work I saw at the show, Self-Portrait, 1973. In it, a desolate figure leans on a sink painted in mid-air. In 1971, two days before the opening of a major exhibition of Bacon’s work at the Grand Palais in Paris, Bacon’s friend and sometime lover George Dyer (who Bacon had brought to Paris for the occasion) died in their hotel bathroom of an overdose. Although Bacon appeared nonplussed at the opening, he revealed the trauma caused by this death in the dark triptychs he painted during the subsequent two years.

Maybe it was because I also was suffering through the July anniversary of my own father’s death nine years ago. Or thinking about the recent news that the sister of a friend had just died of breast cancer, leaving behind her husband and young children, or hearing just yesterday that another friend’s father had just died of brain cancer. Whatever the case, there was something about that painting that was so poignant and powerful in evoking enormous loss, that it reached out to me, and became indelible.

[P]eople say you forget about death, but you don’t. After all, I’ve had a very unfortunate life, because all the people I’ve been really fond of have died. And you don’t stop thinking about them; time doesn’t heal. But you concentrate on something which was an obsession, and what you would have put into your obsession with the physical act you put into your work. Because one of the terrible things about so-called love, certainly for an artist, I think, is the destruction.

Francis Bacon, from a December 1971 interview with David Sylvester

I’ve been thinking a lot about why people go to museums and sit and stare at paintings that are hundreds of years old, and are about narratives and times that seem to have little or no relationship to the present. But still, we go, and we sit and stare. I think it’s because in those lifetimes, although there was papyrus instead of I-phones, in the end, I guess the stories of our lives aren’t that much different. As Bacon once remarked:

 

In a way, it becomes more difficult [to paint]. You’re more conscious of the fact that nine-tenths of everything is inessential. What is called reality becomes more acute. The few things that matter become so much more concentrated and can be summed up with so much less.

And, there are some things that painting can do that nothing else can.

Love is the Devil is a 1998 film of Francis Bacon’s life directed by John Maybury and produced by the BBC, with Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon, Daniel Craig (yes, 007) as George Dyer, and Tilda Swinton as Bacon’s close friend Muriel Belcher. You can check out the trailer here. Adam Low also created a detailed documentary on the painter in Bacon’s Arena.

 

 

 

 

 

Chaos theory: Francis Bacon’s creative process

 

is revealed in a new book Incunabula

 

 

“Honor the error as a hidden intention.”
   – from Oblique Strategies


      (set of published cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt)
 

 

in•cu•nab•u•la:[in-kyoo-nab-yuh-luh] – plural noun, singular [-luh m]

 

1. extant copies of books produced in the earliest stages (before 1501) of printing
 from movable type.

2. the earliest stages or first traces of anything

 

BY SHARON ANDERSON | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | NORTHSIDE SAN FRANCISCO | AUGUST 09 2009

 

During the life of the painter Francis Bacon, journalists became fond of photographing his studio that was famous for its unique disarray. Piles of photographs, books and newspaper clippings were strewn, torn and spattered with paint, creating a veritable archaeological dig of source material for Bacon’s work.

Francis Bacon didn’t work from life. Rather, he used imagery to inform his paintings by surrounding himself with a living collage of reference material. The authors of Incunabula describe the deliberate means in which Bacon’s studio was recently disassembled and scrutinized to achieve a glimpse of the artist in process.

Bacon’s paintings are a subconscious, dreamlike view into floating interiors featuring twisted, flesh-like appendages sometimes resembling people or hanging slabs of meat in a slaughterhouse. The figures often appear pushed into strangely angled corners or trapped in undefined violence, yet the compositions are rendered with an air of serenity.

The evolution of Bacon’s paintings is revealed in random selections of source material. For example, the books that cluttered Bacon’s studio were deliberately shelved with the spines facing away from his sight. A book would be selected at random, pages torn, and imagery folded into the shape of a cone designed to stand beside Bacon’s easel without falling down. The abstraction created by the folds often translated into the final painted image – another degree of separation from the props that aided in creating the dreamlike quality of his canvases

In Incunabula, source materials sit on the pages side by side with the paintings that developed from them. On one page, a torn newspaper photo showing an opera singer in profile with outstretched arms is transformed into a sphinx, the head further transformed to resemble a second photograph of one of the artist’s friends. Thus, a portrait is created. A photograph with sharp diagonal folds becomes a self-portrait of the artist with similarly distorted features as in the photo.

On another page, a clipping of hanging birds stripped of their feathers becomes a painting of a red cubist interior featuring a trompe l’oeil bird hanging in space. Here the authors take a biographical aside and explore Bacon’s interest in meat imagery: Was Francis Bacon fascinated with hanging carcasses, (which became the trademark image in his paintings), because his namesake, Sir Francis Bacon, died of pneumonia after stuffing dead birds with snow in an attempt to find a new way to preserve meat?

During his life, the painter Francis Bacon made no secret about the reason his studio was kept in what might at first glance appear to be only cluttered wreckage. The environment gave him the impulse to create order out of chaos. Paintings were the result. His studio could be regarded as his final work of art, a work that will remain a gloriously unfinished testament to an artist’s creative process

Francis Bacon: Incunabula, by Rebecca Daniels and Martin Harrison (Thames & Hudson, $75).

Sharon Anderson is a Los Angeles-based writer and painter, and a frequent contributor to Northside San Francisco. She also often appears in Art in America.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: A Centenary  Retrospective

 

 


Metropolitan Museum of Art, until August 16

 

 

HUNTLEY DENT  |  THE BERKSHIRE REVIEW OF THE ARTS  |  SATURDAY 8 AUGUST 2009

 

Sod off.  To escape the lingering odour given off by the career of Francis Bacon, you’d have to be hanging from a refrigerator hook in an abattoir. Not an unlikely place to meet the artist, actually. His paintings of anguish and horror make many avert their faces, not so much from offensive art as from an offensive smell. Goya’s blunt, black sketches of rotting corpses hanging from trees in the aftermath of the Napoleonic invasion strike the same note of crossing sensory boundaries.

Bacon joins Jonathan Swift as obsessed with socially aberrant smells, in Swift’s case the smell of a lady farting, in Bacon’s the sweat of a man having sex with another man. But he is quite willing to throw in the rank odour of bloody meat and dog shit on the sidewalk (Bacon once spotted the latter and proclaimed, “Now there’s what life really is.”)  The artist’s renegade sex life has been vividly portrayed in a film titled Love Is the Devil, which summarizes his rough-trade view on the subject of love. Such is the sainted renown of Bacon at home — he passes for the English Jean Genet but without a hagiographer on the order of Sartre — that every drunken careen through the low dives of Soho could be a station of the Cross.

Yet there are a host of critics who aren’t buying any of it. Before I attended the current large exhibit of over sixty Bacon canvases at the Met, I read New York squibs that labelled him a cartoonist, if not himself a cartoon, a shabby shocker, a Johnny One Note of screaming popes and butcher-shop variety meats.  In addition he was a blowhard who never met an interviewer he didn’t want to talk to, and a tireless careerist stage-managing his own fame.  Why did so many articles proclaim that Bacon was at once great but not credible? A painter famous for telling society to bugger off was being handed the same in return.

Yet even if every accusation were true, and there’s a viable argument for each, Bacon’s work jumps off the canvas and aims a dart into the soul as obviously (one should think) as Rembrandt’s or Turner’s.  If the greatest achievement of art is to communicate the consciousness of the artist, how can anyone deny Bacon’s power?  When you visit the Tate Britain in London, whose walls are lined with honourable accomplishment, the two painters capable of flaying the heart (in a good way) are Turner and Bacon.  They are supreme expression of a culture that managed to produce heroes no culture can contain.

I think ordinary viewers grasp this instinctively. Bacon, like Van Gogh, is critic-proof.  The Met’s gallery is all but silent (as an unscripted theatrical effect, an infant was screaming a siren wail on the day I visited), and people stare at images from a modern Hieronymus Bosch, cataloguing a hell of the interior as convincing to contemporary non-believers as Bosch’s was to post-medieval Christians.  An appalled shiver unites the crowds, which are thick and constant at this exhibit. In addition to the paintings themselves, the Met has devoted one dimmed side room to a display of flotsam and jetsam from Bacon’s famously chaotic studio (now transferred in toto to Dublin), where layer upon layer of compositing photos, news clips, magazine articles, and artistic shards formed a sedimentary deposit. Bacon left the studio in that condition, he said, because he was inspired by chaos, and he liked to await the arrival of happy accidents, a chance glance at a scrap or image underfoot that caused his mind to take flight.

Bacon never took a lesson and never painted from life.  He rose almost fully formed after an early start at interior decorating and street hustling, with a small grey Crucifixion in 1933 that resembles an x-ray of the Shroud of Turin, should it happen that the enshrouded figure was a splayed cow. Within months the picture appeared in a book on modern painting opposite a Picasso, the master whom Bacon adored above all others.  I imagine there was a certain shyness he felt before the living. A prowler of public toilets, gambling dens, sordid bars, and cruising spots wouldn’t exactly frolic in the normal, and when all is said and done, a model posing in a studio is decidedly normal.

Among all the detritus that satisfied his nesting instinct, I was struck by two images from Bacon’s studio. One was a page torn from the studies of bodies in motion taken by the nineteenth-century photographer, Eadward Muybridge.  These became famous as the first stop-action portrayals of men running, leaping, wrestling, and the like. Muybridge married science and art. His images supplied painters with thousands upon thousands of new poses, all in real-time motion, never dreamed of in anatomy classes. At the same time, they removed any hint of idealism, since not every gesture made by the human form is beautiful.

Bacon used Muybridge as a major inspiration; in this case, he saved a page showing two nude men wrestling, amounting to over a hundred postage-stamp sized shots in sequence. It’s not only that he transmuted them into men having sex (never explicitly portrayed – they could be men fighting or even merging like melting jelly or pooled liquid flesh). The startling part is how literal Bacon could be in lifting Muybridge’s poses while simultaneously making them so disturbing, as if his own desire-repellence was a transmuting force all its own, capable of damning-celebrating, looking-not looking, touching-cringing at the same time.

The other scrap that caught my eye was of one of Bacon’s young, usually thuggish, moody lovers, George Dyer. After Dyer’s suicide by overdose in 1971, a grief-stricken Bacon began to paint him even more obsessively than he had in life. According to the painter, the two met in 1964 when Dyer was attempting to burgle Bacon’s apartment, a likely story given that Dyer later planted some marijuana in the apartment, which he now shared with Bacon, and then called the police to come and seize it, arresting Bacon in the bargain.  Rough, handsome, and no doubt adept at various tinges of sado-masochism, Dyer happened to have a classic Roman nose in profile.  But in this particular photo he sits grinning in a chair facing us. It’s an ordinary snapshot.  What makes it striking is that Bacon has trampled and folded it many times, adding streaks of colour such as a red slash here and there. This deliberate manhandling – forget the psychological overtones – gave Bacon access to visual distortions that leapt on to the canvas as distortions of face, figure, character, and mood.

Similar mangling can be seen in much outsider art, the kind produced by schizophrenics who obsessively carry out hallucinatory visions. Bacon was certainly an outsider, and yet he calls from beyond sanity with screams that make more sense of life than one would imagine possible.  Psychosis is ultimately sterile when trying to dig deeper into life. It’s too repetitive, self-involved, and private, a maze luxuriant with growth but devoid of fruit. Bacon returns to the same themes with similar compulsiveness – the Met show includes six of his Screaming Popes, luridly purplish takes on a painting he thought the greatest ever done, Velasquez’s famous portrait of Pope Innocent X.  But when he stretches the Pope’s head into an elongated melon, pries his mouth open like a doctor looking for a festering wound (Bacon kept a Victorian volume on mouther. I must admit that seeing them in person doesn’t necessarily add as much as seeing Rembrandt or Titian in person. The pictures have gained some impact of scale, since all but a few are large and at times larger than life. Each is framed, per Bacon’s instructions, in heavy gold frames fronted with glass (he wanted the viewer’s reflection to become part of the painting – it doesn’t really work).  But Bacon’s existential surrealism hits with brute force no matter what the scale, and his habit of putting single figures on bright grounds of green and pink make it impossible not to focus on them. diseases close at hand), cages him in a rectangle of gold bars like a papal menagerie, and furrows the grey space all around into curtains of dripping sorrow, the final effect isn’t remotely psychotic. It’s despairingly religious, as seen by someone who called himself an optimist in a special sense: an optimist of nothing.

In an age of Google images, you can gaze at Bacon’s iconic paintings with the flick of a finger. I must admit that seeing them in person doesn’t necessarily add as much as seeing Rembrandt or Titian in person.  The pictures have gained some impact of scale, since all but a few are large and at times larger than life. Each is framed, per Bacon’s instructions, in heavy gold frames fronted with glass (he wanted the viewer’s reflection to become part of the painting – it doesn’t really work).  But Bacon’s existential surrealism hits with brute force no matter what the scale, and his habit of putting single figures on bright grounds of green and pink make it impossible not to focus on them.

Still, this is the first major Bacon show in New York in two decades, which makes it unmissable. A final point.  In the audio guide and a projection at the end of the show, there’s quite a bit of Bacon talking about himself in his upper-crust drone that’s peculiarly at odds with his tomcat-crawling-the-alley habits. He tends to carry on, almost like an Alec Guinness parody of Francis Bacon.  More to the point, he’s constantly evading the pain and honesty of his canvases. Despite some cogent remarks, Bacon was a celebrity poseur as flaccid as Andy Warhol but without the mesmerizing looks.  Bacon flouted a quotation he lifted from Aeschylus: “The reek of human blood smiles out at me.” He actually meant it, which is horrifying, but how can such an appetite ever be put into words.

 

                                                                   Three Studies for a Self-Portrait 1979 – 1980  Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

Religious Musings on Francis Bacon:

 

 

  A Review of the Francis Bacon Retrospective Exhibition

at Tate Britain from September 11, 2008–January 4, 2009

 

 

 

RINA ARYA | REVIEW  |  IMPLICIT RELIGION  |  VOLUME 12  |  NUMBER 1  |  FRIDAY AUGUST 7 2009

 

Francis Bacon is arguably the most well-known British artist after J.M.W Turner, and his forthcoming centenary in 2009 has been well documented in both the art world and the mass media. !e BBC archive contains a comprehensive range of interviews and footage with the artist. To commemorate the centenary, the Tate has put together the third retrospective on Bacon (the previous ones were in 1962 and 1985 and were also held at the Tate), which has brought together some of his best works from different periods of his life. This extensive exhibition will then move to the Prado (Madrid) from 3 February–19 April 2009, and then on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York from 18 May–6 August 2009

On entry to the exhibition the viewer is faced with the Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988).1 This immediately sets us on guard. Three menacing beasts, one in each panel, either turn their back to the viewer (as in the left panel) or snarl and snap. !e notable absence of eyes in these figures means that the viewer cannot challenge the positions that we are being placed in because we cannot confront these figures, but are instead confronted by them as they grimace and growl at us. Fixed on podiums, and against a blood-red background, these creatures foretell doom. The monumentality of these figures, each featured on a panel measuring 198 x 147.5 cm and together spread across the entire wall, engulfs the viewer. Even before stepping into the room this painting is visible from the open niche and gives us a foretaste of the show. The conspicuous placement of this triptych is deliberate and gives an indication to the viewer who is perhaps not so familiar with Bacon’s work of the preoccupations of his subject matter and also the alarming effect that his paintings have on viewers.

As the title of this review suggests, I want to demonstrate the preoccupation that Bacon has with themes that are addressed in religion: the relationship between life and death, the role of evil in society, the position of the human being in a world that is bereft of God and of ultimate meaning or purpose. In a world without God, the human is drawn closer to the beast, and this is an ongoing theme in Bacon’s work (which is given a particular focus in Room 1: Animal).

Bacon employs religious symbols, namely the crucifixion (which is the subject of Room 4: Crucifixion) and the figure of the pope (of which there are innumerable examples in the exhibition, from Head VI, 1949, to the papal portraits such as Study after Velázquez, 1950, and Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, 1953). In statements about his work he claimed to be resolutely atheistic. Why then was he relentlessly drawn to these two popular iconographical reference points of the Christian tradition? I suggest that he did not use these symbols to support the Christian narrative or any other theological tradition, but that he used these symbols to explore questions about the meaning of life and existence. He explores the human nature of mortality and the plight of being thrown into a Godless world. The alienation of the individual and the realization of one’s fate are questions relating to what Tillich would describe as being of ultimate concern.

 

Rooms 1 to 4

The exhibition consists of ten rooms, which the viewer weaves his/her way through, and the paintings are largely arranged chronologically (Room 4: Crucifixion is an exception). Each room is given a name that corresponds to the subjects of the works. Room 1: Animal examines the significance of our animal instincts, which are usually latent, and demonstrates what happens when they come to the forefront of human expression. In these instances we experience the brutal, ravening capacities that exist beneath the veneer of civilization. For those unfamiliar with Bacon’s art, this room, rather in the manner of Second Version of Triptych 1944, presents a startling and immediate connection to the central issues of Bacon’s concerns: his expression of the proximity between the human and the animal, and the inevitable mortality that encapsulates the universal condition. !e sense of universality is conveyed by the absence of distinctive features in the works. In Figure in a Landscape (1945) and Figure Study I (1945–1946) the presence of a body is suggested, but the faces are hidden from view. More information is given in Figure Study II (1945–1946) and Painting (1946), where we witness the face that breaks out into a scream. More concentrated studies of the scream are conveyed in Head I (1947–1948) and Head II (1949). In the crossover from the human to the animal, and the generalized sense of despair articulated in these examples, Bacon is conveying the existential predicament of the human in post-war life.

Room 2: Zone focuses attention on another characteristic of Bacon’s work, the pictorial frame. In his works of the early 1950s Bacon was thinking about the presentation of form and he devised the three-dimensional space-frames that operate as powerful devices in his work. They serve to draw attention to the three-dimensional figure within the “pictures’ fictive space” (Gale 2008, 107). Study for a Crouching Nude (1952) and Study after Velázquez’ Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) conveys the effects of this device. In both these examples the striated vertical veil of brushstrokes breaks up the surface of the painting and draws the eye to the focal point of the scream. In the former example it draws attention to the taut musculature, of the body and in the latter example we are led to the point of disintegration, symbolized by the screaming mouth.

The literal darkness of the palette and metaphorical darkness of the sensibility pervades Room 3: Apprehension. The paintings in this room concentrate on a single anonymous male figure in a dark suit. These include Study for a Portrait (1953), Study for a Figure II (1953–1954) and Study for a Portrait (1953), Man in Blue V (1954) and Man in Blue (1954). Other paintings in the room focus on the animalistic tendencies in the human to mate—Two Figures in the Grass (1954) and cry—Chimpanzee (1955). The black backgrounds overwhelm and engulf the viewer, bringing with it a sense of doubt, despair and apprehension, which characterizes the atmosphere of the room. This apprehension is translated into real fear in Room 4: Crucifixion. If Room 3 can be described as encapsulating the anticipation and limbo-state of modern man, then the fears are actualized in Room 4. !e fear and aggression evidenced in the screams and cries of so many of the earlier figures are now taken a step further in the crucifixions, as we see the mechanisms of torture: from the figures who are tortured to the torturers themselves.

 

The crucifixions

In his interviews and written statements Bacon denied using the symbol of the crucifixion in a Christian way to support a particular faith. Among his many explanations he suggested that the crucifixion operated as an armature, which enabled him to explore human relationships and the behaviour of one human to another (Sylvester 1993, 44). The crucifixion revealed the cruelty and violence of human interaction. In three of the four crucifixion images that feature here, Crucifixion (1933), Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) and Crucifixion (1965), at least one figure looks as if it is being crucified. Comparisons are made between Christ on the Cross, which is well represented in the history of art, and the figure on a cross in a generic crucifixion. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion Bacon makes the connection, between the figure in the right hand panel and Cimabue’s Crucifixion 1272–1274, explicit. He states, of the representation of the Christ figure in Cimabue: “I always think of that as an image—as a worm crawling down the cross. I did try to make something of the feeling which I’ve sometimes had from that picture of this image just moving, undulating down the cross” (Sylvester 1993, 14). The interplay of brutality in Bacon’s crucifixions, as seen by the bloodshed of the figures on the cross, or the perpetrators of the act, such as in Second Version of Triptych 1944, and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) reinforces the sacrificial dimensions of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, and the concomitant religious feelings that this act symbolizes. The viewer is indirectly made aware of the ramifications of this act, even if they do not subscribe to the faith. The symbol of the crucifixion, which has been banalized and sanitized, now takes on a renewed sense of aesthetic and spiritual focus. The irony is that Bacon may be vehemently atheistic, but by continually referring to the crucifixion he is drawing attention to the very tradition he denies. His atheistic stance is dependent on the affirmation of theism in the first place. In the Godless world of Bacon’s generation, the propensity for violence and brutality is given a sharper focus and these sentiments are expressed in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944).

This painting is comprised of three strange figures separated into three panels with each figure on a podium and placed against a burnt orange background. It has already been referred to in Second Version of Triptych 1944, which as the title suggests was clearly influenced by this earlier triptych. Three Studies was painted in 1944 and exhibited for the first time at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945. This is now regarded as a seminal painting because it established Bacon into the art world. The art critic John Russell described this work as causing “a total consternation” (Russell 1993, 10–11). In contrast to the other exhibits in the 1945 show, Bacon’s contribution was regarded warily and offered a vision that many would have preferred to put behind them. Instead of deflecting or distracting the focus from post-war malaise, Bacon fixed the focus entirely on suffering, pain and despair, which these three figures articulate. These Tiresian figures are prophets of eternal doom. They cannot see and we are placed in this space to see what is in front of us. These figures, like the figures in the Second Version forty years later, are incomprehensible forms that defy easy classification. They have qualities that are unmistakably human and also animal/bird-like. In the earlier example, it becomes apparent that the reference to the crucifixion

in the title is not reflected in the image itself—the crucifixion is absent. Furthermore, contrary to one’s immediate reflection on the title, we are not looking at the, but at a, crucifixion (Russell 1993, 11). The use of the indefinite article alters the potential meaning of the work, and may provide explanations for his repeated use of the symbol. Bacon is discussing the crucifixion in a more generic sense. Given the political context of post-war Europe, it is plausible that this is a statement on the violence of wartime, but also more banally in day-to-day living. In his interviews with Sylvester Bacon spoke of the pervasive sense of violence that he felt he lived with (Sylvester 1993, 81–82). His background and early childhood were certainly tumultuous. His early memories were of upheaval due to the First World World. He also experienced the Blitz of the Second World War and the Irish Civil War (growing up as a Protestant in Catholic Ireland).

The presence of Second Version of Triptych 1944 on the way into Room 1 is a reminder of the monumental effects that the earlier “version,” Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, had on its viewers and singles this motif out as being amongst the most powerful in Bacon’s oeuvre. If the 1944 example established Bacon in the art world, then this second version undoubtedly consolidated his reputation. One possible attribution of the figures in the 1944 example is that of the Furies who seek eternal justice and hunt down wrongdoers. These Furies stalk us on our journey through the exhibition from room to room and appear in different guises.

The main themes reflected in the exhibition are Bacon’s preconception with the human form and the ontological questions about the status and place of the human being in the late twentieth century. In all his depictions, whether of anonymous and generic figures who epitomise the human condition, or in more specific studies of his friends in the portraits (the subject of Room 7), Bacon examines the mortality of the flesh and the proximity between life and death. These concerns are revisited in the final room, Room 10: Late. In these later works, which Bacon painted when he was in his seventies, he is seen facing up to his mortality. The disintegration or dissolution of figures’ heads and the palpability of the shadows (of death) in Triptych (1983) reveal the workings of death.

 

Religious musings

Interpretations of the religious content and sensibility of Bacon’s work are often thwarted in Bacon scholarship. Many defer to the endless statements that he made about his virulent atheistic stance. They interpret his use of the religious images as formal devices, which allowed him to explore aspects of human nature, but they do not concede a religious explanation of behaviour. I argue that his attitude to religion was problematic, but we can speak of the implicit religion in his work. His images do not support a theological tradition and hence cannot be described as explicit, but they do engage in theological debates and speak of existence in a Godless world. God is featured as a palpably absent presence: the grimace of a biomorphic form, a shadow that overspills a body, the numerous dark, black abyssal backgrounds. Bacon dealt with the primary themes about the meaning and purpose of existence by examining the mortality of the flesh and the intricacies of human behaviour. In the absence of any of the religious structures of the afterlife, his figures are left contemplating the void. The reflecting surfaces of the glass, coupled with the spatial inclusion of the triptych devices pulls the viewer in. We see our reflections in the glass and are variously positioned in a cage, at the base of a crucifixion and in a background where we find no familiarity and hence no solace. The Godless world is not a myth that is narrated to us but something that we are confronted with in the very fabric of the work.

I walked around the rooms sometimes following the rooms in sequence and at other times backtracking. The gravitas of the first image preyed on my mind and became weighted down by other similar images of distortion and degeneration. Bacon is inescapably imparting a message about the human condition that is pessimistic insofar as it makes us engage with our mortality and transient position in the world but it is also uplifting because it is energizing and has an urgency and immediacy that makes us rethink our place in the world. I walked away feeling that I had experienced a narrative of the evolution of the human which turns back in on itself thus revealing the animal in the human. Somehow this did not feel stultifying but progressive and paradoxical. !rough his sophisticated pictorial technique Bacon takes the viewer back to the natural body, which is undone of all its cultural fetters, and we experience it in all its spasmodic ways.

 

Critical appraisal

The arrangement of the paintings enabled the amateur to make sense of the broad themes of Bacon’s oeuvre, and, for the more accomplished viewer, to trace the development of Bacon’s style and technique. Whilst the division into named rooms is interesting, it might have been valuable to make more thematic comparisons. Bacon was a painter who emphasised the importance of process and the influence that chance exerted in his work. However, this was not adequately conveyed in the selection of images. The curators deliberately chose his masterpieces but it might have been an interesting contrast to see lesser works, whether in development or technique, in order to make the adjustment. The array of works was at times simply too much to take in, and certainly so for one visit, but when I considered the volume of work against the purpose of the show—a retrospective and a commemoration of his centenary—then I began to revise my opinion. The earliest wall text states that philosophical notions run through the exhibition like a spine, but there was a dearth of philosophical commentary to bolster the images, or rather the wall texts did not provide adequate information. !is could be construed positively, to make the case that the power of Bacon’s paintings is such that they can speak for themselves and do not require texts to impart meaning.

Another apparent mismatch between intention and delivery was the presence of Room 6: Archive. In 1998, John Edwards (Bacon’s former lover) gave the contents of Bacon’s studio and living space at 7 Reece Mews (in South Kensington) to the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. An incredible amount of source material, preparatory sketches, photographs etc was unearthed in the reconstruction and transplantation from the first to the second site. Room 6 chronicled the posthumous investigation of Bacon’s studio. This body of sources was revelatory because it gave us important information about Bacon’s working processes and modus operandi. In his statements and articulations of the brush on canvas it would appear that Bacon utilized the role of chance in his work, the accidental mark. The virtuosity of his brushwork in the examples of images from Room 1 to 5 certainly indicated this. The archival material presented here revealed the mismatch between Bacon’s statements and his actual practice, as it was revealed from photographic and other sources that he did preparatory paintings. The evidence here to a greater or lesser extent undermines his professions of spontaneity, the role he awarded to chance and intuition.

Whilst I understand the significance of this archive material both in authenticating Bacon’s method of working and also as contributing to Bacon scholarship, I feel that it was poorly placed here. It was deeply idiosyncratic and strange to go from Room 5: Crisis, to the orderliness of the archive. It interrupted the flow of being absorbed in the depth of his visions to having suddenly to retract from those recesses to a stark room filled with a proliferation of images and sanitized glass cases containing source material. !e wealth of material was tremendous and had been classified with astonishing precision. But it would have been well placed in an adjunct room, or at the beginning or end of the journey. !e experience of the subsequent rooms represented a deviation from Rooms 1 to 5 and invoked a more critical perspective on Bacon’s intentions. Bacon left an indelible mark on my imagination when I first discovered his work in 1998 and this exhibition bears testimony to this great artist. In spite of the familiarity of individual pieces of his work, which fetch millions at auction houses, and the growing trend of contemporary artists to explore distortion and the grotesque, Bacon’s art still has the power to wound and strike the nervous sensibilities of the viewer. In his engagement with the pain and suffering of the mortal condition, his portrayal of the evil in humankind, of the reality of the death of God and the subsequent redundancy of the symbol of the Pope in the contemporary age, Bacon can be said to be working out problems that are resolutely religious. He was a militant atheist who was haunted by the presence that the absent-God exerted in the world.

 

Note

1. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988 is featured as the tail end of Room 10: Late. However, we actually see the painting before we enter Room 1.

 

References

Gale, M. 2008. “Zone.” In Francis Bacon, edited by M. Gale and C. Stephens, xx-xx. London: Tate Publishing.

Russell, J. 1993. Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson.

Sylvester, D. 1993. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson.

 

 

 

 

CBS 2 At The Met: Francis Bacon

 

 

 

DANA TYLER  |  REPORTING  |  CBS 2 NEWS  |  SUNDAY AUGUST 2 2009

 

NEW YORK (CBS) ― Brace yourself for artist Francis Bacon. Passionate about painting, the Dublin-born Bacon, who never went to art school, is considered one of the most influential European painters of the 20th century.

In this exhibition, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Bacon’s birth, the artist’s twisted, tortured human figures, and dramatic interpretations of screeching religious icons, demand your attention.
Surrounded by 65 dark, and dramatic works, at the met, you might think bacon was a tormented soul. But Curator Gary Tinterow tells CBS2’s Dana Tyler, "Actually he was a very cheerful person. He talked about not believing in God, being a confirmed atheist. But he said there is no meaning to life, there is only meaning one gives it through daily work, through what we achieve on a daily basis. There’s no predetermination he would say, but he would say I’m an optimist, an optimist about nothing. In other words, there’s not grand scheme but he took pleasure in his daily life."

World War II is the subject in Three Studies For Figures at the base of the Crucifixion from 1944. For Curator Gary Tinterow, it’s the most remarkable painting in the exhibition. He said, "This is a work that Bacon showed in London in April 1944. The month when Mussolini was hung. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, and FDR died in the United States. So it was a earth changing, shattering, momentous moment. And he releases this painting that he had been working on for about a year showing these strange, nightmarish creatures that look like an amoeba. We recognize that we want to anthropomorphize them and we want to see human aspects right in the mouth and the eye. But they’re horrific."

Tyler says, "Of course my eye is drawn here?" Tinterow responds, "Yeah, and the mouth is so fascinating with Bacon. Bacon said many times that I’m fascinated by mouth. He had books on diseases of the mouth and radiology."

Bacon was fascinated by Nazi imagery. A 1946 work, called Painting, shows Adolph Hitler’s reception room in his chancellory in Berlin.

Tinterow: "The architecture of power and that’s the statement that he wanted to make with his pictures. He wanted to explore our fascination with power. Our complicity and holding people up who in fact are just empty hallow men. And the colors are meant to be shocking and vibrant and harsh and to go against conventions of good taste. He wanted to, he said, unlock the valves of feeling, in other words he wanted to grab you by your guts."

Bacon’s personal life plays out on canvas, in his 1971 triptych In Memory of George Dyer. Tinterow explains, "This is one of the most moving pictures in the exhibition because it was painted after his companion, long time lover, and his muse George Dyer, who is seen there on the right, committed suicide in their Paris hotel room the night before his big opening of a retrospective at the grand palace. Bacon went on to the opening and pretended nothing had happened but it was tremendously devastating for him."

An artist who never lost his edge, Francis Bacon died in Madrid in 1992. He was 82 years old. Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, on display until August 16th.

 

 

 

 

 

BACON, HALF-BAKED

 

 

 

BEN DAVIS  |  REVIEW  |  ARTNET MAGAZINE  |  TUESDAY 28 JULY 2009

 

The large Francis Bacon show currently drawing multitudes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art really speaks for itself. You don’t need any theory to love it. The hits are all there — the wailing Popes, the naked wrestlers, the melted portraits of the British artist’s colleagues and lovers. All of these are crowd-pleasers, exuding an atmosphere of fertile angst that is immediately accessible. (The first thing you see as you enter, in fact, is Bacon’s triptych of serpentine, phallic monsters, inspiration for the chest-bursting creature of Alien fame, a curatorial decision that hammers home the populist appeal of Bacon.)

As I passed through the galleries one Tuesday morning with the crowds, however, I recalled that despite the horror-movie vibe of it all, there is a particular reference that gives Bacon’s work a sheen of intellectual mystique for me: Gilles Deleuze’s small book, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, first published in 1981. The much-cited postmodern philosopher, part of the canon in any college theory class, was a Bacon fan. That fact by itself has always made Bacon’s work seem somehow important in a way it might not otherwise have.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I know because the Met show quotes Deleuze in its wall text about one of the iconic Pope paintings: “Bacon’s scream is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth.” Every single writer in the Met catalogue feels bound to reference Deleuze’s book (though Martin Harrison does acknowledge that Deleuze is wrong to ascribe to Bacon a fundamentally anti-narrative agenda; more on this in a sec.) Even Bacon’s biographer, Michael Peppiatt, whose Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma was recently republished to coincide with this show, tells us that Deleuze’s treatise “put discussion of Bacon’s painting on a new plane of pure, often playful and always inventive intellectual conjecture” — though he doesn’t say that much more about it (Bacon and Deleuze apparently did meet, once, in the early ‘80s; as Peppiatt puts it, “no friendship evolved”.

A few years ago, University of Minnesota Press sent me a copy of a new edition of The Logic of Sensation when it was reissued in a new translation. After seeing the show at the Met, I decided to pick it up and see if its insights still held today.

I’ll spare a build up and say that I don’t think The Logic of Sensation does hold up to scrutiny (though any book that contains a sentence as crazy as “The head-meat is a becoming-animal of man” can’t be all bad either). Before I get into the details of why, however, I will note that Deleuze’s sibylline manner, which I think connotes a sense of timeless intellectual mystery for his admirers, today strikes me as a dated, period style. Overcomplex and bombastic, it’s a bit like the philosophical equivalent of prog rock. The Logic of Sensation was published the same year Rush released Tom Sawyer — coincidence? (Deleuze himself would probably prefer a comparison to Talking Heads; he quotes Crosseyed and Painless somewhere in this book.)

What, in essence, is Deleuze’s argument about Francis Bacon? The Logic of Sensation amounts to 17 tangentially connected essays, each one a different formal/philosophical analysis of one aspect of Bacon’s practice. Deleuze considers, to pick a few random examples, the fact that Bacon tends to isolate figures in a round area at the center of the frame; the recurrence of animal imagery in his paintings; his recourse to the triptych format; and his use of colors. He postulates a common “logic” that underlies all these various choices. In essence, Deleuze sees in Bacon’s liquescent brand of Expressionism an illustration of his own philosophical thesis that what is most real about bodies is their virtuality, their irreducibility to any one fixed form or identity. Thus, for Deleuze, the isolation of Bacon’s figures at the center of the frame is a way of cutting them out of any narrative relation that would ascribe to them a fixed meaning; the animal imagery reflects the blurring of the self and other; the triptych is a way of showing different aspects of a single form without reducing it to a common essence; and Bacon’s use of colour is a way of escaping the hypostatizing effect of linear representation, instead rendering spaces and bodies as flows of mercurial energy (“Each dominant colour and each broken tone indicates the immediate exercise of a force on the corresponding zone of the body or head; it immediately renders force visible.”

And what’s wrong with all of this? Nothing — unless you actually take it seriously. I’ll proceed through four counts, from the most inconsequential to the most compromised aspect of Deleuze’s adoption of Bacon.

First of all, Deleuze’s adventure into art is thrilling — but when he actually tries to talk about art history, he plays so fast and loose with references that it is distorting. One of Deleuze’s least helpful contributions to understanding Bacon, for instance, is his pronouncement that “Bacon first of all seems to be an Egyptian.” This is fine as a superficial bit of colour — there’s nothing outrageous about the observation that Bacon’s squashed spaces might resemble the absolute space of Egyptian art a little. But this is not a flourish for Deleuze; he repeats it multiple times, and actually seems to think that Bacon’s Egyptian-ness is a matter of world-historical import. When he asks the reader what accounts for the difference between Bacon’s painting and Egyptian art, Deleuze actually replies by stating the following: “What is at stake here is no longer just Bacon, but undoubtedly the entire history of Western painting” (Gotta love how art theorists who reject all historical “meta-narratives” can let a statement like that slide). But then it turns out what is important about “Egyptian art" for Deleuze is just one thing — bas-relief, an art form which (so he says) collapses the opposition between visual and haptic space, a quality that Deleuze also values in Bacon’s painting. Never mind that bas-relief is not really particular to Egypt, or that there is really a lot more to Egyptian art than bas-relief. . . I suppose if I defined an apple as any sweet round fruit, then an orange would also be an apple.

Second, while the power of The Logic of Sensation is due largely to what translator Daniel W. Smith calls Deleuze’s “extraordinarily specific and detailed analyses of individual paintings,” in fact the account has a yawning blind spot when it comes to the actual work of Francis Bacon. If you had to describe the characteristic tone of Bacon’s imagery, you’d probably think of claustrophobia, of dread, of a sense of visceral repulsion. And yet, Gilles Deleuze’s entire argument is based on bracketing this aspect of the work out as insignificant. From Deleuze’s own introduction to his book: “Bacon, to be sure, often traffics in the violence of a depicted scene: spectacles of horror, Crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters. But these are overtly facile detours. . . What directly interests him is a violence that is involved only with colour and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation).” Later, he tells us that “Bacon’s deformations are rarely constrained or forced, they are not tortures, despite appearances,” and still later, he asserts that Bacon “is not a painter who ‘believes’ in death. His is indeed a figurative misérabilisme, but one that serves an increasingly powerful Figure of life.”

But no, wrong — Bacon’s paintings are inescapably about crucifixions, monsters, torture, death, albeit of a surreal variety. That is part of their “logic." A work like Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (1961), on view at the Met, is pregnant with all sorts of meanings — but it does invoke the image of a disabled child, and owes some of its impact to the fact that this referent is explicit (we can be certain, because it is citing a frame from an Eadweard Muybridge serial photo). Deleuze, admittedly, is interested in championing the concept of the “diagram,” a manner of representing bodies that, he tells us, doesn’t try to replicate an original referent, but instead strives toward “a creation of original relations that are substituted for the form.” Apparently, such an operation renders subject matter indifferent; or, better said, it seems that technique is the only real subject matter for Deleuze. In effect, what Deleuze is doing is saying that Bacon is not “really” interested in what he is clearly most interested in, then rhapsodizing over how well his own edited version of the work fits his own thesis

Now, of course, one can argue that some secret life-affirming force is at work underneath Bacon’s imagery of horror and loneliness — but in that case, you still have to account for how the explicit and buried contents interact. If Bacon’s painting is fundamentally about unleashing powerful flows of desire, why do these primarily manifest themselves through horrific imagery? It is not as if sometimes he paints blood and ghouls, and sometimes he paints rainbows and frolicking puppies; he’s not indifferent to content. Similarly, it is no good to state that what is most fundamental about Bacon is a bracketing out of all narrative suggestion, when this is clearly not the case — at the Met, a work like Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI (1957), a depiction of the shadowy Dutchman slouching across a yellow field weighed down by painting instruments, as if in a funk, proves that Bacon is interested in plugging his paintings into recognizable figures and stories, however fragmentary. (As a matter of fact, you can even say he had a taste for stories — Peppiatt notes that the van Gogh series was inspired by the Kirk Douglas film Lust for Life!)

Deleuze fans will say that the philosopher is not interested in “interpreting” paintings, but in generating new ideas about them. However, if such a method is not going to operate just as a license to make shit up, it must be based on a reading of the actual material at hand. In his famous readings of philosophers, Deleuze prided himself on a method of overreading, using their own words to create something new and “monstrous” by pushing their internal logic to its limit — “the author had to say, in effect, everything I made him say.” This is not the method he follows in the much more openly “monstrous” case of Bacon’s art. Here he is simply superimposing his own affirmative philosophy onto his object.

Both of these problems with Deleuze’s reading of Bacon — his haphazard use of history, his tone-deafness when it comes to the paintings themselves — are symptoms of a more fundamental issue of approach. For, despite his attentiveness to specific artworks, it is not really art that interests Deleuze. He is only interested in art as it relates to a specific problem in philosophy, which is the representation of being. Thus, the history of art and the quirks of Bacon’s particular oeuvre both get reduced to responses to the dilemmas of representation — the space of “classical” painting, for Deleuze, is reducible to a manner of establishing an “objective” space which separates out the subject from the object, while he defines the achievement of Bacon as having to do with the way his work undoes this separation, collapsing visual space and returning the subject to its vital co-dependence with its environment.

There is some truth to this reading (though I will take David Harvey’s account of the Renaissance production of “objective” perspectival space as a function of a nascent mercantile capitalism’s needs for objective cartography and scientific knowledge over Deleuze’s placeless, causeless account any day). The real problem lies in the way that The Logic of Sensation reads artworks as nothing more than responses to intellectual problems, turning philosophical pertinence into a device for evaluating artistic quality. Despite the protestations of both his translator and Tom Conley, who writes an afterward for the most recent edition of the book, The Logic of Sensation does in fact amount to a philosophical aesthetics. It is full of casual generalizations about the ontology of art that are used as evaluative tools. Take the following: “[T]here is a special relation between painting and hysteria. . . Painting directly attempts to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation.” Deleuze then goes on to judge the success of various styles of painting against this definition of painting’s essence.

The paradoxical result, given this thinker’s reputation as a champion of difference, is that various artworks are conceived of as offering right or wrong answers, thereby strictly limiting the modes of appreciating art: “There are two ways in which the [modern] painting can fail,” Deleuze pronounces confidently, “once visually” — that would be abstraction of the Mondrian/Kandinsky variety, deemed to be too wrapped up in a quest for ideal Forms — “and once manually.” The latter case is that of Pollock-style abstraction, which Deleuze finds not merely distasteful, but demonstrably false. “By liberating a space that is (wrongly) claimed to be purely optical, the abstract expressionists in fact did nothing other than to make visible an exclusively manual space.” Marcel Duchamp, likewise, comes under fire for being too random, and therefore still implicitly posing a difference between human agency and impersonal chance. In the end, it seems Deleuze’s theory is only flexible enough to accommodate Cézanne, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Bacon.

Which brings me to my final point, which is about the self-undermining nature of Deleuzian “logic” in general. Even philosophical rivals like Alain Badiou will admit that Deleuze constructed a system that is formidably suggestive. However, it must be admitted that any attempt to actually do anything with his thought has mainly added up to nothing, or worse. The most successful attempt to put Deleuze’s insights into political form, for instance, is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s tome Empire, a work that essentially amounts to proposing not having a plan as a strategy for the anti-globalization movement (This is not a surprise, really — Deleuze’s frequent role-model was French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose reflections on the "élan vital" famously became reactionary when taken up as a political philosophy; the Bergsonian tendency to leave politics to "the irrational, to chance" is a subject of critique in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks).

Who was Gilles Deleuze? He was a French leftist philosopher who wrote all his major works in the ’60s and ’70s, most of them in the wake of the uprising of May 1968. As such, his work partakes of the sense of radical intellectual experimentation of that period, but also of the New Left’s disillusionment with material and historical explanations for reality (somewhat understandable, given the Stalinized nature of the French Communist Party’s politics, and the major role it played in French intellectual life). The philosophy Deleuze offers, in his book on Francis Bacon and elsewhere, gets much of its appeal because it still resounds with liberatory rhetoric. We live in a world that brutally instrumentalizes bodies, tries to sell people unrealistic Platonic ideals of what they can be — so Deleuze’s anti-Platonist philosophy that bodies cannot be confined to any one definition, that they are indisociably part of a constantly surging flux of self-differentiating energy, has a potent social content. (It’s always worth remembering that Deleuze, like his colleague Michel Foucault, had a famous — if equivocal — association with the gay liberation movement.)

Nevertheless, the problem with Deleuze’s attempt to write difference into ontology is that in reality what is “different” is determined in relation to actual, historical events, not in some abstract, free-flowing psychic space. Without anchoring concepts in relation to a real context, there is no way to stop one’s prescriptions from becoming ahistorical formulae, no matter how many times you state that they can’t be. In some contradictory way, I think that it is precisely this formalistic character which explains the continued appeal of Deleuze in art circles today: He allows his followers to insist that they are committed to liberating desire from all pre-established structures, while in fact confining themselves to a pretty narrow, predictable structure (Badiou rightly declares Deleuze’s oeuvre to be conceptually “monotonous” underneath its superficial complexity). In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and collaborator Felix Guattari tell us that philosophy is not about establishing fixed axioms and rules, but about creating new concepts, new trajectories of thought. It should therefore be deeply embarrassing that 99 percent of all writing on Deleuze is simply slavish blow-by-blow recapitulation, and that the Met show pays homage to him as a kind of aphorism-spouting sage.

In the final analysis, Francis Bacon’s oeuvre itself provides a tremendous example of the necessity of a historical approach. Read Jerry Saltz’s recent biographical sketch of Bacon’s career [see Sacred Monster, May 27, 2009]. Whereas in The Logic of Sensation, it often seems that Bacon’s career trajectory is nothing but a circling ever closer to Deleuze’s own position, Saltz shows how Bacon’s style, at one point an expression of a potent and unique worldview, eventually became a gimmick, a defense mechanism. The very same formal tics that had been an expression of an original thought became a way of resisting confronting further original thought. “What’s especially poignant about Bacon is that he knew he’d built his own prison. As early as 1963, he referred to ‘my rigidness.’ He talked about the ‘drawback’ of his style and how he used painterly tics as a ‘device.’ ”

My sense is that these days the gleam is off the postmodern apple. But intellectual life moves slowly, weighed down by the structures of tenure, inherited prestige, institutional inertia and so on. There will always be room for difficult-to-understand figures, simply so that curators and scholars who need to establish some kind of objective authority in the profoundly subjective field of art can invoke something that goes over the head of the average person. But it seems to me that these days the recourse to Deleuze’s flawed Bacon book is its own kind of rigid “reflex,” its own kind of inert intellectual “device.” In invoking its authority, it’s worth wondering whether we aren’t building a prison around Bacon, rather than seeing him well.

BEN DAVIS is associate editor of Artnet Magazine.  

 

 

 

 

 

Night in the Museum

 

 

 
John Haber in New York City
 
 

 

Francis Bacon

 

 

 

JOHN HABER  |  REVIEW  |  HABER ARTS  |  WEDNESDAY, 22 JULY, 2009

 

 

In Three Studies for a Crucifixion by Francis Bacon, no one and everyone is on the cross. Each panel, as the title suggests, may show the same room. Its oval and red walls hint at decorative luxury. Its vomit-yellow carpeting terminates in the dark yellow wainscoting of period England. Repeated across three panels, the room could easily mark an estate.

 

It could also mark a museum. Museums used to affect these lavish tastes, before Modernism’s white cubes, and still may today in much of England. Those black rectangles in place of doors and windows could be the paintings. The towering side of meat at right could be sculpture. The grisly, contorted nude on a couch at center could have come right off the wall. Two men in the middle ground at left, cautiously edging their way toward the center panel, could be trapped in the museum at night. 

 

That pretty much describes, too, the experience of a Bacon retrospective. It also describes the experience of art for Bacon. He had no sympathy for Modernism, but he felt cut off from the past. He could not or would not train academically, in a country that clung to academic standards, but he could not help judging himself accordingly. He paints revulsion—against fine art, against the flesh, and against himself. As in Three Studies for a Crucifixion, even the dead are dying.

 

Biography of a slow death

 

They can take their time doing so. Critics vilified his early work, from the 1930s. And in his usual mix of loathing and self-loathing he burned it all—except for a single Crucifixion. By his death in 1992, at age ninety-two, he had become England’s modernist old master, with two Tate retrospectives in his lifetime. A reactionary like Robert Hughes can champion him, while expressing Hughes’s own revulsion at the work. Most people will know Bacon’s Pope Innocent X better than its source, a portrait by Diego Velázquez. 

 

In that early Crucifixion, he sketches Jesus in quick, white curves like a stick figure. Yet he gives it a solid cross with a traditional footrest, like a sculptural base. In 1944, with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, he already aspires to a triptych. What Bacon gives to art history, he takes away and then gives back again. He often lives much the same way, on a mix of art and petty theft. He drifts to and from Europe, barely getting by.  

 

In his next work, he sticks to heads rather like cows and to half figures in a dark, shallow space. It is again the space of inexplicable torment, and it is again the museum. Hints of a box enclose the figures. It could stand for a jail or a witness stand. A homosexual then faced criminal charges. It could also stand for the glass case for sculpture in older museums.

 

He has discovered Pablo Picasso. Naturally he interprets Cubism as distortion, and naturally he loves it. He has also discovered his most famous subject, the Velázquez portrait in Rome’s Galleria Doria Pamphili. Bacon depicts the pope screaming over and over, to the point of self-parody. Sometimes the picture plane forms vertical stripes or a kind a veil across and through the figure. It, too, is a kind of dismemberment and confinement.

 

Bacon has a new lover in the 1950s and early 1960s—and his most intense work. It includes Three Studies for a Crucifixion, from 1962. It includes a sudden burst of colour into drawing, in an imitation after Vincent van Gogh, whose free charcoal strokes also influence a painting of a baboon. This lover dies of various forms of self-abuse. The artist starts over, while he returns to the same compositions. In the late 1960s, again with a new lover, Bacon finds a larger scale, calmer colours, and a kind of openness.

 

His subject, however, remains harsh. When this lover dies of an overdose, the artist finishes his career with an extended memorial. It may signal a final repose, a well-earned simplicity, or more glib repetition. A shadow or a bloodstain may interrupt an open expanse. A repeated head may seem to melt. And it, too, is likely to form a triptych—displayed, as always with Bacon, behind museum glass.

 

Tiptoeing around Modernism

 

None of this may mean much to Americans. It can seem like internecine warfare in a country that never quite got it. Margaret Thatcher still considered Bacon’s art immoral. By her time, too, it had become modern. Even now, one can see critics straining to be fair—and to tiptoe around his relationship to Modernism. I am doing the same thing.

 

A magazine profile evokes the psychic drama of Bacon’s homosexuality. It also describes the art as "cartoonish" and the late work as worthless. A newspaper review seems to defend it, but the reviewer repeats several times that she must withhold judgment. "You may love or hate his work," but she has a job to do in describing it. Another critic says at the start that he will stick up for American art. Then he qualifies his account to the point that neither nation is a winner.

 

The Met and the Tate, which together originated the show, strain in order to boast. Gary Tinterow, the Met’s curator, compares Bacon’s flat colours to Mark Rothko. Bacon did much the same thing, although without mentioning Rothko. In his Heads from the 1940s, he said that he was exploring every shade of an open mouth. In practice, they all look slate grey, and the edges of the canvas look emptier still. Colour interrupts at last, all at once, in the rich purple of the papal cloak. Even then, it enters as symbolism rather than as formalism.

 

The Irish-born artist truly belongs to England—along with what Jed Perl, ever the angry conservative, calls his "literary sensationalism." It echoes his lifelong status as an outsider. If he had a breakthrough, most would name Painting of 1946. That work gives flayed flesh the outstretched arms of a Crucifixion. In front of it, the misshapen man carries an umbrella. René Magritte would recognize him as a Londoner.

 

Modern art did not have to fuss so much over the past, or did it? It could break with art history, as with the Futurist manifesto, without looking back. It could appropriate the past tenderly and mournfully, as with Joseph Cornell. It could parody the past joyfully, as with Dada. It could claim its inheritance from the Louvre and Nicolas Poussin,with confidence, through Paul Cézanne. It could also descend into violence, especially in performance.

 

By the same token, Bacon has an ironic heritage today, now that the struggles are past. As Roberta Smith notes, the Young British Artists are incomprehensible without him. For Tracy Emin, her whole life is about sex in the meat market. The late Picasso, too, struggles with Velázquez. And then Martin Kippenberger ends his short career with self-portraits after Picasso. Where Picasso looks quizzical, weary, or jaunty, Kippenberger looks simply in ruins—like a head by Bacon.

 

A revulsion at art

 

Bacon has managed to become both postmodern and quaint. On the postmodern side, he is tailor-made for Julia Kristeva and her Powers of Horror. Kristeva, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, could have captured his revulsion, with what she calls abjection. She describes it as a condition of the marginalized, outside the "symbolic order" and before words. She also considers it central to art, much as for Antonin Artaud’s "theatre of cruelty." Early on, Bacon in fact devoured an ancestor of her canon, Nietzsche, and he liked to say that he painted meat because it is beautiful.

 

One might, I hope, refuse to accept revulsion—or Bacon’s life—as a given for homosexuality. He may have hated himself, but he knew what he was doing. In a photograph of 1951 by Cecil Beaton, he shrinks back against a wall of framed art. He looks like a figure out of Magic Realism or a slightly puffy William F. Buckley. A notoriously charming bully, he is going along with the game and creating the illusion. And yet he means it, too.

 

He paints Velázquez from postcards, many of them. Even when he is in Rome, he avoids seeing it in person. He never paints from life, and the Met supplements its sixty-six paintings with a packed room of photographs. As usual, the loathing cuts both ways. Is he refusing academic tradition, or is he unable to deal with the flesh? Art history is dead, and nothing else will replace it.

 

It is clearly a place of confinement. In Three Studies for a Crucifixion, its shape and colours press in. The right panel has no windows all—just an extra partition and, behind it, a circle of bones on the floor. Alternatively, that partition could represent another sculptural display case and another enclosure. Sides of meat or perhaps fighting dogs, flatly painted, press against the picture plane at left. Another shadow laps up from the bottom of the picture plane at right.

 

The scene is also the place of art. Despite the title, one can see the three panels as a single drama, like a Renaissance triptych. The figures at left face toward the center, like disciples at the foot of the cross. Even so, they follow ambivalently. They may sneak about, and they refuse to swoon. Bacon has also displaced the closest parallel to a Crucifixion to the right panel.

 

The two men at left could stand for him and a lover. Bacon is furtive and trapped, but also desperate to enter the main action. The man behind him hangs back, his arms thrust out. Is he impatient, defiant, or just a thug? He does not notice that this brings him in closer parallel to the meat. Bacon is drawn to both and in revulsion at both, and no one can appreciate his revulsion but himself.

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 16, 2009.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon’s Strange Sizzle

 

 

 

BY MARIO NAVES  |  ARTS  |  THE NEW YORK OBSERVER  |  SUNDAY 19 JULY 2009

   

“Francis Bacon”, a retrospective timed to the centenary anniversary of the artist’s birth (he died in 1992 at the age of 83) is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his toothy monsters, humping, anonymous men and slabs of meat installed directly off the European wing, a stone’s throw from Rembrandt, Goya and Velazquez.

Bacon would have been pleased by the proximity. Though his contorted figures owe a significant debt to Picasso—their roiling distortions being an almost sculptural equivalent of Cubism’s pictorial fracturing—Bacon’s charnel-house dioramas are, in pivotal ways, unmodern. (Given Bacon’s distaste for abstraction, the pictures could be considered anti-modern.) The ready-made gravitas and epic nature inherent in the tradition of Western painting suited Bacon’s flashy ambitions—hence, the bald reliance on Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and the heaving musculature of Michelangelo’s nudes.

But Bacon was, if not a strict Modernist, then certainly a creature of the modern age. A niggling strain of Surrealism infiltrates the work, as does the collage aesthetic: His compositions are piecemeal affairs, with their uninflected planes of flat color, malleable forms and decal-like figures. His philosophical mien, a lean variant of Nietzschean atheism, is reflective of a more-jaded-than-thou postwar intellectualism. “I haven’t got any morals to preach,” Bacon stated. “I just work as closely to my nerves as I can.” A miserable narcissism permeates the work.

Then there’s the almost Warholian poaching of mass media. Bacon mimicked to startling effect the filmed image—his gauzy slurs of oil paint take on a ghostly, cinematic allure. His sources ranged from Eisenstein’s Battlship Potemkin and Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion to beefcake magazines like MANifique and Man-O-Rama, newspaper clippings of Himmler and Goebbels and photo-booth self-portraits. You can see actual examples of Bacon’s image stockpile at the Met, much of it grubby with paint. It’s a devastating testament to Bacon’s paintings that the reference materials are sometimes more diverting than what he made of them.

The Met show is fairly selective, but it’s endless all the same. How much designer Grand Guignol does one person need? Bacon’s vaunted embrace of chance incident—that would be the ejaculatory blurts of paint flung directly from the tube—are no less false than the late triptychs, wherein we see an artist who’s become a sheepish victim to his own style. It’s the overweening calculation of Bacon’s art, its soulless theatricality, that marks him not as a descendant of the Old Masters but as a progenitor of corporate nihilists like Damian Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Jenny Saville. Like them, Bacon makes a provocative first impression, but then leaves us with little more than a cold rush of artifice.

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until August 16th

 

 

 

 

Bacon and the Old Masters

 

 

 

RICHARD LACAYO  |  REVIEW  |  TIME  |  WEDNESDAY 15 JULY 2009

 

I was at the Metropolitan Museum today for another look at the terrific Francis Bacon retrospective that I’ve written about a few times. What struck me this time is how being surrounded by galleries of Old Masters at the Met brought forward aspects of Bacon’s work that didn’t come to mind so readily when I first saw the show last year at Tate Modern in London.

At the Tate you could go from the Bacon show to the Tate’s permanent collection, which is strictly 20th century, and your thoughts were turned to how Bacon stood in relation to other postwar artists, to the anxiety in Giacometti or the Year Zero distortions of form in Dubuffet. Which is another way of saying it was the desolate quality of the Bacons that got reinforced in the other galleries.

But at the Met you’re decanted from the last Bacon gallery straight into a room of 16th and 17th century Italian painting, including a couple of Caravaggios, and you find yourself thinking about Bacon’s affinities with a more distant past. You realize that his stutter stop way of applying paint reminds you of Tintoretto and that his big backgrounds of monochrome color have sources in Velázquez as well as Ellsworth Kelly. Not that Bacon would ever have acknowledged a debt to Kelly.

We know of course that Bacon was infatuated with one particular Velázquez, the Portrait of Pope Innocent X, which he used as the jumping off point for his long series of screaming Popes. And it’s perfectly obvious that he quotes liberally in his work from Michelangelo, classical sculpture and whatever other sources he needs.

But what struck me this time wasn’t simply that Bacon quotes from the past but that he works in the line of a particular type of painterly virtuosity that stretches back to Velázquez and Tintoretto, to name just two. He was exploiting — insisting upon, glorying in — the sensual power of paint, its power to impart pleasure, even while he was using it to make scenes of utter dejection. It had never occurred to me before how much of the fascination of his work rests on the tension between Bacon the existential desperado and Bacon the voluptuary. What other word can you use?

 

 

 

 

  A Histrionic Horror Show

 

 

 

 

BY LANCE ESPLUND  |  ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT  |  THE WALL STREET JOURNAL  |  JULY 8, 2009

 

You do not have to be squeamish to dislike the paintings of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), the Irish-born British artist who painted crucified sides of beef; screaming popes and apes with gaping mouths; headless bodies, bodiless heads; and contorted, copulating figures who resemble balls of flayed and knotted flesh. Your aversion to Bacon’s work may lie in how, not what, he painted. Perhaps you, like me, favour formal coherence over stilted melodrama. The French painter Balthus, who considered Bacon a great friend, never cared for his work. Aligning Bacon’s grotesqueries with those of Lucian Freud, Balthus said in a 1994 interview, "The idea of craft is taken away. And what has been given is that strange taste for horror. And who can explain to me from where that comes? That shrinking back from beauty . . . ?"

Bacon’s "strange taste for horror" and "shrinking back from beauty" are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the artist is being honored with a centenary retrospective of some 65 paintings and an equal number of archival items. The exhibition, which originated at the Tate Britain and was organized in New York by Gary Tinterow, has transformed one of the Met's most prestigious suites of galleries into something closer to an amusement-park funhouse. Bacon worked almost exclusively from photographs, and along with the gory and sexually overt scenes he painted is a densely installed gallery devoted to the artist’s sources: mostly magazine clippings and photos — including scenes of eroticism, violence and athleticism — as well as some sketches and Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of humans and animals in motion.

Bacon is considered by many art-world aficionados to be one of the most significant and influential artists of the 20th century. Since his death, museums and collectors have pushed the auction prices for his works ever-higher. Influential Bacon most certainly is. But his significance seems largely due to the "prescience" with which many critics and historians credit him. Bacon is a standard bearer for current art world tendencies — tendencies that include the slick, photo-realistic smudges of Gerhard Richter, the sensationalist videos of Bill Viola, and Jenny Saville’s monstrosities of flesh. Perhaps instead of being lauded for being prophetic, Bacon should be singled out for influencing artists to take the path of least resistance.

In the early 1940s, Bacon made his name as an angst-ridden, self-taught figurative painter in Blitz-bludgeoned London. A Surrealist as much as an Expressionist, Bacon shunned abstraction and, after World War II, believed that the world needed nothing less than a viciously honest figurative art that mirrored man’s brutality. His macabre, psychosexual paintings merge blurred, cinematic effects (after the Futurists) and rites of torture (after the martyrdom of saints). They are the disfigured, film-age offspring of the carnage of war and the animalism of sex. Unfortunately, Bacon was first and foremost a calculated illustrator prone to mannerisms, hyperbole and histrionics. His art skims the surface of the human condition, never getting to the real business of psychological portraiture.

The show opens with Crucifixion (1933) and Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. 1944), the painting that launched Bacon on the London scene. Crucifixion, possibly influenced by Rembrandt’s and Soutine's sides of beef or Chardin’s Ray, is a black-and-white painting of a crucified, surrealistic shape — a white form that resembles a ghostly skeleton or an X-ray. Three Studies is a triptych (a common format of Bacon’s). Each of its three panels contains a monstrous phallic form, baring teeth, that occupies the center of an orange ground.

Many of Bacon’s paintings isolate the action or figure, as if on a stage or in a circus arena, within a single-coloured void — a technique later seen by some as a harbinger of Pop art. The large, bold, flat planes of colour — red, orange, yellow, black, grey, pink or mint-green — are Bacon at his best. These are the colours of pills and waiting rooms; and Bacon can give medicinal, almost bodily fluid weight to these hues. Here Bacon comes closest to some of the religious art he emulates, that of the Byzantine era, in which fully formed Madonnas, for instance, are held in tension within the flat, gold leaf ground. But Bacon's forms — all of those snarling mouths, human stains, swirling phalluses and torrents of paint — remain caricatures that have no volume, weight or tension in the plane. Bacon’s paintings of figures — floating or squirming in expanses of emptiness — rather than explore an idea about isolation, tend merely to leave the paintings feeling empty.

The show, organized in loosely chronological order, continues through Bacon’s homosexual lovers, wrestlers, murderers, self-portraits and portraits. His paintings very loosely inspired by van Gogh and those made after Velázquez demonstrate virtually no understanding of what these masters were doing.

Despite variations in subject or approach, Bacon’s work tends to follow the same strident path from 1933 through 1991. Often, while walking through the exhibit, I felt that the single greatest problem was that Bacon abandoned his figures too soon — that he could not nail them, or his own feelings about them, down. I believe that this ambivalence, fuelled by his misunderstanding of the artists he looked up to, forced him to rely on artifice and theatrics. In the end, Bacon’s forms are formless, aborted — stillborn — as if the artist had left them out in the cold. Their sense of isolation and abandonment feels not like an exploration of the frailty of the human condition but, rather, like a shortcoming of the artist himself.

 

 

 

 

 

We’re All Screaming Popes

 

 

 

 

LAURIE FENDRICH  |  THE CHRONICLE REVIEW  |  THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION   |  JULY 8, 2009

 

Broadly speaking, the Irish-born painter Francis Bacon was an expressionist, although that hardly begins to describe his often violent and always difficult paintings. The subject of a large exhibition at the Met (running through August 16). Bacon, who died in 1992, lived an anguished life. Looking at his paintings evokes pain and even fear — probably not nearly the pain and fear he himself experienced as an artist — and some people literally can’t look at them.

Years ago, for example, I was with my sister, who had always struggled with mental illness. We were spending the afternoon doing the galleries in New York and strolled into a show of Bacon’s work at the Marlborough Gallery. She took one look at the paintings and said, “I can’t take this. I’ll wait outside.” (She stepped outside and immediately lit a cigarette.) I’d be the first one to admit that you don’t have to have mental-illness problems to empathize with my sister’s reaction.

With 65 paintings concentrating on his work from the 40s through the 60s, as well as a true-to-life photograph of the artist’s famously messy London studio, this exhibition is the perfect opportunity for an artist like me — who’s spirit is by nature the very opposite of Bacon’s — to ponder his work. Artists and critics I know are evenly split on their opinion of him. There are those who think he’s dreadful — hardly a painter at all, merely an illustrator using designy colors and an affected line. Then there are those for whom he’s one of the greats.

I don’t know about great, but to me, Bacon — taken in a small dose (the Met exhibition is a huge dose, probably too huge) — is a healthy antidote to the bourgeois insistence (which I, for one, appreciate no end) to plaster a cheerful veneer across existence itself. It’s understandable. We need our illusions in order to avoid dwelling on the thought that lurking inside each of us is nothing but gurgling, roiling, rotting mucky stuff.

Bacon’s paintings — most of which are portraits of one kind or another — reflect the way this man always drifted over to this terrible fact. For him, forgetting was impossible. His is a dark and existential vision, the painterly equivalent of the saddest and most despair-filled lines of poetry in T.S. Eliot. His famous “screaming pope” paintings (which had been the cause of my sister having to leave the gallery) are violent riffs on Velásquez’s famous portrait of Pope Innocent X. Bacon strips the pope of the authoritative, commanding and deeply wary personality revealed by Velásquez to expose instead a terrified and terrifying monster.

Bacon’s other pictures — of mad spinning dogs, silently screaming baboons, and alienated, open-mouthed businessmen alone in hotel rooms — are equally terrifying. For Bacon, the mouth, in particular — whether part of an animal or a man — is a riveting orifice. It’s ugly. He likes to portray it wide open, or screaming, or collapsing, or mangled. Bodies and faces are horrible as well, torn into pieces and then mangled into bloody blobs that can resemble hunks of meat. His art is often homoerotic, but not always. Sometimes it’s merely the stuff of misery. Always it’s dark, sad and lonesome.

So why subject yourself to this stuff, you might ask? Well, first off, don’t if you don’t want to. (This should hardly be necessary to say, but when artists are honored at a place like the Met, visitors often think they’re “supposed” to like them.) Some people want their art to always come up sweet, and for those I can only say look out — there’s a lot of art that doesn’t do that. Second, if you suffer from chronic depression or mental illness of any kind, definitely don’t look at Bacon. Art is always potentially disrupting, since it stirs up repressed desires that would otherwise remain dormant.

Bacon is hardly the only artist who’s full of horror. Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, Goya’s series on the disasters of war, Grünewald’s Isenheim altar — all are terrible, horrifying images. Bacon’s are no worse. If you want a dose of the bleak to keep you honest, this show is for you.

 

 

 

 

 The power of the ugly and the brutal

 

 

 

  BY RENE Q. BAS  |  ENTHUSIASMS & FOREBODINGS  |  THE MANILA TIMES  |  WEDNESDAY 24 JUNE 2009 

 

My aim is to make you appreciate the art of Francis Bacon and of the late National Artist Ang Kiukok, whose work has a spiritual bond to Bacon’s.

The paintings of Francis Bacon (b. October 28, 1909 in Dublin, d. April 28, 1992 while vacationing in Spain) disgusts some and edifies others. Dame Mar-garet Thatcher referred to him as “that man who paints those dreadful pictures.”

He was a great-great grandnephew of his namesake Lord Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher (Utopia) and essayist. But he preferred to eschew talk of his blueblooded forebears and instead thought of himself as a nonconformist who boldly designed his own destiny.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has a centenary exhibition of his work, which will go on until August 16.

The current issue of First Things (“a journal of religion, culture and public life” whose founding editor was the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, 1990–2009), has an article by its features editor R. R. Reno. As usual with those found in First Things, Reno’s article—an assessment of the MOMA exhibition as well as the worth of Francis Bacon as an artist—is fair, deep and guided by wisdom. It is titled A Master of Horror.

Reno opens with Aristotle. “In his Poetics, Aristotle observed that some works of art have a paradoxical effect. They represent things that make us cringe and recoil: Orestes kills Clytemnestra; Medea murders her children. Yet, even as we shrink from the brutality and avert our eyes in horror, we are nonetheless strangely attracted to and sometimes ravished by the scenes. What is ugly and brutal can exercise an aesthetic power as great as—perhaps even greater than—beauty itself.”

Reno tells us the MOMA exhibition “offers an ideal occasion to experience the strange aesthetic appeal of deformity, pain, and the darkness of life. Bacon famously filled his studio with images of disease from medical books and murder scenes from tabloids. The paintings that resulted are not ugly. On the contrary, many have alluring colour and form. But there can be no doubt about Bacon’s genius. It was energized by the grotesque.”

Reno gives a glimpse of Bacon’s life and career. “By the late 1930s, Bacon had produced a small body of work. In the early 1940s, however, he repudiated his early efforts, and he destroyed the canvases still in his possession.”

Reno continues: “The centenary retrospective adheres to Bacon’s stricture that his early work should be excluded from his canon. The show begins with a triptych of agony filled paintings: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion [1944], the uncharacteristically busy and overdone ‘Painting’ [1946], and a series of portrait studies culminating in his famous evocation of the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez [1949].”

“The continuity between these early paintings and his later work shows that Bacon was not an experimental artist who bounced form theme to theme or style to style in order to keep up with the latest movements. His paintings from the 1940s serve as an effective overture to the exhibition as whole . . .”

Reno teaches us, proves it by pointing out details, that Bacon’s paintings were not as the respected critics Jed Perl and Robert Hughes said they were.

Jed Perl had written in the New Republic Slaughterhouse, his review of the MOMA centenary exhibition. Reno says, “Jed Perl reads Bacon’s paintings as tedious expressions of modern artistic posturing. Instead of genuine art, Perl writes, Bacon produced ‘noirist graffiti: angst for dummies.’ The images amount to ‘modernist melodramas,’ ‘visual claptrap,’ and ‘bad dreams with fashionable upholstery.’ The Bacon exhibition, he concludes, offers nothing but ‘a nihilistic blood sport, the hideous spectacle of an artist in the process of eviscerating the art of painting.’ ”

Reno calls these “Strong words, but misguided.” He teaches us what Jed Perl missed: That Bacon also tried to paint pictures of “chimpanzees with open-mouthed expressions of primal horror.” But “It’s not very interesting to imagine Edvard Munch at the zoo. The same holds for other pictures without human forms. Blood on Pavement [1988] and A Piece of Wasteland [1982] have a tired, didactic feel—just the sort of thing that fills Chelsea galleries these days.”

Then Reno explains that “The relative failure of these paintings indicates, I think, Bacon’s almost complete artistic alienation from the natural world. The exhibition presents no landscapes, no flowers in bloom, no apples lovingly arranged. Bacon seems to have been entirely focused on the human condition. Indeed, within the human condition his concerns were narrower still: Crucifixion, yes, but no Madonna and Child, no Annunciation, and certainly no Resurrection. Yet, in this domain Bacon certainly succeeded in doing a great deal more than give painterly form to the existentialist and nihilist clichés of our age. His work suggests lived reality—pain, of course, but also endurance.”

Critic Robert Hughes, Reno writes, “cheerfully describes Bacon as ‘the complete atheist, anti-metaphysical, anti-transcendent. Birth, copulation, death, end of story.’ Hughes knew Bacon, and perhaps his description is accurate. Yet the paintings suggest otherwise, for they are not as flat as the dime-store nihilism would suggest. The centenary exhibition shows that Bacon’s work involves more than howls of horror and exaggerated, distorted physical forms. The fundamental role of the grotesque endured to the end for Bacon as the source of aesthetic power. As many other artists have recognized, in a world without transcendent truth, horror and suffering can provide a dark universal to energize the imagination.

“Bacon, however, differs from the usual weekend patrons of the grotesque whom Perl finds so tedious. As Bacon’s work evolved and his commitment to realism deepened, he added layers of tender regard for the fragility of our humanity to his fascination with pain and suffering. Human life—even human life devoid of any religious or transcendent faith—does not end quickly and simply. It’s not just birth, copulation, death, end of story. We must actually live our lives, and do so in the vulnerability of our flesh. This Bacon saw and portrayed, which is no mean artistic achievement.”

Now look whimsically at the ugliness and brutality of the Philippine condition. And see it the way Bacon—and Kiukok—painted. Do you agree that the fanciful outlook offers a view of our being Filipinos in our time as a less painful, less seemingly purposeless and, happily, more meaningful experience?

 

 

 

 

Writer Peppiatt revisits Francis Bacon

 

 

 

KENNETH BAKER | CHRONICLE ART CRITIC | ART | SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE | JUNE 21 2009 

 

British writer Michael Peppiatt first published his widely appreciated biography of painter Francis Bacon in 1997. Since then, he has kept abreast of everything he could find, published and unpublished, concerning his notorious subject, who died at 82 in 1992.

Beginning in the 1930s, the largely self-taught Bacon made a reputation — underground at first, then increasingly public — as a gay sexual adventurer, in times and cities that then still treated homosexuality as a crime. What he saw on the down-low, and many other sources, informed the grotesque vision of his art.

Apprised well in advance of the internationally touring Bacon retrospective currently at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Peppiatt produced an even more absorbing revised version of his book, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Skyehorse; 456 pages; $16.95).

He discussed it with me by phone from his home in London.

Q: Was it an advantage or a disadvantage to have known Bacon while you were writing about him?

A: For me, it was essential. I’m not a biographer as such. ... It came out of my fascination with the man and it was done partly to explain that fascination to myself. ... I’ve met lots and lots of interesting people but never anyone as compelling as Bacon. ... It was a terrific stroke of luck to meet somebody like that when I was 19. I come from a kind of conventional background and I’d never met someone so free and daring and outrageous and inventive. I was at Cambridge studying art history at the time... He sort of excited me about life in way I had never been before. He did all kinds of things I had never done and had no interest in doing but he impressed me by the way he lived and the way he painted.

Q: How did the book originate?

A: I’d met a literary agent, and when Bacon died, she was on the phone with me immediately. ... He’d told me all these things over the years and I’d noted them down. I did do a sort of ghastly literary portrait early on — never published, thank God — and I showed him bits of that and he thought then that it was too indiscreet. But I had that whole manuscript to draw on.

Q: Should readers expect to recognize the new material for what it is?

A: Well, there’s a new introduction and a postscript which takes the story up to now in the Bacon world. But all the way through I’ve threaded in things that I’ve thought of since, or that have come to the surface, some very minor, some very important. I’ve sort of unstitched and restitched the whole thing.

I went through and introduced many things, such as his relationship with and debt to Picasso’s work, because I’ve gotten more interested in Picasso recently.

Also, a lot of people who were in Bacon’s world are now dead, and I couldn’t speak freely about them before — Valerie Beston, for example, who looked after his business affairs and really managed his whole personal life for years, and (critic) David Sylvester.

There were people who were a bit tongue-tied before Bacon’s death who became looser after. I talked to his doctor quite a bit, something I didn’t feel I could do while he was alive. ... Dr. Brass said some very interesting things about Bacon.

Also, I’m no longer in awe of Bacon, and he’s no longer here to keep me in awe.

Q: Did Bacon and Picasso ever meet?

A: No, though they sort of knew each other through their common friendship with Michel Leiris.

Bacon met Giacometti, though, and they struck up quite a lively friendship.

Q: Some years ago, Bacon’s London studio was dismantled and reconstructed in Dublin. Did you learn anything through that process?

A: That made no sense to me, just because he happened to be born there. His home is in London or Paris, not Dublin. ... But I consulted on it a bit and was able to see some of the excavated material — notes to himself, descriptions of dreams, photographs.

Q: Was the Bacon enigma in any sense a failure of self-knowledge on his part?

A: I did a show a couple of years ago called Bacon in the 1950s — before he knew he was Bacon, you might say. They’re the roughest, clumsiest pictures but there is the extraordinary feeling in them of someone not knowing what he’s doing ... as though he was tapping into something he didn’t understand himself. ... So in a sense lack of self-knowledge was an advantage at that point.

The content of the painting, the pain and suffering of it, remain an enigma for me. Bacon was a very robust, energetic, life-loving person. He could have black moods, usually brought on by a sort of waterfall of drink. But I find going through the current exhibition that the sense of pain and loneliness is so strong. He used to say, "I’m optimistic, but about nothing."

Q:Have you made any discoveries since the book went to print?

A: There’s always something bubbling up. In Venice last week somebody presented me an invitation to a show of supposed Bacon drawings. ... I walked for a long, long time and couldn’t find it. But I know if I had, that I would have had serious misgivings about what I saw.

I know that there are letters that will one day surface and give more information.

We need a good film about him. ... There is a fascinating attempt called Love Is the Devil. The actors were brilliant, but it just didn’t capture the feel of the man.

Q: Would you consider taking part in such a project?

A: Oh yes, it’s one of the most fascinating lives of the 20th century. 

 

   

 

 

 

Slaughterhouse

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective

 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

BY JED PERL  |  REVIEW  |  THE NEW REPUBLIC  |  WEDNESDAY JUNE 17 2009 

 

Is there such a thing as a wrongheaded tradition? I believe there is. And the most enduring one is surely the tradition of the artist as a romantic outlaw, which in the last half-century has been pretty much owned by Francis Bacon. His canvases, modernist melodramas with just the right crowd-friendly dash of old-fashioned grandiloquence, are the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bacon, who died in 1992 at the age of eighty-two, may well be the greatest exemplar of a wrongheaded tradition that we have ever seen. He had a knack for adapting all the wrong elements from all the right artists. He zeroed in on those moments when Van Gogh and Picasso were pushing their glorious anarchic energy to the brink of incoherence. This would have been fine, except that Bacon willfully ignored their ordering intelligence, preferring to sacrifice pictorial sensibility to literary sensationalism. What Bacon produced are not paintings, at least not satisfying ones. They are little more than rectangles of canvas inscribed with noirish graffiti: angst for dummies. Bacon turned his clever little quotations from the masters, old or modern, into the twentieth century’s most august visual claptrap.

There is nothing surprising about an artist feeling like a romantic outlaw, and Bacon and his supporters can cite a long tradition of more-or-less alienated creators, winding back to Caravaggio, who actually killed somebody. The trouble with Bacon is that he has not attached himself to a tradition of picture-making but to a tradition of attitudinizing. In this wrongheaded tradition, Caravaggio is admired not because he was a good painter but because he was a bad boy — which is a pretty accurate characterization of the career of Francis Bacon, too. This is not to say that artists are under any obligation to be conventionally respectable members of society. The fact is that an artist’s outward behavior has no fixed relationship to the development or the value of his or her work. But to accept this fact, which really ought to be self-evident, one must accept also the freestanding value of art, an idea that today is devalued when it is not entirely rejected. The Bacon mystique is not grounded in his paintings so much as in a glamorous list of extenuating circumstances. (The exhibition, which has already been seen at the Tate in London and the Prado in Madrid, was organized by Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan together with Chris Stephens and Matthew Gale of the Tate.)

Francis Bacon’s paintings arrive in New York at a moment when wrongheaded traditions are the only ones that are widely esteemed, and the freestanding value of art has more or less been stood on its head, leaving us with the freestanding value of anti-art. So it is no wonder that Bacon is receiving a warm welcome among some of the newer painters who have been praised for turning the grand manner on its head, producing impersonations of traditional painting and campy send-ups of the masters. Before the Bacon retrospective opened, Vogue asked a number of artists to comment. "What’s profound about his work is that it’s not settled," declared Lisa Yuskavage, who paints bimbos with floppy hair. "It’s too big. It’s like a bomb dropping." George Condo, our thrift-shop Picasso, observed that "each one of his paintings is like a very elegant, bad hangover." And John Currin, who has made misogyny safe for high-end collectors, believes that "the feeling you get from Bacon is something akin to a stately mansion that you can’t pay the taxes on, and you can’t afford to heat. And yet, with his poverty of means — simple, unsophisticated techniques — he’s able to do grand painting, completely."

Yuskavage, Condo, and Currin know, like Bacon, how to make mawkishness look cool. The trick of managing to be simultaneously empty and canny is something else that they share with the Englishman. Here is part of what Bacon had to say in the catalogue of a 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, "The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors": "I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime." The Guggenheim or the New Museum ought to organize a survey of painting from Francis Bacon to Lisa Yuskavage and call it "Snail Slime."

In any event, Bacon knew exactly what he was doing when he said that. He was giving mid-century intellectuals and jet-setters just the kick in the pants that would persuade them that he was the leader of their very own avant-garde. Bacon wants to have things every which way, and this makes him a perfect pied piper for our have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too art world. His work is old-fashioned and newfangled, a carefully calculated mixture of literalism and obscurantism. Sometimes he transcribes his own face or the face of a lover more or less directly from a photograph, so that a painting becomes a bulletin board on which to pin a few images. At other times he savagely distorts a photograph, treating the head of his friend Isabel Rawsthorne as if it were made of silly putty, twisting it into a crenulated grotesque. Or he will reconstruct a scene from the life of somebody close to him. When he visualizes his ex-lover, George Dyer, slumped on a toilet in a Paris hotel, dying of an overdose of alcohol and pills, he gives his work a tabloid frisson. Bacon likes body fragments, partly erased figures, and heads that have been reduced to pulp. He takes autobiographical material and plays with it, running signs and symbols through the shredder, producing puzzles and enigmas, flotsam and jetsam floating in a chic void. He is especially fond of paintings that come in threes, so that the composite compositions take on a sort of religious or dramatic implication, the tangled plot line of a hellish holy trinity.

Alienation no longer has the hipster appeal that it had a generation ago, so that Bacon’s version of the man-all-alone-in-an-unfriendly-world routine takes on a retro appeal. I would not be surprised if there are visitors to the Metropolitan who are knowingly mumbling, "Oh, that again." They may be remembering Sartre, or just Last Tanog in Paris, which begins with some paintings by Bacon. Confronted with a prestigious retrospective at the Metropolitan, museumgoers are reluctant to gainsay the authenticity of the artist’s feelings — but they may also find themselves a little weary when confronted with yet another exercise in high modern angst.

There is something rather cool about even Bacon’s most violent images, and this emotional dissonance fits right in with a postmodern taste for muddleheaded irony. The early paintings, especially the shrieking Popes based on Velazquez’s portrait of Innocent X, have a howling 1950s look, and visitors who know their cultural history will find themselves thinking of a traumatized postwar Europe and the dive-glamour of London’s Soho, which has gained a special historical aura in recent years, as England is again hailed as a literary and artistic hotspot. By the 1970s, Bacon’s surfaces are smoother, at times looking almost airbrushed. The stretches of flatly applied paint in tan, gray, pink, and orange suggest the streamlined chic of the 1970s, when furnishings and clothes were done up in Ultrasuede. These paintings are high-style bummers, bad dreams with fashionable upholstery.

Going through the Bacon retrospective, I find that everything changes and everything remains the same. For his admirers, this may be the point. There is always that tormented figure, represented by a face, an entire body, or just some body parts. Bacon likes to paint people in cages or boxes, which are indicated with a few perfunctory lines. Sometimes he drops a bed into one of his nowhere spaces, and then drops a person or maybe two people on the bed. If it is one person, then the theme is loneliness. If it is two people, then the themes are sex, love, and loneliness, with elements of aggression mixed in for good measure. Around the figures the stage is bare or nearly bare, with the line between wall and floor suggested, if you are lucky, and the emptiness done up in red or tan or gray, depending on Bacon’s mood. The message is that we are all prisoners, we are all locked in place, we cannot get up from the chair, we cannot walk through the door. In order to underline their inability to flee the isolation cells that Bacon has contrived for his allegedly archetypal figures, the artist sometimes gives one of these freakish victims an appendage that looks like a club foot, or scrambles the head so badly that you wonder if a man could even see his way through the door. What Bacon’s work brings to mind are the shock tactics of the most literal Surrealists, the photographs of disfigured dolls by Bellmer, and Dali’s Technicolor porno dreams.

Earlier this season, in what amounted to a curtain raiser for the Bacon retrospective, the Gagosian Gallery mounted a show pairing work by Bacon and Giacometti. There could not have been a better demonstration of the poverty of Bacon’s method. There is a coarse methodical belligerence about Bacon’s work, and when the paintings are gathered together a museumgoer may be put in something like a trance state. Perhaps visitors come to accept the muffled horrors, repeated in nearly endless variations, as the sum total of artistic possibilities in the modern world. But when Bacon’s paintings are juxtaposed with those of Giacometti, who was also working in the postwar years and was equally susceptible to the dark shadows that World War II cast, you can see how limited Bacon’s range really is. The Gagosian show, titled "Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers," saluted their admiration for Isabel Rawsthorne, a figure in artistic and literary circles in London and Paris with whom Giacometti was for a time passionately involved. Giacometti and Bacon liked each other, but according to James Lord, in his biography of Giacometti, "concerning aesthetic objectives, the two artists did not see eye to eye. In private, Alberto expressed dislike of the chance effects and crafty sleights of technique so beloved by Francis."

In his paintings Giacometti draws on many themes that we also encounter in Bacon’s work. Giacometti is interested in feelings of unease, in our sense of the unknowableness of our own bodies and the trouble we sometimes have in finding our place in the world. But when Giacometti paints, using the brush with a graphic precision, articulating the nose, the eyes, the mouth, the cheekbones, he is at once disassembling the face, insisting like Bacon that we see things from some fresh perspective, and putting the pieces of the puzzle back together, creating a head that is as inviolably whole as a statue in an Egyptian tomb, something of which Bacon is incapable. While there is vehemence about the frontality of Giacometti’s portrait subjects, there is also tenderness, and a changeableness that registers in the surprising qualities of light and air, the infinite variety that he discovers in his Parisian grays. Giacometti does not prejudge experience in the way that Bacon does. When Giacometti suggests that a man or a woman is caged or imprisoned, he also insists that they are capable of movement, of struggle--that they still have a chance of controlling their own destiny. Freedom is a possibility in Giacometti’s universe, and this can pose a daunting challenge, especially for museumgoers who expect to be told what to feel.

Bacon wants the gravitas of the old masters, but he refuses to understand that the authority of Rembrandt or Goya is grounded in their avid engagement with everyday experience. Bacon never really had any interest in working directly from life. He did not do any drawings to speak of, which is especially strange for an artist who aims to reconceive the human figure. And I think that photography, which played a useful role in the paintings of Vuillard and Bonnard and other artists, is a big, baleful problem in Bacon’s work. His blurred or distorted faces and bodies are nothing more than photographs seen in a funhouse mirror. He depends far too much on the fixity of photographs, which he uses to give his paintings a creepy freeze-frame fascination. The photographic image serves as a source of cheap sensation, a defense mechanism, a way of shutting down any feelings that might arise directly from experience. The result is Pop Art seen through a glass darkly, Warhol’s Electric Chair paintings without the silkscreen technique. And when Bacon chooses to blur these photo-derived figures, the results are as calculatingly sentimental as anything in Gerhard Richter. The organic nature of painting, the end-to-end logic that characterizes all painting, whether in Rembrandt or in Mondrian, is rejected in favor of a modernist re-staging of a fin-de-siecle freakshow.

If the Bacon retrospective is a hit with the public, it will be because visitors are convinced that there are demons pursuing this artist. His art is presented as a high form of black magic, a way of vanquishing the forces of evil in our times. The wall labels make a point of reminding visitors of Bacon’s gambling, his tough-guy lovers, his whiskey-soaked nights in Soho. And near the end of the show the curators leave biography behind and plunge straight into hagiography, devoting an entire gallery to photographs and other assorted talismans that Bacon kept around his studio. Here, along with movie stills, newspaper clippings, and photo-booth self-portraits, we are shown the photographs of friends and lovers on which Bacon based many of his paintings.

This dimly lit gallery, one wall of which is plastered with a photomural of Bacon’s famously messy Reece Mews studio, is the show’s sanctum sanctorum, the place where visitors can peer at all the rumpled mementoes and imagine that they are witnessing the black magic taking place. After galleries full of lifeless paintings, the curators have had the bright idea of introducing some bits and pieces of the artist’s life — which turns out to consist of a heap of photographic images. This is what museumgoing is coming to in the age of reality TV.

We live in a world where the actual matter of art — the artisanal concerns, the structural assumptions — are all too often seen as reactionary and academic, something for pedants and conservatives to bother about. Why go the Giacometti route? Why bother to construct a face in detail, developing expressive distortions that are based on a painstaking study, hour by hour, day by day, of an actual person? Why go to all that trouble when you can simply take a photograph and fancy it up with some distortions that amount to little more than third-hand Picasso? It’s not just that it is difficult — actually, it is nearly impossible — to do what Giacometti did. The resistance goes even deeper. There is a revulsion here against the sincerity of painting — an unwillingness to see that what is truly disturbing or challenging in painting comes out of that sincerity.

Bacon, with his prefab contortions, is the real academic — a pasticheur and parodist of avant-garde attitudes. Like all modern poseurs, he believes that biography is the ultimate trump card, that the art is more or less a reflection of the life, and in this he is again on the frontlines of a wrongheaded tradition — the tradition that values the artist above the art. In the literature about Bacon, too much is made of the terrible story of the opening of his retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971, on the eve of which Dyer died of an overdose of drugs and alcohol. It is perfectly understandable that this terrifying event became the subject of some of Bacon’s compositions. The paintings, however, are so bloodless that all they can possibly do is send you back to the story itself. There is nothing in the paintings themselves to hold you there. In Bacon’s work, content trumps form every time. The emotion is as formulaic and pre-digested as in any Victorian picture of a dying child.

As the subject of a big retrospective, Bacon’s life certainly has a narrative power. And without anything by Giacometti or Picasso to remind us of the poetic power that can be discovered in the anti-naturalistic figure, Bacon’s brutalist paintings are going to strike many observers as the only representational alternative available to an artist in our terrible times. The lack of delicacy or sensitivity — the lack of imagination in the handling of color or line — becomes not the artist’s weakness but ours, a reflection of the troubles of the age. Bacon’s work is a blunt instrument, and museumgoers who begin to feel threatened or manipulated may well conclude that this is what Bacon intended. They may not be wrong. The Bacon retrospective reminds me of the Bruce Nauman show that toured the country a decade ago. Bacon is another specialist in sensory deprivation. There is a Stockholm Syndrome quality about these exhibitions. They give us so little, and what we are meant to discover is that we could not possibly be satisfied with anything more.

To the writer Michael Peppiatt, who over the years has produced a substantial literature devoted to Bacon, the artist observed near the beginning of their acquaintance, "You remember that steak we ate just now? Well, that’s how it is. We live off one another. The shadow of dead meat is cast as soon as we are born. I can never look at a chop without thinking of death — that probably sounds very pompous." Well, yes it does; but then Bacon’s modus operandi always involved being simultaneously pompous and profane. Early in the retrospective there is a painting in which a figure is flanked by beef carcasses. And in 1962 Vogue ran a photograph of a bare-chested Francis Bacon posed in front of two carcasses. By the end of the show, museumgoers may feel as if they are in a slaughterhouse, with each painting presented like a carcass hanging on a hook. The Bacon retrospective is the most fashionable slaughterhouse in the world. What we are witnessing is a nihilist blood sport, the hideous spectacle of an artist in the process of eviscerating the art of painting.

   Jed Perl is the art critic at The New Republic.

 

 

 

Francis Bacon joins the Colony Room Club, Soho, December 1948

 

 

 

BY ROB CROSSAN  |  DEFINING MOMENTS  |  THE FINANCIAL TIMES  |  SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 2009

 

On December 15 1948, Muriel Belcher, a notoriously acid-tongued bar owner whom jazz singer George Melly described as “a benevolent witch... who loved money” opened a tiny room at the top of a staircase on Dean Street in Soho. 

 

Decorating the bar in dark green paint and bamboo, she called it the Colony Room Club, partly in tribute to her female Jamaican lover. One of the first people to climb the stairs was a penniless, 39-year-old, Dublin-born artist called Francis Bacon.

 

The two bonded instantly. They reached a deal whereby Belcher would give Bacon £10 and free drinks in return for the artist persuading his wealthier friends to come and spend money in what quickly became regarded as the most intimidating members bar in London. That reputation was down entirely to Belcher’s personality, which careered between generous affection and tirades of abuse towards her customers.

 

Despite this, Bacon once remarked that Belcher had “a tremendous ability to create an atmosphere of ease”. In Michael Andrews’ The Colony Room I, 1962, reproduced above, Belcher sits in the centre wearing a blue dress, while Bacon is on the right, his back to the artist.

 

Belcher’s arrangement with Bacon gave him the relative stability to paint – at that time his work was barely known outside a few small London galleries. Nine years later, a shocked art world saw his pained, distorted and unremittingly bleak studies of Van Gogh for the first time. Fame and controversy followed him for the rest of his life.

 

Bacon remained a regular patron of the Colony Room until his death in 1992, and the venue was used for his wake. Belcher had died in 1979. On the club’s 60th birthday, in December 2008, the Colony Room closed for the last time, supposedly to be turned into a private apartment.

 

 

                                               Muriel Belcher and Francis Bacon, 1975 © Peter Stark


 

 

 

Den Mother to the Louche and Famous

 

 

 

BY GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT | ART | ART & DESIGN | THE NEW YORK TIMES | FRIDAY 5 JUNE, 2009

 

LONDON

A VISITOR to the magnificent Francis Bacon exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art might easily pass by an alcove filled with photographs of Bacon’s friends. Among them is a tiny, yellowing snapshot of a striking woman gazing at the camera, taken around 1965. But then few Americans would even recognize the name of Muriel Belcher, or know about the part she played in Bacon’s life, as his den mother of sorts, and about the club she ran as his refuge.

She was the greatest of Soho hostesses, from 1948, when she opened the Colony Room Club on Dean Street here, until her death in 1979. The place we all called Muriel’s was a drinking club, a salon, a little community of its own (and one about which this reporter is regrettably well qualified to write, having spent too much of his early life there). What makes the story more poignant today is that not only have most of the players departed, but also the stage itself is dark. Muriel and Francis are no more, and neither is the Colony.

So we’re left with memories, of the kind novelists convey better: “It is an old timetable now, disintegrating at its folds, and headed ‘This schedule in effect July 5, 1922.’ But I can still read the gray names, and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality.” On another old timetable I can still read the names of those who drank at Muriel’s in July 1972.

Among them were writers, hustlers, shady politicians, decayed aristocrats and petty criminals, maybe more Anthony Powell than F. Scott Fitzgerald. But you could also find some of the most famous painters of the age, and Muriel’s deserves at least a small footnote in the history of art.

In those days Soho was full of clubs, though very different from the haughty gentlemen’s establishments of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall. They existed partly to refresh thirsty “afternoon men” at a time when the pubs were obliged to shut from 3 to 5:30 p.m., but each had its own character. Gerry’s on Shaftesbury Avenue was for actors (more likely “resting” than working). The Kismet, a k a the Iron Lung, on Cranbourn Street, also in a basement, had two bars for two clienteles. Back in the ’60s, in the more bohemian bar on the left, I briefly met “the Roberts,” the inseparable painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, while in the other bar somber men in raincoats and hats stood drinking and talking quietly: this was the London underworld and the plainclothes police meeting on equal terms.

But Muriel’s was sui generis. You passed through a door beside an Italian restaurant, climbed stairs smelling of damp or worse, and entered a dark green room with a bar to the left. The walls were covered with pictures, from a cartoon of Muriel by the jazz musician Wally Fawkes (a k a Trog) to a conversation piece set in the Colony by the painter Michael Andrews.

Nothing was more striking than the hostess herself, perched birdlike on her stool, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other, with one eye on the door to block unwelcome visitors and the other on customers to make sure they were spending enough. And all the while she kept up her machine-gun chatter: sarcastic, witty, scabrously obscene.

Her family was Birmingham Jewish, or so I believe. She had made her way to London and the demimonde, and during the war opened her first club, the Music Box, whose core membership seems to have been the better sort of homosexual officer in the Brigade of Guards (not as small a constituency as you might think).

Then she moved to that upstairs room on Dean Street. Although Bacon was already making his name, he needed pocket money, and Muriel paid him to bring in rich patrons. If the word isn’t too far-fetched, she became his muse, while he became one of Muriel’s “daughters.” Most men were “she” to Muriel; it could be disconcerting when some elderly major was introduced with the words, “She was a very gallant little lady on the Somme.”

Before long most of what would later be known as the School of London congregated there, including Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud as well as Bacon and Andrews. That painting by Andrews showed the names on the schedule in effect in the mid-1960s. Clustered around Muriel are her companion Carmel; Jeffrey Bernard (dropout, boozer, wit and later Spectator columnist); Henrietta Moraes (also much painted by Bacon); Lady Rose McClaren (the déclassé sister of the Marquess of Anglesey); and John Deakin, who took the photograph of Muriel, as well as several others in the Bacon exhibition at the Met.

Also Bacon and Mr. Freud, whose friendship had been commemorated years before in another painting, Mr. Freud’s haunting small portrait of Bacon. They could often be seen talking together in the corner, a study in contrasts: Mr. Freud reserved, ironic, abstemious (and conspicuously heterosexual — Muriel’s was very camp, not to say lewd, but far from merely what was then called a “queer club”); Bacon more expansive, especially while the drink flowed.

As it did when he was around. “Champagne for your real friends and real pain for your sham friends” was his favorite Irish toast, and he meant it, both ways. He said superfluously that Muriel’s was “a place where we came to dissolve our inhibitions,” and his were very solvent.

Even after a long drinking session Bacon might still be genial. Though he did once tear open my shirt front, that wasn’t anger, or lust, but simply because he couldn’t quite stand upright and was trying to break his fall.

But obstreperous on occasion veered toward obnoxious. Late one evening he was so truculent that Ian Board, Muriel’s barman asked me to get him out of the Colony, which I did by taking him down the road to a casino where, since he could scarcely tell rouge from noir by then, he lost an enormous sum.

If Bacon was by turns affable and abusive, Muriel herself was “a benevolent witch,” in the words of the writer and musician George Melly. Her humor was certainly distinctive. A friend once surprised us all by getting married and begetting a son. We lunched to celebrate, before climbing the stairs for a postprandial drink and to tell Muriel about this happy event. Her own slightly deflating mode of congratulation was to say, “It’s amazing what a poof can do when she tries.”

Writers and moviemakers as well as painters have portrayed Muriel. Rodney Ackland’s play “The Pink Room” opened in London in 1952, but not for long, since critics were shocked by the frank picture of inebriation and sexual variety in a club very much like the Colony. But the play was revived and televised many years later as “Absolute Hell,” with Judi Dench as the formidable hostess, and very good she was, if too ladylike for Muriel.

In the 1998 biopic “Love Is the Devil,” Bacon is played by Derek Jacobi, his companion George Dyer by Daniel Craig (whose fans can see more of him anatomically here than in his later James Bond films), and our hostess by Tilda Swinton. Although she doesn’t sound anything like Muriel, she looks curiously like her, and the tricksy-arty cinematography through a fisheye lens captures the atmosphere of the Colony rather well.

Not everyone loved Muriel and her club. I once took my friend Shiva Naipaul — younger brother of V. S. Naipaul and a brilliant writer himself, who died suddenly in 1985 at 40 — up to the Colony for a digestif. After a few minutes he said: “Can we please leave? I find this place infinitely depressing.”

But many others were captivated by that room, and not just the people you might expect. The Labor member of Parliament Tom Driberg might be found talking to one of the journalists who liked to look in at Muriel’s, like Peter Jenkins, the liberal columnist, and, more surprisingly, the radical turned conservative Paul Johnson.

Now we can look in no more. Muriel died barely into her 70s, and by the time Bacon died in 1992 he and Mr. Freud had fallen out, quite why I never knew. To make it sadder, that beautiful portrait by Mr. Freud was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin and has never been seen since.

After Muriel died, the Colony was kept going by Mr. Board, and after his death in 1994 by Michael Wojas. But he closed the club some months ago, and sold the contents. Great efforts were made to save the Colony, which had acquired a newer membership, some of them well-known younger artists, and a fund-raiser was held before Christmas, but to no avail. This is not the place to describe the acrimonious and litigious upshot, and although there are some plans to reopen the Colony, almost certainly in some other location, it will not be the same.

Many years ago Jenkins gestured round him, and said fervently he hoped places like this would never vanish. But Muriel’s has, and for some of us Soho today is a place of ghosts, gray names from a green room.

 

 

   

                                      

                                    A portrait of Ms. of Muriel Belcher by John Deakin

 

 

 

 

 

SAY AHHHHHHHH!

 

 

 

 

People feel duped by Francis Bacon; such is our prejudice toward the scream.

 

 

 

BY MORGAN MEIS  |  IDLE CHATTER  |  THE SMART SET  |  FRIDAY 5 JUNE 2009


 

Francis Bacon is a scream. He will always be a scream. Just think of the roar from that fleshy maw under the umbrella in Painting from 1946. Bacon didn’t just paint screams. There are “religious” triptychs, portraits, angry animals, and the ongoing presence of raw meat. But Bacon would not be Bacon without the screams. How you feel about the screams is, I think, the essence of how you’ll feel about every Bacon work.

 

And the man — whose most influential paintings now date back more than half a century — can still stir things up. The current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective,” has inspired the full gamut of critical response. People are falling over themselves just to disagree. Jerry Saltz, of New York Magazine, likes the early work and the screaming but thinks Bacon became a parody of himself over time. Saltz writes, “But in the end, he seems less a modern painter than the last of a breed of Romantics — one who, in his final interview, plaintively stated, ‘I painted to be loved’. ”

 

Roberta Smith over at The New York Times takes the opposite view. Smith dismisses the early work, focusing on the greater emotional complexity of the later paintings. “[T]he Met’s exhibition disputes the notion that Bacon’s art declined, indicating that it often improved as his colors brightened, his paint handling gained muscularity,” she writes. “It was equally important that he began to focus on people he knew and cared about, giving them faces that seem simultaneously masked, gouged out of wet clay and recognizably individual.”

 

At The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl gives Bacon grudging respect for being a major artist of the 20th century, but admits that he can’t stand the work on any personal level. “Francis Bacon has long been my least favorite great painter of the 20th century. My notes from a visit to the new Bacon retrospective, which is very handsomely installed at the Metropolitan Museum, seethe with indignation, which I will now try to get over.”

 

I focus here on the critical disparity and unease for one simple reason: It shows the deep distrust of Bacon among those who think and write about art. This distrust, I pose, can be traced back to the scream. Critics tend not to believe in the scream. They think they’re being manipulated and they don’t like it. Nobody likes to be a sucker, critics least of all. The more the critics witness the public’s adoration of Bacon’s work, the more they smell a rat.

 

Arthur Danto, writing on Bacon for The Nation back in 1990, summed up the feelings with his typical intellectual incisiveness

 

So … these depicted screams seem to entitle us to some inference that they at least express an attitude of despair or outrage or condemnation, and that in the medium of extreme gesture the artist is registering a moral view toward the conditions that account for scream upon scream upon scream. How profoundly disillusioning it is then to read the artist saying, in a famous interview he gave to David Sylvester for The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, “I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.” … It is like a rack maker who listens to the screams of the racked only as evidence that he has done a fine job…. We are accordingly victims ourselves, manipulated in our moral being by an art that has no such being. It is for this reason that I hate Bacon’s art.

 

There is nothing worse, in Danto’s eyes, than a scream that means nothing. It amounts to the destruction of the moral realm in the name of aesthetics. The key scream painting in Bacon’s oeuvre is probably Study after Velázquez (1950). Bacon takes Velazquez’ famous Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650), in which the Pope is a study in cynicism and power and transforms it into one of his blurred, terrifying, screaming heads. The impulse is always to explain this, and other screams through personal history or politics. Bacon was reacting to the horror of his times. Bacon was reacting to the horror of his family life and his later relationships (with their sometimes violent and destructive characteristics). Bacon was reacting to the repressive atmosphere in England regarding his homosexuality. Danto, I think, is correct in rejecting this kind of reductionism. So was Bacon. When asked about his interest in Velasquez’ famous Pope painting, Bacon replied, “I think it’s the magnificent color of it.” He also stated flatly that, “I have never tried to be horrific.” Danto can never forgive Bacon for this sleight of hand.

 

But Danto, and by extension many other critics, miss a key distinction when they focus on the meaninglessness of the screams. Bacon retreated to the language of pure painting and aestheticism in order to resist the specific meanings often attributed to his works. None of his paintings were explicitly about the wars and genocides of the 20th century. His Pope paintings are not a criticism of the Catholic Church. His more abstract screams are not an expression of Existentialist philosophy.

 

In fact, Bacon constantly decontextualized his screams (and other portrayals of violence and terror) in order to cut the causal links and to make the screams more general. He was interested in the form and structure of a scream. He wanted to figure out what makes a scream a scream. Painting the scream onto Pope Innocent X heightens that sense of disjunction. It doesn’t make sense that the Pope is screaming. But that makes the scream all the more pure, all the more screamy in its screaminess.

 

In the aforementioned interview with David Sylvester, Sylvester asks Bacon about the prevalence of violence in his work. Bacon responds with a disturbing account of the ways that, since a small child, he had been constantly surrounded by violence and war. He ends by observing, rather laconically, “So I could say, perhaps, I have been accustomed to always living through forms of violence.” The way he calls it “forms of violence” jumps out at me. The artist in Bacon responded to the specific experience of violence by stepping back and exploring the forms of violence as such. In its structure, this is not unlike many of the abstract painters who were his contemporaries. They stepped back from specific acts of representation in order to study the form of visual perception itself.
 

It is still possible to accuse Bacon of being blithe and cynical in exploring the forms of violence on one hand while tweaking our ingrained emotional response to images of violence and terror on the other. He is having his cake and eating it, too. That’s the essence of Danto’s critique. Bacon hits us with these incredibly powerful and moving images and then claims, la di da, that he was only interested in the color orange all along.

 

But why shouldn’t artists get to explore the forms of violence just as they explore all other forms? With all due respect to Edvard Munch, I can’t think of another artist who so perfectly expressed the Platonic purity of the scream, the scream as scream. There are plenty of artists who exploit our specific attraction to beautiful bodies or landscapes in order to explore more general aesthetic questions about shape, or color, or beauty itself.

 

Something about Bacon’s exploitation of horror arouses an indignation not usually expressed in these other cases. Perhaps we resent that Bacon makes us take pleasure in our more troubling emotions, in our fascination with violence. I don’t know if Peter Schjeldahl “seethes with indignation” because he deplores the amorality of Bacon’s imagery of violence or because he deplores the pleasure he finds himself taking in such amoral imagery of violence. It could be a mixture of both.

 

I always take very seriously the way that teenagers look at Bacon. They see the purity of that scream and they respond to it immediately. They know that it is right, that Bacon got that scream absolutely right because he formalized the subject matter and not because it points to any outside meaning. They stand before those paintings in an open display of their own essential desire, revulsion, lust, anger, fear. There it is. Scream.

    • 5 June 2009

 

 

 

“Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective’’

 

 

The original British bad boy of art takes over the Met.

 

  

BY HOWARD HALLE   |   ART   |   TIME OUT   |   NEW YORK   |   WEDNESDAY JUNE 3 2009


 

There are many adjectives—dark, brutal, homoerotic—one could use to describe the paintings of Francis Bacon (1909—1992), though popular wouldn’t seem to be among them. His work can be hard to take, and sometimes, given the histrionic tenor of his canvases, hard to take seriously. Yet on a recent Friday, visitors could be seen thronging through this survey (edited from the one that originated at London’s Tate Gallery) marking the 100th anniversary of the English-Irish artist’s birth.

 

From all appearances, people were raptly taking in Bacon’s iconographic panoply of screaming popes, slabs of beef and male nudes grappling in heated contortions of love, hate and personal destruction. Perhaps years of exposure to Jason and Freddy Krueger have conditioned viewers to accept Bacon as some sort of high-toned master of horror whose greatest monster was his own bad self.

 

Certainly Bacon’s backstory fits the mold of the classic reprobate: The second of five children born to a wealthy British family in Dublin, Bacon, who was gay, was kicked out of the house at age 17 after his father discovered him wearing his mother’s clothes. He spent the 1920s and ’30s idling around London, Paris and Munich, supporting himself as a gentleman’s gentleman (under the name Francis Lightfoot) before finding some success as an interior designer. But his destiny lay in painting; indeed, though his career really didn’t take off until after the war, he first exhibited in 1933.

 

One of his compositions of the time was purchased by an important collector and was even featured in the book Art Now by the influential British critic Herbert Read. Still, Bacon was dissatisfied by the critical reception to his works and wound up destroying many of them. He produced little during the war years, spending most of his time in pubs and betting parlors. He was famous for his drinking, and was a founding member of the Colony Room, a private bar for artists in London’s Soho district.

 

Bacon wasn’t wise when it came to matters of the heart, either. Both of the major loves of his life, Peter Lacy and George Dyer, were drug addicts prone to violence, whether physical or emotional. Although their relationship had ended, Dyer accompanied Bacon to Paris in 1971 for the painter’s triumphant survey at the Grand Palais; the former wound up ODing in the bathroom of their hotel on the eve of Bacon’s opening. Talk about drama queens.

 

Like his life then, Bacon’s canvases are kind of a mess, an amalgam of abstraction and figuration, postwar angst and recondite old-master references. Self-taught, Bacon betrayed little interest in the conventions of avant-garde art at the time. Propelled by an autodidact’s restless curiosity, he borrowed freely from a wide range of source material, including photography and cinema. He mixed together references to Velázquez, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein and Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion studies, a strange thing to do in the late 1940s, though quite normal now. I

 

It’s been argued that Bacon’s import lies in being the first openly queer artist, but it’s also the case that he was one of the first to foreground the photograph as a subject matter for painting. Bacon drew the parallel between the photographic blur and the painterly stroke well before Gerhard Richter did the same, though his penchant for portentousness also gave license to the bombast of contemporary artists like Damien Hirst.

 

The output that first gained him notoriety in the aftermath of the war has been described as “religious painting for atheists,” and there’s undoubtedly some truth to this, given the surfeit of shrieking pontiffs—notably Head VI (1949), Study After Velázquez (1950) and Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)—and allusions to crucifixion. Taken together, these canvases create a metaphor for Europe’s experience of the conflict as a collective Passion that disproved the existence of God. But these works also suggest that Bacon, as frank as he was about his homosexuality, may have found his sexual orientation a cross to bear.
 

In any case, by the late 1960s, Bacon increasingly turned to portraying himself and his circle of friends and lovers. Expanses of bright color became a hallmark of his work, and if these vivid hues signal the return of the decorator’s eye, Bacon’s subjects could still be indecorous, albeit heartfelt. Triptych, May—June 1973 depicts Dyer’s ignoble death on the toilet, flanked by walls painted a vermilion rich enough for a monarch’s robes. Individually, paintings like this are hard to beat, but seen en masse, they are somewhat oppressive. In art as at breakfast, a little Bacon goes a long way.

 

 

 

 

“The best exhibition I have ever seen, anywhere, in my life” 

 

– Francis Bacon at the Met.   

 

  

Robert Ayers in New York

 

 ROBERT AYERS  |  A SKY FILLED WITH SHOOTING STARS  |  NEW YORK  |  WEDNESDAY JUNE 3 2009

 

I know it’s beyond a joke now, but having experienced Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective at the Met yesterday I now formally reinstate it as New York’s museum show of 2009. I admit I was thrilled by the Guggenheim’s “The Third Mind”, and because I enjoyed such a breadth of the work that it included, I hailed it as Exhibition of the Year in one of my first posts here on A Sky filled with Shooting Stars. But the Bacon show really is something else altogether, and at least partly because it’s not about breadth at all: everything here is the product of one artistic personality.

 

So I go back to what I originally wrote for ARTINFO back in December:

 

“It’s as simple as this: Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was one of the twentieth century’s most innovative, dramatic, and controversial painters; his personal life was at least as romantically chaotic as the best of his pictures; his work still manages to split opinion right down the middle; his long shadow still falls on much of contemporary art making; and this is a huge, all-encompassing museum study of his career, boasting new technical and interpretive insights. With more than 150 works in total, and the organizing and intellectual weight of the Met, the Tate, and the Prado behind it, this hundredth birthday tribute is New York’s show of the year.”

 

In fact now I’d say more than that, because despite that near-eulogistic enthusiasm I now find myself reflecting that I had actually always misunderstood and underestimated Francis Bacon’s art.

 

Growing up and getting most of my formal art education in England, Bacon’s painting was always there in the background. In the Tate (which was only one oh-so-familiar museum in those days) and in every published or exhibited survey of British art, he was always there. I am ashamed to admit that I got so that I couldn’t even see him any more. I took his work for granted. I certainly didn’t appreciate its intensity or comprehend its difficult, tragic, and utterly human subject matter.


 Why this realization is so beguiling is because it makes me register how much of my misunderstanding of Bacon was symptomatic of misunderstanding much of modern art in general. The first picture of Bacon’s that you see full-frontal in the Met’s show is Painting from 1946. It’s a terrifying image, all hanging carcasses and screaming, but what struck me most about it in the context of this show is the odd little enclosure that appears here so early in Bacon’s work, and really stays there in one way or another throughout his career. In this picture it’s described by the circular rail in the lower quarter of the picture – it reminds me of the dock in a British court room or of a display in some fancy Fortnum & Mason sort of emporium – and by the set of drawn roller blinds at the top. In other paintings it’s delimited by the walls of rooms, by geometrical forms sketched out in fine white lines, or by yellow ochre suggestions of church furniture in the early fifties portraits after the Velasquez Pope Innocent X. There’s even a whole gallery at the Met that’s given the title “Caged”. At least part of the claustrophobic power of Francis Bacon’s art derives from this really rather simple device of conjuring an enclosed space immediately behind or just inside of the surface of his pictures. It’s like a chamber prepared for a ritual, or a ring in which wrestling or bare knuckle fighting might happen, or an arena.
 

That word “arena” made me think of this statement of Harold Rosenberg’s from The American Action Painters, which is quite understandably one of the most celebrated passages in the whole of modern art criticism, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Now anyone who knows me will be aware that the last thing I’m going to indulge in here is some sort of jingoistic tub-thumping for British art’s superiority over American – it was my besottedness with American art that brought me to New York City in the first place – but just think about this: in Francis Bacon (to borrow Rosenberg’s language) we are confronted with an artist for whom the canvas was an arena in which to act, as well as a space in which to redesign, analyze and ‘express’ objects – and more particularly human beings – actual and imagined. What was to go on the canvas was both a picture and an event.”

 

The Three Studies for a Crucifixion of March 1962 is still, even nearly half a century after it was painted, a ghastly, genuinely upsetting piece, each panel recording some different moment of horror, but what gripped me here (though not only here) is the nature of transubstantiation in Bacon’s art. In the right hand panel, he drags dry-ish white-ish paint over the mud color of his bare canvas to evoke with the slightest of means that horrible floating enclosure of stripped bones; in what the Met’s label rather quaintly calls the “sordid scene” of the center panel he squirts white paint directly from the tube to suggest ejaculated semen. Alright, he makes paint look like something else, that’s what painters have done for centuries. But representation is only half of the story for Francis Bacon. In the forms of the two unsettling characters in the left hand panel – in what we might otherwise have to read as one figure’s ballooning hunchback and the other’s jellyfish arms and extravagantly brushed club foot – it as though he is melting representation back into the fluid of paint again. Something similar is happening in the “shadow” in the foreground of the right hand panel. In fact, once you become conscious of it, you find it happening everywhere, nowhere more beguilingly or beautifully than in the right hand panel of Triptych in Memory of George Dyer (1971) where the squirted-paint-as-squirted-semen trick is extended lasciviously by then being made to represent the slick highlight on Dyer’s greasy cheekbone.

 

There’s a grey dimly-lit room in the middle of this exhibition, which would in truth have made a small but perfectly fascinating exhibition in itself. It’s labelled an “Archival Gallery Overview”, and one wall is filled with a more than life-sized slice out of the famous photograph of Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews.

 

In a weird way that picture transforms the room into an echo of the studio itself, and that is entirely appropriate, for it contains Bacon’s source materials: pages torn from books and magazines, photo booth pictures and specially commissioned photographs of Bacon and his friends and his lovers, and most harrowingly, pictures of George Dyer, the bruiser who was the love of Bacon’s life, sitting in his baggy underpants in the very same studio that the little gallery has become.
 

Everything is torn, or crumpled, or glued back together, or smeared with paint.  The response of Met visitors to this whole exhibition is fascinating. Tourists in their summer vacation clothes who happily romp their way through pretty much the whole of rest of the museum are stunned into abject silence by the sheer overbearing power of Bacon’s art. (“Let’s get out of here!” I heard one unsettled young woman whisper to her boyfriend.) But in this room they become particularly hushed and reverent, as though visiting a shrine. Look again at that studio photograph, with its every surface strewn with paints, brushes, books, and the very newspaper clippings and photographs that we have here in front of us, and the walls peppered with little gory circles and smears of paint. The place looks like the scene of an explosion, or a crime, or a passion.

 

There has in the past been a tendency to romanticize Francis Bacon’s life and art. I’ve been guilty of it myself. But seeing this show makes me realize that there is nothing romantic about him or his work at all (and in passing makes also reassures me that I was right about Love is the Devil – what an utterly absurd movie that is.) Why Bacon’s tragedy is real tragedy (or why that routinely devalued word is for once appropriate) is because it has absolutely no romance to it, and – other than the art that it spawned – not a single elevating aspect.

 There’s a painting here called Self Portrait (from 1973) that I’d never really looked at before. In it Bacon leans on his elbow on the corner of a bare sink. His legs are twisted around one another in some paroxism of boredom, and he paws at his forehead above a screwed up jowly face that is once again doing that turning-back-into-paint thing. Bacon’s only companions are that sink, his bentwood chair, his own reflection, and a bare bulb that hangs above him. His watch reads 10 past 5. It is a truly harrowing picture. There are no hanging carcasses, no mysterious intruders, no fights or embraces, no bloodstains. Just Bacon enduring his own company at the end of an English afternoon, and finding it empty, boring, and loathsome. And in those days even the pubs didn’t open until 5.30.
 

This picture also tells us something about the peculiar role of resemblance in Bacon’s art. He famously hated to paint his subjects from life – he just couldn’t stand their proximity, apparently – and thus resorted so often to photographs. It’s interesting to ponder whether he hated other people’s appearance as much as his Three Studies for a Self Portrait (1979-80) – with its grotesque exaggerations of his nose and the bags around his eyes – makes it obvious that he despised his own. But what is undeniably the case is that the strange transubstantiation that occurs in Bacon – from paint to appearance and at least some of the way back again – is fundamental to his ability to evoke human presence. Look at that photograph of George Dyer again. Look at how like and unlike him Bacon’s various portraits look, and you begin to see that Bacon shows up portraiture that relies on resemblance as trite and lightweight and distracting. And only a stab in the dark at the sad mystery that is human existence.

 

Mystery runs through Bacon’s art like its spirit, for as well as portraits of real people that look little more like their subjects than they look like elaborate smearing of paint, there are all those portraits that look scarily like people they cannot possibly represent. There’s a whole room full of these so-called "Men in Blue” at the Met. Perhaps it tells us more about some unresolved oedipal problem of mine that I find these pictures of big framed middle aged men in business suits so frightening, but I still want to know how – decades before their emergence as adversaries on the world stage – Francis Bacon could come up with such convincing representations of (here) Ronald Reagan, and – in another painting with the same title – of Leonid Brezhnev.

 

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective is not merely the real exhibition of the year, I genuinely think it may be the best exhibition I have ever seen, anywhere, in my life. “Best” in the sense that it has made me totally reconsider not only the status of its subject, but also my comprehension of his relation to his predecessors (the late Picassos down at Gagosian suddenly look terribly unsubstantial by comparison) and to his contemporaries (rethinking Rosenberg’s The American Action Painters is really going to force me to think again about de Kooning, and particularly about Pollock). It’s also left me with all kinds of problems around my understanding of words like “tragedy”, “representation”, and “portraiture” and, though I haven’t mentioned them here, like “existentialism” and “beauty” as well. That such questions are wrapped up in a show that utterly renews one’s faith in the power of art to communicate something major about the human condition means that whether or not this is the best exhibition that has ever been seen in the city, it’s going to be a hell of a wait before another one that’s as good comes along.

 

 

 

 

 

Rough Stuff

 

 

A Francis Bacon retrospective at the Met.

 

 

BY PETER SCHJELDAHL  |  THE ART WORLD  |  THE NEW YORKER  |  JUNE 1, 2009

 

Francis Bacon has long been my least favourite great painter of the twentieth century. My notes from a visit to the new Bacon retrospective, which is very handsomely installed at the Metropolitan Museum, seethe with indignation, which I will now try to get over. It's unseemly to stay mad at an artist whose canonical stature, as graphed by the fervour of intelligent admirers, not to mention market value, has only grown since his death, in 1992, at the age of eighty-two. But first I must file away my accumulated objections to the theatrical shock tactics with which Bacon, in the nineteen-forties, aimed to create museum-worthy European painting that could stand up to that of his hero, Picasso. An old politics of style hovers. Bacon opposed American Abstract Expressionism, scorning Jackson Pollock’s manner as "old lace" and Mark Rothko’s as "rather dismal variations on colour." I have liked to believe that, in the mid-century contest for a radically new and befitting Western art, my countrymen played fair, and Bacon cheated. They forged integral styles that absorbed and transcended Impressionism and Cubism, engulfing rather than just addressing the eye. He vamped with an eclectic mix of Expressionist tactics and decorative longueurs. But I’m aware that the scorekeeping applies to a game not won or lost but called on account of rain--proliferating points of view that have swamped all would-be authoritative accounts of art history along with those of history, period.

In fact, it is Bacon, rather than the Abstract Expressionists, who now looks prophetic about subsequent developments in art, starting with Pop and continuing through the so-called Pictures Generation, the worthy subject of a concurrent exhibition at the Met. The key is his pioneering use of photographs and printed sources for his subject matter. To make his well-known, mordant takeoffs on Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (circa 1650), beginning in the early nineteen-fifties, he worked from reproductions, passing up opportunities to view the original in Rome during an extended stay there. Bacon also exerts an influence on young artists of today, such as Peter Doig and other friskily decadent British-educated painters. So here goes a rearguard skirmish, on behalf of Pollock and Rothko — and of Willem de Kooning, who, like Bacon, was a self-conscious inheritor of European tradition, an Oedipal scion of Picasso, and lingeringly a figurative artist, despite his achievements in abstraction.

Bacon was born in Ireland, in 1909, the son of a cutlery heiress and a military man who raised horses. As a teen-ager, Bacon was flamboyantly effeminate, and his behaviour enraged his father, who, according to a story reported by a friend, the novelist Caroline Blackwood, had him horsewhipped by grooms. By 1926 — spottily educated, having run away from boarding school — he was living in London on an allowance from his mother, supplemented by petty theft and, a bit later, by occasional largesse from enamoured older men. Jobs as a valet and a telephone answerer, for a dress company, were brief. Bacon read eagerly — Nietzsche, Eliot — and knocked around London, Berlin, and Paris. He was excited by Russian Revolutionary and Surrealist films. A show of works by Picasso in Paris in 1928 fired an artistic ambition that would sputter until the war years. Among the few early works he did not destroy is the first in the Met show: Crucifixion (1933), a vaguely Picassoesque figure, also reminiscent of work by a mentoring friend, Graham Sutherland, in ghostly white-on-black. The religious reference is not pious. All his life, in the words of his most devoted critic, the eloquent David Sylvester, Bacon was "an old-fashioned militant atheist who always seemed to be looking for pretexts to issue a reminder that God was dead and to bang a few nails into his coffin." He made a compensatory sacrament of a penchant for rugged sex, alcohol, and gambling.

In 1929, all of twenty years old, he set up as an interior designer in London. He enjoyed immediate success, recognized in an issue of a leading magazine devoted to The 1930 Look in British Decoration, but, in a decade of abundant social and erotic doings, he stuck with nothing for long. When war came, in 1939, asthma got him excused from the military and then, tormented by dusty air during the Blitz, from a civil-service position. At a house in South Kensington, his major work commenced. Here I glide past immense quantities of biography, amounting to an alternately exalted and gutter picaresque, which, in writings about Bacon, make him seem as much a literary character as a working artist. While his work is routinely celebrated as an authentic reaction to the horrors and the dislocations of the Second World War, it can come off, in the telling, as a pageant of hangovers and refractory lovers. He remains, in death, the raffish celebrity that he was in life; a meticulous re-creation of one of his incredibly cluttered studios, in which a book of Velazquez lies near a beefcake magazine, lures tourists to the municipal Hugh Lane Gallery, in Dublin.

In 1943, Bacon painted Figure Getting Out of a Car, derived from a photograph of Hitler. It centers on a naked, long-necked lump, whose head is all toothy maw. This seminal picture is not at the Met, but variations of the figure, on orange grounds, dominate a triptych, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (circa 1944), which announces Bacon’s vision of an age of monstrosity. Painting (1946), from the Museum of Modern Art, renders a crucified victim as sides of beef. Some screaming Popes of the early fifties are striated with vertical bands suggested by Albert Speer's cathedral of searchlights for a Nazi rally. Writing in 1948, Sylvester detected in Bacon’s style a redolence of the sixteenth-century painter Matthias Grunewald's "germanic temperament of epileptic delirium." In ways comparable to but ranging beyond those of his existentialist contemporary Alberto Giacometti, Bacon mobilized an emotion of energetic, strangely energizing despair. He regularly proclaimed his allegiance to primal drives as the only credible substitute for meaning in a hostile universe. (But did he have to be quite so enthusiastic about it?)

Bacon's striking formal innovations, in handlings of pictorial space, include swiftly limned cubical enclosures and evocations of proscenium stages, in which single figures - or paired figures interwoven in paroxysms of sex and/or death — leap to the eye. Marvellously snarling knots of brushwork in the figures are increasingly offset by flat grounds and, at times, by overlaid geometrical ciphers, such as graphic arrows. The critic Lawrence Gowing wrote, approvingly, that Bacon hatched a look "at once of pastiche and of iconoclasm." It's on this point that I rebel in favor of, particularly, de Kooning's hardly less ferocious "Women" paintings, which observe the imperative, shared by all the Abstract Expressionists, to reconcile figure and ground. Bacon spoke of "a complete interlocking of image and paint, so that the image is the paint and vice versa," but he attained that effect only in isolated passages, surrounded by dead space. His paintings, despite their extraordinary visual drama, thus lack a de Kooningesque sense of scale, which knits visible brushstrokes to the proportions of the canvas and relates the whole to the viewer’s body. Big or small, the size of a Bacon feels arbitrary. With a few exceptions--such as some van Gogh-inspired painterly thunderstorms that he made in the late nineteen-fifties, and which I wish he had built on —they are illustrational: tissues of fiction, or caricature, that complete themselves in literary imagination.

Not that there's anything wrong with illustration. That's the retroactive mercy of regarding Bacon in the light of Pop art and of later grapplings, by artists including the Pictures crew, with the tyranny of mechanical reproduction in contemporary culture. The most crucial tension of Bacon's style, between life mediated by received images and life suffered in the flesh, can be awfully heady. In one of his caustic moods, he pronounced ninety-five per cent of people "fools about painting." He complained, "Hardly anyone really feels about painting: they read things into it." I disagree, except in cases, like Bacon's, where reading things in can seem pretty much the modus operandi. With a Pollock or a Rothko, you either feel about painting or have nothing to engage you. But I find myself persuaded that Bacon did identify with the visceral sorcery of paint — though he wouldn't maintain it across any whole canvas--and that he wanted us to perceive that fact, even as he perversely threw melodramatic scenarios in the way.

A sense of dilemma leads me to reconsider a feature of his art that I have regarded as finicky and precious: his insistence that all his paintings be displayed behind glass, in gold frames. The only reason I could surmise for this was that Bacon used glass as a prosthetic gloss to unify his lurchingly fragmented surfaces. But having witnessed, at the Met, the gleaming parade of his career, I begin to understand the policy as a poignant gesture that weds decorative chic to fierce aspiration. Reflecting in more ways than one, the framing registers the viewer's physical presence and, abstractly, the hermetic fate of Western painting, fallen from the Renaissance into a state of besiegement by cameras and printing presses. Bacon's paintings objectify the subjective ordeal of perishing bodies that harbour immortal longings. In this, the paintings are indeed great, standing for a historical condition even of people who can't abide them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                              

 

                                     Bacon’s “Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X” (1953), one of a series of mordant takeoffs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

London Landscape

 

 

 

 

Bacon – psychoanalyst for human solitude

 

 

 

 

FRANCESCO CARELLII |  LONDON JOURNAL OF PRIMARY CARE  |  NUMBER 2  |  VOLUME 1  |  JUNE 2009

 

 

Tate Britain’s exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon (1909–1992) is a major celebration heralding the artist’s centenary in 2009. As the first UK retrospective since 1985, it affords a re-assessment of his work in the light of the new research that has emerged since the revelation of his studio and its contents following the artist’s death.

 

Comprising around 65 paintings and covering the artist’s career, including 13 large triptychs, the exhibition bring together the most important works from each period of his life. It is the largest display to date to examine Bacon’s sources, processes and thoughts by an artist internationally regarded as Britain’s greatest painter of the last century and the biggest one after Turner.

 

His paintings of the 1940s bore witness to the shattered psychology of the time and shot him to prominence that hardly diminished over the next 50 years. He captured sexuality, violence and isolation in his unflinching depictions of the anxieties of the modern condition.

 

The exhibition explores Bacon’s philosophy that man is simply another animal in a godless world, subject to the same natural urges of violence, lust and fear that are physically evident in the body. Bacon’s output was dominated by the human body.

 

His way of portraying the body was unique in the history of painting, usually in isolation, at moments of extreme tension or even pain, distorted like figures from a fantastical nightmare, indicating the isolation of human life without God just as an animal. So humans are subject to the same natural urges of violence, lust and fear as any other animal.

 

He reveals the frailty of the human figure and the scream or cry that expresses repressed and violent anxieties. In one painting we see the distorted human figure where we recognise the famous crying nurse on the steps depicted in Eisenstein’s movie ‘Potemkin battleship’ with broken glasses indicating the human shattered vision on a number of levels. Bacon said ‘I like Freud very much because I like his way of explaining things between conscious and unconscious’. Along his works, we see a sense of dread pervading the brutality of everyday life in which he portrays humans as pathetically isolated.

 

In the final part of his life, dark openings consciously evoke the abyss of confrontation with mortality, the inevitability and constant presence of death, where the poetry of TS Eliot was a particular source of inspiration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Raw Vision of Francis Bacon

 

 

Francis Bacon at 100.

 

 

BY CHRISTOPHER BENFEY|  ART  |  CULTURE  |  SLATE  |  WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2009

 

The Met’s reverential celebration of English artist Francis Bacon, who was born 100 years ago and died in 1992, feels more like a coronation than a retrospective. It’s as though after years of painting howling popes and grisly crucifixions, the bad-boy sinner had finally been rewarded with a puff of white smoke from the Holy See. Bacon's impact on younger painters has never been greater; Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which stunned viewers in war-ravaged London in 1945, helps us see why. In this grim triptych, more Abu Ghraib than Gethsemane, Bacon preserved the visceral impact of religious painting while emptying it of overt spiritual baggage. Three genetically modified life forms are the eyeless spectators at "a crucifixion," as though such things happen every day. Lampreylike and bandaged against a lethal orange background, they look as though they could survive anything. A lifelong atheist, Bacon once said that he wanted his pictures "to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime."

"I kinda like this one," says Jack Nicholson’s nihilistic Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman as he mows through an art museum defacing paintings. The painting he spares is one of Bacon’s famous popes, flanked by slabs of flayed meat. Loosely based on Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1649-50), which Bacon claimed to know only in reproductions, Bacon's open-mouthed popes have elicited many interpretations, from the personal (Bacon was severely asthmatic, and the pope is gasping for air) to the existential ("This is the black night of the 20th-century soul. …"). But it’s doubtful that Bacon had any specific interpretation in mind in creating such images. Intensity was what he was after—and jarring incongruity. Like a chemist in the lab, he combined unstable substances—in this case, a familiar portrait of a pope with a still of a screaming nurse from Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin—to see what explosive compound might emerge. The results can be oddly divergent in their emotional impact. Head VI, the earliest surviving version of the series, may invite an initial sense of horror, but it also looks surprisingly like a triumphant college graduate with a tassel dangling from his mortarboard. Teeth and gums are lovingly painted, a miniature symphony of mauve and white. Bacon once told art critic David Sylvester that he always wanted "to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.

 

Bacon recombines the meat, the teeth, and the tassel in his monumental Painting, another crucifixion for modern times. With its echoes of Rembrandt and Soutine, masters of the painted carcass, Painting is a "masterpiece" in the old sense of the word: a work that displays what an apprentice has learned in mastering his craft. Bacon had little formal schooling and none in art; he learned what he needed to know from museums and fellow artists. Born in Dublin into a rich Protestant English family that divided its time between Ireland and England, Bacon was kicked out of the house at 16 when his father, a horse trainer and official in the War Office, discovered him wearing his mother's clothes. He drifted among professions (gentleman's valet, interior decorator) and lovers (his first was a Tory politician) before finding in art—especially the paintings of Picasso he saw in Paris on a visit during the 1920s—a staging ground for emotional and sexual intensity. While Bacon's biomorphic forms superficially recall Picasso’s Surrealist period, his working methods, the subject of intense research since his studio was made available to scholars after his death, align him with Warhol. Bacon painted primarily from a horde of photographs, many of which are displayed in the Met exhibition. Painting is based in part on an image of the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, behind a bank of microphones.

Bacon based many paintings on Eadweard Muybridge's stop-action studies of animal locomotion from the 1880s. "It would be very difficult for me," he once said, "to disentangle the influence of Muybridge from the influence of Michelangelo." Michelangelo was a great religious painter, while Muybridge was a secular scientist. But for Bacon, both Muybridge and Michelangelo were thesauruses of suggestive physical poses, available for recombination, and trailing old meanings like a snail trailing slime. There is probably some man-as-beast analogy in Bacon's dogs and baboons, but Bacon didn't insist on the metaphors. Sometimes a dog is just a dog.

During the 1950s, Bacon’s toothy popes morphed into toothy businessmen in grey flannel suits, often portrayed in cagelike bedrooms with heavy blinds lowered. These have been interpreted, predictably, as commentaries on Cold War bureaucratic uniformity and sexual repression—"the hollow men, the stuffed men," as Bacon’s favourite poet, T.S. Eliot, might have called them. But these men in blue are weirder than that. In Study for a Portrait, the gaping mouth is based on a book about oral diseases that Bacon had bought in Paris. If Bacon painted gaping mouths like Monet sunsets, here the lush blues and blacks resemble Whistler's nocturnes. As in many of Bacon’s strongest paintings, our emotions and our eyes are pulled in two directions at once: a disturbing image of grinning derangement and a reassuring harmony of blues and greys.

There’s a kindred tension between horror and harmony in Bacon's hallucinatory riff on the life mask of William Blake, originally cast by London phrenologist James Delville in 1813, when Blake was 56. Working, as usual, from a photograph, Bacon reanimated the mask. The seemingly flayed head looms in the darkness like an actor delivering a soliloquy. The spectral image bears an uncanny resemblance to Marlon Brando reciting Eliot’s The Hollow Men in Apocalypse Now. Bacon is also inviting a comparison between his own visionary work and that of an outsider artist like Blake. The painted planes of the face are hauntingly beautiful, a jagged map of human presence at the border of life and death.

Bacon's work slackened during the 1960s, and there are too many flamboyant triptychs of theatrical and sexual goings-on, hurriedly (and reportedly drunkenly) painted. Smaller portraits, often in sequences like strips from a photo booth, retain their intensity. Bacon liked to quote Cocteau’s quip, "Each day in the mirror I watch death at work." He claimed not to like self-portraiture: "I loathe my own face." But by the late 1970s, he had lost so many friends—along with his longtime lover, George Dyer, dead of a drug overdose (and commemorated in many, many paintings)—that "I’ve nobody left to paint but myself!" Across the mouth, Bacon applied paint with ribbed fabrics, giving a strangely striated texture, like Eliot’s Sweeney (the subject of a late Bacon triptych) with "zebra stripes along his jaw."

The bleak paintings of Bacon’s lonely last years have titles like A Piece of Waste Land (Eliot again) and Blood on Pavement. This picture may, as the wall-text claims, be based on "a night when the artist encountered evidence of a brutal act in the street while walking home." And yet there’s nothing brutal about the painting, with its calm, Rothko-like swaths of colour. "You have to abbreviate into intensity," Bacon believed, and this picture takes abbreviation to the edge of abstraction. Like the related Jet of Water, with its white paint splashed across the canvas, Blood on Pavement seems to be about the act of painting, the mysterious process by which seemingly arbitrary marks assume emotional power.

Lovingly preserved in a Dublin gallery, Bacon's studio is now a site of pilgrimage as well as a live archeological dig. When American art historian Sam Hunter visited Bacon during the early 1950s, the creative clutter already threatened to engulf the studio. "At one end stand his paintings, unique and extremely personal inventions," Hunter wrote. "At the other are tables littered with newspaper photographs and clippings, crime sheets. … Violence is the common denominator of photographs showing Goebbels waggling a finger on the public platform, the human carnage of a highway accident, every sort of war atrocity." During Bacon’s lifetime, critics often noted the eerie ways in which his paintings seemed to predict public events. His slaughterhouse motifs were displayed as the first shocking images from the Nazi concentration camps emerged. Eichmann on trial in his glass cell recalled Bacon’s popes in their kindred cages. In our own era of enhanced interrogation techniques, it feels as though Bacon, whose life spanned the century of total war, has dreamed it all before us. "I’m an optimist," Bacon liked to say, "an optimist about nothing."

 
 

 

 

 

 

  He made despair glamorous, but was

  Francis Bacon truly great?

 

 

    SEBASTIAN SMEE  |  THE BOSTON GLOBE  |  SUNDAY, MAY 24, 2009

 

NEW YORK — Embarrassed by our former selves, we often recoil from the art we loved as adolescents. Artists we ardently fall for in our teens are frequently — and sometimes savagely — "dropped" later in life as our tastes become more sophisticated (or so we think).

In literature, such writers as J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver routinely suffer such a fate, while in art, Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, and Vincent Van Gogh are perhaps the classic cases.

Francis Bacon, too, belongs in this category. For those who succumbed early to an infatuation with his violent and glamorous work, as I did, the question of whether he is really any good can be as much a test of respect for our former selves, and the special receptiveness of youth, as it is of Bacon himself.

Widely regarded as a — if not the — leading figure in postwar British art, Bacon, who died in 1992, is the subject of a major retrospective here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Over the years, he has been received in America with am bivalence. His first work to enter a public collection was bought by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1948. And the Met made Bacon the first living artist from Britain to be accorded a solo show in 1975.

But many leading US critics, offended, perhaps, by his disdain for abstraction — the idiom that established American ascendancy in art after 1940 — failed to give Bacon the lavish praise he was accorded in Britain and France.

Gary Tinterow, a curator at the Met, suggests another cause. In the catalogue for Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, he writes that Bacon’s "overt homosexuality was incompatible with the disguised Puritan and overtly macho ethos of many of his American contemporaries . . . at least until the 1980s" when, he says, feminism and queer studies introduced more sympathetic attitudes.

Tinterow’s claim is as ridiculous as it looks (homosexuality was far from unknown in American art between the 1940s and the 1980s). But it is fair to say that Bacon’s psychological complexity, his combination of intense charm, queeny wit, and instinctive perversity, can seem very British (although he was actually born in Ireland) and, to some American observers, perhaps, alienating.

The Met show, which originated at London’s Tate Britain last year, does not make an open-and-shut case for Bacon’s greatness. It includes too much early work, and too much late work. The early paintings, from 1944 to 1962, which made such a big impression on observers at the time, look histrionic and bloated (big canvases with not much going on). The late ones lack tension, depending on arbitrary mannerisms and sensation-craving effects.

But there are two rooms filled with works of devastating force — and that ought to be enough for anyone.

Part of what makes these works, painted between 1962 and 1976, great is Bacon’s introduction of bright, saturated colours to his carefully designed and fastidiously painted backgrounds.

The early works, including the series of screaming popes that Bacon later dismissed, quite rightly, as "very silly," tended to set isolated figures in transparent enclosures against black or gray backgrounds, often with vertical striations, vaguely suggestive of veils, prison bars, or the rows of spotlights used as ghostly extensions of architecture at Nazi rallies.

The contrast between the near-monochrome sobriety of this early work and the sumptuousness of the post-1962 colours is extreme. But nowhere in the lamely dutiful introduction to the catalogue by curators Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens is colour discussed.

Certainly it is strange to think of this supreme painter of human agony and despair as a connoisseur of royal purples, lush spring greens, phallic pinks, perfumed mauves, and commercial oranges. But Bacon was a great colourist who, like Matisse, came to understand the impact that large areas of saturated tints could have.

In paintings like Lying Figure (1969), Triptych—In Memory of George Dyer (1971), and the Matisse-like nude Henrietta Moraes (1966), Bacon set up thrilling tensions between the rectilinear areas of flat, unmodulated colour he used for his backgrounds; the liquid, bulging outlines of his figures, which cast shadows like spilled blood; and the scumbled, layered brushstrokes he used to convey flesh.

The commentary on Bacon focuses always on the flesh. Bacon was, after all, a connoisseur of mortality and an avid student of gruesome medical textbooks, scenes of cinematic violence, and photographs of abattoirs. But in his great period, all these elements are splendidly interwoven.

A gambler, Bacon liked to play up his reliance on chance. But his orchestration of all the various elements in his paintings was so carefully controlled that the operations of chance were surely minimal. He began his creative career as a designer of modernist rugs and furniture in the vein of Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, and Eileen Gray, and it’s hard not to see the carefully plotted designs of his later canvases, especially the great triptychs, as vestiges of this period.

The fund of remarkable anecdotes relating to Bacon’s life is almost inexhaustible, and not entirely incidental to the impact of his paintings. One such is told by Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, in his memoir, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Richardson described seeing Bacon "ensconced in front of a mirror, seemingly making up his face. In fact he was rehearsing those heavily loaded brushstrokes that would give his portraits . . . their sumptuous gyroscopic spin."

Bacon, he continued, would "let his beard grow for a few days" and "then cake pads with different shades of Max Factor’s pancake makeup and apply them, this way and that, across his stubble in great swoops . . . It was as if the surface of his face were the page of a sketchbook."

With this in mind, get up close to one of the smaller portraits in the show, such as the 1966 Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne or the 1967 Study for Head of George Dyer. You see the attention Bacon lavished on his subjects’ skin — the remarkable feeling for different textures, the sense of volume and motion conveyed by shifting speeds of brushstroke, the embrace of arbitrary colour as a correlative not of atmospheric light, as in the Fauves, but of the arbitrariness of life itself.

 

For Bacon’s portraiture was not just about degrees of physical likeness. It was an attempt to capture a psychological, an existential condition. The weakness of his art as he got older was that he tended to subordinate a sense of specific presence — a shiver, a spasm, a convulsion of hatred or ecstatic release — to more abstract, generalized notions about the condition of being alive.

 

I have no doubt that, for Bacon, these ideas were more than just philosophical musings; he clearly experienced them down in the core of his being. But as he got older, he seemed unable to find new ways to communicate their urgency.

 

In the famous interviews Bacon conducted with the critic David Sylvester (published in the book Interviews with Francis Bacon), which have had an incalculable influence not only on artists but on novelists, playwrights, poets, musicians, and filmmakers around the world, he said: "You see, all art has now become completely a game by which man distracts himself. . . . What is fascinating now is that it’s going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to be any good at all."

 

Regrettably, Bacon, in his last two decades, seemed unable to find ways to deepen the game.

 

Similarly, he used the word "illustrative" as a powerful pejorative — a quality to be avoided at all costs. A great work, he said, must hit the "nervous system" directly rather than have its emotion conveyed via "a long diatribe in the brain."

 

But a lot of his work, with its teasing arrows and ashtrays, its syringes and swastikas, seems coyly involved in games of storytelling, and his drawing frequently feels flatly descriptive — exactly like illustration.

 

Despite all that, I remember well the effect Bacon’s work first had on me, as well as its impact on several friends who have gone on to become artists. His paintings combined abject violence with a kind of immaculate beauty in ways that teenage boys are probably predestined to find alluring. I may be fussier in my mind about what succeeds and what doesn’t now, but I remain in awe of that early union of Bacon’s imagery and my own teenage hunger for maximum impact.

 

This show is an important retrospective by an artist who could seize you by the throat as almost no other 20th-century artist could. But it fails to settle the case of his greatness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                       

                                           Study for Portrait I, 1953 Francis Bacon
 

 

 

 

 If Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would Shriek

 

 

 

By ROBERTA SMITH   |   ART REVIEW   |  THE NEW YORK TIMES   |   THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2009


Francis Bacon is an artist for our time. You may love or hate his work, which is still vigorously polarizing after all these years. But more than that of any other artist who emerged at the end of World War II, his work tells us about the strengths and weaknesses of the moment.

For nearly 50 years, until his death in 1992 at 82, Bacon worked the fault lines dividing abstraction and representation and sometimes photography, where many contemporary painters from subsequent generations have staked claims of one kind or another.

His contorted figures and portraits, his screaming popes and apes, his flanks of beef and crime-scene gore, and his wrestling lovers bring to mind any number of video-melodramatists, most quickly Bill Viola, reflecting a taste for hokey humanism, spectacle and sensationalism that often seems pervasive today. His emphasis on loaded narrative over form, which can make his art seem formulaic and repetitive, is now nearly epidemic.

The stately if cursory survey of Bacon’s paintings that opened Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art suggests a more lasting pertinence: Bacon’s depiction of the love that until a few decades ago dared not say its name, much less demand the right to marry. Bacon convincingly painted men having sex and sometimes making love. Whether this makes him a great painter, it certainly secures him a place in the history of both painting and art. He emphatically turned the male gaze toward males.

Bacon did for men in lust or in love what his hero Picasso had done for men and women in the same spot — or at least for Picasso and women. He turned sex and genuine passion into a pictorial event, using paint on canvas with finesse and no small sense of drama and without getting clinical. He operated, like Picasso, under cover of modernism.

The show, which originated at the Tate Britain last fall, has been slightly reconstituted and installed at the Met by Gary Tinterow, the curator in charge of 19th-century modern and contemporary art. It is freshest where it delves into Bacon’s use of photographs, not only those clipped from magazines and books but also images he had taken of friends and lovers. He often blew up images and used their cut-out forms as templates. (You can see this especially with George Dyer, his handsome, distinctively profiled companion, whom he painted often in the 1960s and ’70s.)

“Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” begins in full cry. First come the screeching fiends of “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion,” the triptych with which Bacon announced himself to the London art scene in 1944. Against bright orange grounds that would become something of a signature, gape-mouthed furies — part human, part monster, and one per canvas — foretell postwar deprivation, rage and existential doubt. The dogs of war are not going to be leashed anytime soon; the world itself is on the cross.

These overwrought creatures work better in movies, like “Alien.” Their screams continue in the next gallery, where the open, dentally precise mouths gradually migrate to human heads, mostly from 1949, and the first of Bacon’s famous, often glib screaming popes, after Velázquez, arrives. The Museum of Modern Art’s “Painting” from 1946 is also here, encapsulating much of the Bacon repertory: matching slabs of meat that might be said to couple, a seated male, a half-hidden screaming face and the luxurious surface and color. Even so, his mastery was more than a decade away

Only in the third gallery does this show dial back the hysteria and risk real emotion, in particular the tenderness passing between two men in “Untitled (Two Figures in the Grass),” from around 1952. Pale, soft-fleshed and naked, his back to us, one sits with his legs tucked beneath him, bowing his head over the other, who apparently lies in the grass, his presence indicated mostly as a pair of bent knees that are, ominously, faintly touched with red. Theirs is a sorrowing intimacy stolen amid a gale of blue-black strokes. The faint outlines of a bed and room hint at an imagined interior, a safe, private haven.

Bacon later said that he regretted having wasted so much time while young. Instead of learning his craft, he was often drinking, gambling, sleeping around and having a brutal affair with a violent, alcoholic, drug-addicted sadist named Peter Lacy that sometimes made his friends fear for his life.

This show concurs by bringing on more popes, along with screaming apes, slinking dogs and mute businessmen. Scant of surface and image, with glancing, uneasy brushwork, they imply a divided attention and a reliance on pictorial short cuts and ambiguities to disguise limited skills. Although they are some of Bacon’s best-known works, they barely pass muster as paintings.

Yet the Met’s exhibition disputes the notion that Bacon’s art declined, indicating that it often improved as his colors brightened, his paint handling gained muscularity. It was equally important that he began to focus on people he knew and cared about, giving them faces that seem simultaneously masked, gouged out of wet clay and recognizably individual.

Bacon may have been saved by the physicality of van Gogh’s art, as evidenced by the 1957 “Study for a Portrait of van Gogh VI,” with its thick, troweled paint, raking light and a plowed field that resembles a butterflied slab of meat marbled with red and green. In the same room “Three Studies for a Crucifixion” from 1962 announces Bacon’s maturity: in pulsations of red, orange and black we see two assassins; the bloody pulp of their victim, curled on a striped mattress; and a hanging side of beef — with human teeth — that suggests a saint’s martyrdom

In the show’s second half Bacon paints from his life, his imagination or somewhere in between, uncoiling new, ambiguous narratives that were often enhanced by the expansiveness of the triptych format. These paintings may not always work, but it is rarely for lack of trying. Sex, both violent and not, takes place; crimes are committed; guts are spilled. Colors become electrifying, textures enrich. The curved shelf of space that becomes the norm circles around, implicating us as intimates, voyeurs or unwilling witnesses.

Often we seem to see people posing in the studio, fidgeting, ready to jump out of their skins (even though Bacon didn’t paint from life, only from photographs). In “Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer,” the subject sits near a canvas that is pinned with a nude picture of him, which is truer to Bacon’s working method.

An especially fraught 1967 triptych that Bacon allowed to be named for T. S. Eliot’s poem “Sweeney Agonistes” has two scenes of lovers on low platforms raised above grass-green carpet. They flank an interior in which a hideous partial carcass is propped up before a window. One imagines it as the remnants of a man who, from loneliness, has literally howled out his heart to the implacable black sea visible beneath a violet sky. Except that the violet plane is a window shade, a regal color commensurate with the sacrifice. Whatever Bacon’s mangled, solitary or coupled beings meant to him, they starkly remind us that, while we look at the painting, others are dying, seizing up with loneliness or having sex

I’m not sure that this show will do much to alter the polarities of opinion around Bacon; that will take much more curatorial precision and imagination. But it is always bracing to see his work and to realize that part of its energy derives from its refusal to go softly in art history. He reminds us that in the end very little about art is fixed, and that we should always be ready to turn on a dime.


“Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” continues through Aug. 16 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

 

 

  Culture Zohn: Francis Bacon:

 

 

The Painter as Pulverising Machine

 

 

 

PATRICIA ZOHN   |   THE HUFFINGTON POST   |   THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2009

 

When they think of Francis Bacon, most people think: torment. Tortured and torqued figures, wailing, screaming, headless, chinless, from world and his personal history, portrayed under attack for being gay (which was actually illegal when he began to emerge as a painter) or being political or just being different. Bacon sampled poetry, power, religion, world events, spiritualism, hypocrisy and homophobia in a mix with liner notes that told of isolation and fear. That sense of discomfort you got from the confrontational work turned you on or off; Bacon referred to himself as a "pulverizing machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed." 

Yet, even though I didn’t immediately understand the depth of suffering, I always loved his dynamic, in your face painting, his pushy subjects, his sophisticated colours (oranges – neon to peach to ochre to muddy brown – blues – navy to teal to lavender – and a luscious avocado). Even the backgrounds, at first glance seemingly one-dimensional, are tricky with floor sweepings and bits of collage that give lie to the notion that he is simply a portraitist who cared only about the figure. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the last stop on a tour of a retrospective of this spectacular painter.

In 1975 when the Metropolitan showed his work (including the triptych that sold at auction last year for $86.3 million), I bought a signed poster, all I could afford, which was relegated to an attic as my stuff could not keep up with my criss-crossing of the country.

When I landed again in NY a few years ago, I quickly retrieved the Bacon and put it next to my bed and in the tiny room you can’t help but think how unlike most bedroom art it is. And yet even with his angst and anger over his lovers, Bacon was immensely moving, spewing fractured fairy tales that depict desire as the thing that drives you crazy even as it is the only thing that keeps you sane.

The retrospective is extremely beautiful. Everyone was talking about how the artist normally known for his ugly portraits could be an astonishing colourist, every bit as complicated as Picasso, Velasquez, Matisse and many photographers (Muybridge) and filmmakers (Eisenstein) whom he took as inspiration. His love affairs almost undid him. Yet he worked every day with a protean single-mindedness; the work is testament to his original and fierce view of the world.

I can’t help but think a whole new generation of artists will come to the Met and claim his audacity and genius for themselves, his inspirational technique and passion ricocheting off the Metropolitan walls.

 

 

 

 

                                                                                 Francis Bacon: Three Studies for a Self-Portrait (1979-80) 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Art’s obsessive genius

 

 

 

The Met is celebrating Francis Bacon’s centenary with a grand retrospective.

Paul Laster highlights this controversial artist’s best and most disturbing work.

  

 

PAUL LASTER   |   THE DAILY BEAST   |   WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 2009

 

Francis Bacon’s daring yet disturbing portrayals of friends and lovers and his imaginative interpretations of historical paintings, photographs, and films have long been celebrated. Now the controversial self-taught British artist is the subject of a grand, 100th-year birthday retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The exhibition, which began at Tate Britain last fall and traveled to Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado earlier this year, was originally organized around such central themes as animal, crucifixion, and crisis. However, at the Met, curators Gary Tinterow and Anne Strauss stage a chronological viewing for Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective that takes the viewer through the most significant stages of Bacon’s development as an artist—from his early success in the ’40s and portraits of people in the ’60s and ’70s to self-portraits and landscapes in his final decade. The paintings, ephemera, wall texts, and audio tour construct a story of an obsessive, gifted genius who lived for love and art until he took his last breath on April 28, 1992

The show opens with Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion(1944), a triptych of distorted, repellent figures—defiantly perched on tabletops and a patch of grass—that are all mouths and muscle. Of equal importance is Painting (1946), which New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired two years after it was made. It features a dark, anguished figure surrounded by a lexicon of Bacon’s symbols: butchered meat, silhouetted window shades, black umbrellas, and tubular rails that echo his modernist furniture designs. An accident that developed from a sequence of false starts, Painting is shown in an intimate room with several Head series paintings that were exhibited in Bacon’s first solo show at London’s Hanover Gallery in 1949.

Head VI (1949), which is the cover image of the Met’s catalog, is a horrific portrait of a screaming, robed man that may have been the first work in Bacon’s series of pope paintings, made after Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) by the 17th-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Working from a reproduction, Bacon would eventually paint more than 40 versions of the Velázquez masterpiece; although he later said none were as good as the original. Today, however, Bacon’s pope paintings are highly coveted.

The paintings, ephemera, wall texts, and audio tour construct a story of an obsessive, gifted genius who lived for love and art.

Expressive paintings of people and animals in motion, from the ’40s and ’50s, such as Study of a Baboon (1953), a primate that appears to be both in and out of its cage, are featured in the third and fourth galleries, alongside the pope paintings and leading into a room of four of the seven known paintings from the Men in Blue series (1953-55). Study for a Portrait (1953), from the Hamburger Kunsthalle Collection, is the most dynamic, simultaneously depicting a suited man in his bed and at his desk—a figure of authority considered to be a portrayal of Bacon’s tumultuous lover Peter Lacy, an ex-RAF pilot.

The Men in Blue series utilizes Bacon’s favored technique of thick, vertical, curtain-like lines, which he referred to as shuttering, to obscure the figure and ground and veil what might be considered any lack of painterly finesse. Bacon also chose to present all of his works behind glass, in gilded frames, to lend a level of importance to the work. The glass establishes a distance between the painting and the viewer, while disturbingly causing one to see his own reflection in it.

In 1961, after Bacon’s move to 7 Reece Mews in London, a new, spare aesthetic evolved, which placed a lone figure or pair of figures on a painted background of one or two colors. Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours (from Muybridge), from that year, is a fine example of this stylistic shift. Based on a 19th-century Eadweard Muybridge photograph, it focuses on a child walking like an animal in a sparse plane, a vision that expressed Bacon’s existentialist belief that we are the same as animals, living life without a predetermined nature.

The following year, Bacon painted Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962), the first triptych he had made in 20 years, which put him back on the path to paint many more. The riveting painting—which symbolically captures Hitler and Himmler pushing people into the gas chamber; a contorted, bullet-ridden body on a bed; and Christ as an irreverent slab of beef, sliding down the cross—was made for his 1962 retrospective at the Tate Gallery and offered a powerful response to the American abstract painters, who dominated the international art scene at the time and worked on a similarly grand scale.

The ’60s and ’70s are arguably Bacon’s best years. He enlisted Vogue photographer John Deakin to photograph his coarse, creative group of friends, preferring to paint them from pictures, as he saw fit, in the solitude of his messy studio. Bacon crumpled and folded the photos to get new, distorted perspectives on the models’ faces, perhaps seeing them in their drunken states at the bar.

There are portraits of Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, and George Dyer in the show. Moraes, a lover of Lucian Freud, is splayed nude on a bed; Rawsthorne, a painter who had also modeled for Giacometti and Picasso, stands in a surreal vision of a Soho street; and Dyer, Bacon’s lover, rides a bike on a suspended rail. He was the inspiration for some of Bacon’s best paintings of the ’60s, including Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1968), which places two views of the dapper dude—one twistingly evil and the other vacuous—hovering around an ashtray, overflowing with cigarette butt.

Bacon rivals Picasso in the way he represents the body, particularly the face. He defines the model’s nature, which is most often dark, through a combination of elegant marks. Everything is in motion, and the triptych panels often construct a narrative, like the frames of a film do. In the ’70s he made even more triptychs of Dyer, but now to memorialize his suicidal overdose, which came on the eve of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Triptych— In Memory of George Dyer (1971) dramatically mixes Dyer’s death in a Paris hotel with a passage from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, while Triptych— August 1972(1972) shows his former companion dissolving into pools of pink fluid.

The remainder of the paintings in the show focus on Bacon’s small but powerful portraits; a few landscapes, in particular Blood on Pavement (1988), which throws stark reality into a painting that mocks a Mark Rothko; a Portrait of John Edwards (1988), Bacon’s lover since 1976, seated on a chair in a position that’s reminiscent of Dyer’s portraits; and a final self-portrait, Triptych (1991), which juxtaposes two coupling figures, based on a Muybridge photograph, surrounded by two truncated bodies, one with the head of a Brazilian race-car driver and the other with the head of Bacon.

Beyond his lifetime of work, Bacon left a studio full of ephemera: pictures of wrestlers, boxers, and baseball players, torn from books and magazines; Deakin’s photographs, smudged with Bacon’s paint-stained fingerprints; fragments of medical journals; and sketches and handwritten notes on scraps. As enchanting as the art that fills the surrounding galleries, it gives the viewer insight into the simple origins of some of the most psychological paintings ever made.

Paul Laster is the editor of  Art Asia Pacific, and a contributing writer at Time Out New York and Art in America

 

 

 

 

 

 Why Bacon?

 

 

 

   SHARON BUTLER  |  TWO COATS OF PAINT  |  NEW YORK CITY  |  MONDAY, MAY 18, 2009

 

Francis Bacon is one of those painters every beginning painting student adores because Bacon’s work is so much more accessible than the abstract painters who were exploring similar existential themes during the same period. The accessibility of Bacon’s corporeal vision is undoubtedly why his work appeals so strongly to new collectors short on art theory. Not surprisingly, during today’s opening remarks at the press preview for the Bacon exhibition that opens this week at the Met, curator Gary Tinterow cited Bacon’s influence on later artists (primarily Damien Hirst and the YBAs) as one of the primary reasons that this show is so important. The second reason, Tinterow declared, is the fact that Bacon is dead.

Huh? Well, it seems that many of Bacon’s friends and colleagues who were reluctant to dish while the painter was alive, have come forward to give us a more fully formed picture of Bacon’s life and working process than was available during the last Bacon retrospective twenty years ago. Additionally, after Bacon died, the source material in his notoriously cluttered London studio was sorted and catalogued, and 65 pieces from the archive are included in the exhibition. The dog-eared magazine images, crumpled photographs, and torn book pages, many painted over or altered by the artist, are my favorite part of the show. Bacon’s sketches and notes reveal that he was, to use Jung’s categories, a thinker who struggled to reconcile his need to explain and tell with his desire to make the viewer feel.

The exhibition, arranged chronologically, shows a self-taught artist earnestly learning how to paint in the early years. According to Tinterow, one of the reasons that Bacon framed his paintings under glass was so that the reflections and sheen would camouflage his technical shortcomings. The later work shows a mastery of materials and a much richer understanding of color, but the early immediacy and agitation have been replaced by a more placid, decorative approach, not unlike DeKooning’s path from edgy action painter to lyrical abstractionist.

Bacon’s paintings aren’t all that influential among young artists today, but perhaps, thanks to this show, we can look forward to some screaming, yelping angst emerging from grad school studios in the near future, instead of the text-heavy theoretical constructs we’ve become accustomed to

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Tate Publishing, with essays by Martin Harrison, David Mellor, Simon Ofield, Rachel Tant, Gary Tinterow, and Victoria Walsh.

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, curated by Gary Tinterow, Matthew Gale, and Chris Stephens. Organized by Gary Tinterow, Anne L. Strauss, and Ian Alteveer. The Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY. May 20 –August 16. Exhibited at Tate Britain and the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid before its presentation at the Metropolitan Museum.

 

 

 

        

                                               George Dyer in the Reece Mews Studio, ca. 1964.

 

 

 

 

Sacred Monster

 

 

 

On the eve of the Met’s giant retrospective, a critic asks:

 

 

Was Francis Bacon really the greatest painter of the twentieth

 

century, or just a fascinating mess?

 

 

By JERRY SALTZ   |   ART   |   NEW YORK MAGAZINE   |   SUNDAY, MAY 17, 2009

 

Francis Bacon, whose centenary is being marked by a Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective opening this week, is the Irish-born English artist whom the English consider their Achilles: a truculent hero rising from the turbulence, an outlaw god. Indeed, the first word of Homer’s Iliad comes to mind when thinking about his paintings and tumultuous life: “Rage..”

Those who knew the artist—some of them his friends—described him variously as “devil,” “whore,” “one of the world’s leading alcoholics,” “bilious ogre,” “sacred monster,” and “a drunken, faded sodomite swaying nocturnally through the lowest dives and gambling dens of Soho.” Bacon was no kinder: He called himself a “grinding machine” and “rotten to the core.” This hasn’t stopped admirers and critics alike from proclaiming him “the greatest painter in the world,” “the best … since Turner.” Never one to spare hyperbole, Robert Hughes wrote, “This painter of buggery, sadism, dread, and death-vomit has emerged as the toughest, the most implacable, lyric artist in late-twentieth-century England, perhaps in all the world.”

For me, Bacon—who may be the only artist sharing a name with one of his main subjects, meat—has always been more of a cartoonist. He’s an illustrator of exaggerated, ultimately empty angst. His early accomplishments are undeniable, and the Met’s survey of 66 paintings and a cache of never-before-seen source material is peppered with high points, especially the signature paintings of the forties and fifties: Canvases with twisted masses of faceless flesh and otherworldly homunculi, creatures of the id posed in living-room wastelands and Stygian prisons. The best of this work shrouds you in a sulfuric gloom where strange powers transform human souls into delirious monsters. These paintings make audiences stare as if they were looking at animals in a zoo, trying to come to terms with these merciless inhuman presences. You’ll see this at the Met: people blankly gaping in wonder. To understand Bacon’s impact, look no further than the young Brits emulating him.

Jake and Dinos Chapman place tortured figures in glass cases; Jenny Saville’s contorted Gargantuas are direct descendants of Bacon’s golems; Tracey Emin works with blood and guts; Sarah Lucas gives us spooks and deformities. Damien Hirst not only makes vitrines straight out of Bacon—he puts meat and carcasses in them. Like Dalí and Munch, Bacon is an artist we love when young. Tantalized by the urgency, angst, weirdness, blood, sex, and bodies, we think, That’s me! That’s how I feel!

You might have reconsidered feeling like Bacon if you’d lived in his skin. His love life is a study in emotional privation and degradation. “We are meat,” he often remarked—understandable, given his adolescence. Bacon, who was given morphine as a child for his asthma (the ailment that contributed to his death in 1992), always knew which way his erotic compass pointed, which is not to say that he approved of its inclination: He called his homosexuality “a defect” and a “limp.” And no wonder. When Bacon was 16, his father—the artist derisively called him “a failed horse-trainer”—caught the boy wearing his mother’s underwear. (“Fishnet stockings were an essential part of the artist’s wardrobe for most of his life,” one biographer notes.) As punishment, the father had him horsewhipped by the stable hands, whom, Bacon later claimed, he then had affairs with. Bacon Sr. asked a family friend to “straighten the boy out” by taking him to Berlin. The man complied—and subsequently bedded the younger Bacon, then abandoned him in the city that W. H. Auden called “a bugger’s daydream.”

Endless liaisons with rent boys and society types followed, until Bacon’s predator-prey notion of love and his “desire to suffer” reached new heights, in 1952. At the age of 43, he met a former RAF pilot, Peter Lacy, in London’s Soho. They spent a lot of time in Tangier, a refuge for gay men looking for freedom. “I’d never really fallen in love with anyone until then,” Bacon said. “Of course, it was the most total disaster from the start.” Bacon couldn’t live with or without him: “Being in love in that extreme way,” he said, “being totally obsessed by someone, is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.” They experimented with the far reaches of S&M. The end was horrid, too. On the day before his first Tate retrospective opened, in May 1962, Bacon learned Lacy had been found dead, almost surely from drinking.

Less than two years later, Bacon met George Dyer—reportedly when Dyer broke into his studio to rob him. For the next seven years the relationship rocketed up and down, then history repeated itself. On October 25, 1971, the day before Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris opened, Dyer overdosed and died in their Paris hotel room. Bacon, then 61, was again devastated. No wonder he talked about “the destruction” of love.

All this manifested itself in his art, which rattled the cage of English painting like nothing before it. Compared with the prevailing emphasis on the literary and the anecdotal (the sappy Victorian painter George Frederic Watts is considered “England’s Michelangelo”), Bacon came out of nowhere. His unfinished surfaces, saturated color, and nonstories make him a near anomaly in the history of his country’s painting. He never attended art school—he was entirely self-taught—but he devoured art history, and you can easily spot his influences: Cubism, Romanticism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Chaim Soutine, Goya’s late paintings, and the figures of Michelangelo.

In 1927, a year after he was banished from home, Bacon went to Paris, where he saw a survey of over 100 Picasso drawings. The show tattooed itself on his brain and left him thinking that Picasso had come closer than anyone in the century to “the core of what feeling is about.” He became “the reason I paint,” Bacon said, “the father figure.” Tellingly, the show consisted mainly of Picasso’s classical drawings; there were no Cubist works on hand. Thus Bacon’s rendezvous with modernism was fairly un-modern. Like Balthus, another insider-outsider type, he’s an artist who never went abstract or painted in the visual idiom of his time.

In 1929, back in London, he set himself up creating furniture and rugs based on modern French design. He tentatively showed a few paintings in his own home, but it wasn’t until April 1933, when he was 24, that Bacon exhibited his first painting, at the Mayor Gallery in London’s West End. Interest was immediate and word spread. Within months, a painting of his was reproduced opposite a recent Picasso in art historian Herbert Read’s book Art Now.

That work, Crucifixion (1933), which vibrates off the walls at the Met, Bacon claimed to have finished “in about a fortnight when I was in a bad mood of drinking.” It’s a haunted little thing, with no sense of devotion to anything except painting—an ectoplasmic alien shape with phosphorescent wings and outstretched arms standing in a murky monochromatic ground demarcated by lines forming invisible planes. The macabre work was influenced by the almost unknown Catholic Australian painter Roy de Maistre (Bacon’s mentor and lover) and owes much to Soutine and archaic altarpiece painting. Yet it also epitomized Bacon’s astonishing description of what a painting should be: “a snail leaving a trail of the human presence.” Crucifixion radiates what Deleuze called “cosmic dissipation.”

But just as it appeared that he would take the English art world by storm, Bacon’s trail dissipated. He exhibited works the following year, to little attention and bad reviews. Stung, he destroyed every painting from the show. By the late thirties, he had quit painting. He “abandoned himself with a vengeance to drifting, from bar to bar, from person to person … setting up a series of private—and totally illegal—gambling clubs,” says his biographer Michael Peppiatt.

Then came the “night of the world”: the Second World War. In April 1945—a month of simultaneous relief and unimagined horror—Mussolini was hanged upside-down, Hitler committed suicide, Roosevelt died, and the nightmares at Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen were revealed. And Bacon, then 35, exhibited a painting that still induces shudders. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a triptych depicting howling, deformed, harpylike goblins. There are intimations of real space, but these raving underworld visitants mostly exist in a universe of animal instinct. A lamentation for the dead and living, a retaliation for his personal traumas, the painting exudes venomous visionary force. Reviewers were shocked and awed: “Images so unrelievedly awful that the mind snaps shut,” wrote John Russell after first seeing Three Studies. “We had no name for them, no name for what we felt about them.” (Years later, in 1953, the Tate had to be persuaded to accept the painting as a gift.)

Bacon had broached a new door, and to his enormous credit, he kept doing that for fifteen years. Painting, from 1946 (bought by the Museum of Modern Art in 1948 for £280), was an even bigger breakthrough. In this coagulated masterpiece, a grinning or grimacing man—only the bottom of whose face is seen—is jammed between splayed cow carcasses and what looks like a witness stand. An umbrella is over his head. Here, Bacon hits on many of the themes, techniques, and formal concerns that occupied him for the rest of his life: Man, animal, and meat merge. There is no narrative, just a conjuration of some malevolent force. As with countless subsequent figures, Bacon isolates this one within an enclosure in the middle of the canvas. The space feels hallucinatory, menacing, sullen, shallow. Best of all, the paint is physical and visceral—clotted, smeared, wiped off, applied with rags and fingers and brushes or straight from the tubes. Intense lilacs, pinks, and magentas multiply the effect. Within a few years, Bacon was applying great unbroken fields of orange, apricot, and red. Some of this color is so intense and modern it keeps even the worst of his oeuvre alive.

By the fifties, Bacon had hit his stride, painting what he called “figures … [in] moments of crisis … [with] acute awareness of their mortality … of their animal nature”—truths hauntingly self-evident in his large pictures of naked beefy men crouching in transparent cases, making love with or attacking one another; dogs cowering on dark streets; sphinxes; businessmen; and howling monkeys. Adding to this symphony of hatred, longing, and pain are his many portraits of popes.

This period of Bacon’s paintings was revolutionary for two reasons, both hard to see now. First, an openly gay man was painting gay subjects at a time when homosexuality was a punishable crime in Great Britain. (Sodomy laws remained in effect there until 1967, and sentencing could involve hard labor.) Introducing overtly queer subject matter into grand painting without dressing it up in classicism or coy kitsch was as unheard-of as it was dangerous, and not just in England. One of Bacon’s first solo exhibitions in New York in the fifties included a painting of two naked men grappling on a bed. It had to be installed out of the way, on the gallery’s upper floor, in case of a police raid.

1957, while going though one of his tumults with Peter Lacy and with the pressure of an imminent solo show building, Bacon, who in his own words was in a “bad way mentally and physically” and was trying to avoid a crackdown on homosexuality in Tangier, tried to make a move in his work. This, for all practical purposes, was the last time he’d attempt to break from predictability. He painted a series “at high speed,” based on Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, experimenting with more viscous surfaces and strident light. The color is flamboyant and  brassy; space is flatter, less reliant on perspective; subjects are outdoors. In the one Van Gogh painting at the Met—a stunner—you can see him giving up his tricks, breaking out of his style to fantastic effect. But when the series first appeared, some of his most ardent supporters turned away. Russell called them “clamorous,” “hectic,” “perhaps the weakest” he ever did; Lawrence Alloway dismissed the series as “an outburst from a gypsy violin.”

I believe the Van Gogh series marks the beginning of the end for Bacon. It’s true that he painted for another 35 years, and that in the sixties and seventies he produced arresting triptychs of bloody figures—in fact, it’s doubtful that Bacon would be nearly as famous without them. Bernardo Bertolucci based scenes in Last Tango in Paris on them. A so-so 1976 example sold in 2008 for $86.3 million, setting an auction record.

But the Metropolitan’s retrospective, like most Bacon shows, makes it clear that he kept working his theme until it became a gimmick. The calculated pictorial repetitiousness and lack of formal development wear thin. Except for a number of fabulous portrait heads and the astounding Jet of Water—made in 1988, just four years before his death, featuring an enormous streak of blue paint across an interior—Bacon’s formula had grown stagnant by 1965.

Once you’re aware of this point, it becomes all you see. He has no idea what to do with the edges of his paintings. Everything that happens in Bacon’s work happens in the middle of the canvas; at times you don’t have to look anywhere else. The bottoms of his paintings are always the same, too—a receding plane curves up at the sides, like you’re looking through a fish-eye lens or from inside someone’s eye sockets. He neutralized his paintings further by insisting they be framed behind glass. (“I even like Rembrandts under glass,” he once said.

Last fall, when I saw this Bacon retrospective at the Tate, it ran concurrently with a Mark Rothko show. Rothko and Bacon were virtually the same age; both worked away from Paris and took “anguish” as their subject. Yet compared with Rothko’s glowing blank Buddhist television sets, Bacon’s work seems mannered, conservative, simplistic. Bacon said that “only by going too far can you go far enough,” yet in giving up all the conventions of painting, Rothko went further. When I saw the Bacon show again at the Prado this past winter—near the galleries full of Velázquez masterpieces—Bacon’s work seemed dead and canned. His supporters often refer to the rousing chaos of his studio (Cecil Beaton noted its “discarded paintings, rags, newspapers, and every sort of  rubbish”). If only his late work had some of that anarchy.

What’s especially poignant about Bacon is that he knew he’d built his own prison. As early as 1963, he referred to “my rigidness.” He talked about the “drawback” of his style and how he used painterly tics as a “device.” In 1970, drama turned to tragicomedy when Dyer falsely accused Bacon of marijuana possession. A police raid was followed by arrest, public humiliation, and trial and acquittal. By then Bacon and his work were becoming parodies of themselves. You can see this at the Met; the bright chalky color in his work is vibrantly alive, but everything else is flat. And he seems to have recognized that. He’d sealed himself off from the art of his time. “I stay here in my cage,” he said. Bacon disliked abstract art, saying it was “too weak to convey anything, and had “nothing to do with the avant-garde.”

When you watch the 1985 BBC film of Bacon being interviewed in that grubby studio and hear him spout bromides he’d repeated for decades (he was “an optimist about nothing,” he said again and again), one of his self-assessments seems apt: “I am the most artificial person you’ll ever meet.” The more one looks at his long career—especially the last 25 years of it—the more Bacon strikes you not as an artist unafraid of the darkest within himself but as an artist who didn’t go to that source enough. Bacon wanted to “remake the violence of reality itself,” and for a time he succeeded. But in the end, he seems less a modern painter than the last of a breed of Romantics—one who, in his final interview, plaintively stated, “I painted to be loved.”

 


 

      

 

                                                                                                        Francis Bacon in 1951 by Cecil Beaton

 

 

 


 

 The ‘degenerate’ road to totalitarianism

 

 

The wonder and appeal of art is its mutability

 

 

GARY CLEMENT  |  NATIONAL POST  |  CANADA  |  THURSDAY, MAY 14, 2009

 

On July 19, 1937, a singular, notorious art show made its premiere in Munich. Entitled the Entartete Kunst or Degenerate Art exhibit, it featured over 650 drawings, paintings, sculptures, prints and books collected by the Nazis from German artists and museums that had been confiscated on the grounds that the works, and by extension the artists that created them, represented un-German — or worse, Jewish — forms of expression and ideology.

The show featured such well known degenerates as Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Max Beckman and Marc Chagall, to name but a few. The works themselves were derided for being insulting to German women and farmers, revealing the Jewish racial soul and just generally presenting the view of sick minds. The exhibit has since become a major reference point for anyone requiring a handy example of institutional intolerance at its most absurd ... and most dangerous.

Barbara Kay argues that the work of artists like Francis Bacon finds its "aesthetic inspiration in humiliation, filth, disease, deformity and sadism." She further states that this "so-called art is degenerate" and that "the so-called cultural elites’ fascination with it [is] indecent." Ms. Kay, naturally, has every right to dislike whatever she wishes — far be it from me to dictate taste. I do believe, however, that the ice starts getting pretty thin when one begins labelling art one doesn’t approve of as "degenerate."

The wonder and appeal of art — the reason for its durability as a form of human expression — is its mutability; its ability to satisfy an enormous amount of demands and to be reinvented by each new generation of artists. We turn to art for pleasure, for intellectual challenge, for stories, for mystery, for provocation. Sometimes we even get it all in a single piece of work.

There are those who prefer to look at art that will be pleasing to the eye and nothing more and, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that. There are of course others who want to see work that will, to borrow a phrase form my parents, grab us by the kishkas — in other words, deeply affect us. I’m talking about the kind of work that will inspire thought, debate, emotional outbursts and, heck, maybe even outrage. Work like Francis Bacon’s, for example.

Historically, when institutions, governments — the authorities in general — have tried to mandate what we should and shouldn’t be looking at in the way of paintings, books, theatre, etc., based on, for example, moral grounds, the skid toward totalitarianism is pretty easy to discern. There were not, as I recall, too many gallery openings in Kabul under the Taliban.

Francis Bacon has long since moved on from outraging audiences to delighting them by the hordes. The show that Barbara Kay speaks of was at the Prado in Madrid when I was there recently and I can assure her that it was doing brisk business indeed. And I don’t believe I saw a single degenerate in the crowd.

— Gary Clement is the editorial cartoonist for the National Post.

 

 

 

 

 Barbara Kay, Note to kneejerk liberal art critics: 

  Nazis and homophobics don’t own the word “degenerate”

 

 

 

 

 BARBRA KAY  |  NATIONAL POST  |  CANADA  |  THURSDAY, MAY 14, 2009

 

The surge of reaction, some very angry, to the column I wrote May 13 about artist Francis Bacon and others of the "abject" or "disgust" school of art, surprised me. I often get feedback that disagrees with my opinion, but when I get hate mail suggesting I should be banned from writing in newspapers and that it is "obscene" for me to query the words of an expert art critic (this person is known to me — a good liberal except for his totalitarian views on those who disagree with his liberal views), I realized I have been, sob, misunderstood.

There were three strands of criticism that emerged from my personal mail and the letters to the editor.

One assumed that I thought Bacon’s artwork should be banned or not shown in public because I consider adulation of shock artists "indecent." Well I do consider it indecent, but I consider a lot of things in life indecent. Indecency is a choice and I’m all about choice and free speech — unlike certain liberals I could name.

The second misunderstanding was that I seemed in some people’s eyes to be suggesting that Bacon was untalented. I didn’t say that either. I said his art was degenerate and reflected a degenerate mind. He’s obviously very gifted, but talent in the service of prurience is no defence of what emerges.

Because of its history, the real problem was the word "degenerate." Some people saw the word and immediately assumed I was importing a lot of historical baggage I had no intention of referencing. A slew of writers to me personally, and in particular, Gary Clement in today’s Post, accused me of doing to Bacon what the Nazis did to Jews in the thirties. More than a few accused me of homophobia, simply because Bacon happens to be gay. This is illogical and unfair. As I wrote back to one such critic, I don’t care whether Bacon and other disgust artists are gay, straight, trannies or polygamists from Utah: It isn’t them I hate, it’s their work, because their work is degenerate in its focus.

The Nazis took the exact opposite view from mine. They assigned the word degenerate to beauty because it came from the hands of a despised group, and they banished it. I don’t hate these artists and I don’t want their work banned. So it is both irrational and polemically irresponsible to align me with evils I am quite as appalled by as they are. (I can’t help noting in an ironic aside that if anyone’s association with the Nazi era is suspect, you have to wonder why Bacon had iconic pictures of Himmler and Goebbels in his studio. Inspiration? Well, he was a sado-masochist, so who knows?)

Finally some critics triumphantly pointed to the popularity of Bacon’s art as an apparently knockout rhetorical blow. Gary Clement argues that Francis Bacon’s work delights the public. That is no argument against its degeneracy. Plenty of great artists went unloved and unseen in their creative years, so surely who is going to exhibits to see whom is a very weak argument for its morality. The public is notorious for flocking to exhibitions that feature shock art. Body World, which I cited in my column, has drawn over 20 million viewers to see its plastinated cadavers. That doesn’t make it moral or any the less a violation of human dignity. In ancient Rome, stadiums were full of crowds watching people being torn to pieces by wild animals. Fascination with the dark side of our nature is no argument for its morality, which is what troubled me the most. Why can’t critics be honest and simply admit it: Hey, it’s disgusting and self-loathing, and we are attracted to it. If you like it, go see it, but don’t gussy up your impulse in moral finery. There’s nothing moral in mocking the symbols of Christianity (we get it already, you artists don’t like religion, but how come we never see any screaming imams in cages, only screaming popes?) going on in these paintings.

Furthermore, to answer another criticism that misunderstood my argumentation, I was not suggesting all art must be about sweetness and light. There are all kinds of artistic ways to show despair without dipping crucifixes in urine, smearing blood and faeces on artefacts and in general highlighting the loathsome aspects of material life. The artist Andrew Wyeth, a near-contemporary to Bacon, illuminated despair as well as any artist I know of, and did it with respect for the dignity of his subjects.

It is fine and good that artists should experiment with new forms and materials and perspectives in their struggle to comprehend the world and translate it to the canvas. It is a narcissistic indulgence to look at skin disease manuals for inspiration and call it a moral impulse.
 

 

 


 A perversion of art

 

 

 

Barbara Kay: Francis Bacon’s mirror on a diseased soul

 

 

 

 BARBRA KAY |  NATIONAL POST  |  CANADA  |  WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2009

 

An old New Yorker cartoon has four men contemplating an abstract painting in a gallery. Two of them, Runyonesque philistines, are rolling on the floor laughing. The snooty-aired dandies standing behind them look disdainful, but a bit wistful, too. One says to the other something like: "We miss out on a lot of fun by understanding art."

Would that philistines today still reacted to contemporary art with merriment, and how very innocent the once-sophisticated term "abstract" now seems. Rather than laughing in galleries nowadays, ordinary folks are more inclined to head for the vomitorium.

The Metropolitan Museum in New York is mounting a Francis Bacon show next week. Bacon, who died in 1992, was a very disturbed man, a sadomasochist, in fact. Amongst his recurrent motifs were screaming popes in glass cages and copulating male bodies. His favourite quote was Aeschylus’s "the reek of human blood is laughter to my heart."

It’s a curious paradox: In the real world we are increasingly obsessed with seamless, poreless, ever-youthful Botoxed beauty, while the art world seems to vie for who can represent the human body in its most degraded, damaged and repulsive form.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven was painting landscapes because he found in lakes and mountains "a power and a majesty and a wealth of experience at nature’s summit." Today his "artist" great-granddaughter Kyla Harris, paralyzed in an accident from the neck down, employs herself as a photographic model for wheelchair erotica.

Another Canadian artist, Terence Koh, is enjoying enormous commercial success in New York for his controversial works featuring eclectic cultural icons like Jesus, Michelangelo’s David and Mickey Mouse in a state of sexual arousal. Sometimes he smears his work with his own blood or semen.

Then there’s the touring exhibit, Body World, visited by more than 20 million people. Body World goes beyond disgust in the degradation of the living to delight in the violation of the dead. Creator Gunther von Hagen’s Crayolabright plastinated cadavers, articulated into jocular poses, treat the human corpse as a kind of stylized meta-human: death imitating art imitating life.

Several of the cadavers used are alleged to have been executed in China. Von Hagen once did a live autopsy on London television and laughed when bodily fluids shot out of the corpse.

The way acknowledged artists treat the human body reflects a culture’s attitude to itself. When artists take their inspiration from skin disease manuals (as Bacon did) rather than Olympian or godly ideals, that doesn’t say much for our cultural confidence. It’s no coincidence that the race to the aesthetic bottom coincides with our acceptance of the body’s functions and continual decay as all that’s left after the banishment of any linkage of corporal humanity with sanctity or a higher purpose.

Art critic John Richardson feebly attempts to exculpate Francis Bacon: "By holding a mirror up to our degenerate times, Bacon proves himself to be one of the most moral artists of the day."

What nonsense. For if it is moral to find aesthetic inspiration in humiliation, filth, disease, deformity and sadism, what, pray tell, would be immoral in the topsy-turvy world of today’s art world elites? Lakes, mountains and the Mona Lisa? No, Francis Bacon and his ilk are holding up a mirror to their own perverted selves.

Bacon’s painting of an abattoir with trailing entrails and blood went for $86-million, and a Qatar sheik paid £26-million for one of his screaming popes. I don’t know the price for the painting of his boyfriend sitting on the toilet.

This so-called art is degenerate; the so-called cultural elites’ fascination with it is indecent. Degeneracy and indecency are, of course, quaintly archaic concepts, still understood by philistines, that have coprophilic artists and their enablers rolling on the floor laughing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ianthe Knott

 

 

LIVES REMEMBERED  |  OBITUARIES  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 2009

 

Ianthe Knott Aged 90. Sister of artist Francis Bacon, and reportedly his favourite sibling. Moved to Rhodesia in 1931, subsequently married a South African farmer and raised a family on a large farm on the Limpopo, not far from Zimbabwe’s border with South Africa.

Last September travelled to London to attend the opening of the Bacon retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain which marked the beginning of the artist’s centennial celebrations. It was believed to be only the second time she had returned to England after emigrating.

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

FRANCIS BACON’S HORROR SHOW

 

 

Francis Bacon believed there was beauty in the colour of meat, and it was possible

“to be optimistic and totally without hope.” This year, the centennial of his birth,

is a fine time to revisit his insights on art, writes Megan Buskey ...

 

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

 

MEGAN BUSKEY  |  INTELLIGENT LIFE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE  |  THE ECONOMIST  |  SPRING 2009

 

If you were in London in the 1960s and wanted to chat up Francis Bacon, all you had to do was head to the Colony Room, a junky club on Dean Street in Soho, where he routinely held court. He was such a fixture there that the Colony’s owner and den-mother, a crass woman named Muriel Belcher, called him “daughter”. As Bacon’s critical reputation grew, so did his financial means, and he was known for covering the tab for his friends and leaving lavish tips. What he valued more than money was conversation, and he was as comfortable telling a dirty joke as he was discussing Aeschylus. 

In 1962 David Sylvester, an art critic and friend, decided to bring Bacon’s pontifications to a wider audience. These long-form recorded interviews proved popular, largely owing to Bacon’s insight, and in 1975 they were compiled as a book.  The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon shed welcome light on Bacon’s work, which many found inscrutable, if not disturbing.

Bacon is now enjoying a lot of attention, particularly since a few of his paintings sold for record-breaking prices in 2007. To celebrate the centennial of his birth this year, a grand retrospective of his work opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York on May 20th (travelling from the Tate Britain via the Prado in Madrid). As a new generation struggles to come to terms with his dramatic, searing paintings, Bacon’s conversations with Sylvester are freshly relevant.

Interviews is rare for the way it addresses big questions about the purpose and process of artistic creation. Which art is more true? Work that proceeds from a preconceived idea or work that comes from impulse? Is abstraction more powerful than figurative representation? What causes artists to fixate on certain subjects? Artists and writers regularly praise these interviews for Bacon’s candid, plain-spoken perceptions of so tricky a subject. "I read and re-read the interviews and have carried on devouring them, like a bible to a believer," Damien Hirst has written. "[I]t was the way into art for me."

 

The answers “didn’t always come on the spur of the moment,” Sylvester wrote in Looking Back on Francis Bacon, a critical study he published after Bacon’s death in 1992. “Right up to the end of his life I would get a telephone call at eight in the morning trying out some formulation of a thought.” It’s true that Bacon sometimes struggled to express himself—he didn’t have much in the way of formal education. But his earnestness and self-awareness made up for his deficits in eloquence. Bacon attributed the origins of his successful work to “accident[s]” born of impulse:

 

When I was trying in despair the other day to paint that head of a specific person, I used a very big brush and a great deal of paint, and I put it on very, very freely, and I simply didn’t know in the end what I was doing, and suddenly this thing clicked, and became exactly like this image I was trying to record. But not out of any conscious will, nor was it anything to do with illustrational painting.

 

Just how an artist made certain choices beguiled him, though he recognised that talent and dedication had influence. Bacon held that it was through “profound sensibility” that a master like Rembrandt decided to “hold onto one irrational mark rather than onto another.” Balancing impulse with more deliberate aims was a challenge; Bacon thought it was easier to create when under the influence of drugs, alcohol, exhaustion or, in his case, “despair.”

The central question for Bacon was “how do I feel I can make this image more immediately real to myself?” Forms still had their purpose, but he arranged them in a way that courted an emotional response. Observe the mangled figures in Bacon’s paintings, with their misplaced arms, ears, legs and elbows. Blank backdrops, on the other hand, provided “a very clear background against which the image can articulate itself”. He used certain colours until he grew bored with them and moved on. The idea was to make work that “brought the figurative thing up onto the nervous system violently and poignantly.”

 

Bacon searched widely for inspiration. His chaotic studio on Reece Mews was carpeted with heaps of paint-splattered images culled from random sources. (He once had nicer digs in Roland Gardens,  but he felt “absolutely castrated in the place” and summarily moved.) When he was painting a portrait of Sylvester, he constantly consulted photographs of wild animals. “One image can be deeply suggestive of the other,” Bacon said. “Rhinoceros skin would help me to think of the texture of human skin.” He credited Sigmund Freud for inspiring his careful play between reality and eerie dreamscapes. “I don’t think I’m gifted," he reflected. "I just think I’m receptive."

 

Recurring motifs in Bacon’s work, such as animal carcasses, black umbrellas and the detritus of drug use and illness, convey self-destruction. Bernardo Bertolucci described his portraits as “faces eaten up by something that comes from within”, and sent Marlon Brando to a Bacon exhibition at the Grand Palais during the filming of Last Tango in Paris. 

 

But Bacon resisted the idea that his work was principally about inspiring horror. Horror was part of life, but not its sole constituent. “You must not forget the beauty of the colour of a piece of meat,” Bacon said. He acknowledged that his early life in Ireland and his adolescent forays into Berlin’s harsh homosexual underworld made him “accustomed to always living through violence.” Yet he claimed his art was not a reaction to these fraught experiences.

He did concede that his subjects appeared “doomed” and “in moments of crisis,” as Sylvester put it. Yet Bacon preferred to think of them as exhibiting their “mortality”, the inescapable condition that he could never stop thinking about. “If life excites you, its shadow, death, must also excite you," he said. "You can be optimistic and totally without hope.”

Sylvester was sceptical: “It’s not altogether stupid to attribute an obsession with horror to an artist who has done so many paintings of the human scream.” But Bacon maintained that his paintings of screams reflected his obsession with the aesthetic of the human mouth. The screams he most admired were in Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. I’ve always wanted and never succeeded in painting the smile.”

 

If that sounds glib, it’s on account of the risk that comes with Bacon using language to explain what he believed could only be conveyed through art. Yet his efforts to express himself in Interviews are nothing short of profound. “I remember looking at a dog-shit on the pavement when I was 17 and I suddenly realised, there it is–this is what life is like,” Bacon told Sylvester. “It tormented me for months. I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence. We give this purposeless existence a meaning by our drives. [Art] really comes from a feeling [that] it’s impossible to do these things, so I might as well just do anything. And out of this anything, one sees what happens.”  

 

 

 

 

 Francis Bacon: The Show Goes On

 

 

 

By RICHARD LACAVO  |  TIME  |  TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2009 

 

The most powerful museum show I saw last year — or, for that matter, for decades — was the Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain in London. From there it traveled to the Prado and now it’s finally coming to the U.S. On May 20 it makes its third and final stop at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Bacon was one of the favourites of the art market that just collapsed. One of his triptychs sold last year for $86 million and so on. But unlike the hundreds of overvalued players in that extended low comic episode, he will always be a name to be reckoned with. Money has nothing to do with his value.

Some artists simply validate art itself. Bacon was one of those. He demonstrated the continuing authority and ingenuity of paint as a way of reaching to places where no other medium — not books, not movies, not music — can go. He didn’t make it easy.

What he was good at were emblems of loathing and despair, wretched creatures in abject moments, seen in the full light of day and without sentiment. This isn’t the only way to make great art — it’s certainly not the road Matisse went down, or, most of the time, Picasso — but as we sort out the 20th century it’s becoming more and more obvious that Bacon is one of the greats.

 

 

 


Tragic Hero

 

 

 

By RICHARD LACAVO   |   TIME   |   THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2009 

 

Francis Bacon did for despair what Michelangelo did for faith. He made it majestic. That’s the conclusion you can’t help taking away from the Bacon retrospective that will open on May 20 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I caught the show last year at its first venue, London’s Tate Britain, and left it convinced that it was one of the most powerful exhibitions I’d seen in more than 40 years of museumgoing.

 

This has nothing to do with Bacon as the phenomenon of last year’s hot auction market, now extinguished, where one of his triptychs sold for $86 million. By bringing together almost five decades of his work into a collective cry, this show makes you realize how rare it is to see contemporary art that attempts, much less achieves, what used to be called a tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, as well as low comedy, puerile cool and enigma. But in a time that has its share of suffering, where is the art that tries to strike an equivalent note? What we have almost no language for anymore, at least not in painting, is acute pain. Except in room after room of this magnificent show.

 

The exhibition, which runs through Aug. 16, marks the centenary of Bacon’s birth in 1909 in Dublin. His father, a truculent British army officer turned horse trainer, shuttled the family for years between Ireland and England. But by the age of 16, Bacon was in London, and living on his own with a small allowance from his mother and the assistance of various older men. Eventually he drifted into a career as an interior decorator while trying to find his way as a painter. But it wasn’t until the 1940s that he arrived at the vocabulary of tortured forms against a flat backdrop that he would develop for the rest of his life.

 

Along with Giacometti, Dubuffet and a few others, Bacon would emerge as one of the artists who found a way, after the butchery of World War II, to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure. The soft tissue of Bacon’s men and women is wrenched and smeared by their own drives and desires and by whatever it is they do to one another. Their heads are split, their torsos are boneless. Their limbs, stretched and exploded, truly deserve to be called extremities--because with Bacon the body is always in extremis.

 

So in a triptych like Three Studies for a Crucifixion from 1962, with its invertebrate lovers grappling in the center panel and its butchered carcass in the right, the body is the visible sign of the eternal devils of human nature, the dog beneath the skin that bares its fangs in war and in bed. What the eyes represent for most painters, the mouth was for Bacon, the locus of human identity. The mouth is what bites, suckles, and howls at the moon. By contrast, the eyes are likely to be missing entirely or smeared shut or obscured by a milky scrim, as in his portrait of the writer Michel Leiris. With Bacon, the windows of the soul--not that he believed in the soul--always have the curtains drawn.

 

To piece together his wretched figures, Bacon spent a lifetime ransacking art history. From Poussin he took the mouth of a screaming mother in The Massacre of the Innocents and from Degas the arched back of a woman bathing herself in a tub. Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photos of wrestlers gave him a perennial motif — sex as sexual combat. He also drew from sources far outside art. One of his favorites was an illustrated medical text about illnesses of the mouth. He worked from reproductions, movie stills and photographs of all kinds pinned to the walls of his studio and scattered on the floor in a sedimentary muck of paper, rags, used brushes and broken furniture that he would dive into for ideas.

 

But it was Picasso who first showed him the way. In the central panel of one of Bacon’s works from the 1970s, Triptych - In Memory of George Dyer, a shadowy man stands near the landing of a darkened stairwell, turning a tiny key in a lock. That key is borrowed from an odd creature doing the same in several of Picasso’s seaside pictures from the late 1920s, when he was flirting with Surrealism. Those elastic Picassos, with their biomorphic figures that are part human, part dirigible, part swollen breast or phallus, turned a key in Bacon. They showed him the way to his own nightmare distortions of anatomy.

 

Oddly, the steel-tube furnishings that Bacon favoured as an interior designer in the ’30s also found their way years later - in ghostly outline, stripped of any associations with fashion or taste - into the stark spaces and barred enclosures of his pictures. You detect them for the first time in his series of paintings from the 1950s that were drawn from the great Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X. Flickering white perimeters form a cage for the Pontiff’s impotent fury. Why a Pope? With Bacon there’s never one answer. His great gift was for visual and psychological conflation, for compressing multiple possibilities into a single sliding form. Trapped in a kind of isolation booth, where a thunderstorm of granular black strokes rains down on him, the screaming Pope in Head VI suggests the baying, baboon madness of authority. (One source for the image was a photo of Joseph Goebbels in full harangue.) Yet at the same time he’s the face of the powerlessness of absolute power.

 

That picture of the Holy Father might also bear traces of Bacon’s anguished dealings with his own father, who had rejected his girlish son. But it’s a mistake to read Bacon’s work too quickly by way of his life. That’s true even of the ferocious triptychs he made after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, a onetime London hood who killed himself in their hotel room on the eve of Bacon’s first big retrospective, in Paris in 1971. In those pictures Bacon didn’t simply unload his grief. He used it to find his way to the even bleaker abbreviations of a pitiless world he produced in the 1970s. Dyer’s grotesque end — he was found dead on the toilet from a drug overdose — stands behind these paintings, but they speak to you about more universal miseries. This is the thing so compelling about Bacon, the sense he produces that the suffering is ferocious but the sufferer is dry-eyed.

 

Not everything he did is a triumph. In the mid-1950s, when he was spending a lot of time in Tangiers in a miserable love affair, he was inspired by Van Gogh and by the keen Moroccan sunlight to experiment with brighter colours and looser brushwork. The result was a series of congested Expressionist canvases that are the weakest in the show. But the high-key palette of those pictures also pointed him to the orange, lilac and beige backgrounds that make his great work of the ’60s and ’70s so unnerving, precisely because the figures struggle in such bright spaces.

 

By his last decade — he died in 1992 — Bacon was almost too fluent in his own bleak idioms. There are cluttered, overdetermined pictures in the last galleries, where you watch him wondering how to make it new. But there are also great ones, like the 1991 Triptych. In all three panels, a large black square is placed like a window within a flat beige background. In the center, a barely human form flows over the lower edge of the black square. In each side panel, Bacon appears as a painted photograph of his own head pinned to the space above a pair of disembodied legs. Each of these has one foot stepping into the blackness. It’s a portrait of the artist bowing out, dying as fearlessly as he lived. And when you see it without sentiment, even death can be majestic.

 

 

 

  Secrets Of The Flesh

 

 

 

DODIE KAZANJIAN   |   PREVIEW   |   VOGUE   |   WEDNESDAY, 1 APRIL, 2009

 

As a major Francis Bacon retrospective comes to New York, six contemporary artists reflect on the creative impact and enduring legacy of the 20th-century painter.

Francis Bacon, who died in 1992, is the great chthonic dragon of modern art. His images of human anguish and dislocation have never lost their power to shock and frighten us, and to influence the generations of artists who still grapple with figurative painting, which not so long ago was considered obsolete.

Next month, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is certain to set off new and surprising reverberations. The show, the first major New York exhibition of Bacon’s work in 20 years, has drawn huge audiences in its previous appearances, at the Tate Britain in London and at the Prado in Madrid. It includes paintings from all phases of the artist’s career, plus a rich trove of source materials rescued from his famously cluttered studio.

Bacon often worked from pictures he found in magazines, and many of these are on view, torn and folded, scribbled on and manipulated in his search for the toughest, most poignant, most concentrated image. "Bacon’s under-lying goal is to knock you off your feet," says Gary Tinterow, the Met’s chairman of nineteenth-century, modern, and contemporary art, who organized the show here. "He wants to knock you out of your complacency, make you see the world differently, and expose the underlying violence in human nature. He really is the Picasso of our time, in terms of artists who are fighting against, or coming to grips with, the horrible ogre-father figure who has to be destroyed so that their art can go forward."

Bacon’s reputation has fluctuated in recent years. During his 19711972 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, a poll of critics named him the greatest living artist when Picasso was still alive! "He’s been up, and then he went down," Tinterow says. "Now that a lot of younger artists are interested in figurative painting, he obviously has something to teach them."

With this in mind, I asked a number of artists to talk about Bacon what his work has meant and still means to them, and how his influence persists.



 cecily brown

I met him just once, with David [Sylvester, the art historian and Brown’s father]. The three of us went to an exhibition of Italian art at the Royal Academy. I was just getting into art school, and I was so starstruck, I could barely speak. All my early art school paintings were cringe-inducingly Baconesque. If you wanted to paint the figure in London during the late eighties, he was the obvious person to look at especially if you liked a bit of angst with your flesh. He was the only person whose work stood up to much older painting.

I love the way he painted men: tender and erotic. His treatment of the sex act is without compare. People talk about the violence, but the way he painted George Dyer’s back, or the back of a man’s head, you could see that his touch was very loving, and ambiguous. Obviously there’s brutality to it, but there’s a caress and a gentleness. . . . One feels the lover’s gaze and the desire. This is at the heart of what I’ve always tried to do, to steal from him the tenderness without sentimentality. He’s a bigger influence than anyone, in terms of how you want your paint to react straight into the viewer’s nervous system.

The early work is so muscular and raw, but always poetic. You feel he’s struggling to articulate something that can only be said in paint; he’s inventing a language. You see traces of Picasso, but you also feel dreary England, with the decadence and everything one knows about his life. He manages to condense it into a five-by-four-foot space.

His descendants? I don’t think he has any. It annoys me the way some artists try to claim Bacon. It’s vanity to put yourself in the same sentence with him.



 lisa yuskavage

When I was in art school I started to look at Bacon. I thought, That’s the party I want to be at. It’s not anemic art by a long shot. It’s full-on, full-force, the humanity, the depth, the power.

There really is nothing that ever looked like a Bacon, nor should there ever be. What’s profound about his work is that it’s not settled. It’s too big. It’s like a bomb dropping. You can’t take his paintings and move them forward. They’re endgames in themselves. You can take lessons from the power of them and from what the artist asked of himself. But the look of them and the technique, one should avoid at all cost. It’s like the Sirens: You will crash. Stay away.

I’ve just finished some new paintings of very exposed-looking young women who have been pie-eda pie thrown in the face. What I like about this is that it’s very painterly but at the same time totally inappropriate for painting. It’s like slapstick/high art/pornography. It’s important when you’re doing something new to be not sure that what you’re doing is even art. Overstepping is the only way to change the game. What you have to do is make a leap, and don’t ask if it’s OK. You have to proceed without permission. That’s what Bacon did.
george condo

I’ve always wanted to do the same thing to Francis Bacon that he did to Velázquez. I’ve done it by starting with the lower echelon in the religious order, with screaming priests rather than the pope. There are certain artists in history who are obsessed with insane, crazy faces, from Goya to Picasso to Bacon to Basquiat.

Two of the funniest painters I know are Goya and Bacon. What’s funny is the way they work against expectation. Comedy has always been a necessary diffuser of horror. I can’t help but think that when Bacon was working, during and after the Second World War, his paintings reflected not only the horrors of the time but also the comedy of destruction, which is somehow in line with his acid humour. The irony of comedy is it takes root in self-torture, and this is what Bacon is all about. He inflicts torture upon his figures. He tortured Velazquez’s painting of Pope Innocent numerous times. Fear is another subject of comedy. Bacon’s paintings produce an acute state of fear, which in turn creates fear in the viewer. That is his edge. Bacon was fascinated with that close-up in Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin of the insane woman with the shattered glasses. All of it comes down to the extremities of human nature. I love Bacon’s hard look at reality. Each one of his paintings is like a very elegant, bad hangover.



 walton ford
Like a twentieth-century version of Goya, Bacon tried to make visible invisible anxieties and states of mind that are very dark. He exposes himself in a way that’s deeply disturbing, and I want to have that kind of courage. The work I do appears to be a comment on natural history, but it’s also an exploration of darker parts of your psyche, and for me, animals work as wonderful metaphors for that kind of thing. There’s nothing more human in all Bacon’s work than his painting of that isolated dog. And Goya, too, with his little dog howling. These animal pictures can be the most revealing and emotional things those guys made.

The best Bacons, like the best natural-history art, have a tension between the figurative image and pure abstract design. The sum total of Bacon’s work is greater than any individual picture. You think of screaming popes, and sides of beef, and dogs, and wrestlers, and lovers dying on the toilet, and all those strange portraits, and you feel like you inhabit that entire world. Bacon had a lot of pain inside, and the work was an amazing effort to do something constructive with that. Look at his pope, screaming. That’s the way you get it out. It’s a tantrum in paint. I’m all for artistic tantrums.



 dana schutz

People often say to me, "You must like Bacon a lot." I am interested in the way he constructs spaces in his paintings, the theatricality, the stage-like set-ups, the way he puts people in them. It’s like a stage presence, as though the subject is just there for the picture. That’s what I’ve really gotten from Bacon, but he was never a big figure for me the way Edvard Munch or Philip Guston was.

I guess it’s possible to be influenced by something and never really love it.



 john currin
Bacon was the first real artist I ripped off. I got obsessed with him and wanted to be like him. I made crummy pastel versions of his paintings and self-portraits. A lot of his work has a kind of adolescent appeal, similar to heavy-metal rock music. It’s gothic and frightening. The joke is that only teenage boys like Bacon, for the same reason they like Black Sabbath. The demonic appeals to them. But it also appealed to Goya and Velázquez and Manet. It’s a big part of painting that was kind of banished from twentieth-century art. For such an evil time, there’s remarkably little of it.

Bacon’s paintings are old-fashioned, in a funny way. There’s no real modernist aspect to them. I admire his approach to the grand manner from the perspective of an impoverished inheritance. The feeling you get from Bacon is something akin to a stately mansion that you can’t pay the taxes on, and you can’t afford to heat. And yet, with his poverty of means simple, unsophisticated technique she’s able to do grand painting, completely. Maybe it took a British person to be able to paint in the grand European manner.

I expected to outgrow Bacon because it felt as if he wasn’t cool. But no, he’s insanely good. The farther you get from him, the more he seems an expression of his time, rather than a weirdo.

 

 

 

 

 

Remaking the Body:

 

The Cultural Dimensions of Francis Bacon

 

 

Rina Arya

 

 

RINA AYRA   |   JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH   |   VOLUME 13   |   NUMBER 2   |   APRIL 2009

 

Introduction

 

In 2008 the Tate Gallery hosted a retrospective of Francis Bacon to commemorate his centenary. This occasion was one of the motivations for presenting this reflection on Bacon and his legacy 16 years after his death. The exhibition demonstrated Bacon’s technical ability to capture the nuances of flesh in a remarkably visceral way and consolidated his position as one of the greatest painters of the human body. In this article I want to concentrate on the cultural dimensions of Bacon’s Weltanschauung. I argue that it is not a misrepresentation to discuss Bacon as a social and cultural commentator but rather a way of intensifying his aestheticism. This was the source of the curators’ motivations for the 2008 retrospective at the Tate. They believed that “Bacon was not only one of the great painters of the human form but one of the great articulators of the human condition” (Gale & Stephens 2008, p. 27).

I propose that the sustained interest in Bacon by the critics and public alike can partially be attributed to the epistemological questions that his paintings posed to an audience that had lived through the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Bacon was keen to emphasize his contemporaneity in both his sensibility and outlook. At times he made contradictory remarks about the purpose and role attributed to painting. For example, he remarked on a number of occasions that he painted for himself and did not have a message to impart. This rather insular outlook was at other times counteracted by a greater awareness of the power of painting to move and shape cultural perspectives. In this second outlook Bacon showed a strong awareness of the cultural currents of thought within politics and other domains. He was influenced by a number of different media — by painting, photography, film, literature and poetry — and eagerly assimilated these influences. The influence of the films of Eisenstein, the photographs of Muybridge, the narratives of Greek mythology, and modernist literary works can all be seen in his work.

I am inclined to describe Bacon as being an exceptional social commentator who recorded human behaviour, articulating it in his own idiosyncratic style. He once described himself as a “pulverizing machine” (Russell 1993, p. 71) and this is an apt metaphor for his predilection to strip the human being down to its bare essentials of flesh and blood. When we examine his work, we are then led to his view of the world, which is simultaneously exhilarating and also despairing.

Bacon invested art with the power to communicate truths about the age that one lives in. He asked: “Why, after the great artists, do people ever try to do anything again? Only because, from generation to generation, through what the great artists have done, the instincts change” (Sylvester 1993, p. 59). In an interview with Davies, Bacon observes that “great art is always a way of concen[1]trating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence — a reconcentration … tearing away the veils” (Davies & Yard 1986, p. 110). Art then becomes a process of updating perspectives that resonate with the people of the time. Bacon’s subsequent updating of Velázquez’s painting of Pope Innocent X (1650) is seen in his papal series but most notably pinpointed in the Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (1953). Although Bacon’s version has clearly been derived from Velázquez’s representation, the rendition of the Pope and the tone of the piece could not be more different. Velázquez painted the Pope at the height of the Counter-Reformation when papal power was at its greatest and the Pope was treated with reverence. His poised, authoritative and inscrutable gaze conveys his role ex cathedra. In sharp contrast is Bacon’s inarticulate wretch of a Pope who evokes fallibility and fear. These two alternative viewpoints are pertinent in their respective contexts. In his depiction of papal glory Velázquez was adhering to convention. However, in Bacon’s experience of living through the Irish Civil War (where as a Protestant he represented the minority) the Pope represented conflict and stood as the figure of opposition. In Bacon’s depiction the Pope’s power is undermined by the scream, which shatters any claim to authority. The scream of the Pope then subsequently invalidates the accompanying symbols of authority within the painting, such as the papal robes and other articles. Davies stresses the tragicomic aspects of the painting: the papal robes that have a powerful symbolic significance are transformed in the Bacon painting to become “some form of ludicrous fancy dress in a Genet play” (Davies 1978, 100). Zweite argues that rather than viewing Bacon’s study as a negation of Velázquez’s representation of the Pope, it was “an intensification and historical relocation” (Zweite 2006a, p. 72). I think that rather than focusing on how Bacon’s Pope differs from Velázquez’s, it is better to evaluate Bacon’s motivations more broadly. By referencing the strong tradition of papal painting within the history of art and then presenting an interpretation, which at the outset looks like a defacement of centuries of the Grand Style, Bacon’s depiction is iconoclastic.

Another claim that Bacon held was that we live a screened or veiled existence, and that one of the purposes of art should be about removing these screens and veils with a view to uncover the truth about existence (what Bacon referred to as the brutality of fact).2 The truth about existence concerns certain facts about existence that are normally suppressed in aesthetic representation. The facts that Bacon delineates in his oeuvre are the role of the human in a Godless world and the doubt this places on questions of purpose and identity. Bacon aimed for rawness and directness (Sylvester 1993, p. 48). In the process of painting Bacon describes the struggle between keeping the form open and trapping the fact, and the moment that truth emerges through the interlocking of paint and idea. This moment corresponds to the direct realism that Bacon wished to emulate. I argue that the uniqueness of Bacon’s art lies in his depiction of the human body. He strips away the layers of the body until we get to the flesh and blood reality. He seeks what is universal to all human beings and eliminates any extraneous material. “Whatever the setting (an anonymous empty space, a stage or circus arena, a staircase, a broom cupboard), Bacon’s figures are seen sub specie aeternitatis” (Schmied 2006, p. 96). In this process of reconstructing the body, Bacon poses interesting cross-disciplinary questions, which engage with sociology, anthropology, and theology amongst other disciplines.

Bacon remakes the body in a strategic way. He exposes the limitations of the representation of the static body and of mere appearance (which is defined as likeness) and then embarks on a practice of distortion, whereby the body is disfigured. In the process of distorting the body Bacon takes the viewer beyond the appearance and into the realms that Leiris defines as “a heightened sensa[1]tion of presence” (Leiris 1983, p. 27). In this trajectory Bacon enacts a shift from the depiction of a body that is frozen in appearance and fixed in time to a representation that captures temporality and change, what I describe as the natural body. He depicts the natural body with recourse to smudged contours and blurred boundaries — the body is in a state of liquefaction. Every twist and turn of the body is rendered in line and tone, which is reflected in the misshapen form and bruised colouration. These factors create the impression that his figures are in the throes of mental and physical anguish. They are not in repose and are preoccupied with their mortality. According to Bacon, death is not a state that exists after life but is inherent within its very condition (Sylvester 1993, p. 78). The pained appearances of the contorted bodies and facial expressions (which include in their range grimaces, cries and screams) articulate a sense of the bodily. We do not simply see the body but experience sensations that evoke a sense of embodiment. We move from inner to outer. This move coheres with Bacon’s desire to depict a natural body. In Bacon’s Godless world pain and suffering are not teleological and the shadow of death exists in every turn of the body. Visually, this is seen in the palpable shadows of the body that often have greater opacity than the body itself, and the abyssal black spaces into which the figure dissolves. In his remaking of the body Bacon reframes the dialogue between hitherto polarized states, such as life and death, wholeness and fragmentation, and the sacred and the profane.

 

Remaking the Body: The Art of Distortion

 

Bacon’s main subject matter is the human body. This subject is subdivided into categories, such as portraits of friends and lovers, portraits of anonymous figures in interiors, portraits of popes, and general studies of the human body (which include his depictions of crucifixions). All these depictions have in common the insistence on the corporeality of the body where the figure(s) displays an awareness of the inevitability of death. Bacon criticizes the tradition within representational painting that depicts the body in stasis, such as is found in the history of portrait painting. Hunter observes Bacon’s “Bergsonian horror of the static” and his desire to move painting closer to the “optical and psychological sources of movement and action in life” (Tinterow 2008, p. 32). According to Bacon the lived body is in a continual state of motion, where motion can be conceived of as voluntary (such as walking) or involuntary (such as in spasmodic reflexes as sneezing or internal physiological processes, like the heartbeat). Bacon is not explicit about the particularities of these processes. In The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze describes the bodily processes that occur in Bacon’s bodies in terms of disequilibrium, where the hiccup or the act of vomiting can be seen as ways in which the body wishes to escape itself through the orifice of the mouth (Deleuze 2003, p. 15).3 The constant sense of motion means that the inner functions and outer surface are in a state of perpetual disruption.

Bacon discusses the motion of the body with reference to pulsations or emana[1]tions — the energy that a person gives off. He discusses how his idea of a person transcends the physical description of what the person looks like, that is, their appearance, and is instead tied up with a whole host of non-material aspects that are inextricably linked to the “living quality” (Sylvester 1993, p. 174). And it is this appearance plus “living quality” that he aspires to convey in his painting. He states how:

There is the appearance and there is the energy within the appearance. And that is an extremely difficult thing to trap. Of course, a person’s appearance is closely linked with their energy. So that, when you are in the street and in the distance you see somebody you know, you can tell who they are just by the way they walk and by the way they move. But I don’t know whether it would be possible to do a portrait of somebody just by making a gesture of them. So far it seems that if you are doing a portrait you have to record the face. But with their face you have to try and trap the energy that emanates from them. (Sylvester 1993, p. 175)

From the above commentary it can be inferred that appearance can be equated with the static representation, whilst the living quality is appearance plus the non-material aspects of energy that resist stasis. In his explorations of the “natural” body Bacon deformed the single viewpoint, which is seen in the distortions of the body. He often smeared and smudged lines to achieve this, such as evidenced in Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne (1966) and Study for Three Heads (1962). In his attempt to present naturalism he went beyond verisimilitude, the appearance of being true or real to the actual truth of the living person as a corporeal entity and not as a two-dimensional representation.4 Aesthetically, he was able to implement this in his experimental technique, which in his own words was a tightrope walk between figuration and abstraction (Sylvester 1993, p. 12). Bone and flesh are in a continual state of tension and every turn (motion) of the flesh results in distortion, which appears to be a relationship of tension or torsion between the bone structure and the flesh. The brutal fact that I spoke of earlier is the ability to be able to render the person as they really look in life and not simply a photographic and static representation.

The Western tradition of the history of art is predicated on the Judaeo-Christian legacy. One fundamental tenet is the Imago dei (in God’s image). This refers to the belief that the human was made in the image of God, where God represents the ground of being. Paintings such as Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X and Titian’s Portrait of Pope Paul III (1543) reflect the importance of this ideology. These depictions are rendered with the intention of memorializing and eternalizing the Popes. The Pope as the divine representative of Christ on Earth is sacrosanct. This is reflected in the representations that sought to capture the holiness and reverence of the Pope. God’s representation was taken to be problematic. From early Christian and Byzantine art right through to the nineteenth century, all religious art echoed this ground of being. This tradition extended to non-religious but very important subjects, such as royalty. The visual representations of these figures were mimetic, and strove to imitate the ultimate representation.

In the Byzantine era religious figures (icons) were regarded as a focus for devotion. The death of God was heralded in the nineteenth century and by the twentieth century was widely held amongst progressive thinkers. The death of God removed this absolute ground of being. If God signifies absolute values of truth, beauty, and goodness, then the death of God removes teleological justifications of suffering and theological conceits of life after death. Bacon’s depiction of the natural body, which defies stasis and fixity, is viewed from within this context. Bacon’s remaking of the body is a simultaneous deconstruction of an established tradition of aesthetic representation. Bacon transcends the depiction of the appearance of the human body to articulate the experience of embodiment, which invariably means an experience of death.

 

Levels of Violence

 

Bacon’s figures often look as if they have been embroiled in a violent struggle and have undergone horrific torture. Bacon lived through violent times and his early years were turbulent. He grew up during the Irish Civil War and the Second World War. As a young child Bacon experienced the effects of violence, which he reported to his interviewers and biographers. These incidents remained vivid in his psyche but should not be regarded as literally present in his work. Bacon himself made a distinction between the violence in his life, the violence that he lived amidst and the violence in painting (Sylvester 1993, p. 81). He states how, “when talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war” (Sylvester 1993, p. 81). Ades develops this distinction by describing the literal violence as “mirrored” violence, which stands apart from the violence that arose from the suggestion in his paint. The violence he is talking about does not have anything to do with the violent application of paint, with “expressionist” violence (Ades 1985, p. 8). It is not about the outpouring of emotion or the psychological suggestion of pain as was the case with the German Expressionist painters of the 1920s. Nor is it about the outpouring of sensation akin to the work of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s. Bacon’s violence comes out of an ability to transform the multitude of sensations surrounding an image into paint. Deleuze qualifies this: “Bacon, to be sure, often traffics in the violence of a depicted scene: spectacles of horror, crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters. But these are overly facile detours, detours that the artist judges severely and condemns in his work” (Deleuze 2003, p. x). The violence in Bacon is not issued from an external source but rather occurs from within: “these are invisible forces that deform the flesh” (Deleuze 2003, p. x). These invisible forces include any spasmodic activity which causes disequilibrium within the body, such as the “violence of a hiccup” (Deleuze 2003, p. x) or a sneeze. What is crucial is that there is no external source of horror that causes the deformation of flesh. In Study after Velásquez’s Portrait of Innocent X the deformation takes the form of the scream on the face of the Pope. However, Deleuze asserts that the Pope is not screaming at anything and there is no object that causes the scream.

I want to add the violence of viewing to this typology. This is the starting point of Van Alphen’s study of Bacon in Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (1992). He describes the effect of viewing Bacon:

Seeing a work by Francis Bacon hurts. It causes pain. The first time I saw a painting by Bacon, I was literally left speechless. I was touched so profoundly because the experience was one of total engagement, of being dragged along by the work. (Van Alphen 1992, p. 9)

This wounding experience causes “a silence about that feeling of paralysis” (Van Alphen 1992, p. 9). The corporeal turbulence of Bacon’s figures is mirrored and transferred to viewers so that we experience a sense of wounding. His art affects the viewer on both a visceral and an intellectual level, in that order. The work grips the viewer’s senses and this feeling is then processed intellectually. One of the reasons why his depictions instill such feelings of trepidation and violence in the viewer is because of the anti-narrative strategies that he implements which inhibit cursory reflection. Bacon did not want his figures to be viewed within narrative confines because he felt that narratives deflect the focus from the figure and onto the story itself, which in turn reduces its impact. And so he disrupts our sense of familiarity by not seeking recourse to anecdote or narrative structures. Many of his backdrops are stark and neutral, and can be compared to the anonymity of hotel rooms. He also employs the use of architectonic space-frames to focus our gaze.

The violence of viewing is demonstrated in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), for example. A cursory glance at the title might lead one to believe that Bacon is depicting the three mourners or figures of sorrow at the foot of Bacon’s Cross. However, the actual title reads, at the base of a and not the Crucifixion. The use of the indefinite article, as Russell observes (1993, p. 11), transforms the meaning and intentions of the painting. This is not the Crucifixion and so we cannot sanction the brutality with reference to the Christian narrative. Furthermore, the absence of the Cross raises a question of focus: if we can’t reflect on the physical cross, then where, and to what, do we draw our attention? One possibility is that the visual and narrative focal point is deflected onto the viewer. Bacon places the three figures at the eye level of the viewer because he is offering the viewer a reflection of him/herself. This is what we have become. Our natural reaction is to recoil from these menacing beasts and this sensation of recoil is heightened, if they are indeed us. By deflecting the focal point onto us Bacon is intimating that, in order to make sense of these creatures, we have to place ourselves at the centre of the interpretation of them. In his essay “The Real Presence of Evil: Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” Yates suggests that these figures represent “the ones who crucify or who embody the emotions that feed the vengeance and cruelty of the act of crucifixion” (Yates 1996, p. 24). Pursuing this point, Spender comments on how:

These appalling dehumanized faces, which epitomize cruelty and mockery are those of the crucifiers rather than the crucified … His figures are those who participate in the crucifixion of humanity which includes themselves. If they are not always the people who actually hammer in the nails, they are those among the crowd which shares in the guilt of cruelty to the qualities that are — or were — beneficently human, and which here seem to have banished forever. (Yates 1996, p. 24)

We become the crucifiers. We cannot see the crucifixion because we are ensconced in the brutality of the action that goes into the act of putting to death. Therefore, in the context of Bacon’s image, the crucifixion is no longer a spectacle in the sense of something that we stand back and think about either contemplatively and/or sadistically. We are actually implicit in the making and complicit in the act itself. Viewing becomes performative. The only way to make sense of Bacon’s images is to enter into the narrative with them because there is no other narrative that occurs across the picture plane. And in this viewing we are torn apart and wounded. There is no salving, no making whole as happens in the Crucifixion of Christ, where the bodily fragments are rebound in the Resurrection. There is no resolution in Bacon, only the deepest confrontation of the horror of being. 

Bacon employs the symbol of the crucifixion anthropologically, as “the behaviour between one man and another”;5 and sociologically, as indicative of the prevalence of violence in society. Bacon is not literally depicting the actual violence that he encountered in his early years but he is applying his understand[1]ing of the ubiquity of violence in his figures. Violence reduces the human to the animal as we resort to instinctual responses. Ades discusses the interchangeability that occurs between the human and the animal in Bacon’s work as “a zone of non-discrimination” (Ades 1985, p. 14). By taking on the characteristics of an animal the human is able to release his/her pain more primally — to scream louder and with a greater sense of abandonment. This animal element is a necessary part of the human psyche: “without it he is restricted or ‘constipated’” (Ades 1985, p. 15). This visual cross-over of the human and the animal is evidenced in a number of examples of Bacon’s figures, such as the three figures in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), Figure Study II (1945–6), Head VI (1949), and Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988). Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was first exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery, London months before the end of the Second World War. When it was first put on public show the impact that it had was so monumental that the work of what were then better-known artists, such as Matthew Smith, Graham Sutherland, and Henry Moore was eclipsed by Bacon’s contribution. Critics unanimously agreed on the shock value this painting had on the British public (Alley 1993, p. 20). John Russell conveys the impact the painting had:

Common to all three figures was a mindless voracity, an automatic unregulated gluttony, a ravening undifferentiated capacity for hatred. Each was as if cornered, and only waiting for the chance to drag the observer down to its own level.

They caused a [sic] total consternation. We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them. They were regarded as freaks, monsters irrelevant to the concerns of the day, and the product of an imagination so eccentric as not to count in any possible permanent way. They were spectres at what we all hoped was going to be a feast, and most people hoped that they would just be quietly put away. (Russell 1993, pp. 10–11)

The unequivocal message that the painting conveyed was that “nothing will ever be the same” (Russell 1993, p. 11) and Bacon was launched into the art world. The impact the painting had was also related to its timeliness (or untimeliness, as many of his contemporaries may have viewed it). Unlike Moore or Sutherland, Bacon did not share the mood of war consolation and hence was unconcerned to direct his art at boosting public morale at the end of the Second World War. However, given the climate of spiritual malaise and general uncertainty that permeated aspects of British life, why did he feel inclined to produce such a horrific image?

The mood in April 1945 in London was doleful. The bombing had ceased but its effects were widespread. Faced with blackouts and food rationing, many focused on the nostalgia of the great English past; a world which, Russell observed, no longer existed (Russell 1993, p. 9). Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Eliot’s Four Quartets were two popular texts, which in their different ways paid homage to the past. Another perspective focused on trying to instil a sense of peace and calm whilst looking to the future. Bacon’s art contravened both approaches. He remained firmly fixed on recent events and the atrocities and bloodshed. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion can be regarded as a corrective of the romanticised outlook that many adopted.

With Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion Bacon removed all the veils that people live behind and confronted viewers with the brutality of existence. The three grotesque figures ravening and aggressive, snarling, and snapping refused to give any respite to the viewer. In this image we are confronted with hell. They were the embodiment of carnage and evil, figures so distorted, so dispossessed. In his attempt to uncover the veils Bacon exposes the violence that lies at the heart of humanity in the guise of the three figures. Yates describes these forms as grotesque, where the grotesque refers to something that both is and is not of this world. The grotesque forms of Bacon are: Forms rooted in our common world, enough so that we can see in them that which they distort, while in their otherness they suggest a different world altogether. They are part of our “familiar world” — though transformed in images difficult to decipher, images that are foreign. (Yates 1997, p. 40) The three forms push us beneath the surface reality to a deeper level, which Bacon strove to capture in his articulation of humanity. Davies and Yard note “Bacon’s tendencies to confront the grimmest realities of ‘human existence’ in his crucifixions. They offer no hope or transcendence or image of meaningful suffering”. (Yates 1997, p. 170) Although allusions to the post-war climate have been made, the interpretation of the painting should be viewed more extensively to encompass not simply human behaviour during the war but the violence that lies at the heart of humanity. Bacon is alerting humanity to its own nature and disallows attempts to sanitize and banalize violence.

 

Existentialism in Bacon

 

Another theme that Bacon engaged with which started in the 1940s and contin[1]ued throughout his life is the notion of identity and purpose. Given what some might regard as his misanthropic statement of humanity in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, in the aftermath of the war Bacon develops this idea to its logical conclusion. Typically, in the Heads series of the 1940s and the Popes and the Men in Blue series‘ of the 1950s, Bacon explores these questions. In these works man6 is left alone to ponder his existence. Featured in small interiors Bacon subjected all to this treatment: “Rulers, top managers, demagogues on the one hand; prisoners, victims, the downtrodden on the other” (Zweite 2006, p. 87). In their respective isolation booths these individu[1]als are trapped in existential crisis, where their public images collapse and they experience psychological torture as they lose a sense of self. Bacon’s Self-Portrait (1973) conveys the individualism of the existentialist predicament. Resting on a sink, with only a lit light bulb above him, Bacon contemplates his fate. Contemporaneous with the production of these images were works of literary existentialism, such as Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), and Sartre’s Huis Clos (1944). All these writers employ the metaphor of a claustrophobic, windowless space as indicative of the human predicament.

Bacon’s isolated figures in windowless spaces are unprecedented in the history of portraiture. Traditionally in portraiture the sitter (the subject) displays awareness that they are being observed. This is portrayed in the self-conscious fashioning of the poses and postures. Even in more naturalized poses there is an implicit understanding that there are two presences in the painting, that of the sitter and that of the artist. Bacon’s candid-camera approach displays the sitter in the privacy of his/her own thoughts, oblivious to any external reference

Russell describes how Bacon is able to depict a psychological profile by portraying the sitter entirely on his own where they are able to explore the limits of selfhood without inhibition or restraint. The result is the collapse of self: “we may feel that we are by turns all teeth, all eye, all ear, all nose” (Russell 1993, p. 38). All the trappings of civilization and culture are stripped away and the human is shown in their natural state of vulnerability, in the proximity to the animal. These grotesque figures have been likened to Untermensch (Russell 1993, p. 38). Gale and Stephens summarize the existential predicament of the human: “In a world without God, humans are no different to any other animal, subject to the same innate urges; transient and alone” (Gale & Stephens 2008, p. 27). In his interviews and statements about his outlook Bacon was indisputably existentialist: “I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence. We create certain attitudes which give it a meaning while we exist, though they in themselves are meaningless, really” (Sylvester 1993, p. 133). However, many do not have the resolution or depth to be able to contend with the lack of prescribed meaning and hence they fall into despair.

 

Refiguring the Polarities of Thought

 

In his remaking of the human body Bacon reconfigures states that are often conceived of as polar opposites: life and death, the sacred and the profane, wholeness and fragmentation, and form and formlessness. And in rethinking these putative binaries Bacon reworks them so that they are no longer binaries but are proximate. Death is then not conceived of as a state after life, but as a condition inherent within the living body. Bacon was particularly enamoured by Jean Cocteau’s dictum, “each day in the mirror I watch death at work” (Sylvester 1993, p. 133). Life and death are inextricably interwoven so that the “condition in which life is at its richest is also the moment of extreme dissolution” (Zweite 2006b, p. 24). Gale and Stephens interpret Bacon’s desire to represent the body in motion as laden with (Barthesian) pathos because it draws our attention to the transience and fragility of human life (Gale & Stephens 2008, p. 20). This underpins Bacon’s representations and reframes how the viewer responds to mass distortion and fragmentation. The deformed bodies that are spilling out of their boundaries and that twist and turn about themselves (as in Figure in Movement 1978) demonstrate an intensified vitality. Deleuze’s phrase “ambulating flesh” (Deleuze 1993, p. 24) astutely conveys this and also reconfigures the relationship between fragmentation and wholeness. The Baconian body does not adhere to conventions about bodily boundaries nor the concept that fragments make up the whole. It typically overflows into its surroundings and contains bodily boundaries that are permeable. However, each fragment of the Baconian body articulates such a strong sense of vitality and palpable presence (such as in Painting 1978) that it overrides any notion of incompleteness.

Another duality that Bacon explores is the relationship between the sacred and the profane. Bacon takes religious symbols, such as the Pope and the Crucifixion, and profanizes them. With reference to Bacon’s screaming popes Zweite argues that the Holy Father opening his mouth in a scream is a degrading act which for all the aesthetic analysis still causes considerable disquiet (Zweite 2006a, p. 100). Similarly, he profanes the sacrality of the Crucifixion by conflating it with the butcher’s shop, which Sylvester observes: “one very personal recurrent configuration in your [Bacon] work is the interlocking of Crucifixion imagery with that of the butcher’s shop. The connexion with meat must mean a great deal to you” (Sylvester 1993, p. 46).

The paradox is that by desecrating the purity of the sacred Bacon was actually adhering to the meaning of the sacred in its etymological sense. In its etymological sense the sacred and the profane cannot be conceived of in a simple dualism. The Latin sacer has two possible translations — “sacred” and “accursed”. Similarly, the Greek hieros can be translated as “sacred” and also “to qualify instruments of violence and warfare” (Girard 1979, p. 262–263). Major scholars of the sacred such as Robertson Smith, Mauss, and Durkheim, and lesser-known ones such as Hertz, explore the ambivalence of the sacred and the notion that the impure nature of the sacred aligns it with the profane in many respects. Bacon’s interpretation of the sacred is therefore atavistic. And also by desecrating and deconstructing the symbol Bacon was making the viewer aware of the special status of these symbols, which have been made commonplace over time.

A consequence of reframing these erstwhile binaries is that Bacon is rethinking the conventions of representation and offering a fresh approach to the viewer about how to think about the relationship between inner and outer body and the condition of the bodily. Ofield suggests “that his paintings are about the deformation, dissolution, disintegration, decomposition and deconstruction of subjectivity, each insisting that the pictures question mastery and undermine traditional forms of rationality and order” (Ofield 2006, p. 38).

 

Bacon — the Nihilist?

 

It is not surprising to see why some may regard Bacon’s work as nihilistic. With the abundance of tortured bodies, slumped in their chairs or trapped in confined spaces and the recurring scream or cry, “his gaze is pitiless” (Schmied 2006, p. 7). On the contrary, his work could be viewed as the products of a misanthrope, who dismissed the spiritual dimensions of life and was compelled by the propensity for violence and death. Russell notes that even in the posthumous (memorial) paintings of George Dyer7 there was not a tinge of conventional pathos (Russell 1993, p. 165). Given the tragic circumstances of Dyer’s demise, it is peculiar that Bacon did not inject any feeling into his portrayals. He abhorred sentimentality and stood against the neo-romanticism that was popularized in the 1930s and 1940s. Collectively, the subject matter, palette, and tone of his human forms are more grotesque than uplifting and point to a particular attitude, which is described as nihilistic. Bacon was also prone to make ostensibly nihilistic pronouncements, such as “you can be optimistic and totally without hope” (Sylvester 1993, p. 80).

Bacon’s work causes profound introspection. We are provided with innumerable studies of the human body articulating bold stances (such as the proximity of the human and the animal) but no solutions. The Baconian landscape is bleak: we are meat, we are potential carcasses and once we are dead there is nothing. For many, this absolute denial of an afterlife is dispiriting and pessimistic. Bacon aligned himself with Nietzschean nihilism and agreed with the assertion that pessimism could be overcome by art. Nietzsche’s attitude towards art varied in his texts. In certain periods, such as when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy (published in 1872) and then in his final prolific year of 1888, when he wrote Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche displays optimism and expresses the life-affirming characteristics of art. Correspondingly, Bacon believed that art had the propensity to encapsulate the human condition of suffering and despair. A common focus shared by Nietzsche and Bacon is the cathartic dimensions of tragedy. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche articulates the regenerative powers that tragedy has, to stimulate, purify and discharge the whole life of the people.

Likewise Bacon frequently alluded to Greek tragedy in his work, whether by reference through source material (Oedipus and the Eumenides are two such examples) or more explicitly, such as in statements in interviews. In an interview with Peter Beard, Bacon pays homage to the aesthetic grandeur of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (in Colmar, c. 1515–1516):

[The] body studded with thorns like nails, but oddly enough, the form is so grand it takes away from the horror. But that is grand horror in the sense that it is so vitalizing, isn’t it; isn’t that how people come out of the great tragedies of Greece, the Agamemnon ... People came out as though purged into happiness into a fuller reality of existence. (Geldzahler 1975, p. 14–15)

Nietzsche’s response to nihilism was to quash the metaphysical systems which brought about this situation, that of religion and morality, and to create his own mythology. Bacon’s response is different. He does not construct an alternative but remains resolute and stoical in the face of the human condition. His attempt to clear away the screens that people live behind and capture the brutality of fact is not nihilistic but realistic and hence revitalizing. His art unlocks the valves of sensation that return the onlooker to life more violently (Sylvester 1993, p. 17). In the post-war climate of the twentieth century Bacon employed the transformative power of art.

In his depictions Bacon resists the sanitization of violence that he felt that people had become accustomed to. And he distorted the symbol so that we can see behind it and look at the bloodiness and horror beneath it. In Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion he emphasizes the horror of the Cross a a weapon of torture. In his figures of human forms he thwarts our attempts to hide behind a public persona, and leaves us only with our existential predicament of aloneness. The public outcry at the Three Figures can be attributed to the fact that “nobody wanted to believe that there was in human nature an element that was irreducibly evil” (Russell 1993, p. 10). People wanted respite and comfort in whatever aesthetic form that took. Bacon was not being unduly negative but was merely commenting that in the light of recent atrocities evil does exist and rather than marginalizing this fact, it should be made central in human existence.

 

Conclusion

 

In his interrogation of the human body Bacon articulates different ways of perceiving and representing the body in aesthetics. His paintings are provocative and encourage people to think about ideas concerning culture and society. He addresses the following questions: What does it mean to feel, to be in a body and to be alive in the twentieth century? The predicament the viewer finds him/ herself in the modern world with the bombardment of the visual (through advertising and mass media) is that corporeality has become sanitized and marginalized. Sobchack makes an incisive distinction between the viewing of the body and the feeling in the body (my italics):

To say we’ve lost touch with our bodies is not to say we’ve lost sight of them. Indeed, there seems to be an inverse ratio between seeing our bodies and feeling them: the more aware we are of ourselves as the “cultural artifacts”, “symbolic fragments” and “made things” that are images, the less we seem to sense the intentional complexity and richness of the corporeal existence that substantiates them. (Sobchack, cited in Warr & Jones 2000, p. 41

In an interview with Beard, Bacon argues that: “we’ve evolved over millions of years into the state of unnaturalness that we are now in. Humans are totally unnatural. And they vary from race to race in their degrees of unnaturalness …” (Geldzahler 1975, p. 16).

Bacon set out to naturalize the human by defamiliarizing the body. He does this by disfiguring and distorting our perception of what the body looks like. He strips away the public persona of the individual, and all the other veils that we hide behind and places us on the same level as the animal. On a psychological level he takes us back to the existential moment where our identity is in crisis and we are left questioning our purpose.

Bacon’s images make the viewer recoil in disgust. Their distortions are unsightly, pained and the viewer does not want to be associated with them. They look like grotesque deformations of bodies. These seemingly alien interpretations are actually us. Bacon is presenting us with a snapshot of the human condition. Culture has denaturalised us to the extent of estranging us from our condition, which is that of mere flesh. We look at his portrayals and think that they are grotesque and this is because we are so estranged from our natural condition. Bacon takes us back to “nature” and into the slaughterhouse. He told Sylvester: “We are meat, 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” (Sylvester 1993, p. 46).

The lack of narrative clues means that we cannot deflect the focus of the painting onto the figures and interpret their story but are forced to place ourselves at the centre on the interpretation. The figures are stand-ins for the viewer. In their stripped-down and universalised condition Bacon is making a generic statement about humanity. The images do not simply affect us visually but also haptically. They are prehensile and wound the viewer. In his desire to “clear away the veils that we live behind” Bacon succeeded in updating the position of the human being in the twentieth century for a contemporary audience in a consistent and developed manner. He paved the way for generations of artists after him, most notably the Young British Artists.8

The “Sensation” exhibition of 1997 at the Royal Academy can be viewed as an extension of Bacon’s aspiration that “art should unlock the valves of sensation and return the viewer onto life more violently” (Sylvester 1993, p.17). In their presentation of a number of themes ranging from love, sex, violence, crime, disease and death, the YBAs aimed to cause a sensation — to confront the audience with a series of dislocations that “jolt us out of our complacency” (Rosenthal et al. 1997, p. 11). Headed by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, many of the artists in this grouping articulated their responses to mass consumerism, globalization and other contemporary issues. And instead of moving away from the bodily as had been encouraged in these post-human sensibilities, they returned to it in all its sensations and viscerality. In their explorations of bodily fluids and death (which is a recurring theme in Hirst’s dead animals in formaldehyde, such as in The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991) these artists draw on the everyday and the banal (Emin’s Everyone I Have Slept With 1963–1995, 1995, being a case in point) with recourse to the scatalogical and the grotesque. But the YBAs part company with Bacon because of their sensationalism. The representation of the body is often present in their work, but it is often sidelined or tangential, and the focus is on the sensation and the spectacular. In Bacon’s art, however, sensations cannot be extrapolated from the body. The body is of critical importance and is the locus of sensation and perception. Another crucial difference relates to lineage. The YBAs are thoroughly postmodern in their assimilation of sources and ideas whilst Bacon’s work, although deeply idiosyncratic, is rooted in an art historical tradition, beginning from Bosch and extended to other key influences such as Rembrandt, Goya and Soutine, for example.

In spite of these divergences Bacon remains an heir to the YBAs and other contemporary artists because of the crucial questions that he interrogates in his work. He refers to universal issues regarding the body, the role of evil in society, and the fragmentation of identity.

 

References

 

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Alley, R. (1993) ‘Francis Bacon’s Place in Twentieth Century Art’, in Chiappini, R. (ed.), Francis Bacon, Electra, Milan.

Davies, H. M. (1978) Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928–1958, Garland, New York and London.

Davies, H. & Yard, S. (1986) Francis Bacon, Abbeville Press, New York.

Deleuze, G. (2003) Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, trans. Hurley, R., Continuum, London and New York.

Gale, M. & Stephens, C. (2008) ‘On the Margin of the Impossible’, in Gale, M. & Stephens, C. (eds), Francis Bacon, Tate Publishing, London.

Geldzahler, H. (1975) Francis Bacon. Recent Paintings 1968–1974. March 20–June 29, 1975, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Girard, R. (1979) Violence and the Sacred, trans. Gregory, P., The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Harrison, M. (2008) Bacon’s Paintings’, in Gale, M. & Stephens, C. (eds), Francis Bacon, Tate Publishing, London.

Leiris, M. (1983) Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile, trans. Weightman, J., Phaidon, Oxford.

Rosenthal, N., Shone, R., Maloney, M., Adams, B. & Jardine, L. (1997) Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection: Sensation, Thames & Hudson, London.

Russell, J. (1993) Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson, London.

Schmied, W. (2006) Francis Bacon. Commitment and Conflict, Prestel, Verlag, Munich.

Sylvester, D. (1993) Interviews with David Sylvester, Thames and Hudson, London.

Tinterow, G. (assisted by I. Alteveer) (2008) ‘Bacon and his Critics’, in Gale, M. & Stephens, C. (eds), Francis Bacon, Tate Publishing, London.

Van Alphen, E. (1992) Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, Reaktion Books, London.

Warr, T. & Jones, A. (eds) (2000) The Artists’ Body, Phaidon Press, London.

Yates, W. (1996) ‘The Real Presence of Evil: Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’, Arts, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 20–26.

Zweite, A. (2006a) ‘Bacon’s Scream: Observations on Some of the Artist’s Paintings’, in Zweite, A. (ed., in collaboration with M. Muller), Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, Thames & Hudson, London, pp. 69–104.

Zweite, A. (2006b) ‘Introduction’, in Zweite, A. (ed., in collaboration with M. Muller), Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real, Thames and Hudson, London, pp. 17–28.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon and Walter Sickert:

 

‘images which unlock other images’

 

 

 

REBECCA DANIELS  |  THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE  |  VOLUME 151  |  NUMBER 1273  |  APRIL 2009

 

‘I’VE MET TWO geniuses’, Helen Lessore of the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, told Daniel Farson, ‘Walter Sickert and Francis Bacon’.1 Although separated by a generation, both artists were devoted to figurative art and recognised the need to modernise the genre. One of the ways in which they did this was by openly publicising the sources of their figuration, albeit in a highly selective manner.2 Before being photographed for the Sketch in 1938, Sickert refused to clear up his studio, preferring to be captured in the real environment of his creative space. The photograph (Fig.27) anticipates the standard images of Bacon in his studio (Fig.28), where the painter posed repeatedly for press and art photographers. Both artists appear in front of mirrors among the seeming chaos of newspapers and magazines strewn across the floor. In fact a close examination of both studios reveals that these controversial sources were not randomly amassed but key aids in the genesis of their work.3

During the summer of 1950, some twelve years after the photograph of Sickert had been published, Francis Bacon allowed the photographer and historian Sam Hunter into his Cromwell Place studio in London to photograph particular items of his source material. Hunter put together various images which he recalled were daily newspapers, magazines and such crime sheets as News of the Week in London and Crapouillot in Paris, all of which readily provided for his [Bacon’s] practiced eye a fertile image bank of the most notorious happenings and unsavoury personalities of the period.4 Two years, later Hunter identifies Sickert as an influence on Bacon.5 David Mellor has noted the curious coincidence that Sickert was said to have ‘remembered death all the time’ while Bacon confessed ‘I think about death every day’6. While this may have conveyed sensitivity to human mortality, it is just as likely to have been encouraged by their reading newspapers filled with the horrors of crime stories guaranteed to generate sales. Sickert was a passionate reader of newspapers and was fascinated by crime, while Bacon’s studio contained numerous magazine articles and photographs of murders, assassinations and terrorist acts sourced mainly from the British, American and French press.7

Bacon was famously interested in reproductions: he claimed never to have seen the original of Velasquez’s Pope Innocent X yet he owned several different reproductions of it. In the background of photographs of Reece Mews studio-flat one can se pinned-up reproductions of paintings, including his own, that seem to have triggered his imagination. Surprisingly, none is a reproduction of a work by Sickert. Bacon’s experience of Sickert’s art came from looking at original works. Despite his well-publicised reliance on reproductions, he was a voracious visitor to exhibitions, art galleries and archaeological sites: he told Hugh Davies that he looked at everything from ‘cave art to contemporary art’ and was ‘influenced by it all’.8 He also admitted  visiting exhibitions for inspiration9 and this included seeing Sickert’s paintings. This suggests that Bacon may have been influenced by the way Sickert applied paint, the tonality of which makes it extremely difficult to photograph accurately. For Bacon, poor reproductions of Sickert’s paintings would not have been of use. His description of his own art as ‘a kind of tightrope walk between what is called figurative painting and abstraction’ could equally be applied to Sickert’s paintings. For example, in La Hollandaise (c. 1906; Tate, London), the sudden movement of the woman’s upper body has caused a blurred effect (possibly also derived from photography) and this is heightened by  the use of jagged brushstrokes to capture the strong light that that abstracts her features.10 This fascination with distortions of the body in movement was of pivotal concern to Bacon.

In September 1950, shortly after Hunter’s visit, Bacon temporarily replaced John Minton in his teaching role at the Royal College of Art in London. Minton was travelling to the West Indies and gave Bacon his salary while he was away ‘for the winter at least’.11 It is a revealing insight into Bacon’s reputation in 1950, so early in his career, that he was allowed to replace Minton but was relieved of any teaching duties.12 Carel Weight commented that he did not add much to the College but there was a lot of ’hero worship’ and Albert Herbert confessed he went to see Bacon’s paintings ’during his [Bacon’s] very long lunches.13

While Bacon was at the Royal College he undoubtedly saw a newly acquired drawing by Walter Sickert, Conversation (c. 1909; Fig. 30). Rodrigo Moynihan, then Professor of Painting at the College, a great admirer of Sickert, had seen the drawing at an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London, in January 1950 and recommended that Sir Robin Darwin, then Rector and Vice-Provost, purchase it for fifty guineas from that exhibition. Darwin did so and presented it to the College.14 Bacon may have known Moynihan before taking up the post at the Royal College of Art, but, if he did not, the two must have developed a rapid rapport as Moynihan lent Bacon his studio sometime during the term.15 In any case, Conversation was in the College’ s collection during Bacon’s tenure there.

Painting (1950; Fig.29) is a rare example of a work by Bacon which can now be seen as having been inspired by an original drawing rather than a reproduction or photograph, for Bacon has clearly borrowed the standing figure and the *disquieting and unrelated shadow’16 from Conversation. The drawing itself is an early preliminary study for the first of Sickert’s Camden Town Murder series, L’Affaire de Camden Town (c.1909; Fig. 3 1), which was titled after the murder of a young prostitute in September 1907. Sickert’s use of subject-matter drawn from press reports of a notorious murder would have appealed to Bacon, whose studio, as Hunter revealed, contained many similar newspaper articles from the following decades.

Bacon’s encounter with Sickert’s drawing introduced two important motifs that recur throughout his œuvre: the shadow emerging directly from a body and the androgynous figure.17 Sickert’s drawing involves complex gendering of the figures; two women are talking, but the standing woman is accompanied by a strong shadow on the wall beside her. Despite the seemingly relaxed atmosphere, it is clear that Conversation relates to L’Affaire de Camden Town because the position of the shadow is imbued with sexual tension and impending violence, suggesting that Sickert had the final composition in mind. This is heightened by the reclining woman’s foot tensely pushing against the bed end, a gesture reiterated by the pentimenti on the iron rail of the bed. It seems likely that Sickert began his studies for the painting using two female life models for convenience, one of whom he later replaced with a man.

Martin Harrison identifies Painting (1950) as the work that ‘marks the inception of Bacon’s ambiguous gendering’ and the inspiration for this seems to have been taken directly from Sickert’s Conversation.18 The naked figure in Bacon’s painting appears to be androgynous with masculine musculature on the thighs, buttocks and biceps but the back of the head, visible beneath the cupped hand, suggests that even the bun from the woman’s hair in the Sickert drawing has been appropriated. David Sylvester noted this duality in Bacon himself: ‘The two sexes met in Francis Bacon, more than in any other human being I have encountered. At moments he was one of the most feminine of men, at others one of the most masculine. He would switch between these roles as suddenly and as unpredictably as the switching of a light’.19 Harrison identifies this male/female duality as reappearing in various works through-out each decade of Bacon’s career, culminating in Study of a man and woman walking, which dates to as late as c. 1988/89 (private collection) and which he considers to be a ‘reinvention of the theme of Painting (1950)’.20

Bacon has converted the end of Sickert’s bedstead into the steel rail that cuts across the naked figure in Painting (1950), further emphasising the shadow’s intrusive and, as it were, voyeuristic presence in the scene. Here Bacon’s shadow possibly comes close to echoing the ambiguous narrative and sense of foreboding that are visible in Sickert’s Camden Town Murder works. The motif of the figure and its shadow preoccupied Bacon in the following years and he acknowledged that ‘in the Study for Crouching Nude of 1952, I tried to make the shadows as much there as the image. In a funny way, and though I hate the word, our shadows are our ghosts’.21

In L’Affaire de Camden Town Sickert appeared undecided about the narrative implications of the placement and size of the shadow. Preliminary drawings are extant and the shadow appears in different positions and in varying degrees of shading. Sickert had not finalised the role of the shadow even when he began the oil painting because pentimenti are visible where the shadow was originally placed, leaning down over the reclining woman. He must have decided at a late stage to paint it out and replace it with wallpaper, eventually retaining the realistic shadow of the standing man. This alteration diminishes the threat of physical violence and increases the ambiguity of the scene, an ambiguity Sickert continued to use in the subsequent two works in this series. Coincidently, Bacon may have seen L’Affaire de Camden Town at the Roland, Browse and Delbanco gallery, London, where it was exhibited during 1950.22 One of the later works in the series, The Camden Town Murder, was also exhibited during the same year at the Leicester Galleries.23 Bacon also seems to have struggled with the position of the shadow in Painting. Blue pentimenti suggest that the shadow was originally leaning further out of the naked figure at a lower level but that Bacon changed his mind and aligned it more closely to the Sickert drawing.24 Sylvester noted that there was a change of mind.25 This may have been because Bacon was frantically trying to finish the painting for inclusion in his exhibition Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings which opened at the Hanover Gallery on 14th September 1950. According to Harrison, the painting was ‘delivered late, missing inclusion in both the catalogue and the opening reviews’.26

Bacon habitually left the painting of works for an upcoming exhibition until the very last moment (or even later).27 John Minton sailed for the West Indies on 9th September 1950 and since Bacon probably only saw Sickert’s Conversation and had access to his Royal College of Art studio from that date, Painting is likely to have been conceived around 9th September. The Hanover Gallery archive lists the painting as having been in the exhibition, ex-catalogue, and this gives a terminus date of 21st October. In the archive the painting is recorded as ‘Painting 1950 “Man with shadow” ’, a subtitle that seems to have been dropped by December that year when it was exhibited in Fifteen Contemporary British Painters held at the Leeds City Art Gallery from December 1950 to January 1951.28 It was subsequently purchased, with its present title Painting (1950), by the Leeds Art Collections Fund in 1951 and presented to Temple Newsam, making it the first painting by Bacon to be acquired by a British public gallery.29

Bacon may have experimented with a single figure and a shadow as a way of discouraging narrative interpretation. He accepted that when there were two or more figures in painting it was difficult to ‘cancel out the story-telling’.30 However, he repeatedly denied that his paintings contained any narrative content, stating that he wanted to ’make the paint speak louder than the story ’.31 It is curious that by adopting the figure and shadow from the Sickert drawing, he unwittingly pinpointed Sickert’s dilemma over narrative content. The Camden Town Murder series is part of an attempt by Sickert to update Victorian anecdotal painting by introducing ambiguous narratives that have no clear moral outcome.32

Sickert rejects narrative progression and instead incorporates a number of episodic Scenes, whereby the three paintings that comprise the murder series raise the same question regardless of their time frame and two of them in fact show the same episode.33 Here Sickert came close to what Bacon was trying to achieve in being ‘able to cancel out the story-telling between one image and another’.34 This has direct parallels with Bacon’s rejection of narrative content in his triptychs, in which the format of multiple panels traditionally encourages a progressive narrative reading.35 For Bacon the frames ‘isolate’ the panels and ‘cut off the story between one and the other’.36 Sickert wished to combine an updated narrative with a modernist facture and thereby introduce a methodology akin to modernist literature. (As he told Virginia Woolf, ‘I have always been a literary painter, thank goodness, like all the decent painters’.)37 His task became more urgent when Roger Fry mounted Manet and the Post Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries, London, from November 1910 to January 1911. Sickert exhibited the Camden Town Murder series number 1 and 2 in June 1911 (Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery and private collection, respectively), partly, perhaps, Fry’s exhibition generated. Sickert realised that the new focus on formalism was going to render his draughtsmanship and passion for the Victorians redundant. Fry’s victory was to establish the supremacy of formalism throughout the first half of the twentieth century and cause narrative content in art to become unfashionable.

Despite Bacon’s repeated denial of narrative content in his art he openly discussed his passion for literature. Aeschylus and T.S. Eliot were among his favourite writers and imagery from these sources appears frequently and overtly in his work.38 There is a strong literary element in Bacon’s art that demands narrative inquiry. His dismissal of narrative arose, paradoxically, because of his struggle to establish an international reputation
as a figurative artist in England at a time when Abstract Expressionism in America was dominant.39 He must have felt that to defend figurative art was going to be extremely difficult and, in order to avoid any inevitable accusations that his work descended into narrative, it may have been simpler to deny its presence.

The number of sources for Painting (1950) exposes the extent to which Bacon had to ‘crystallize all these phantoms that drop into your mind’ in order to create an original composition.40 Sickert’s drawing Conversation is a crucial source but is by no means the only one. Bacon remained faithful to the shadow in Sickert’s drawing but stood the naked woman up, only loosely retaining the pose of her hand raised to her head with her arm placed across her body. Bacon then fused aspects of Degas’s After the bath, women drying herself (1890-95; National Gallery, London) in order to suggest that the naked figure is bathing. Painting was also important as Bacon’s first work to incorporate a photograph by Eadweard Muybridge, Walking and carrying a 75-Ib stone on head, hands raised, as the source for the lower torso.41

In the previous year Bacon had discovered the original plates of Muybridge’s Animal locomotion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.42 Muybridge and Michelangelo, Bacon said, ’are mixed up in my mind together, and so I perhaps could learn about positions from Muybridge and learn about the ampleness, the grandeur of form from Michelangelo’.43 Painting (1950) seems to be a literal example of Bacon’ s statement. Sickert’s King George V and Queen Mary (1935; Fig.34)44 may also have been a source for the mysterious black frame/curtain running vertically down Painting (1950) and Sickert’s palette in that work may account for Bacon’s sudden departure from tonal painting to primary colours.45 He is likely to have seen Sickert’s painting at the house of his patron at that time, Sir Colin Anderson.46

Bacon’ s insistence that his paintings came about by ‘chance’, ‘accident’ or as a result of his ‘nervous system’  (no doubt said partly to downplay any narrative intention) conceals his careful preparation.47 The extraordinary number of sources Bacon seems to have used in Painting required detailed planning.48 The clear use of Sickert’s Conversation as the principal preparatory aid raises the question of the role of drawing in Bacon’s art — particularly since he rarely drew on paper. In effect, he made his preliminary drawings with paint on canvas. Traditionally it is during the process of drawing that ‘accident’  and ‘chance’  can be played out, working up the idea until it is ready to be executed in oil. Bacon adopts this method when he first applies the paint and this element of chance is increased by painting directly onto the raw side of the canvas, thereby increasing the risk of failure. Hugh Davies commented that Bacon destroys unsuccessful paintings in the way other painters tear up sketches.49 This could explain why Bacon often genuinely did not seem to know immediately whether something was successful or not and so he adopted titles used in drawing such as  ‘study from’ or  ‘study of’ for many of his works. This acknowledged their transitional state even after they appeared finished. He frequently requested that paintings be returned to him after he had sent them to his gallery and these were often destroyed or repainted.50 Painting may have been titled Painting to indicate that it was considered complete and perhaps was a rare work in which Bacon was immediately pleased with the outcome.

While a student at the Royal College of Art, the painter Albert Herbert observed that Bacon ‘drew on the canvas with chalk and pastel — working out compositional lines in a traditional way. These lines were of course eliminated when he painted over them. He was not quite so spontaneous as he later said’.51 These compositional lines appear on his final, unfinished painting Untitled (self-portrait) (1992; Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane) showing that his methods remained unaltered throughout his career. Eddy Batache, a friend of Bacon and one of the only people to have watched him paint, confirmed this when he noted that Bacon attached ‘enormous importance to the details he so lovingly polishes and re-polishes, even though he knows that nobody but himself would perceive the subtle transformations he has wrought in them’.52 To Batache, it is the fusion of the ‘soul of a miniaturist’, with the daring of a gambler, ‘who could also throw a pellet of white paint at the picture’, that made Bacon a master.53

While Bacon did not publicly acknowledge the influence of Sickert — he tended to cite the great old masters — in private he was more forthcoming. He was certainly aware of Sickert’s art from an early stage and evidence suggests he maintained an active interest in it throughout his life. Sylvester told Richard Shone that Bacon had seen Sickert’s The miner (1935-36; Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery) at an exhibition from stock at the Lefevre Gallery, London, in 1944 and that Bacon had found the work ‘intriguing’.54 Sylvester notes that the palette with similar flecks of red, the creases in the sleeve, and ’the black void with a similar whitish form traversing it’ all appear in Bacon’s Figure in a landscape (1945; Tate, London) shown at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945.55 Valerie Beston, Bacon’s dealer at Marlborough Fine Art, recorded in her diary that on Friday 22nd January 1982 Bacon and Sylvester visited the exhibition of late paintings by Sickert held at the Hayward Gallery, London (partly instigated by Bacon’s old friend Frank Auerbach), before going on to dinner at Claridges.56

Pichard Morphet recognised the connection between Sickert and Bacon when he observed that ‘if Sickert depicts two figures in a room he establishes a psychological tension between them that is extended in Bacon’s claustrophobic interior scenes’.57 Sickert joked that he considered himself the ‘painter of wallpaper’ and this decorative feature plays a crucial role in establishing the ‘suffocating atmosphere’ of the room in L’Affaire de
Camden Town.58 Bacon used curtains (often emphasising the folds of thick drapery) to the same effect, coming closest to Sickert’s wallpaper in Painting (1950). Having had a successful career as an interior designer in the early 1930s, Bacon became newsworthy for hanging white surgical rubber curtains in his studio, a Madge Garland, editor of Vogue, copied in her own flat.59 David Mellor observed that Bacon seemed to follow Sickert’s nudes in ‘perverse spaces’ where ‘bodies were foreshortened and compressed into a set of anatomies impacted together’.60 Bacon also knew Sickert’s Old Bedford Music Hall paintings, in which the claustrophobic interior space is distorted by mirrors to enhance its size and shape.61 Sickert depicts the music hall in an extremely complex manner in order to visually confuse the interior space and dismantle the traditional relationship between viewer, audience and performer.62 This sense of distorted space is also explored in his domestic interiors. In his series of nudes on beds, the iron bed acts as a device to frame and enclose the naked woman in the same way that Bacon uses his space frames to trap his popes and screaming men.

The sudden introduction by Bacon, in Two figures (1953; Fig-33) of a bed in the middle ground with ruffled sheets could have come from seeing Sickert’s paintings of the Mornington Crescent period (c. 1906).63 From September to October 1953 the Beaux Arts Gallery held an exhibition of Sickert’s paintings, which included two unidentified but dated ‘nude on bed’ subjects. The position of the bed in the middle ground in Two figures, with an emphasis on the light-soaked crumpled sheets defined by thick brushstrokes, bears close similarities to Sickert’s Mornington Crescent nude, contre-jour (c. 1907; Fig. 32).64 An exhibition of Bacon’s work opened at the Beaux Arts Gallery immediately after the Sickert show (November to December 1953) and it seems likely that Bacon would have visited the gallery during the Sickert exhibition to organise his own show.

If that was the case, it seems that Bacon was engaged in looking at a wide range of Sickert’s work during the 1940s to the early 1950s. This could have come about through the large number of his works that were exhibited then, but it was also undoubtedly due to the fascination they held for Bacon‘s friends Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.

Despite Bacon’s appetite for art he owned only four original works of art in his lifetime that are documented. One of them was Sickert’s Granby Street (c.1912-13; Fig.35).65 The appeal of the painting to Bacon may have been its emotional rawness and dissolving brushwork. The faces of the sitters are almost totally abstract being obscured by strong light streaming in through the French windows. Bacon bought the painting from the D’Offay Couper Gallery, London, in 1971 for £3,5oo.66 Hugh Davies commented that the Sickert painting was the only original artwork hanging in Reece Mews when he interviewed Bacon in March 1973 and he photographed the painting there in June that year.67 In the period 1971 to 1973, Bacon was painting his Black Triptychs, and Davies suggests that the technique adopted by Sickert for the father’s leg in Granby Street may have influenced the manner in which Bacon depicted George Dyer’s leg dissolving away in the memorial Triptych—August 1972 (1972; Tate, London) — ‘the life flowing out of him’, as Bacon told a friend.68 The strong lighting on the father in Granby Street has resulted in a contre-jour effect on the figure’s right shoulder, arm and chest, which appear as an undefined area of black paint. It is possible that this was the inspiration for Bacon’s extraordinary depiction of Dyer’s body in the left and right panels of the triptych where parts of the figure have evaporated.

Painting is a highly important work in Bacon’s œuvre since multiple sources can be identified within it, revealing the extent of planning that went into its preliminary stages. The use of Sickert’s drawing Conversation suggests that Bacon’s influences were wider than he acknowledged and extended beyond reproductions. Painting represents the beginning of a continuing dialogue with Sickert’s art that was to last Bacon’s lifetime:  ‘images which unlock other images’.69

 

I dedicate this article to my father, Roger Daniels (1937-2008). I would like to thank Martin Harrison for encouraging me to explore the interrelationship between Sickert and Bacon and to thank for their help and advice Kate Austin, Wendy Baron, Hugh Davies, Adrian Glew, Louisa John-Krol, Richard Shone, Juliet Thorp and Nigel Walsh.


 1 D. Farson: The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, London 1993, p. 96.

2 M. Harrison and R. Daniels: Francis Bacon: Incunabula, London 2008, p. 7.

3 Richard Morphet first discussed the similarities between Sickert, Bacon and Warhol in his pioneering article ‘The Modernity of late Sickert’, Studio International 190 (July-August 1975), pp. 3 5-3 8. Morphet’s article was the first to illustrate Sickert’s and Bacon’s studios together, but thirty-four years have elapsed since it was written and it seems relevant to juxtapose these two artists again.

 4 S. Hunter: ’Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of Horror’, Magazine of Art (January 1952), pp.n-15.

5 Ibid.

6 D. Mellor: ’Francis Bacon: Affinities, Contexts and the British Visual Tradition’, in A. Bonito Oliva, ed.: exh. cat. Figurabile. Omaggio a Francis Bacon, Venice (Museo Correr) 1993, p.98.

7 R. Daniels: ’Walter Sickert and urban realism. Ordinary life and tragedy in Camden Town’, The British Art Journal 3/2 (2001), pp.58- 69. The present author has been through the extensive archive of Bacon’s studio housed at the Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane.

8 H. Davies and S. Yard: Bacon, New York 1986, p.i 14.

9 Bacon told Michel Archimbaud that he had recently visited the Pop art exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1991), and thought there ‘might be something that can help me. I will get something out of it, or perhaps it’ll give me a shock’; M. Archimbaud: Francis Bacon: In Conversation, London and New York 2004, p. 45.

10 D . Sylvester: Interviews with Francis Bacon, London 2004, p. 12.

11 F. Spalding: Dance till the Stars Come Down. A biography of John Minton, London 1991, p. 1 53. Juliet Thorp, archivist at the Royal College of Art, confirmed that the College records show that Bacon filled in for Minton for a term from 1950 to 1951.

12 Ibid.

13 Carel Weight interviewed for the British Library Sound Archive; A. Herbert: ’Francis Bacon at the Royal College of Art 1951-1952’, in M. Peppiatt: Francis Bacon in the 1950s, New Haven and London 2006, p. 64.

 14 Letter from Robin Darwin, 21st October 1971, courtesy of the Royal College ofArt; J. Moynihan: Restless Lives: the Bohemian world of Rodrigo and Elinor Moynihan,
Bristol 2002, p. 28.

15 Richard Shone recalls that Moynihan told him that he had been a guest at Anne Dunn’s and Michael Wishart’s legendary wedding party held at Bacon’s Cromwell Place studio in 1950.

16 J. Russell: Francis Bacon, London 1993^.75.

17 In Study for portrait (1949; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago) a man appears in a space frame. There is an unconnected, yet voyeuristic, shadow in the lower section of the composition.

18 M. Harrison: ‘Francis Bacon: Extreme Points of Realism’, in A. Zweite, ed.: Francis Bacon. The Violence of the Real, London 2006, p.42.

19 D. Sylvester: Francis Bacon: The Human Body, California and London 1998, p. 38.

20 Harrison, op. cit. (note 18), p. 41.

21 Russell, op. cit. (note 16), p.92.

22 W. Baron: Sickert Paintings and Drawings, New Haven and London 2006, p. 3 72; the artist Fred Uhlman purchased it from that exhibition.

23 Ibid., p.364.

24 I would like to thank Nigel Walsh for confirming the presence of the pentimenti.

25 D. Sylvester: Looking back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 56.

 26 M. Harrison: In Camera. Francis Bacon. Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, London 2005, p. 98.

27 Similarly for his first exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, London, the previous year, Bacon did not have his works ready until the very last minute.

28 R. Alley and J. Rothenstein: Francis Bacon, London 1964, p.48.

29 Ibid.; information from Nigel Walsh.

30 Sylvester, op. cit. (note 10), p. 22.

31 A. Sinclair: Francis Bacon: His life and violent times, London 1993,

32 R. Daniels: ’Sickert, the Music Hall and the Camden Town Murder’, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS.M.Litt c.1035, 1993; and idem, op. at. (note 7), p. 65.

33 These two paintings, see Baron, op. cit. (note 22), seem to have been intended as a related pair and were almost certainly exhibited together at the first Camden Town Group exhibition in June 1911.

34 Sylvester, op. cit. (note 10), p.22.

35 He did acknowledge that his triptychs of George Dyer came close to illustration and narrative; see J. Withers: ’Carcasses and crucifixes’, The

38 See Harrison, op. cit. (note 18), pp.3 8-39.

39 Ibid., p.37.

40 Bacon in an interview with Michael Peppiatt, in ‘Provoking Accident — Prompting Chance’, Art International 8 (Autumn 1989), p. 32.

41 Alley and Rothenstein, op. cit. (note 28), p. 48; and H. Davies: Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928-1958, New York and London 1978, p. 130.

42 Harrison, op. cit. (note 26), pp.97-98.

43 Sylvester, op. cit. (note 10), p. 114; for further sources for Painting (1950), see Harrison, op. cit. (note 26), pp.98- 102.

44 This itself was based on a newspaper photograph which has recently been discovered; see R. Daniels: Tress Art: The Late Ouvre of Walter Richard Sickert’, Apollo 156 (October 2002), pp. 30-3 5.

45 A. Brighton: Francis Bacon, London 2001, p.33, discusses Bacon’s tonal painting up to the mid-1950s. Martin Hammer has suggested the cathedral of light from the Nuremberg Rally in 1937 as an alternative source (lecture given at the Architectural Association, London, September 2008).

46 A group of letters from Bacon to Anderson, in which Bacon sends his love to Anderson’s wife and children, suggests he had visited them at home. The letters, held in a private collection, are dated from the mid-1940s to 1952.

47 Harrison, op. at. (note 18), p.51.

48 Instead of drawing, Bacon often wrote lists of ideas for compositions on the inside cover of books in his studio. He also appears to have worked directly from reproductions and those of great importance to him would be preserved by affixing them to a board.

49 Davies and Yard, op. cit. (note 8), p. 113.

50 Marlborough Fine Art Archive. Valerie Beston’s diary also contains frequent mention of this practice. It often resulted from Bacon looking at his work hanging in the gallery at Marlborough Fine Art.

51 Peppiatt, op. cit. (note 13), p. 64.

52 E. Batache: ‘Francis Bacon and the last convulsions of Humanism’, Art and Australia 23/2 (Summer 1985), p. 223.

53 Ibid.

 54 Conversation with Richard Shone, 20th October 2008. Shone recalled going around the Bacon exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (November 1996 to January 1997), with Sylvester and discussing The miner in great detail. Adrian Glew of the Tate Archive, London, confirmed the painting was shown at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944.

55 Sylvester, op. cit. (note 25), p.25.

56 Bacon kept the catalogue to that exhibition; see Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, RM98F244:3. My thanks to Patrick Casey for this information.

57 Morphet, op. cit. (note 3), p. 36.

58 See Shone, op. cit. (note 37), p.

59 ’The windows [. . .] are curtained with white rubber sheeting, that hangs in sculptural folds’; no author cited but probably M. Garland: ‘The 1930 Look in British Decoration’, Studio 100/449 (1930), p. 141.

60 Mellor, op. cit. (note 6), p.101.

61 Ibid., p. 102; Helen Lessore in a letter to David Mellor.

62 Daniels 1993, op. cit. (note 32).

63 Richard Shone discusses the influence of the Mornington Crescent Nude paintings on successive generations of British painters, including Bacon, in ‘Walter Sickert: The Dispassionate Observer’, in W. Baron and R. Shone, eds.: exh. cat. Sickert Paintings, London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1992, p.6.

64 It is not known if Bacon could have seen this painting as it was in the collection of Hugh Hammersley. But Hammersley was certainly in the circle of Bacon’s early patrons and, like many of them, such as Sir Colin Anderson, also lived in Hampstead.

65 The other works were a Henri Michaux, a Juan Genovés and Frank Auerbach’s Head of E.O. W. IV (1961). My thanks to Kate Austin, archivist at Marlborough Fine Art, and to Patrick Elliott.

66 Marlborough Fine Art Archive. Not long afterwards, the painting was owned by Lucian Freud.

67 Hugh Davies, in correspondence with the present writer, 29th January 2009.

68 Sylvester: ’Bacon’s Course’, in idem, op. cit. (note 10), p. 68.

69 The quotation from Bacon here and in the title of this article is from Davies and Yard, op. cit. (note 8), p. 110.

 

 

 

   

                                                                                                             

                                                                         Walter Richard Sickert  La Hollandaise  c. 1906


 

 

 

 

 MARKET NEWS

 

 

 

COLIN GLEADELL  |  ART SALES  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  TUESDAY, MARCH 31, 2009

 

Whatever happened to the early Francis Bacon rugs that were discovered by Netherhampton salerooms near Salisbury among a large number of goods consigned for sale by an Iranian carpet dealer?

Following a blaze of publicity, they were due to be sold earlier this month, with a very vague, five-figure estimate. But, sadly for Netherhampton, they were withdrawn by the owner at the last minute and are now expected to resurface, probably at a major London saleroom with a far less appealing estimate — probably now in six figures according to experts in the Bacon market.

But who is to say they would not have made just as much in the provinces?

 

 

 

 

 

PAINTING THE POPE: AN ANALYSIS OF FRANCIS BACON’S

  STUDY AFTER VELÁZQUEZ’S PORTRAIT OF INNOCENT X

 

 

 

 

RINA AYRA   |   LITERATURE & THEOLOGY   |   VOLUME 23, NUMBER 1   |   THURSDAY 26 MARCH 2009

 

IN MANY discussions of his work, Francis Bacon is disparaging about religion, and more specifically, Christianity. In his various denigrations he employs the term ‘anodyne’1to refer to the effects that the Christian religion has on people—it alleviates suffering by making it purposeful. Elsewhere he remarks how ‘faith is a fantasy’, ‘religion is a way of disciplining people’, and ‘governments use religion to control the people’.2 And yet, in spite of his unequivocal stance, throughout his oeuvre he was relentlessly drawn towards the symbols of the Christian tradition, especially the motif of the Crucifixion and the Pope.

In this article I want to account for his obsession with the papal image by specifically focusing on Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X (1953). This study, his famous depiction of a screaming Pope, encapsulated many of the central themes in Bacon’s work. Here he can be seen critiquing, among other things, the tradition of papal portraits, which immortalised and eternalised the sanctified figure of the Pope. Bacon’s interpretation is diametrically opposed to such sanctification; it is, rather, located within the context of death. In his oeuvre Bacon discussed the omnipresence of death in life, where he stated that death was not to be conceived of as a state that occurs after life, but as interpenetrable with life, as part of the human condition. His lack of religious belief dispensed with the promise of an afterlife, and he approached the body as a purely physical entity, which disintegrates over time. This is seen in his rendition of the papal figure. The Pope is not exempt from death, and, in his interpretation, we witness the death of the symbol of the Pope who screams as his public persona falls apart and his corporeality is revealed.

The symbol of the scream is multilayered—it denotes not only the death of the papal symbol, but the death of an art historical tradition, the ‘death of God’ and the death of the self. The screaming Pope encapsulates the existentialist predicament in the absent presence of God, and the Pope’s scream mirrors the scream of the viewer, who screams at the void.

In Bacon’s oeuvre the papal paintings have as their origin the Heads, which are, as the classification indicates, the study of the head (and often shoulders) of an individual3 depicted within an enclosed frame/space. In these images Bacon aimed to explore the theme of psychological collapse.

European portraiture includes a great number of portraits of individuals in rooms where the viewer gets a sense of not only the presence of the sitter but also that of the painter. By removing the presence of the painter the sitter would experience what it felt like to be truly alone in a room, and this is what Bacon explored in his Heads. Russell comments on Bacon’s innovations:

Not merely is the subject not alone in a portrait by Titian or Ingres, but he is notalone [sic] in the highest possible degree: he is under inspection ... The sitter is busy: busy posing ... What painting had never shown before is the disintegration of the social being which takes place when one is alone in a room which has no looking-glass. We may well feel at such times that the accepted hierarchy of our features is collapsing, and that we are by turns all teeth, all eye, all ear, all nose.4

The Heads preoccupied Bacon in the late forties (1948–49) and were supplanted by the Popes in the 1950s. From the first study of Velázquez’s painting, Study after Velázquez, dated at 1950,5 and for the next twenty years Bacon painted more than forty-five paintings of the Pope. He would finally abandon the subject matter in 1962.6

I want to open up a dialogue between Velazquez’s painting of Pope Innocent X (1650) and Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X in order to explore reasons for his obsession with the image of the Pope. This will be done by evaluating Bacon’s attitudes towards religion, authority and societal norms. And secondly, I will explain his motives for painting the Pope emitting a scream.

The tradition of papal painting, and more specifically the enthroned Pope, was inaugurated by Raphael and inherited by Titian. Steffen documents the shift of portrayal from the Renaissance idealisation of the symbol of the Pope to the more majestic and formal state portraits of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, where the Pope was active in state affairs, and was, as Zweite describes, ‘worldly–looking’.7 It was specifically Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X which served as Bacon’s starting point—he was said to be transfixed by Velázquez’s painting, calling it ‘one of the greatest portraits ever’.8 In spite of his fascination with the image, during his visit to Rome in 1954, where he spent some weeks, he declined seeing the Velázquez original, which was in the Galleria Doria Pamphili, and knew it only in reproduction.9 Peppiatt remarks how ‘Bacon kept various reproductions of the painting to hand and pinned one in pride of place on his studio wall’;10 the series of photographs which Sam Hunter took in Bacon’s studio in 1950, and published two years later, bears testimony to the latter’s obsession with the Velázquez image.11

 

I. THE SYMBOL OF THE POPE

The symbol of the Pope may have been localised in the Velázquez image within Bacon’s aesthetic, but given the socio-political context of Bacon’s life, the symbol can be said to resonate on a number of different levels. On an ecclesiastical level, Bacon would have been aware of the religious and social significance of the figure of the Pope. Born in Ireland (Dublin) to English parents, religion was an unavoidable part of the English experience within Irish society because of the tensions between Protestants and Catholics. Bacon was brought up during the Sinn Fein movement and once the Irish Republican Army was formed in 1919 guerrilla warfare broke out. During his boyhood Bacon’s understanding of religion was marked by social and religious tension and isolation—being both English and Protestant he represented the minority. Religion also contributed to his sense of physical danger.

He lived for a time with his grandmother who married the Commissioner of Police for Kildare, and recalls how ‘we lived in a sandbagged house and, as I went out, these ditches were dug across the road for a cart or horse-and-cart or anything like that to fall into, and there would be snipers on the edges’.12 These formative experiences led to a conflation between violence and religion, and by extension, the Pope, as the incarnation of the Catholic Church, would have been viewed within this context of opposition and conflict.

The figure of the Pope can also be interpreted from the perspective of psychoanalysis. The etymological root of the word ‘Pope’—papa 13—associates it with the figure of the Father. Bacon had a turbulent relationship with his own father, who had high esteem for traditional masculinity and the values it espoused. His father was vehemently opposed to two aspects of his son’s identity—his homosexuality and his desire to be a painter. When the sixteen year-old Francis was found dressed up in his mother’s underwear he was expelled from the family home.14

Two years later Bacon’s father made one last attempt to straighten out his wayward son by placing him in the hands of a family friend, who was to accompany him to Berlin. This was to prove disastrous since the friend encouraged and even shared Bacon’s sexual predilections. The son’s relationship with his father was complicated by erotic fascination, which Bacon claimed his father had awakened in him. Bacon recalls that he scarcely understood his feelings of sexual attraction towards his father at the time, and recognised the truth only after he had been ‘broken in’ by his father’s grooms and stable lads15 on his father’s instruction. This instruction demonstrates the brutally sadistic side of the father–son relationship. Arguably, Bacon worked through his troubled relationship with his father in his paintings of the Pope: he enhanced the significance of the Pope by echoing Velázquez’s grand depiction of Innocent X, whilst simultaneously subverting him through vitriolic treatment.

From a Freudian perspective Bacon’s perpetual obsession with the papal image alludes to an inverted Oedipal Complex, where it is not the mother but the father who is revered in all the fear that he evokes. Bacon’s homoerotic turn to the figure of the Pope might here represent a therapeutic means for him to reverse the roles within the sadomasochistic paternal relationship, so that instead of his father inflicting pain, Bacon reclaims his autonomy. This autonomy had been suppressed in Bacon’s youth when his father frustrated Bacon’s artistic and homosexual leanings. Bacon exercised his new-found power by representing his father as a figure that is positively haunted, trapped and confined within the claustrophobic and airless pictorial space, akin to a decompression chamber. Ironically, Bacon used the very medium that his father had denied him—paint—as the instrument with which to torture him. The Pope’s utterance of a scream could be viewed from a Lacanian perspective as a reversal of the transition from the ‘imaginary’ stage of pre-language to the ‘symbolic’ state of language, which, considering his role as religious spokesman, is deeply ironic. Even after his father’s death Bacon clearly remained haunted by him; his father exerted a forceful presence in his absence—in psychoanalytical terms, the ‘return of the repressed’. Peppiatt observes how, around 1950, although Bacon’s father had been dead for ten years, ‘his presence extended well beyond the grave, but the son had to some extent freed himself from its shadow by bringing out a succession of Heads howling their rage and pain’.16 The Heads emboldened him aesthetically and emotionally over the next few years to confront the image of paternal authority par excellence, the Pope, and execute a magnificent series of paraphrases—or parodies—of Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X; rarely can a father figure have been pilloried and rejected with such ferocity.17

The stance of homophobia as symbolised by Catholicism was another reason for Bacon’s anathema towards the papal figure. Bacon obstreperously resisted being controlled by such a figure and the vitriolic treatment of the papal image can even go so far as being an attempt to kill the Father. Bryson elucidates this idea:

The regime of masculinity is revealed as, in the end, a murderous violence ... The figure of the Father (everyone’s father, yours, mine—not the real father, but the image or force behind him) is contemplated in the form of a supreme power that is vanquished by the son in a drastic coup d’etat. 18

 

II. VELÁZQUEZ’S POPE INNOCENT X

The portrait is painted in the vigorous manner of Titian. Davies traces the roots of Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X back to Titian and draws parallels between the pose of Titian’s Portrait of Filippo Archinto (circa 1551–62) and Velázquez’s portrait of the Pope, observing how the pose of the Pope, especially the position of the left arm and the ringed left-hand of the sitter, anticipated the Velázquez portrait.19 Majestically seated on the gilded papal throne, the Pope is depicted in traditional papal robes—wearing a white cassock covered with a red velvet mozzetta and a camauro. He also wears the traditional Fisherman’s Ring and ‘his coat of arms showed the dove of peace carrying an olive branch in its beak’.20 The Pope is featured in all his glory, which is enhanced by the sumptuous rendering of the fabrics of the clothing and other paraphernalia, such as the velvet curtain and the ornate throne, which adheres to the fashion of the Baroque. These robes of office, which link him to St Peter, both simultaneously acknowledge this human being and dehumanise him in the sense that it is what he is and not who he is that grants him authority. The Pope ‘must relinquish all sense of self-identity (including his family name).

 

21 and exists only as a public persona. Steffen argues that although in one sense Velázquez’s portrayal is conventional, as it depicts the Pope in line with the dictates of official representation, it is also able to impart a sense of the individual characteristics of the Pope.22 And so incisive is the characterisation that Innocent X was said himself to declare that he felt that it was ‘troppo vero’ (too truthful).23 And it is this fine balance of conventional codes of acceptability, whilst being able to add the nuances of individuality, which distinguishes Velázquez from other Court Painters.24 The Pope is oriented to the right side of the picture and is gazing to his left. This placement, of being at an angle to the viewer, makes him occupy a larger portion of the viewers’ visual field than if he was confronting the viewers face on. This extended amount of space grants him a commanding presence and his gaze to the side of the viewer conveys his detached and aloof stance; he is not deferring to the viewer but expects us to defer to him. There are two other factors that increase the sense of detachment. Schmied observes how the gilded back of the throne in the painting operates as a frame: ‘it focuses attention on the head by demarcating it from the background, and this suggests a picture within a picture’.25 The doubling up of throne-as-frame is an effective device and accentuates the formality of the representation. Furthermore he looks out with a stern authoritative expression that is unnerving for the viewer because the eyes do not innocently stare out at the viewer; they scrutinise. The sternness of his facial expression is balanced by his composed seated gesture. Collectively, his expression and the array of symbols in the painting convey Innocent’s temporal and spiritual rule. Bryson argues that the power of Velázquez’s Pope is conveyed by much more than the articles of his status, by something far more deep-rooted. Bryson claims that ‘power does not lie on the surface, it shapes flesh and bone’, and similarly, ‘power is always incarnate and never abstract’26. The emphasis on the naturalisation of power and status in Innocent X was particularly apt for the year in which the painting was executed, 1650, which marked the height of the Counter-Reformation when papal power was at its greatest, and which also was the Jubilee year, when Rome was host to hordes of pilgrims, painters and sculptors from all over Europe.27  Velázquez as Court Painter was in a privileged position as he was able to document the Pope at his height (before the papacy lost its political power).

 

III. STUDY AFTER VELÁZQUEZ’ S PORTRAIT OF POPE INNOCENT X

Bacon described great art as being a way of keeping abreast of cultural shifts and responding to the contemporary in one’s own age—‘you see, I believe that art is recording: I think it’s reporting’.28

His Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X was his interpretation, or what Bryson describes as his ‘revision’,29 after Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X. At a cursory glance Bacon’s image contains all the articles of the Pope—the papal throne and his vestments. It also contains echoes of the Grand Manner, namely in, as Alloway points to, ‘the size of the canvas, the placing of the figures depicted’.30 However, from a formal and thematic perspective there is also major difference. This is embodied in the defining feature—the scream, which has the effect of polarising the two paintings. In the Bacon example the Pope emits a scream which shatters the surface of the painting and divests the papal image of its power and authority.

There are a number of reasons that may account for the scream of the Pope. Extending the earlier statement about Bacon’s view of the role of art in society, the screaming Pope could be reacting to postwar existential angst, which was exemplified in Nietzsche’s declaration of the ‘death of God’. If God is dead, then the Pope is exposed as an empty symbol. By drawing on Velázquez’s image, which, to reiterate, glorifies the Pope at the pinnacle of his religious power, Bacon is instead charting the redundancy of the symbol. In her essay ‘Web of Images’, Ades examines the role of the mouth as the mouth vis-à-vis Bataille’s entry on ‘La Bouche’ (in the Critical Dictionary) and focuses on the fact that it is through the mouth that ‘our most concentrated experiences of agony or ecstasy are physiologically expressed, and also that in this expression the human draws particularly close to the animal’.31 Ades offers the following explanation of Bacon’s rendition of the scream, which incidentally she refers to as a cry32: Perhaps his idea was to test one of the greatest portraits ever painted, of a man set highest above his fellow men (the archetypal father, verging on the divine) in the grip of a feeling so intense that the only expression of it brought him close to the beasts.33

Bacon’s humiliation of the Pope was two-fold. He wanted to debase the exalted status of the Pope by paralleling him with the beast. He may also have been exploiting the sexual implications of the mouth, which Freud identified as the first organ to emerge as an erotogenic and libidinal zone. In his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) Bacon explores this sexual theme in the transposition of the genital to the buccal region. Bacon reprimands the Pope for condemning homosexuality by depicting him as being oppressed by carnal desires. The scream connotes the trapped sexuality that the Pope endures. From a biographical perspective Bacon could be seen as enacting his own torture on the father, who screams in pain as his image collapses. Another interpretation is to read the scream as issuing from the mouth of Bacon himself. It is plausible that the scream was an articulation of Bacon’s rage at the authority of the Catholic Church, in particular its position on the issue of homosexuality. Another possibility is that in the wide-opened gesture of the scream, Bacon was commenting on his lifelong battle with asthma and encapsulating this in the image of one gasping for air. Harrison remarked that although asthma wasn’t an obvious focal point in his work, partly because of Bacon’s own attitude— ‘he bore it with a habitual stoicism’—Bacon nevertheless was fully aware of the perpetuity of this condition, and stated, ‘it’s been with me longer than painting has and it’s a daily experience’.34

 

IV. FROM VELÁZQUEZ TO BACON: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Davies consolidates the differences between the two images in the following phrase: ‘while Velázquez portrayed the Pope ex cathedra, Bacon captured him in camera’.35 It was customary for bishops to preach from the cathedra (the bishop’s throne) and the expression ‘ex cathedra’ conveys an infallible authority of the pronouncement.36 3

Velázquez’s portrayal of the Pope ex cathedra means that he was depicted in all his uncompromising authority, in his public role as spiritual leader. This contrasts with Bacon’s portrayal in camera, which translates as ‘in the chamber’.37 In legal terms ‘it refers to private sittings to cases heard, not in open court, but in closed court or a judge’s private room’.38 By placing him thus Bacon is removing the legitimacy of the (ex cathedra) dictate and is placing the Pope under his own scrutiny. Velázquez is dehumanising the Pope (the Pope known for what he represents and not for who he is as a person, the Pope first and foremost as a symbol) and Bacon is then re-humanising him by depicting him as a man in a state of psychological collapse as his public guise falls apart. Bacon bifurcates the Pope into ‘Pope’ and ‘Pope as-man’. The viewer is privy to this incompatibility of identities, which is reflected in the image of the screaming Pope. This image can be described as Surrealist, where Surrealism involves the juxtaposition of two incompatible realities on the same visual plane—in this case, the scream of a Pope.

Steffen compares the two interpretations of the Pope and suggests that Bacon’s Pope takes Velázquez’s Pope a step further by making ‘Velázquez’s introverted but dangerously restrained Pope positively explode. He brought into the open everything that was hidden and suppressed in the figure’.39 Bryson’s interpretations are similar, with the exception that he downplays the tension in Velázquez’s image. Bryson refers to ‘Bacon’s surgical operation of the ‘‘neutralness’’ of Velázquez’ and discusses how ‘Bacon dismantles Velázquez’s ascesis’.40 What both Steffen and Bryson fail to see is that Velázquez portrays the Pope at the height of his papacy whilst Bacon is more intent on capturing the moment at which the papacy collapses and the Pope is exposed. I suggest that Bacon’s Pope is the negative inverse of the Velázquez example; we are faced with what appears to be a photographic negative. In the Velázquez example the Pope fulfils all the criteria of his office; from his attire to his facial expressions, the viewer is facing the archetypal image of the Pope. This is deconstructed in the Bacon example, where the Pope is satirised, from his appearance to his articulation. Velázquez’s Pope poses in role, that is, ex cathedra imparting a sense of confidence and authority. He is formal and yet relaxed in his role. The Pope in Bacon, however, is vulnerable and under judgement. Sitting bolt upright with ‘balled fists’41 he awaits his doomed fate. The shift of perspective also contributes to their varying interpretations. Velázquez’s Pope is depicted according to the rules of Renaissance perspective which were based on a fixed central viewpoint. This fixes the sitter at a comfortable distance from the viewer. In the Bacon image, space does not conform to this model. Schmied describes Bacon’s version of pictorial space as a ‘nexus of interlocking spatial systems that are in continued conflict but also have a mutually reinforcing effect’.42 These spatial systems are created by the architectonic frames (space-frames), which are continuous with the papal throne and create the sensation of incarceration and isolation.

Another significant difference between the two paintings is in the treatment of the trappings of papal power. In Velázquez’s image the robes are highly symbolic; the velvety-rich red cape symbolises the colour of the martyrs and is coupled with the more lightweight but voluminous white cassock, which refers to Christ at the Transfiguration. The splendour of the materials and colours convey the authority and magnificence of the sitter. And what he is sitting on, the throne, is the supreme symbol of papal power. All the features convey his position as set apart, as holy.

In the Bacon image the viewer is faced with a reversal of the Velázquez image. Instead of endowing weight and substance to the Pope the translucent garments disfigure the presence of the Pope. This is further enhanced by the device of vertical striations (which Bacon refers to as ‘shuttering’), which run from the top to the end of the lower body and the cassock. Other striations flare out at the bottom43 of the painting and run from two sides towards the figure and the centre of the painting. The striations stretch and cut through the figure, exacerbating his claustrophobia. They also create a veil-like effect, which masks and distorts his identity, whilst also paradoxically making it very immediate. In the process of viewing, Bacon is removing/ stripping away this veil to reveal the disintegration of the Pope. The viewer does not witness the Pope in power but in his symbolic demise. The striations of the veil therefore can be interpreted as attempts to rupture the identity of the Pope. 43

The use of colour is plausibly one of the greatest differences between the two paintings. The Velázquez painting is painted in soft muted tones, which convey the lustre of the paraphernalia and the status it represents. The colours in the Bacon image are remarkably stark and lack warmth. The red cape from the Velázquez is transformed into a garish bluish-purple cape in the Bacon. This transformation can be viewed as an attempt to satirise the resonance of the symbol and the specificity of the colour. He turns a venerable symbol into what Davies refers to as ‘some form of ludicrous fancy dress in a Genet play’.44 The starkness of the complementary colours (with the purple against the yellow throne) adds to the sense of discomfort that the Pope experiences. The white cassock in the Bacon example is endowed with a luminosity, which makes it seem almost ghostlike. It also appears to be blood-spattered, which adds to the drama of the scene. In addition, the gilded and stately throne in the Velázquez image is transformed into a translucent bright yellow chair, which is cold, clinical and literally unsupportive of the weight of the Pope. The juxtaposition of the dark colours and ‘glaring highlights’45 which flicker incandescently is unsettling and visually disruptive.

Another visually incongruous feature is the facial expressions and general demeanour of the two Popes. The face of the Pope in the Velázquez image and his relaxed confident hand gestures impart the impression of authority, integrity and wisdom. In contrast, the ghostly white face of the screaming Pope is elongated and differs from the strong angularity and fleshiness of the Velázquez face. Bacon’s Pope does not possess the strength and power of the Velázquez Pope. Instead we have the petrified soundless scream emerging from the blackness of the mouth. The hands are fearfully bolted to the chair, which has been likened to an electric chair,46 and the Pope looks as if he has seen a ghost, or some horrific sight that has induced temporary paralysis.
 

 

V. CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS : RESPONSES TO THE VOID

Earlier I outlined a number of different possibilities which account for why the Pope is screaming. All the reasons stated can be framed within a relationship of cause and effect. For example, the Pope as representative of Bacon’s biological father screams because of the torture chamber that he has now been placed in by the murderous son. Or, the Pope’s scream is the effect of his trapped sexuality—he is oppressed by the frailties of the flesh. In Logic of Sensation (2003 [1981]) Deleuze promulgates a very different analysis of the scream, emphasising that the Pope is not screaming at anything and there is no object which causes the scream. He is screaming at ‘nothing’; he is screaming at the void. Rather like Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness, the exclamation of ‘the horror! the horror!’47 has no referent. A similar charge can be levelled at Munch’s The Scream (1895), where there is no external source that is causing the central figure to scream. However, the use of pathetic fallacy here prevents (the background of) nature from being conceived of as a void. The scream of the figure is absorbed by the organic swirls, which constitute the sky and surrounding landscape. In this example nature operates as a buffer, and the angst of the figure is transported and communicated through the expressive lines of the road and landscape. The scream may be emitted from the individual figure but it reverberates throughout nature, causing the effect of expansion and unity. In contrast, the scream in Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X cannot be communicated to its surroundings and instead echoes in ‘the vortex of contracting space’.48 This ‘vortex of contracting space’ is the void left by the realisation of the ‘death of God’. The Pope is screaming in response to the belief that the theological concept of God is dead.

 

A. The ‘Death of God’ and Existentialism

Davies draws a direct parallel between a passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) and Bacon’s papal images. He states how:

Bacon’s papal images support the Nietzschean declaration and may be viewed as visual equivalents of the pathetic figure of ‘‘the last pope’’ featured in the section entitled ‘‘Retired’’ in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 49

In ‘Retired from Service’ (in Part Four of ‘Zarathustra’s Discourses’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) the Pope approaches Zarathustra, and when he learns of the ‘death of God’, he declares: ‘I am retired from service, without master, and yet I am not free, neither am I merry even for an hour, except in memories ... . I am the last pope!’50 The Pope needs (the belief in) God to validate his identity as Pope and, in the absence of God, seeks another master, which leads him to Zarathustra. The tragedy of Bacon’s papal images is that the individual has ‘relinquished himself completely to a stifling system of beliefs’51 and one which following the ‘death of God’ has revealed itself to be untenable. The Pope screams in realisation of his fate. As Peppiatt observes, ‘the scream was the moment of truth, the moment at which all pretence and false seeming fall away’.52

Bacon is staging the announcement of the ‘death of God’ rather in the manner that Nietzsche undertook through the guise of ‘the madman’, in The Gay Science (1882—Book 3, Section 125), where the madman runs into the market place in the early hours of the morning, and announces the demise of God. The effects of the ‘kinetic flickering’53 on the figure of the Pope combined with his isolated placement on the throne gives the impression to the viewer that what we are bearing witness to is a spectacle, a great event, a possible re-enactment of the story of the madman.54

The consequences of the ‘death of God’ and subsequent ramifications on the identity of the Pope have encouraged parallels to be drawn between the papal (or other ecclesiastical) figures and existentialist thinking,54 which were popular during the 1940s and 50s. This has further been enhanced by the configurations of isolated figures in windowless spaces, which predominate in Bacon’s work, and recall literary equivalents such as Camus’ L’E´tranger (1942) and Sartre’s Huis Clos (1944). I proposed vis-à-vis Russell the innovations of Bacon’s portraiture which depicted the disintegration of the social being and exposed the individual as entirely on their own, faced to contemplate the dissolution of the self. This existentialist predicament can be applied to many of Bacon’s solitary figures, who are isolated in claustrophobic interiors. However, if the given condition of existentialism is the focus on the self then an existentialist reading is denied in Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, because the Pope cannot be conceived of in terms of a self. The existential possibilities of liberation and the construction of meaning through existence are not feasible here, and the only option remains to acknowledge the abandonment of meaning and sense. The Pope’s scream is abyssal—it is the void itself. Although Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X cannot be described as an example of existentialism, Bacon was, undoubtedly, working within a cultural climate of existentialist thought. Yet if he employs some of the metaphors of existentialist thought they are for radically different ends.

 

 B. A Deleuzian Reading

Bacon makes a distinction between the violence in his life (‘actual’ violence) and the violence in painting.55 In Logic of Sensation Deleuze develops this distinction. He describes the violence of war as ‘the violence of representation (the sensational, the cliché)’ which is to be contrasted with ‘the violence of sensation’56, which is the violence which emerges through the paint. Deleuze states that what interests Bacon directly is, ‘a violence that is involved with line and colour: the violence of a sensation ...a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression’.57 The violence is caused through movement, where the movement is not external but comes from within, such as the spasm of a sneeze or the ‘violence of a hiccup’.58 He describes the violence that he is attempting to convey in the following terms:

In the end, the maximum violence will be found in the seated or crouching Figures, which are subjected to neither torture nor brutality, to which nothing visible happens, and yet which manifest the power of the paint all the more.59

The key phrase in the above description is ‘nothing visible happens’. Deleuze notes that there is nothing that might cause horror. The Pope screams before the invisible. 60 The transparent striated curtain reinforces the fact that there is nothing in front of the Pope that is causing him to scream. And since the scream is object-less, so to speak, it has the effect of heightening the level of horror. ‘[T]he horror is multiplied because it is inferred from the scream, and not the reverse’.61 Bacon always stated that he wanted to be able to paint the scream more than the horror62 and this example fulfils his aspirations because the horror is experienced through the scream. We are not distracted by the horror but it is incremental to the power of the scream. It is a similar image to that of the screaming nurse from Sergei Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potempkin of 1925, which Bacon claimed was an important source in his work. The nurse’s mouth was a vivid example of the kind of deformation under stress that Bacon was aiming to parallel in paint: the great soundless O of the mouth.63  In the context of Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, the contortion of the mouth into a scream has the effect of distorting the stability of the body. The restraint embodied through the poise and grandeur in the Velázquez image is subverted entirely in the Bacon example, where all we are left with is the scream. Deleuze describes the relationship between the two painters, and places Velázquez in the role of documentarian:

Velázquez was undoubtedly the wisest of the classical painters, possessing an immense wisdom: he created his extraordinary audacities by holding firmly to the coordinates of representation ...64

And he subsequently places Bacon as responsible for ‘hysterizing’65 all the elements of Velázquez’s painting. Bacon distorts the reserve that Velázquez’s Pope holds into a mania that is conveyed by the scream and articulates the fear of the internal violence of the body. Deleuze describes the dynamic between the internal forces (the spasms) and the outer body as being in continual tension. The spasms can be interpreted literally, as deformations of the flesh, but are, as Deleuze discusses, also interpreted metaphorically as desperate attempts to escape the body. In Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X the turbulence of the body resolves itself through the insistence of the scream which survives the effacement of the body.66 What we as viewers are bearing witness to is ‘an extreme point of cosmic dissipation, in a closed but unlimited cosmos’.67 The framing down of the image of the Pope in the space-frame accentuates the sensation of disintegration because it has the effect of focusing the viewers’ attention to what is happening within the confines of the frame. Russell describes the systematic disintegration of the Pope: ‘... we may feel at such times that the accepted hierarchy of our features is collapsing, and that we are by turns all teeth, all eye, all ear, all nose’.

68 This sense of disintegration conveys one of the central themes within Bacon’s work, which is the transience of representation. In what can be described as Derridean, representation cannot halt the workings of time but can only expose the workings of death.69 This claim is enforced by the cultural awareness of the ‘death of God’, which eliminates the possibility of an ultimate guarantor. According to Bacon, life and death are inextricably entwined and the experience of dying or death is conveyed when the body is at the point of its greatest vitality. Bacon’s Pope is expressed at this peak moment of intensity where life and death coincide in the scream. Deleuze refers to Kafka to describe this notion of impending doom:

It was Kafka who spoke of detecting the diabolical powers of the future knocking at the door. Every scream contains them potentially. Innocent X screams, but he screams behind the curtain, not only as someone who can no longer see, who has nothing left to see, whose only remaining function is to render visible these invisible forces that are making him scream, these powers of the future. That is what is expressed in the phrase ‘‘to scream at’’ – not to scream before or about, but to scream at death – which suggests this coupling of forces, the perceptible force of the scream and the imperceptible force that makes one scream.70

Although Bacon’s painting clearly uses Velázquez’s painting as a reference point, in terms of the paraphernalia and layout, the qualifier ‘study after’ in the title is revealing and indicative of Bacon’s intentions. The final outcome of Bacon’s ‘study after’ Velázquez’s image of Pope Innocent X is the complete antithesis of the Velázquez Pope. In terms of visual semiotics, Velázquez’s painting is a naturalistic rendition of Innocent X. In contrast, in the Bacon image, the viewer is faced with a symbolic index of pain, the scream.

 

VI. CONCLUSION

Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X is a reworking of the Velázquez painting which Bacon updated so that it would have pertinence for its age, in the same way that Velázquez went to Rome, determined to vie with the state portraits of Titian and remake them in his own time.71 Bacon pastiches the strong artistic heritage of papal painting by idiosyncratically combining the monumentality of the papal image with that of a photographic image, in order to give it contemporary resonance. He aimed to replicate the ‘blurred, out-of-focus appearance and monochromatic tone of a newsprint photograph’72 which was popular in his day.

The Velázquez painting conveyed both the spiritual leadership and political power of Pope Innocent X whilst Bacon’s version is counter-cultural: the Pope becomes an anti-Pope. Thus, everything is seen in reverse—the papal throne becomes the electric chair, the papal attire becomes gaudy dress and the organ of speech becomes the aperture of a scream. In short, the confident, authoritative and holy Pope in the Velázquez painting becomes an inarticulate screaming wretch, who is placed on the same level as the beasts.

Bacon was interested in the papal figure for a variety of different reasons, which stemmed from the conflation of his own father with the divine Father. His subsequent attack on the papal figure was viewed as a way of avenging his bitterness on this combined enemy, who opposed his sexuality and therefore his identity. It also conveyed his disgust at the institutions of religion, particularly Catholicism, which features as a negative force in his life. Bacon communicates his rage through the emission of the deadly scream, which is a stark reminder of the Nietzschean announcement of the ‘death of God’. Deleuze magnifies the potency of the scream by suggesting that the Pope is not screaming at anything; there is no object in his field of vision that is causing him to emit the scream. The scream of the Pope is located within the context of death and in the painting we experience the death of the symbol. The Pope screams as his public persona disintegrates, which in turn signifies his own demise. And through the process of viewing, the viewer becomes the Pope, who experiences the void and the apocalyptic moment of ‘the horror! the horror!’ where the self disappears.73

 

REFERENCES

1 D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 200.

2 D. Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 134.

3 The vestments of Head VI (1949) are indisputably papal.

4 J. Russell, Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 38.

5 Which, incidentally, was destroyed. In Alley and Rothstein’s catalogue raisonne there are two paintings entitled, Study after Velázquez, both dated 1950 in appendix B of ‘Destroyed Paintings’. They are coded as D6 and D7. Bacon planned to paint a series of three variations on the Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X for his exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in September–October 1950. D6 and D7 are shown here but he never executed the third and decided at the last minute to withhold the series. Quoted in, R. Alley and J. Rothstein, Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964) catalogue raisonne´, D6 and D7.

6 W. Schmied, Francis Bacon. Commitment and Conflict (Munich: Prestel, Verlag, 2006), p. 13.

7 A. Zweite, ‘Bacon’s Scream’, in A. Zweite (ed.) Francis Bacon. The Violence of the Real (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), p. 69.

8 Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, p. 24.

9 D. Sylvester, ‘The Supreme Pontiff’, quoted in, T. Shafrazi, Francis Bacon. Important Paintings from the Estate (New York: Tony Shafrazi Gallery. On occasion of the first exhibition of paintings from the Estate of Francis Bacon, 1998), p. 24. Bacon remarked that he was reluctant to look at it. Quoted in, R. Alley and J. Rothstein, Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), p. 13. See also, Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, p. 38.

10 M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon. Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 139.

11 A. Zweite, ‘Bacon’s Scream’, quoted in, A. Zweite (ed.), 2006, p. 69.

12 Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, p. 81.

13 Ibid., p. 71.

14 Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon, pp. 17–18.

15 Ibid., p. 16.

16 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon. Anatomy of an Enigma, p. 133.

17 Ibid.

18 N. Bryson, ‘Bacon’s Dialogues with the Past’, quoted in, W. Seipel, B. Steffen and C. Vitali (eds) Francis Bacon and the Tradition of Art (Milan: Skira, 2003), p. 47.

19 H. M. Davies, ‘The Screaming Pope: Past Art and Present Reality’, quoted in, R. Chiappini (ed.) Francis Bacon (Milan: Electra. Museo d’Arte Moderna Citta` di Lugano, 1993), p. 52.

20 D. Brown (and ed.) The World of Velázquez 1599-1660 (The Netherlands: Time Life International, 1972), p. 146.

21 J. G. Hatch, ‘Fatum as Theme and Method in the Work of Francis Bacon’, Artibus et Historiae 19(37), (1998) 163–75, p. 171.

22 B. Steffen, ‘The Representation of the Body: Velázquez—Bacon’, quoted in, W. Seipel, B. Steffen and C. Vitali (eds.) 2003, p. 206.

23 I. Chilvers, H. Osborne and D. Farr (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 515.

24 The other obvious exception is Goya, who transformed his portraits through caricature.

25 Schmied, Francis Bacon. Commitment and Conflict, p. 20.

26 Bryson, ‘Bacon’s Dialogues with the Past’, pp. 45–6.

27 Brown (and ed.), The World of Velázquez 1599-1660, p. 159.

28 Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, pp. 59–60.

29 Bryson, ‘Bacon’s Dialogues with the Past’, p. 44.

30 Davies, ‘The Screaming Pope: Past Art and Present Reality’, p. 58.

31 D. Ades, ‘Web of Images’, in, D. Ades and A. Forge, Francis Bacon (London: The Trustees of the Tate Gallery and Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1985), p. 13.

32 Ades does not localise this interpretation to Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X but applies it to other papal images, such as, Pope I and Pope II (1951).

33 Ades, Francis Bacon, p. 15.

34 M. Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon. Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), p. 208.

35 H. M. Davies, Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928-1958 (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1978), p. 98.

36 P. Murray and L. Murray, Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 102. 37 E. Martin (ed.), A Dictionary of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 195. 38 L. B. Curzon, Dictionary of Law (London: Pitman Publishing, 1994), p. 187.

39 B. Steffen, ‘The Papal Portraits’, p. 117.

40 N. Bryson, ‘Bacon’s Dialogues with the Past’, p. 46. 41 H. Davies and S. Yard, Francis Bacon (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 26.

42 Schmied, Francis Bacon. Commitment and Conflict, p. 20.

43 Sylvester traces the fold in the curtain back to late Degas pastels. Bacon had been developing this device, which essentially consisted of the use of sets of close parallel lines that seemed to be passing through a semi-transparent body. Bacon’s use of this technique, which he called ‘shuttering’, created folds or striations in the background, which had the effect of breaking up the solidity of the figure. D. Sylvester, ‘The Supreme Pontiff’, quoted in, T. Shafrazi, Francis Bacon. Important paintings from the Estate, p. 26. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, pp. 46–7.

44 Davies, Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928-1958, p. 100.

45 Zweite, ‘Bacon’s Scream’, p. 72.

46 H. M. Davies, The Papal Portraits of "æ (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Arts in association with Lund Humphries, 1999), p. 12.

47 J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1990), p. 71.

 48 B. Steffen, ‘Veils and Striations as Motifs of Isolation’, p. 133.

49 Davies, Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928-1958, p. 276.

50 F. Nietzsche in R. J. Hollingdale (tr.) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 271–2. 51 Hatch, ‘Fatum as Theme and Method in the Work of Francis Bacon’, p. 171. 52 M. Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the "æs (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 26.

53 ‘Kinetic flickering’ is the phrase that Harrison uses to refer to the effects of the striations of Study after Vela´zquez (1950) but I feel that it has a wider application which extends to Study after Vela´zquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon. Photography, Film and the Practice of Painting, p. 200.

54 Although it seems almost imperative to read the existentialism within Bacon there is also much about his work and life that is antithetical to the almost stoic optimism of existentialism. Ades discusses this further in ‘Web of Images’, p. 11. 55 Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, p. 81. 56 G. Deleuze, in D. Smith (tr.) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 39.

57 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, x. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., pp. 38–9. 60 Ibid., p. 38. 61 Ibid.

62 Bacon states how, ‘I want to paint the scream more than the horror’. Quoted in Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, p. 48. In his interviews with Sylvester, Bacon mentioned his fascination with the scream and the mouth. Bacon explained to Sylvester that his obsession with the mouth stemmed from his fascination ‘that comes from the mouth and states how, ‘‘I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset’’ ’. Quoted in, Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, p. 50. See also, Sylvester, ‘The Supreme Pontiff’, in, Shafrazi, p. 48. Amongst the visual sources which Bacon assimilated which contained images of the buccal cavity was a second-hand book which Bacon bought in his younger days which had beautiful hand-coloured plates of diseases of the mouth from a bookshop in Paris. He also expressed the influence that Poussin’s painting of The Massacre of the Innocents (1630–1), which he saw whilst in Paris and noted how he felt that it was ‘probably the best human cry in painting’. The Brutality of Fact, p. 35.

63 Russell, Francis Bacon, 1993, p. 56.

64 Deleuze is quoting from Sylvester’s interviews (1987, pp. 28 in my edition), in Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 53.

65 Ibid. 66 In the context in which Deleuze is describing this he suggests that beyond the scream is the smile, which is the terminus of abjection and establishes the disappearance of the body. Quoted in, Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 28. I want to suggest that within the context of Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, the scream fulfils the same function.

67 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 29.

68 Russell, Francis Bacon, p. 38.

69 E. v. Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 1992), p. 14.

70 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 61.

71 Davies, Francis Bacon: The Early and Middle Years, 1928-1958, p. 98.

72 Davies, ‘The Screaming Pope: Past Art and Present Reality’, p. 46.

73 M. Kundera’s ‘Introduction’, in F. Borel, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), p. 12.

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                        Diego Velázquez, Pope Innocent X, 1650  Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome

 

 

 


 

Christie’s Is Sued After Francis Bacon Painting Fails to Sell

 

 

 

ART SALES  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES |  FRIDAY, MARCH 20, 2009

 

Christie’s is being sued by a family trust led by the Connecticut collector George A. Weiss, who says the auction house reneged on a $40 million guarantee when it tried but failed to sell a 1964 painting by Francis Bacon in November.

 

The lawsuit, filed in the United States Southern District Court on Friday, claims that Christie’s, in competition with archrival Sotheby’s, agreed to give the trust, Weiss Family Art, a guarantee — a sum promised to the seller regardless of the sale’s outcome — of $40 million for the painting. In order to win the consignment from Sotheby’s, Christie’s sweetened its deal and won the business.

 

An agreement was struck in late July, but by September, after the auction house already had the painting, Christie’s said it would no longer honour the guarantee because of the faltering global economy.

 

Christie’s was not able to sell the painting. Now the trust is suing for the $40 million it says it was promised, plus interest. The president of Christie’s was traveling on Friday and could not be reached for comment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Christie’s Auction House Sued Over Francis Bacon Guarantee

 

  

BY ERIK LARSON  |  BLOOMBERG |  FRIDAY, MARCH 20, 2009

 

March 20 (Bloomberg) – Christie’s International’s New York unit was sued by a Florida art collector over claims the auction house failed to sell as promised a self-portrait by Irish painter Francis Bacon for at least $40 million.

Christie’s, based in London, owes the minimum guarantee to collector George Weiss after his 1964 Study for Self Portrait by Bacon failed to find a buyer at the auctioneer’s November 2008 Post War and Contemporary Art sale, according to a breach-of-contract complaint filed today in federal court in New York.

Christie’s and rival Sotheby’s in July 2008 made competing offers to Weiss to include the painting in their respective auctions, according to the complaint. In September, after Weiss chose Christie’s, the auction house said it wouldn’t follow through on the minimum-bid guarantee, citing “the changed climate of the art market,” according to the complaint.

“For years, the major auction houses, including Christie’s and Sotheby’s, have offered guaranteed price arrangements for select works in order to bring major pieces to market,” Weiss said in the complaint. “Christie’s reneged upon the minimum price guarantee.”

Toby Usnik, a Christie’s spokesman, declined to comment, citing company policy.

The case is Weiss Family Art (Bacon) LLC v. Christie’s Inc., 09-cv-2598, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan). 

 

 

 

 

 

Dirty genius

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Venice–everyone goes there, everyone makes pictures of it. Past shows have explored the city’s impact on Turner, Monet and Sargent; now it’s Sickert’s turn. Some artists have triumphed there, but is it really, wonders Craig Raine, a graveyard for painters?



 



 

BY CRAIG RAINE   |   ART   |   CULTURE  |   THE GUARDIAN   |   SATURDAY, 7 MARCH, 2009

 

In 1995, I talked with Philip Rylands, then the deputy director of the Guggenheim Collection in Venice, about Jackson Pollock. It didn’t matter that I was unpersuaded by Pollock’s painting, he calmly explained, because his place in art history was assured by, among other things, his anecdotal value. You might call this the Vasari effect. Which is another way of saying we like gossip, recently dignified as life writing. Do we read Diogenes Laërtius’s Lives of the Philosophers for a measured exposition of these ancient thinkers' tenets? I think not. We read them, as we read Aubrey’s Brief Lives, for the scandal, the fresh scurrilities, Robert Lowell’s “everlasting dross”, dirt with the bloom still unblemished. Think of the fart that inadvertently escaped Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, as he bowed low to Elizabeth I – a fart recorded by Aubrey, who also noted the monarch’s response when de Vere returned to court after seven years of self-imposed exile. “My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.” Think of Diogenes’s account of his namesake, masturbating in public: “When behaving indecently in the marketplace, he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach.”

Were Rylands correct, Walter Sickert (or Richard Walter Sickert, as he later preferred to be known) would have an assured place in the history of art. He has anecdotal value. Marjorie Lilly’s Sickert: The Painter and His Circle is a mine of anecdote: when Sickert’s first wife was angry, “she went very pink ... a sort of carnation ... charming. I had to fetch my palette and state the tone." Maddening, perhaps charming. Unruffled or uncaring? Ellen Cobden Sickert had every reason to be cross with her husband. The couple separated in 1895 because of his numerous infidelities – with Ada Leverson, a friend of Oscar Wilde and grandmother of Francis Wyndham; with, among others, Aggie, the sister of Max Beerbohm. Sickert refused either to apologise or to adapt his behaviour. Ellen Cobden Sickert set down her former husband's misbehaviour in her 1902 novel Wistons (published under the pseudonym Miles Amber). Sickert thoroughly approved.

On 3 June 1911, he was jilted at the registry office by his fiancée, a former pupil at the Westminster Technical Institute. He did not repine. On 29 July, he married instead Christine Drummond Angus, a woman 12 years his junior, who died in 1920. When asked if he missed her, he said: “It’s not that. My grief is, that she no longer exists.” Not then, perhaps, the egotist he often seemed. Nor simply the immoralist he often seemed. When Arthur Clifton, his dealer, left his wife for Madeline Knox, Sickert terminated his contract with the gallery. On the other hand, Madeline had been a partner at Sickert’s etching school. The connotations of “partner” may be relevant here. Morality? Or jealousy?

Early in his career, Sickert, painting in Venice, living on the Zattere, wrote to Philip Wilson Steer, a friend and fellow painter: “nearly sat on a scorpion in the wc. Thought of you at once: of what you would say.” This may account for Sickert’s alterations to his Islington house in 1927, where he lived with his third wife, the painter Thérèse Lessore: he had the builders rip out all the conventional lavatory bowls and replace them with French stand-up floor-pans. (It was said, to enjoy the reaction of his discommoded female guests, but perhaps that scorpion played its part.)

Throughout his life, he grew and shaved his beard – beginning lean as Gregory Peck and ending with an ebullient beard like Brian Blessed. Periodically, he shaved off all his hair. He couldn't decide about his Christian name. And he changed his style all the time. For example, he began by denouncing the use of photographs: "in proportion as a painter or a draughtsman works from photographs, so he is sapping his powers of observation and expression. It is much as if a swimmer practised in a cork jacket [a life jacket], or a pianist by turning a barrel organ.” By the end of his life, he was using photographs as much as Francis Bacon used them.

And Bacon is an interesting point de repère in any discussion of Sickert. There is a direct line that runs from Degas, through Sickert, to Bacon. Degas’s Le Viol (1874) is a bedroom scene showing a man, fully dressed with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the door, and a woman with a torn chemise. Obviously, Sickert’s Camden Town Murder series – of naked women and fully clothed men – derives from his beloved (and much quoted) Degas. Sickert’s La Hollandaise (c 1906), with its iron bedstead, sunken, perfunctory mattress and meaty nude, is benefactor to Bacon’s Henrietta Moraes (1966). Each model’s face is an anonymous smudge, the face of a woman who has been systematically fucked over. The difference between Bacon and Sickert is that Bacon can be a brilliant and vibrant colourist, whereas Sickert’s palette was consistently limited to the dun end of the spectrum. (Which made it difficult when he gave lessons to Winston Churchill, always an energetic colourist.) Nevertheless, there are Bacons that owe everything to Sickert’s continent drabs. Compare, for example, the brushwork and the browns of Sickert’s Self-Portrait (1896) with Bacon’s Study from the Human Body (1947).

Sickert is important to Bacon, no question. He makes a top-hatted, bespectacled appearance – perhaps based on the well-known 1923 photograph taken when Sickert lectured in Edinburgh – in the left-hand panel of Bacon’s Triptych (1987). And the panama-hatted drinkers in the right-hand panel of Bacon’s Crucifixion (1965) owe everything to Sickert’s Vernet’s, Dieppe (1920), where the central male drinker wears an identical hat (and hatband!) and is also in profile.

As well as these (arguable) visual details and parallels, Sickert and Bacon share a temperament. Don’t be fooled by the dark, occluded passages in some Sickert paintings, or the smudges and “accidental” drips and spills in Bacon. Neither painter takes his eye off the object. They are realists, classicists, bent on the unpretty truth. This is why Sickert is so unfair to his first mentor, Whistler, who made ravishingly beautiful paintings. In Whistler, there is a transaction between truth and beauty, an assimilation that is incomparable. Sickert, like Bacon, was fascinated by crude, uncompromising truth and therefore accused Whistler of too much taste. No surprise, then, that Sickert defended his beloved impressionists against charges of vagueness: for him, impressionism was a “severe and pure reaction in art”, not a “cult of the vague or a refuge of the negligent”.

Like TS Eliot, another classicist in favour of unblinking emotional precision, Sickert was committed to impersonality in art: “Banish your own person, your life and that means you and your affections and yourself from your theatre ...” Little wonder, perhaps, that Sickert, who began as an actor, should have used Mr Nemo (no one) as his stage name. Eliot's range went well beyond the obvious “poetic” subjects – for example, his prose poem “Hysteria”. Sickert’s brush addressed the subject of Ennuie – the dead taste in the mouth, the sticky glass. Both men were profoundly swayed by French cultural life, both men loved the music halls. Both men were realists rather than beauticians.

The always enterprising Dulwich Picture Gallery is showing Sickert's Venice paintings. In March 2007, I saw the Sargent and Venice exhibition at the Museo Correr in Venice. Sargent is a very good painter, but Venice is the graveyard of painters. I have nine pages of notes in my notebook. They end on a note of exasperation. About, note, repetition: “Too many pictures with cropped prow of gondola in foreground. 10!” Up to then, my comments are appreciative. For example, I admire the way the “represented ripples bleed into the steps” in Zattere, Spirito Santo and Scuola (c 1902-04). But the only great painting, among many good pictures, was called Side Canal (1880-81), a watercolour that showed the viewer its dirty walls, with the one gondola banished under a bridge and practically invisible. To paint a dirty wall, to think a dirty wall a worthwhile subject – that is genius, that is Vermeer.

Venice is full of fallen plaster, broken brickwork, dirty walls, dowdy poetry – all unpainted, all neglected in favour of the tourist centres of Piazza San Marco, the Palazzo Ducale, San Salute, the Basilica San Marco, the Rialto, the Grand Canal. Who hasn’t been photographed in Piazza San Marco? Schoenberg. Monet. Leonid Pasternak. Wagner. Stravinsky. Everyone who is anyone. And then the nobodies. Piazza San Marco is a site both dulled forever and shiny with constant contact – as meaningless as a politician’s handshake. Everyone goes there. Everyone paints it. Imagine it was compulsory to paint the Eiffel tower and you get the scale of the disaster. It is just this oppression, this tourist tyranny, that Claes Oldenburg addressed in his 1999 exhibition at the Museo Correr, where he sent up the winged Venetian lion and twisted its tail. The tail became a yellow chain of interlocking builder’s buckets dangling from the side of the building, its frayed end mimicking a spout of builder’s detritus.

Some painters have triumphed in Venice. Whistler, for example – because he sought out the unofficial, the back passages rather than the front entrances. In Turner Whistler Monet at Tate Britain in 2005, those self-important sites were shrunk to a pretext for the subtlest colours in combination. They were self-evidently secondary to Whistler’s rust-gold pastels, restrained blues and greys, on brown or beige paper, that materialised miraculously out of the background like spectral textiles, frail faery fragments from Fortuny’s factory: Red and Gold: Salute Sunset (1880); Salute: Sundown (1880); Sunset, Venice (1880), all of them better than the Turners from which they derive.

By comparison, Sickert hardly survives. You feel the economic imperative. At this time, as Sickert remembered in 1935, his dealers “bought my canvases in roped up (and unseen) batches of 10 at £40 the batch, with one batch thrown in as a make-weight”. It’s hardly surprising he painted the subjects that would sell. The three best, genuinely exceptional paintings are oil on panel – one, surprisingly enough, of Piazza San Marco, which normally hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Somehow the official nature of the site is subverted by the way the undisguised grain of the wood is frankly visible through the paint at points. The two masterworks, however, are The Ghetto, Venice (1897-98) and Santa Maria della Salute (1901). The ghetto pell-mell architectural crowding is a waffle of windows, a dun Mondrian avant la lettre, a kind of fretwork that uses the wood on which it is painted. Perhaps it resembles an Andreas Gursky more than a Mondrian: it is at once intensely patterned and idiosyncratic in its detail.

Santa Maria della Salute is tonally red, and still squared up in red, a grid that transforms the familiar church, making of it a mirage, something seen through a veil. “A rose red city – half as old as time.” Actually, Sickert's red reads as the red of gold – it confers value and splendour as well as unfamiliarity. We see the thing again, thank goodness. It isn’t so different now, while Santa Maria della Salute is being restored and is surrounded by scaffolding. My notebook records that, in the morning mist, the dome of Salute is a fuzzy corduroy cactus. This is what Martin Amis called the war against cliché. Go to Dulwich Picture Gallery for these three paintings that break the adamantine spell of hypnotic holiday Venice. That will have to suffice until the best living landscape painter, Richard van den Dool, can be persuaded to go to Venice and do it justice.

 Sickert in Venice is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21, until 31 May. Details: 020 8693 525

 

 

 

  


 


 

             Sickert’s La Hollandaise (c 1906), with its iron bedstead, sunken, perfunctory mattress and meaty nude, is benefactor to Bacon’s Henrietta Moraes (1966).

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

Francis Bacon, Man in Blue VI, 1954 (est £4m-£6m), unsold

 



 

 

 

FRANCIS BACON   |   AUCTIONS   |   ART MARKET   |   THE ART NEWSPAPER   |   SUNDAY, 1 MARCH, 2009

 

The spectacular failure of Study for a Self-Portrait, 1964, which New York collector George Weiss had dispatched to Christie’s New York on 12 November 2008, but which had failed to attract a single bid (and is now the subject of a dispute over a $40m guarantee which was offered and subsequently withdrawn), had dented the reputation of an apparently resilient market for the artist’s pictures.

 

Bacon traders were hoping that normal business would be resumed with this canvas (lot 11), which had been consigned by Norwich Union and was expected to be the most expensive work of art to be offered in the various contemporary art sessions.

 

The canvas belongs to a series of seven “Man in Blue” compositions, six of which were included in Bacon’s first exhibition at Erika Brausen’s Hanover Gallery in 1954, and several of which were displayed to critical acclaim in the recent Tate Britain survey of the artist’s work.

 

Nevertheless, the series is regarded as a stark and subtle project omitting the theatrical drama of the artist’s most distinctive and popular work. Christie’s appeared to have addressed this issue with a reasonable valuation for a picture which, according to several Bacon market makers, would have been worth $12m, and even as much as $18m, just a year ago.

 

However, there were no bids for the picture, which becomes the most expensive casualty of the week and brings further disruption to one of the market’s most reliable and profitable centres of trading activity.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon

 

 

 

TATE BRITAIN, LONDON

 

 

 

DAVID GLEESON  |  REVIEWS   |   CANADIAN ART   |   ONTARIO  |  SPRING ISSUE  |  1 MARCH 2009

 

For the past half century, Francis Bacon has been the malevolent colossus of British painting: a maverick who never attended art school, yet created pictures that continue to both enchant and horrify viewers with their singular vision of a bleak humanity framed by violence, sexuality and isolation. Every British art generation has its Bacon, and now the Tate has presented the first major study of work since the wave of critical reassessments following his death in 1992.

Aiming to explore “Bacon’s philosophy that man is simply another animal in this godless world,” the Tate assembled what the gallery claimed was the largest display of his work so far to also examine his sources and work processes. The main proof of this came in a room entirely devoted to archived material: photographs taken by friends or clipped from magazines, excavated largely from the chaos of his studio along with brief preparatory drawings that Bacon himself always denied making. The rapid metamorphoses from found or contrived images to, say, a grand work like Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne (1966) or from small photo-booth snapshots to Three Studies of a Portrait of George Dyer, 1963 could be clearly traced.

Roughy half the show dealt with Bacon’s earlier mature work, which dated from the 1940s until about 1960. By this time he had produced chilling images of screaming popes, crucifixions, writhing figures and head with hideously deformed mouths that had earned him a reputation as the chronicler of human degradation. But it is in the flowering of his later work that a subtle and elegiac beauty appears. Everyone is familiar with Bacon’s work, and wandering around the 10 rooms served as a sharp reminder of how spectacular a colourist he was, and how his deftly choreographed compositions produced some of the most haunting painted imagery of the last century. His thinly sketched, almost cartoon-like draftsmanship animates the figures in his work while lending them an elegance at odds with their visceral distortions.

In one room dedicated to Bacon’s lover, George Dyer, the curators, Chris Stephens and Matthew Gale, assembled three of the artist’s large-scale memorial triptychs and the 1963 portrait studies already mentioned. The large paintings were all produced within two years of Dyer’s suicide in 1971 and, when displayed together, presented a tableau of desire and loss, with the subject, at once familiar and mysterious, melting into the jewel-like colours of each canvas. Each triptych is an sumptuous evocation of the dead companion: putting all these together was almost overwhelming. The effect spoke eloquently about Bacon and his feelings toward the late Dyer, who still remains the quiet cipher he has always been, albeit now with a dignified, if belated, recognition.

 

DAVID GLEESON

 

 

  


                       Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait of George Dyer, 1963

 

 

 

 

Golf Grips and Swastikas

 

                       William Feaver

 

 

Francis Bacon: Incunabula edited by Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels

Thames & Hudson, 224 pp, £39.95, September 2008, ISBN 978 0 500 09344 3

 

  

WILLIAM FEAVER  |  LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS  |  VOL. 31, NO. 4  |  THURSDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2009

 

Francis Bacon liked to rail against illustration. ‘If you know how to record it you illustrate it,’ he’d cry. As for ‘illustrational paint’, ughh – the thought of that would set the jowls shuddering. ‘Illustration’ wasn’t just to be despised on its own account, it was a word to be smeared across whatever he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once asked what precisely was so deplorable about it (a ‘kind of caution’ perhaps?), Bacon’s response was studiedly offhand. ‘Well,’ he drawled, clearing his throat. ‘Well . . . Illustration surely means just illustrating the image before you, not inventing it.’

Martin Harrison, the editor of the Bacon catalogue raisonné currently in preparation, has produced a scrapbook of illustrational materials from Bacon’s studio floor, among them dog-eared pages torn from magazines, newspaper cuttings with rusty paper clips still attached, images from Duchamp and Velázquez, images of dodgy seances, beefcake bikers, cricketers a-swipe, scrapping street urchins, teeth ’n’ smiles from medical textbooks, golf grips and swastikas and doors kicked in. Many of these items – admirably reproduced – will be familiar to those who know Bacon’s work. Eadweard Muybridge’s jumpers and divers, body parts of Henrietta Moraes and so on, are laid out as evidence that ‘inventing it’ was never as classy an activity as Bacon maintained, given that these were the images – illustrations really – that served him so famously well. Graphic images, photographs especially, were a godsend for someone requiring ready astonishment and ready-sorted tones.

No wonder Bacon banged on about ‘just illustrating’. Ankle-deep in apposite litter, he trampled the stuff that he depended on. No wonder too that he took against the dummy of a book on his work and his sources put together in the late 1980s by Bruce Bernard, the layouts for which paired paintings to photographs. Not that those involved in the project (least of all Bruce Bernard, a dedicated admirer) intended to downgrade the artist; it was just that, heady with the pleasures of mix-and-match, they failed to appreciate that the pictures were bound to appear more diminished in reproduction than the related photographs and that this might be seen as a giveaway. Bacon put a stop to publication because he understood that, knowingly or not, it stitched him up.

Being a non-drawer (except for the odd scribble) and almost never a painter from life or from the cul de sac of the imagination, Bacon obliged himself to rely for imagery on secondary sources. Not Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X itself, but scaled down and debased reproductions of it, ideal for his purposes in that they screened out the subtleties. Similarly, he used not actual bared necks but memories of a certain neck reinforced or clarified by suitable reference material. Why bother to draw when he was up to his eyes in printed matter salvaged from the outside world, imagery drifted and layered like alluvial deposits? Why not let the marvellously impure serve superior ends?

Bacon argued that, given the need to believe that images endure, painting remains the ideal medium for expressing motivations that matter. He talked of ‘complete accident’, by which he meant those moments when the senses take leave of themselves and invention happens. His was the philosophy of cut to the chase. No exposition, no establishing shot, no dalliance: just ‘the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance’. A flick of the cloth, a crack of the whip, and suddenly the thing’s there, wrenched from the dark interior of the showman’s hat, raw and gawping, that strangled rabbit.

Transposing duty and impulse, making every effort to defy expectations, Bacon peeled back the imagery to disclose looks passed off as tactility, sham upon sham, horror splitting its sides with high-pitched hilarity. He stressed the bafflement that comes of keeping on trying to reinvent and the numbness brought on by becoming well versed in distinctive traits. As someone who liked to betray, he made liberal use of dismissiveness, preferring swipe to caress, or confusing the two.

Francis Bacon: Incunabula promotes confusions. Spillover that it is from that regrettable installation piece, the Bacon studio translated entire from London to Dublin, the book is a seeker’s guide to whatever came in handy, or whatever could have come in handy, or whatever caught Bacon’s eye or didn’t get thrown out before being buried underfoot, or whatever. Seekers after insight into what prompted what will enjoy spotting obvious congruences. But that’s not all. The state of each distressed item is discussed. ‘Condition poor’ is the best that ephemera dealers could say of most of them, but that only encourages Harrison in his search for meanings and purposes in every archival blemish.

When Bacon daubed a little, as one might try out a lipstick, or test-squirted a spray can, he left traces on what is now paper booty. Sometimes he did slightly more, altering images, even accentuating them, but this was hardly an artistic procedure. In their notes at the back of the book Harrison and Rebecca Daniels make what they can of such largely haphazard markings, their function or status in this iconographical ‘image-bank’. We are shown a photo from a 1961 Paris Match of Jeanne Moreau baring her teeth at Pierre Cardin in a starry sort of way: an image that never made it into the painting repertoire, though two curly brushstrokes besmirch the actress’s hair like livid topknots. It could be supposed that this was an idle brush wipe, or it could be interpreted as Bacon reassigning Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly role to Moreau. Wisely, the compilers refrain from Colony Room speculation. Yet they feel obliged to say something. So here goes: ‘The meaning of Bacon’s paintmarks, which encircle Moreau’s face, is unclear.’

Harrison observes that many of these now cherished pieces of paper have been folded. Some are creased quite elaborately, like napkins or paper darts: this was a neat way to isolate the faces or figures that stood a chance of becoming pictorially usable or, as Harrison puts it, ‘critically transformed’. But then what to make of the plate on page 69, ‘Fragment of leaf torn from the Sunday Times Magazine, 20 May 1973 (p.81)’? I mention it not so much in a nit-picking spirit (in fact it was p.74) as out of direct personal interest in a page so grievously tattered that the headline reads: ‘artime ances a trend flourished’

Originally (though Harrison and Daniels do not say so) this read: ‘WARTIME ROMANCES: William Feaver recalls a trend in English painting that flourished in the 1940s’. Bruce Bernard, then the Sunday Times  picture editor, and I had spent weeks picking the images for an article on  the neo-romantic insularity of such artists as Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Leslie Hurry and Keith Vaughan, committed at that time to fervid inkiness and illustrational hypertension. The article went down well. (Cyril Connolly was nice about it in the Sunday Times lift). Bacon will have found that he went unmentioned (not a neo-romantic) and that the reproduction of Lucian Freud’s 1952 portrait of a luminously doleful John Minton made page 74 the one page worth saving. For Bacon, seeing it in 1973, 16 years after Minton’s suicide, this was a painting wreathed in despair. To him John Minton had been the epitome of the illustrator-artist. ‘Fragment of leaf’: so eloquent a scrap.

 

 

 

 

Chance to own a Francis Bacon

(from his tufted period)

 

 

 

JACK MALVERN  |  UK NEWS  |  THE TIMES  |  WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 25 2009

 

Roman Abramovich spent £43 million on one. Tate Britain has one hanging on its wall. Now it is possible to buy an original Francis Bacon for as little as a thousandth of the price of his most impressive works. The only catch: this one has been trampled on for years.

 

Bacon’s early life as a rugmaker is almost forgotten, and his output so small that an example held by the Victoria and Albert Museum was thought to be one of only three to exist. His rug oeuvre has suddenly increased, however, after an Iranian carpet dealer cleaned out one of her storerooms and took a pile of rugs to an auction house in Wiltshire

 

Ian Bennett, a textile specialist at Netherhampton Salerooms, near Salisbury, was astonished to discover a pair of rugs that are believed to be the only surviving works from Bacon’s first exhibition of his own designs in 1929.

 

“This particular batch of rugs contained the usual mix of good, bad and indifferent, but there were a lot of them and initially they had to be gone through fairly quickly,” he told The Times. “All of a sudden, in the middle of a pile of Persian tribal weavings in varying stages of disintegration, there appeared two obviously European Modernist rugs, which I threw aside with an instant semi-automatic valuation of a few hundred pounds

 

“Just as they were about to be covered up by other rugs, I vaguely noted the presence of writing at the bottom of each piece and suddenly what I had only half seen came into sharp focus. I said, ‘Hang on a minute!’. In large capital letters was the name Francis Bacon.”

 

Mr Bennett contacted the Authentication Committee of Francis Bacon, which responded that the rugs were not only authentic, but also possibly the only works from the artist’s 1929 exhibition that had not been destroyed by the artist or discarded.

 

Bacon had such a reputation for destroying his work that his gallery would pick up finished paintings while the paint was still wet. Rebecca Daniels, who is helping to compile the catalogue raisonn? for Bacon, said that the design and ground colour of the Netherhampton rugs were unique.

 

Bacon was a teenager when he designed the rugs at his flat in West London. He had recently been thrown out of his family home by his father after he was found in front of a mirror posing in his mother’s underwear.

 

No records survive of the 1929 exhibition, but it was successful enough for Bacon to follow it up with a second one in 1930. A year or two later he gave up design to concentrate on painting.

 

Mr Bennett said that it was almost impossible to put a value on the rugs because none had been on the market in recent years. “I hope that each one will fetch a five-figure sum, but I haven’t the foggiest idea. There is no precedent. You never know. Roman Abramovich might want one.” The rugs will be auctioned on March 12.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon, Seduced by Madrid

 

 

 

 

 

 

BY VICTORIA BURNETT  |  CULTURED TRAVELLER  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  THURSDAY 19 FEBRUARY 2009

 


ON the afternoon of April 30, 1992, a plain coffin bearing the body of the Dublin-born painter Francis Bacon arrived at the brick and white-stone chapel of the vast Almudena Cemetery in Madrid. The artist then made the quiet exit he had sought. He was cremated with minimal ceremony, with no mourners present; his ashes were sent to England.

Bacon had spent his final six days in a Madrid clinic, wheezing oxygen from a bottle and nursed by nuns. He charmed them with his basic Spanish, but he asked for no visitors and reportedly received none. After he died of a heart attack on April 28, his London dealer sent a Spanish colleague to collect Bacon’s brown suitcase and his leather jacket.

Bacon’s solitary death at 82 in Madrid seems a desolate, slightly random, parting for a London dweller whose foreign playgrounds, over the years, included Berlin, Paris and Tangier. In fact, the Spanish capital became something of a haunt for the artist in his final years, which he spent entwined in an on-and-off relationship with a handsome, young art-loving Spaniard.

So the retrospective of Bacon’s work that opened at the Prado Museum in Madrid this month is something of a homecoming for the painter. The show, which drew hordes to the Tate Gallery in London over the past few months, runs in Madrid until April 19 and then moves to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Madrid was quite a late discovery for Bacon,” says Michael Peppiatt, an art critic and biographer of Bacon. “It was very seductive: there was the Prado, which was a summit on his horizon, and, into the mix, a very good-looking Spanish friend who he was completely in love with.”

Bacon’s discreet trips to see his lover rounded off a long-standing interest in the home of the bullfight and of the two painters who, arguably, most influenced him: Picasso and Velázquez. He was charmed by the city, with its late rhythm, its bars that emptied at dawn, its dry, baking heat and narrow, seamy streets.

“He loved the heat, he loved the food, he loved the pictures, he loved the look of it,” said Janetta Parladé, a friend whom Bacon visited in southern Spain.

In the evenings, he and his Spanish friend would stop in for a dry martini — or three — or a bottle of Champagne at Bar Cock, a rather baronial-style bar frequented by actors and artists on a downtown street, then derelict and lined with heroin addicts. From there, a favorite destination was La Trainera, a landmark seafood restaurant whose beamed dining room is decked with nautical gear.

Patricia Ferrer, an owner of Bar Cock, remembers Bacon, immaculately dressed, having a drink just days before his death. “Here he was, a perfect dandy, sitting with his back beautifully straight,” she said. “He certainly died with his boots on.”

Bacon was fascinated by the bullfight, or corrida, a motif that recurs in his work in the form of circling bulls, ringed spaces, thrusting horns, gored legs. He described the corrida as “death in the sunlight” and “a marvelous aperitif of sex” and probably went to see fights in Madrid at Las Ventas bullring.

“He was captivated by the torero — the sexuality, the elegance, the outfit, the ballet of it,” said José Capa Eiriz, who, as director of exhibitions at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, put on the first show of Bacon’s work in Spain in 1978.

For Bacon, the artistic high point of Madrid was, naturally, the Prado itself, home to a large collection of works by Goya and by Velázquez, whose 1650 “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” Bacon revered and transformed — some would say deformed — in his paintings of agonized, screaming popes. (Velázquez’s pope is at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome.)

Manuela Mena, the Prado’s curator of 18th-century painting and Goya — and of the Madrid retrospective — remembers Bacon asking to visit the museum on a Monday, when it was closed to the public. He would stand for long stretches before a work by Velázquez or Goya, peering up close, “thrusting himself right into the painting,” she said. “He wanted to see the brush strokes, the texture, the canvas.”

The retrospective offers a rare opportunity to see Bacon’s work in conjunction with some of the Spanish paintings that influenced him, according to Ms. Mena, who said she found echoes of, and allusions to, many of the Prado’s works in Bacon’s paintings.

In the “Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho,” Ms. Mena sees the self-assuredness of Velázquez’s black-clad “Pablo de Valladolid.” The stairs in the central panel of “Triptych — In Memory of George Dyer” (1971) are a reference to the Paris hotel where Dyer, Bacon’s lover, committed suicide, but they are also an allusion, Ms. Mena said, to the stairs leading to a half-open door in “Las Meninas” by Velázquez.

The purplish blood that soaks the clothes in the middle panel of Bacon’s “Triptych Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ ”; the rusty, mottled patch in “Blood on Pavement” — these surely owe a debt to the sticky crimson smear on the dead man’s face and the blood mingling with the earth in Goya’s “Third of May 1808,” Ms. Mena said.

Friends and associates of Bacon speculated that he would be excited to see his paintings hanging in the museum that houses some of the painters he admired most. One person who seemed moved by the painter’s return to Madrid was Sister Mercedes, a nun of the Order of Servants of Mary who nursed the sick artist at the Ruber Clinic. She had no idea who Bacon was until the press descended on the hospital after he died.

Standing before the “Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X” in a crowd of Madrid glitterati, Sister Mercedes looked a little pensive.

“He painted what he felt,” she said, nodding her head. “I could tell he was a tormented soul.”

 

UNHOLY POPES

The Francis Bacon retrospective runs until April 19 at the Prado Museum, Paseo del Prado; (34-91) 330-2800.

Admission, 8 euros ($10.56 at $1.32 to the euro), includes permanent collection; open 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon portrait fails to sell at auction

 

 

A rare portrait by Francis Bacon which was expected to fetch up to £6 million

has failed to sell at auction amid fears that the recession is hitting collectors.

 

 

  By MURRAY WARDROP   |   ARTS SALES   |   THE TELEGRAPH   |   THURSDAY 12 February 2009

 

The painter’s Man in Blue VI was one of a series of seven paintings he completed in the spring of 1954.It had been estimated to fetch a price of between £4m and £6m when it went under the hammer at Christie’s auction house in London on Wednesday night.

However, bidders failed to reach the asking price and the painting was returned to the vendor. The work reveals a smartly dressed man whose features seem obscured, seated at the centre of a cavernous dark canvas.

The painting is unusual in that the artist appears to have painted the sitter from life as opposed to using a photograph, which was Bacon’s typical method. The sitter is an unknown man who Bacon is thought to have met at the Imperial Hotel in Henley-upon-Thames, where the painter was living at the time.

Despite the disappointment of the Bacon picture failing to sell, Christie’s reported that 79 per cent of the other pieces on offer in its Post-War and Contemporary art sale had been sold. The auction house blamed the style of the painting itself rather than its price tag in the economic gloom for disinterest in the sale.

 Christie’s spokesman said: "I don’t think we can blame the credit crunch for the Bacon picture not selling. It was quite an academic piece.

"Collectors still have that liquidity in the market. There was a lot of interest in the painting in the run up to the sale and there has been immediately after."

 He said it was possible that the painting may now be subject to a private sale.


 

 

 

Rare Bacon is set to fetch £6m

 

 

 

BY LOUISE JURY  |  NEWS  |  EVENING STANDARD  |  THURSDAY 5 FEBRUARY 2009

 

A Francis Bacon painting bought for £31,500 nearly 40 years ago has gone on public show before an auction where it is expected to fetch up to £6 million. The work Man in Blue VI is the highlight of next week’s post-war and contemporary auction at Christie’s.

 

It was painted in the spring of 1954 which was a period of intense creativity for Bacon. He was in the middle of a tempestuous romance with Peter Lacy, a veteran Spitfire pilot. The artist said at the time: “Being in love in that extreme way — being totally, physically obsessed by someone — is like having some dreadful disease. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

 

The difficult relationship had prompted Bacon to move out of the cottage that he shared with his lover to stay at the Imperial Hotel in nearby Henley-upon-Thames. It is thought the sitter was an unknown man Bacon met in the hotel. 

 

The work seems to have been painted from life, even though the artist usually worked from photographs. The finest of seven major paintings Bacon produced at this time, the estimate for next Wednesday’s sale is £4 million to £6 million.

 

The current owner bought the painting in 1971. The portrait is one of a number not seen at auction for many years. It is on show at Christie’s, 85 Old Brompton Road, before auction at its King Street headquarters. Pilas Ordovás, international director of Christie’s Europe, said their sale of post-war and contemporary art included a “carefully curated selection of works by a number of the most established artists of the last 60 years”.

 

Auction houses are putting the emphasis on the quality of the works on offer in this month’s sales. Nerves were frazzled last November when an important Bacon failed to sell — just months after a triptych by the same artist set a world record price of $86.2 million (£43 million).

 

Sotheby’s is holding its first big Contemporary Art sale tonight since Damien Hirst’s £111 million bonanza last September and the market catastrophe in New York.

 

 

 

 

    

 

               Blue period: Francis Bacon’s Man in Blue VI, which is the portrait of

               an unknown man he met in a hotel, is on showat Christie’s next week 

 

 

 

 

 “Dear Ronnie”: letter from Bacon in Kray sale

 

 

 The auction took pace on 26th January

  

 

  MARTIN BAILEY   |   AUCTIONS   |   THE ART NEWSPAPER   |   SUNDAY 1 FEBRUARY 2009 

 

A letter from Francis Bacon to Ronnie Kray, one of the notorious Kray twins, was put up for auction on 26 January. The identical twins had been involved in armed robberies, violent assaults and murder in London’s East End, and were sentenced to life in 1969. Ronnie remained in Broadmoor until his death in 1995.

Bacon’s letter of 27 September 1989 thanked Ronnie for a drawing (he took up art in Broadmoor), saying “I have been ill for some” (Bacon had kidney problems). Bacon was almost 80 at the time of the letter, and he had known the twins in the 1960s. He once remarked: “They were dreadful, of course, just killing people off and so on, but at least they were really different from everybody else.”

Chiswick Auctions is selling off 144 lots of the twins’ personal effects, consigned by a family friend.

 

 

 

 

The Accelerated Grimace

 

 

 

In time for the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain, Grey Gowrie publishes

his introduction for the 1988 Moscow exhibition in English for the first time

 

 

BY GREY GOWRIE   |   THE ALLIGATOR   |   FRIDAY 16 JANUARY 2009


 

In September 1988, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the British Council organised an exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon in Moscow. Bacon (1909-1992) planned to attend the opening but decided at the last minute not to. Grey Gowrie, a Minister for the Arts in Margaret Thatcher’s administration and by this time European chairman of Sotheby’s, was a friend of the painter and represented him. Lord Gowrie also provided the introductory essay to the catalogue of the exhibition which was translated into Russian. It is republished here in English for the first time to coincide with the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. Famished for unofficial art, and no doubt bored by Soviet programming, more than 100 million people tuned into the Moscow exhibition on television. 

The 20th century has been called the age of anxiety. Certainly it is an age of extremes. Life lived against the edge, the extremity of the human experience is, even vicariously, electric with nervous stress. Scientific progress is double-edged. In the industrialised world people live longer, are better nourished, entertain ideas, at least, of developing their creative potential. Through film and television and the pervasive influence of photography they are bombarded with images of what life can or should be. At the same time they are made aware that this civilisation of cars and central heating and pain killing drugs has entertained more horrors than any since the dark ages. Visual technology transmits the parts of the globe which have been left out of the development race or, worse still, allows people to view skyscrapers and bars and hospitals beside open-drained hovels only a few metres away. Throughout the advanced societies, the great central images which once governed people’s lives have cracked or broken down: the religious icons which reminded them, however briefly, of matters richer than their own concerns. We live in an age of political and scientific materialism which is nevertheless uncomfortably aware of the psychological limits of materialism. We are aware of the physical limits as well, of an earth threatened by tools of peace as well as weapons of war. No wonder that we are an anxious species, or that artists, who hold up mirrors to our condition, are nervous themselves of attempting those images of an idealised experience which art used to provide.

Since the death of Picasso, Francis Bacon has more than any other painter provided the age with an image, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, of its accelerated grimace. The key to his work is its ambition. He has taken on the great masters of the past without their mythological resources or their requirement to record events. At the same time he has turned his back on the abstract artist’s indulgence in decorative introspection: the painting whose principal subject is itself and the fact that someone painted it. Although his subject matter, the visual impulse which triggers his attempts to fashion an image on canvas, derives from his own sensibility and is to that extent egoistic, Bacon is the least narcissistic of artists. He uses some recollection or preoccupation which is at hand, so to speak, as a prompt for an act of painting. But it is the paint alone, and what happens as a result of its being pushed around on the canvas, which can provide an image of great externality and force, influencing the viewer with a life of its own and doing this independently of the artist. Bacon is in some respects closer to being a sculptor than a painter. The background to his paintings, which are applied at the end, act as a kind of plinth for the images poised upon them. It is sad that Bacon’s eminence occasions, as is often the case with major artists, so much photographic reproduction of his work. The physical grandeur, the sensual texture of his paint outweighs the often horrifying imagery it encapsulates. In reproduction it is the imagery that tells.

“He has taken on the great masters of the past without their mythological resources or their requirement to record events”


Bacon is descended from his great Elizabethan namesake, Shakespeare’s contemporary and an ancestor of the English scientific enlightenment. In his late 70’s now, though looking and talking like a man fifteen years younger, he lives alone in two rooms in central London. He works continually at present, sees a few close friends, eats and drinks very well, gambles with less Doskovieskian intensity than before. He is a man of great but narrow erudition, narrow because he is impatient of anything less than masterpieces and impatient also of masterpieces which he cannot harness to his own art. He is an asthmatic who dislikes the countryside: an urban, noctambular spirit. His bleak view of human life does not stop him enjoying it; indeed he has said in an interview that the aim of art – however violent or sad or grim – is to produce joy. He is good company and generous with money in the way of one who has had to hustle for a living in youth and now has more than he needs. Politically, he is an old-fashioned aristocratic liberal with a low threshold of boredom. He has said that in recent years he has supported the Conservatives, because they are marginally less interfering of individual liberty than political groups on the Left; he is savage about the way modern states interfere with citizens’ lives for their own good. He has refused to be honoured. The British admire his eminence but do not know quite what to make of him: an elegant, wealthy, rather conservative gentleman who paints such scary pictures.

“His bleak view of human life does not stop him enjoying it; indeed he has said in an interview that the aim of art is to produce joy”

Nevertheless he is the greatest living painter and the most important Britain has produced since Turner. This is a large claim but it is shared by a remarkable number of people round the world, many of them painters, rather few of them British. To us natives, it is still difficult to recognise how distinct Bacon and the sculptor Henry Moore have made us in the visual arts. Our cultural establishment is musical and literary in outlook; we take our theatrical tradition, and Shakespeare, for granted; since the Beatles we can command a world stage in popular music. Seeing and touching, by contrast, belong to the slightly seditious universe of pure sensation and both our puritan and idealistic strands of thought make us suspect appearances. Happily, these two great men have encouraged more than one generation of artists now to build on their achievements and make international names.

Of the two, Bacon is the more surprising. Henry Moore’s work is permeated with the English love of nature. He gives simple and powerful signals about the correspondence between landscapes and female figures. He reinforces life’s primal effects, as if the poet Wordsworth were working in stone. Francis Bacon is not a romantic artist in this way, although he shares the aristocratic intuitiveness of later romantics like Baudelaire. He has the nihilism and gaiety of certain 18th century minds. Nature, when it appears at all in his work, is both threatening and monotonous: purposeless matter unrelieved by the flicker of civilisation’s match. One of his greatest paintings, Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), is a picture of a tree. It demonstrates the way colour, not drawing, is movement in painting, and how a tree’s sinews suggest muscular movement. But try to people this landscape and you are in the world of Beckett’s Godot or King Lear. A more recent work, Sand Dune (1981), is a picture of sand encroaching a building by the sea. The sand is all movement, dynamic; the building is being eaten and that will be the end of it because nature is in the business of demolition. To fly in the face of nature you need luck and the peculiar courage to stare her down. To adapt a line of the poet Thom Gunn, a few friends and a few with historical names have had the courage. A number of artists – Cimabue, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Degas, Picasso – have looked without blinking. Otherwise, existence is the same as nature: food, drink, territory, sex and status. Bacon is an artist of endgame. His work is a lifespan distant from Moore’s family groups or mothers-with-child.

Classical and romantic are hoary old terms but they provide us with a shorthand, yet to be superseded, for a profound and permanent divide, a creative conflict, within our sensibility. The classical approach represents tradition and training. Its focus is on the human clay and on proportions suitable for the configuration of the body. ‘The lengthened shadow of a man/Is history, said Emerson,’ wrote T. S. Eliot, the great classical poet of our century and one who has always haunted Bacon, in his poem Sweeney Erect. The fascination of the classical artist is the way he bends tradition and training to his own purpose, be that subjective and self-realising, or objective in the sense of realising or trying to imitate a world beyond the self. The permanent things in nature are birth, copulation and death; the ruins of time, man’s time, are what interest the classicist and provide him with his forms. The romantic says, with the 19th century poet Hopkins, that the sensibility soars above its terrestrial confines: ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/, Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed.’

“Nature is in the business of demolition. To fly in the face of nature you need luck and the peculiar courage to stare her down”

This being the case, the classical artist is preoccupied with realism. Bacon is passionate for realism, only he would argue that now photography has made reportage redundant you need realism of another kind: the ability to capture the emotional energy thrown off by any living presence. Added to this is the energy which works of art generate themselves. In a recent interview he said:

‘I have just finished three portraits of a friend and the problem, as usual, was how to make an image and keep the likeness. To combine the two is what creates tension and excitement.’

The Study for Portrait of John Edwards (1988) is as ‘like’ as a photograph but with so much density of form that it has an object-life of its own. Because of the force of his painting, some commentators have confused Bacon with the Expressionists. They attribute to him an unsettling, northern sensibility. Bacon insists this is wrong. He is adamant that he is not an expressionist, believing in truthfulness rather than effects. The disturbing quality of his work comes partly from what Michel Leiris, quoting Bacon himself, has called his ‘exhilarated despair…the painful yet lyrical disturbance felt by all those who, living in these times of horror spangled with enchantment, can contemplate them with lucidity.’ It also comes, more prosaically, from what Bacon would see as his failure to win the fight between the raw material of oil paint and the mind’s eye. When Bacon does win, as in the Edwards portrait, his paintings are both awesome and tender, moving in the highest and most humane way. Yet even in the most violent pictures, the distortions of his figures are implicit in their own flesh. This is where he comes closest to Picasso.

To an existential artist like Bacon, chance is very important, both as a rubric for the universe (his hobby is roulette) and for what it brings about on the canvas. Lying Figure (1969) is one of a number of works painted in the 1960’s in which a naked, usually female figure lies on a bed, the head south to the viewer, limbs akimbo, bed and body seemingly about to slide down a great escarpment of carpet. Facial features are blurred as if they and the pigment from which they are formed had been pummelled into the final image. (This is often literally the case, since Bacon paints with rags and his hands as well as with brush). Stripped of their associations, not least the threat to civilised values and human dignity suggested by hypodermic digging into vein, these paintings have the vibrance – the beauty even – of colour which early in his career Bacon found in a medical textbook about diseases of the mouth. Bacon’s surgeon’s aesthetics and sang-froid take some getting used to. They are worth it because they are bound up with his special lucidity of purpose. Look how close oil paint comes to the stuff of life, he seems to say. You are used to this happening with clouds and hills in landscape painting. Why not discover it with the body as well? If the painter is lucky, impulses of memory and desire may allow him to manipulate the stuff so as to trap elusive and temporal personalities, and our feelings about them. Bacon does not paint from life. His subjects are a few friends and himself, painted over and over, in some cases after they have died, from snapshots and memory. Bacon himself looks very like a Francis Bacon. In this respect he is close to his admired contemporary, the painter and sculptor Giacometti. And as John Russell wrote in his book Francis Bacon (1971), ‘Bacon when he wishes is one of the great painters of human flesh and can give it a kind of creamy resonance, a fulfilled soft firmness, for which both Ingres and Courbet had also been searching.’

Ambition, in art, requires not only high seriousness but sufficient personal confidence and aplomb to take on the masters at their own game. Bacon’s belief in un-accommodated man, his identification during the two decades after the war with London’s low life, his gambling, his generosity with money and caustic wit, his frightening ability to drink a great deal and remain at the height of his powers, his age-cheating appearance – all play their part in his anti-heroic legend. By contrast, his career has been altogether steadfast and determined. He was a late starter. He was born and spent much of his childhood in Ireland, where his father trained racehorses. There is a lot of Ireland in Bacon but it is reasonable to think of Bacon as Irish only in the way of thinking of Camus as Algerian. He was educated haphazardly and travelled about Europe in the late 1920s. Berlin and Paris held his imagination and Paris remains the city which most admires his work.

He made his historical debut about 1930 as an interior decorator and furniture designer; he worked in what is today called the Art Deco style, a popularisation of cubism and geometric abstraction. He studied the art of Picasso, at that time involved in attenuated semi-geometrical figure paintings which were beginning to look haunted and surreal. Inspired, he taught himself to paint. His early work, nearly all of which he subsequently destroyed, gave abstracted hominoid shapes a similarly heightened air – sometimes by little references to the Western religious tradition. His work was not well received and he was turned down for the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936. He himself dates his career from the 1944 triptych Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion in the Tate Gallery.

“Bacon’s belief in un-accommodated man, his identification during the two decades after the war with London’s low life, his gambling, his generosity with money and caustic wit, his frightening ability to drink a great deal and remain at the height of his powers, his age-cheating appearance – all play their part in his anti-heroic legend”

At first glance, this work still owes much to Picasso. It is a study, like the paintings and sketches of the Guernica period, of how to assault the nervous system of an onlooker with formal equivalents for pain, mental stress, distortions not of art merely but of daily living and his own hold upon it. Closer acquaintance suggest that here is someone who has looked hard and imaginatively at the Baroque tradition of wrenching the figure until it is, literally, dragged towards that self-extension known as the sublime. Although the triptych is a very strong, even a terrifying picture, one is at least as much aware of the scepticism and control underlying the element of shock. It is as if the artist were playing ‘touch’ with theatrical excess and learning to paint on the dangerous Baroque margin between going very far and going too far.

Bacon then dropped the linear, attenuated style of the triptych in favour of something much more solid. He was discovering oil paint’s correspondence with the density of the observed world: the Bourbet road to nature. Key paintings were Figure Study I and Figure Study II (both 1945-6), the latter also known as the Magdalene. These paintings seem to have inaugurated the interest in clothes (no other 20th century painter has rendered them so attentively) which reflected Bacon’s preoccupation with Velasquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X and led to his own robed and enthroned popes, Head VI (1949) for example. A strong formal understanding of the kind of space clothes are designed to occupy draws shocking, and effective, attention to the absence ofany owner – or the presence, in the case of Figure Study II, of the wrong owner. “’What modern man wants,`” Bacon has said, quoting Valéry, “´is the grin without the cat`: the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.” Throughout his career, he has attempted to combine psychological immediacy – his chamber of horrors side – with whatever formal mechanics are most likely to allow the viewer to retain the pained image until it moves into memory and becomes a way of looking at the world. In the years following the war this search led Bacon to solidity at all cost. The Magdalene has the poise of a Giotto figure, so much presence that the umbrella half-concealing her becomes a convincing frame and not the gratuitous surreal emblem for which it is sometimes mistaken. Thirty years later we see it again, in the left panel of Triptych (1974-77): quarry for Bacon iconographers, along with light bulbs, blinds, plumbing, cricket pads and newspapers.

In the following decade, Bacon juxtaposed violent historical signs of our era with the gravities, hollow maybe, but socially and spiritually well anchored, of earlier epochs of painting. His habit of working from photographs and news clippings is everywhere apparent. Himmler and Goebbels, silent or in oratorical flood; Nadar’s captivating photograph of Baudelaire’s sidelong look; people rushing for shelter during street fighting in Petrograd in 1917; Marius Maxwell’s photographs of animals in equatorial Africa; the screaming nurse from Eisenstein’s film Potemkin; a postcard of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice – all appear and reappear as if they were slabs from some lost fresco of devastating formality and scale. There is the same feeling of a civilisation undergoing nervous breakdown that we find in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (‘These fragments I have shored against my ruin.’) although the prevailing mood is relish rather than disgust. Bacon would bring technical devices out into the open and reinstate them as images. The famous boxes which circumscribe his male nudes, popes, business executives and monkeys start life as methods of containing space and end it as prisons out of Kafka or, prophetically, scenes from the trial of Eichmann. His brush strokes become rapid at this time (he does no preliminary drawing) and blur into one another. So originates the suggestion of the flesh poised, like that of M. Valdemar in Poe’s horrifying tale, on the edge of putrefaction.


“There is the same feeling of a civilisation undergoing nervous breakdown that we find in Eliot’s poem The Waste Land”

In recent years the work has in the main turned from public to private scenes, although the image of President Wilson in Triptych (1986-87) must be one of Bacon’s greatest paintings. Bacon’s originality is on as firm ground here, and slightly less susceptible to the aesthetics of shock. It can be said against him, however, that his paintings of men defecating or vomiting lack the grace which Degas found in women’s exercise of natural functions. They look as if their purpose were epater le bourgeois and they do. Memory traces of friends, nudes and the urban interiors which provide a natural setting for all but our least superficial human encounters are recreated, hit and miss, in the large body of work which made his international name. Bacon is unique in this century in his ability to render the indoor, overfed, alcohol-and-tobacco-lined flesh of the average urban male. His painting is how most of us look. Bacon paints beds, platforms, chairs and sofas with the attention Courbet gave to rocks. The effect is a suffocating enclosure: the landscape of hell done as hell’s hotel bedroom; the non-world of Sartre’s Huis Clos and Beckett’s Endgame. The implied theatricality seems to be deliberate. Compositional layout is very much like a stage set; at any moment another figure, bearing hypodermic or ashtray, may enter left or right. Sofas and tables have, like flesh, puffed out and turned flabby, their Art Deco youthfulness long gone. Not surprisingly, the great Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981) discovers a theatricality appropriate to its purpose. The Oresteia plays are an abiding inspiration for Bacon, as they are the most powerful image in literature of mankind trapped by its history and its own sensibility. But in general all these interiors reveal a truism of art impossible to over-emphasize. The function of any artistic medium is to make the recipient work: to offer interchange, metamorphosis, the telescopic sliding-together of our perceptions until they are gathered back to their solitary neural source, there to be stored, reprocessed and used.

Like Eliot’s early poetry, Bacon’s paintings are documentaries of nervous stress. Given the era in which we find ourselves living, this comes as no surprise. What is surprising is the attempt to endow our diminished psychological circumstances with painting which can achieve the formal grandeur and beauty of texture of the very greatest old masters. These characteristics remain, in his best paintings, long after the initial assault on the system has worn off. When things work, therefore, the quality achieved is joy, which is, as Bacon said it should be, the purpose of art.

The Alligator is extremely grateful to Tate Britain for permission to use its images. The Francis Bacon exhibition is on until 4th January and the Alligator strongly recommends going to see it.

 

 

 

 

Bacon’s Man in Blue expected to fetch £6m

 

 

 

LONDON  |  NEWS  |  THE TIMES  |  THURSDAY JANUARY 15 2009

 

A portrait by Francis Bacon could fetch up to £6 million at auction, 38 years after selling for £31,500, Man in Blue VI is one of seven major paintings that Bacon produced in the spring of 1954 and has been held by the same owner since November 1971.

It was painted while the artist was in the middle of a violent relationship with Peter Lacy, a former Spitfire pilot. Bacon left the cottage they shared and checked into a hotel, where he painted the Man in Blue series. It is thought that they were done from life, with the sitter-being an unknown man whom Bacon had met at the hotel.

Man in Blue VI has been exhibited internationally and was included in the artist’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1962. It will be sold at the Post-War and Contemporary Art auction at Christie’s in London on February 11.

 

 

 

 

 

BETWEEN THE RITZ AND THE GUTTER:

 

   FRANCIS BACON’S LIFE IN LONDON

 

 

 

      I decided when I was very young that I would have an extraordinary life going

everywhere and meeting everyone. But of course I used everybody along the way

–Francis Bacon

 

 

AMABEL BARRACLOUGH  |  ART  |  FEATURES  |  FANZINE  |  FRIDAY, 2 JANUARY, 2009 

 

For Francis Bacon, London was an endless labyrinth of possibilities. He first arrived to live in the city when he was nineteen, having been expelled from his Irish home by his tyrannical father three years prior (he was caught trying on his mother’s underwear); he then spent two years in Paris and Berlin. If the Irish countryside had been a prison in his youth, his coming of age in Weimar Germany had opened his eyes to new possibilities of experience and expression. During his time there he had witnessed the thin line between extravagant luxury and dire need, between the Ritz and the gutter as he described it. He adored the company of those who lived by their instincts, whether they were the super rich, to whom every possibility was available, or the amoral rent boys and petty criminals who he would pick up in East End drinking dens and bring across the tracks for his own amusement.  He would disappear for days on end, and in the vast confines of the metropolis he could delve into every underground bolt-hole and dark alley his inquisitive senses drew him to.

By 1929 he had created some stability in his life. Roy de Maistre was the first in a series of father figures who were both lovers and patrons who supported Bacon and encouraged and guided his talents. The connection continued but the attraction soon waned. In 1931 an extraordinary domestic arrangement had come into being in the Queensbury Mews studio. Living with him now was Jessie Lightfoot, his nanny since birth, an aging Irish spinster devoted to her surrogate son who slept on the kitchen table.  Completing the household was Bacon’s lover of this era, Eric Alden. Still living a hairs breadth from abject poverty, Bacon continued to rely on the rough trade that had kept him warm when he first arrived in London, but he now followed the ironically conventional and lucrative route of advertising himself in The Times as a gentleman’s escort; Nanny Lightfoot would help him pick out suitable offers.

It is sometimes overlooked that Bacon was first and foremost a post-war artist; in describing his close friend and fellow painter Graham Sutherland he also defines an aspect of himself as ‘An Englishman who saw a great darkness gathering.’ In ‘Figure Getting out of a Car’ c.1943, a biomorphic figure with Mussolini or Hitler’s head bends down on a monstrously extended neck to the microphones, teeth bared in a foul grin. The war exposed what lay beneath the gloss of civilization; the primitive animal rage undiminished within us all – the bestiality of man. Bacon saw not only the horror but also the eroticism of violence and political power. The siege like mentality of London during the blitz broke down the social barriers and boundaries of normal life. Bacon’s nature and sexuality was stimulated by risk and the war years were a period of intense germination.

In 1943 the makeshift family moved to 7 Cromwell Place in South Kensington, the address was known as ‘Millais House’ after the eminent Pre-Raphaelite painter who had lived and worked there. It was a grand ground floor studio which perfectly accommodated Bacon’s latest ruse––the creation of a clandestine gambling den which became part of the evening’s round for some of London’s most salubrious characters. The street outside would fill up with Rolls Royces and Daimlers; it was an escape from the dreariness of the war to an atmosphere of faded Edwardian grandeur and bohemian freedom of spirit. Bacon was happy among the ghostly transient clientele of a casino, while Nanny Lightfoot played the hostess. It became part of the round after The Gargoyle club, peopled by wayward aristocrats, drunkard society beauties, artists and intellectuals; Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir once visited. Originally designed by Matisse it was decked with gilt mirrors and a gold and silver staircase swept down into the main room. Bacon loved the uninhibited behavior and the lack of social boundaries or moral constraints.

7 Cromwell Place proved to be an auspicious studio. ‘Three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion’ was made there towards the end of the war, along with the ‘Head’ series and ‘Painting 1946’. Three studies fulfilled the traditional requirements of a masterpiece; the apprentice absorbs the style of a master whilst establishing a style unmistakably his own.  By 1952 the establishment critics, including David Sylvester who was to become a lifelong friend and his most famous interviewer, began writing regular reviews of his work. Bacon’s mythic status had begun to take root.

Around this time his intense sadomasochistic love affair with Peter Lacy began. They met in the now infamous Colony Room. The club also came to be known as ‘Muriel’s’ after its legendary owner Muriel Belcher, a woman of stature and terrifying epithets: ‘You must remember me sucking cocks in rented rooms’ would be her pronouncement to break the ice for new arrivals. Bacon was a founding member of the CR. He had walked in off the street the day after the club had opened in 1948,  and was given ten bob a week and free drinks for bringing in as many spending punters as he could. This lasted until he was a millionaire, and there was a waiting list the length of Dean Street to be a member. It was a place where people who did not feel at home anywhere else could lose all inhibitions; a court of witticism and drunkenness, a dingy claustrophobic fish bowl of bitchy remarks and back chat. ‘Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends’ Bacon would announce as yet another round of drinks was issued.

A handful of key habitués made the Colony Room their home away from home, among them was the young Lucian Freud, who is said to have had a hero worshipping crush on Bacon. Ideologically Freud was his closest companion; they had an affinity as deeply committed figurative painters at a time when abstraction was being hailed as the only inventive mode of painting. Freud also shared Bacon’s obsessive gambling habit and an endless curiosity in the human comedy; they could be as serious and as frivolous as each other.  Freud once went round and dealt Peter Lacy retribution after he had found his friend and mentor beaten to a pulp, a favor which received not thanks but an impetuous cold shoulder from Bacon who adored and thrived on his lover’s cruelty. One of Bacon’s closest allies in this circle was Isabel Rawsthorne––a magnetic, lively and resolute individual, she had been, in the Paris art world of the 1930’s, both a muse to writer Georges Bataille and a model for Picasso. Several of Bacon’s most successful portraits were of her.  Another less trustworthy but equally invaluable friend was John Deakin, who took some of the most striking photographs of the period.

The Colony Room, this ‘member’s club for outsiders’, the drinking den favoured by every lowlife and genius to ever roam the streets of London, is on the verge of extinction, about to be shut down over legal disputes. With its demise ends a way of life in Soho that was created by Bacon and his circle. The mix of desolation and libertine decadence that characterized their post-war existence has thrived for decades within the tiny confines of this unique establishment. Hirst, Emin and the Brit art crowd followed in Bacon’s footsteps as members and punters.

Soho has always accommodated the flotsam and jetsam of the city. In the 40’s and 50’s it was an escape from the drab post-war austerity enveloping London. Bacon’s other favorite haunts were The Golden Lion on Dean Street and the French pub run by the mustachioed Gaston Berlemont, another gathering place for artists and intellectuals. At his favorite restaurant, Wheeler’s on Old Compton Street, he ran up huge credit, even borrowing money, but he brought in so much business and always settled up in the end that he was always welcomed with open arms. He held court there; endless rounds of seafood and excellent wine, and occasionally the East End toughs he brought in would start a ruckus, to the delight of his other friends.

In the autumn of 1961 Bacon moved to 7 Reece mews, a stone’s throw from Cromwell Place, which he was to keep as his London home for the rest of his life. This was also his most famous and well documented studio. A poky, stark and awkward space; he had wished despite his success to retain an ascetic bubble in which to work. He wanted to be rich enough to live like a poor person, without any of the constraints usually implicit in either level of life. In 1962, Bacon took his place in the firmament with a Retrospective at the Tate, organized by his close friend John Rothenstein. From the brilliant outsider to a revered artist of international stature, Bacon’s changed position in London society little affected his sundry tastes for pleasures and amusements. He refused an order of merit from the queen, better than a knighthood, and dressed in Saville row suits, leather jackets and fish net stockings underneath his trousers; he came to know the Kray twins. He was capable of being many things to many people.

Bacon believed that nothing was a coincidence. Both life and painting were made up of fortuitous chance; it all came down to luck, having the gods on your side. ‘It was chance, the slip of a paintbrush the dribble of paint…that gave the image its necessary injection of the unforeseen’, he said of his art. Considering the tragic end to his life, it might be said that George Dyer’s luck ran out the day he offered to buy Bacon a drink in The French Pub in Soho in 1964. Dyer had been bought up in an East End family steeped in petty crime, a career he was not naturally suited to. Isabel Rawsthorne observed that he was too sweet and gentle to be a criminal. For Bacon he was his greatest muse – dark and physically powerful, he was obsessively immaculate in his appearance, characteristic in part of his Teddy boy background. Bacon saw in him an animal rawness and beauty but also an innocence. In the midst of the Colony room crowd he was a lamb among wolves, unable to keep up with their sharp tongues and intellectual wit. His suicide on the eve of Bacon’s greatest exhibition, at the Grand Palais in Paris cruelly reflected the death of Bacon’s other great love, Peter Lacy.

In his current retrospective at Tate Britain, some of the most powerful images are those of the people he knew and loved; the London faces such as Muriel Belcher and Isabel Rawsthorne. None are more affecting however, than the images of George Dyer.

For Bacon, London became malleable to his every whim, he was as at home in the Ritz as he was in the gutter and he always had to have both within reach. He had reached a pre-eminent status among the establishment art world, but he still felt compelled to have in his life the Soho back alley; he needed the tortured expressions of lust and pain to be found in the places of least restraint. This city allowed him to be an enigma, to live out the extreme contradictions in his nature that created the violent dynamism so integral to his work.

References:

Interviews with Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact by David Sylvester. London –  Thames and Hudson 1987.

The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon: The Authorized Biography by Daniel Farson. London –  Pantheon Books 1994.

Anatomy of an Enigma by Michael Peppiatt. London – Constable 2008.

 

 

    

      

            Francis Bacon at his kitchen with his cleaning lady Jean Ward. London 1979   Photo: Edward Quinn

 

 

 

 

   Disturbed Ground:

   

   Francis Bacon, Traumatic Memory

                         and the Gothic1

 

 

                                            FIONNA BARBER

 

 

FIONNA BARBER | CONTEMPORARY ART | THE IRISH REVIEW | VOLUME 39 | WINTER 2008

 

Francis Bacon's relationship with definitions of Irishness has always been somewhat problematic. His Anglo-Irish origins, homosexuality and a reputation for challenging paintings have all in different ways contributed to degrees of difficulty in situating his work within the discourses of Irish art history. However, approaching the centenary of his birth, this is a relationship that needs to be re-examined. Bacon, like other Irish mod? ernist artists such as Louis le Brocquy, William Scott or EE. McWillliam, spent his working life outside Ireland. In Bacon's case this was mostly in London with occasional forays to the Mediterranean and once, memorably, to the artists' colony at St Ives in Cornwall.2 Yet in comparison with any of these other artists Bacon's work sits uneasily with its Irish identifications. One reason is that, like Samuel Beckett, his work avoids any degree of explicit Irish reference. Or rather, the traces that remain are deeply embedded, suppressed narratives whose signs emerge within the staging of Bacon’s paintings where they figure as uncanny echoes of an almost forgotten past. Francis Bacon’s figurative paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the terrifying visions of screaming popes and other similarly disturbing figure studies, have already been pulled into numerous interpretative contexts. Critical readings of these images have repeatedly focused on such varying issues as Cold War anxieties, a pathological fascination with violence, or engagement with art-historical precedents such as Velazquez or Munch. All of these are certainly relevant; Bacon’s uncomfortable, challenging paintings were perceived as a figurative counterpart to the so-called ‘Geometry of Fear’ dominating British art in the post-war years. On another level the conflation of pleasure and pain remained a feature of his approach to the human body throughout his life. Through his handling, the painted male body became a figure of both terror and desire, a counterpart to the sadomasochistic sex that featured so consistently in his personal life.

Bacon had a continual love of artifice in both life and painting; even into old age he prepared for a night on the town by putting on pan-stick make? up and colouring his hair with boot polish. A similar staging of scenarios within his paintings to produce disturbing emotional resonances begins to suggest a set of concerns that can be identified as Gothic. As a cultural mode — literary, cinematic or painterly — the Gothic also involves dizzying temporal juxtapositions of archaic and modern, registering in perverse and uncanny terms the superseding of one order by another. This also has a relevance for readings of Bacon, and not just in his fascination with the image of the Pope. Paintings such as Pope I (1951) were, after all, produced in a predominantly Anglican post-war British culture, where the depiction of the head of the Catholic Church was increasingly anachronistic. Yet to read these paintings in relation to the Gothic can also open onto a further cultural formation in decline during Bacon’s youth in Ireland. The Gothic mise en scene requires the construction of an antiquated, outmoded space, within which the irrational is staged and the hidden is revealed.3 In the pictorial spaces of Bacon’s paintings of this period the decaying milieu of Anglo-Irishness leaves recurrent traces, returning not as reverie but as nightmare.

Bacon’s biographers — mainly Michael Peppiatt but also Andrew Sinclair — have paid careful attention to his Irish origins.4 The artist’s early life also figures in another key source for information about his preoccupations, the series of interviews with the art critic David Sylvester, who championed Bacon throughout his career. Despite their appearance of a coherent auto? biographical seamlessness, these are in fact a discursive collage of transcripts from conversations on different occasions, in some cases taking place over a number of years.5 Through these sources and others the main features of his early years in Ireland emerge. Francis Bacon was born in 1909 in Dublin, in a nursing home in Lower Baggott Street, to a mother from a wealthy family in the north of England and a father who was a retired army captain. After leaving the army, Eddy Bacon set up a business breeding racehorses near the Curragh of Kildare, a location known as much for its stud farms as for the military garrison. After the First World War, which the Bacons spent in London, they returned to Ireland, where the young Francis Bacon spent his time either in the family home at Farmleigh, in Kildare, or the nearby Straffan Lodge, where his grandmother lived. Yet this was a very different Ireland, dominated by the threat of violence during the War of Independence both towards his class and more specifically his family — Bacon’s maternal grandmother was married at this time to the district inspector of police for Kildare. He later identified the period of his early life in Ireland as ‘violent in the military sense’,6 and would recall terrifying incidents from that time that had a direct effect on his family. This all came to an end at the age of sixteen, however, when Eddy Bacon discovered his son’s homosexuality and expelled him from the family home; he never returned to Ireland.

Within these biographical accounts, detailed and informative as they are, Bacon’s Anglo-Irish background is relegated in comparison to the difficult relationship with his father as a source of the violence of both his later life and work, and becomes a kind of supporting chorus for the unresolved Oedipal scenario played out within the paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The ‘fact’ of Bacon’s Irishness, in other words, is subordinate to the universal drama enacted before our eyes, and which was itself the cause of his growing reputation as a major British artist. He was also, right from the outset, perceived as an artist who could be readily incorporated into trends of European modernism; in 1949 the critic Robert Melville placed Bacon in a pantheon that included such figures as Eisenstein, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Picasso.7

On the other hand, Bacon’s incorporation into canons of Irish art has been far from straightforward. Inadmissible during his lifetime due to his overt homosexuality and the difficult nature of his paintings, Bacon’s death in 1992 began a process of gradual acceptance that was finally validated by the acquisition of his relics and their public display in the Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane from 2001 onwards. Although he never revisited Ireland in person, the artist made a different kind of return with the uncanny reconstruction of his final London studio in the spaces of an Irish art museum. This was 7 Reece Mews, where he lived and worked for the last thirty years of his life; transposed to Dublin it becomes both shrine and simulacrum of the artist’s presence.8 The reconstruction promises a degree of authenticity through its tantalising glimpses of a space that claims, impossibly, to be the same as that which Bacon once inhabited and painted. Yet the conditions surrounding Bacon’s reappearance in Dublin also have Gothic affinities, transforming him into the exiled revenant come to claim his birthright. The reconstructed studio now sits within a building steeped in connotations of a lost Anglo-Irishness. Commissioned from the leading neoclassical architect William Chambers in 1763 by the first Earl of Charlemont, the residence was adapted in 1929 to house the collection bequeathed on somewhat controversial terms to the nation by Hugh Lane.9 As the nephew of Augusta Gregory, Lane’s intention was to assemble a collection of both European and Irish art that would play a significant role in Ireland’s cultural revival. Bacon’s studio is now located in relation to a collection that on one hand evokes a prelapsarian past: the Manets and Orpens, although daring for Dublin in the early twentieth century, were also examples of fairly conservative British Edwardian taste that had little time for the contemporary avant-gardism of Picasso or Matisse. On the other hand, the subsequent acquisitions of the gallery ? works by Henry, Keating and le Brocquy among them — represent a somewhat uneasy narrative of Irish art over a period of decolonisation. The situation of the studio in spatial proximity to this collection posits a relationship that is far from secure; rather than ratifying Bacon’s status with regard to Irish art it can also be seen as raising troublesome questions about canons and cultural identity.

Recognising the significance of Francis Bacon in relation to Irish cultural contexts is important, but it should be accompanied by an awareness of the danger of reinstating another insidiously regressive trope of privilege ? the heroic male Irish artist. The position from which we can now interrogate categories of the subject in Irish art is in no small part a product of the feminist landmining of the canon in the 1980s. The drive to discursively produce new and interesting masculinities, therefore, should by no means be taken as a licence to overlook continuing feminist interrogations of both history and art practice. The aim, then, is to prise Francis Bacon out of more familiar British and European frames of reference, and into another range of associations that are predominantly concerned with Irishness as an already problematised category. The Gothic, in this reading, becomes a dark and perverse filter through which the paintings begin to suggest a destabilisation of tropes of Irishness that include both the nostalgic fetishisation of the past and the predominance of a heteronormative masculinity.

 

Pictorial space and the staging of terror

But first we need to look at the paintings. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Francis Bacon produced a cluster of works focused around the screaming figure. Although these are images of male subjects, their sources include two other representations of terrified women: the mortally wounded nurse in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and the mother desperately trying to protect her child in Poussin’s painting The Massacre of the Innocents (1630? 31) that Bacon saw in Chantilly at an early stage of his career.10 The screaming figures were the paintings that made his reputation, albeit as a difficult and challenging artist. Yet they were also produced during a period of emotional and domestic stability, when Bacon lived in an unconventional ménage in Cromwell Place with his older lover, Eric Hall, and his former nanny, Jessie Lightfoot.

Not all of Bacon's male figures from this period are screaming. Some have facial expressions of unease rather than overt abjection — such as Head III, 1949, or Pope I, which was part of the major series engaging with Velazquez' Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650) begun in the late 1940s. In the first painting, a seemingly elderly man peers out of a murky background over his left shoulder; the figure only barely emerges from the greyish green wash covering the picture surface. The pince-nez glasses through which his eyes gaze at the viewer suggest him to be a bureaucrat, a representative of some nameless authority, although this power is also under? mined through the reference to the savagery of the nurse's fate in Battleship Potemkin. Made vulnerable through his apparent nakedness, this is an unclothed version of the men in suits Bacon painted throughout his career, such as Study for a Portrait (1953) or the later Study for a Portrait (1991). The suggestion of civility undercut by the threat of violence here is also a taste of the full-blown confrontation with the cataclysmic destruction of authority that was to come The same anticipatory gaze also appears on the face of the figure of Pope I, although there have been a number of key shifts that affect the meaning of the work. All in all, this is a more complex image than the earlier figure study, not only through the delineation of the papal throne that ties the image back to Velazquez but the sketching out of the architectural framework that surrounds the figure. This contains elements familiar from other Bacon paintings ? the box that focuses and encloses, the indications of an interior, here classicised but also as suggestive and as insubstantial as a stage set, and the curved armature that sweeps across the painting, separating the viewer from whatever emotional drama is being played out behind it. In its sequel, Pope II (Fig. 1 [see colour section, p. 157]), further shifts in pose occur ? and then there is the introduction of the scream. Imagined sound seems to reverberate throughout its pictorial space, both contained and amplified by the edges of the painting. This remarkable image has also been identified as the first clear articulation in Bacons work of the full-throated, terrified scream, depicted in all its psychological intensity.11

Why the Pope? David Sylvester suggested to Bacon that the Pope (‘il Papa’) symbolised his father, as the basis for his obsession with Velazquez’ portrait.12 Both the Pope and Velazquez represented figures of authority, a father to be rebelled against. David Mellor has developed these issues further in an essay that convincingly locates Bacon’s concerns in a history of twentieth-century British painting. Mellor identifies the importance of both Velazquez and Spain for earlier British painters; for avant-garde artists such as Wyndham Lewis and Edward Burra, Spain became ‘a paradigm of the primitive-modern, one based around stark violence, blackness and complexity’ .13 As he also observes, the addition of Eisenstein’s pince-nez to Bacon’s versions of Velazquez, ‘turn the face of the seventeenth century Pope into the then current Pope of nineteen-fifty [Pius XII]’.14 But there are other aspects of Bacon that repeatedly escape this framing within a British cultural context. What the Pope may have meant for Bacon would have also been determined at some level by his early life as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, whose dominating and distant father conformed also by being a staunch Anglican. The visualisation of the terrifying yet terrified Papa thus becomes the restaging of a relationship with another equally threatening patriarch. Already weighted with a deep emotional ambivalence, the abjection of temporal and spiritual power becomes even more significant.

In Pope II, the Holy Father’s grasp on authority and temporal power are in turn savagely blasted away by a scream so elemental it seems to come from some place before and outside of language. Looking at this work, it is tempting at this point to let go of the frame, to allow yourself to tumble headlong into that pit of emotion. But this Gothic disintegration of boundaries is a staged effect, one that is manoeuvred through pictorial strategy ? the uneasy relationship between figure and ground or the murky, purplish-blue coloration. There is also a temporal oscillation characteristic of Gothic modes. It only takes a few brush strokes for the figure to emerge out of the gloom, slipping through the safety net of art historical reference to a seventeenth-century papal portrait, and pitched into a whole different set of connotations more recognisable as the traumas of modernity. Some years after its first appearance in Bacon’s work of the mid-1940s, for example, the box containing the figure in the related Study for a Portrait (1949) was also being compared to that surrounding Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem, as representative of a similar architecture of containment.15

Yet this is a repeated scenario within which particular representational strategies generate an emotional effect — one of pain, unease, anxiety. We need to be careful not to suggest intuitive homologies between what the viewer experiences and what the painter feels. As J.R.R. Christie and Fred Orton have warned, with reference to Wittgenstein: ‘inner experience only enters consciousness when it finds a language; whereof we can not speak, thereof we must remain silent’.16 This is a useful proviso for engagements with expression in modernist painting, particularly with regard to the construction of artistic subjectivities that privilege categories of emotional suffering. It is not just a case of identifying some kind of primary core of experience that then inevitably emanates through the painted surface. Causality, particularly in the case of Francis Bacon, is a much more complex matter, not helped by the artist’s repeated insistence on the denial of narrative in favour of a direct impact of his paintings on the viewer. When asked by David Sylvester about the violence of his paintings in relation to the violence he had experienced in his life, Bacon was at pains to deny any direct connection:

But this violence of my life, the violence which I’ve lived amongst, I think it’s very different to the violence in painting. When talking about the violence of paint, it’s nothing to do with the violence of war. It’s to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality itself. And the violence of reality is not only the simple violence meant when you say a rose or something is violent, but it’s the violence also of the suggestions with? in the image itself which can only be conveyed through paint.17

However, as Julian Bell has suggested, Bacon’s claims of ‘transcendent immediacy’ are also reminiscent of ‘handsome modernist reverie, at odds with equally strong countervailing instincts’.18 There are always levels of meaning beyond those that artists themselves suggest and attempt to curate. The viewer’s engagement with these dark and disturbing interiors takes place at a level of sensation experienced within a continuous present, yet it is also predicated upon the suggestion of a past where terrible things may have happened.

Terrible, but not unspeakable, for that would deny not just the possibility but the necessity of their representation. Both the Gothic and psychoanalysis involve a recognition of an underlying terror that becomes articulated through irrational means.19 Drawing on Freud’s arguments in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Cathy Caruth has written of trauma as ‘always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’.20 Theories of trauma suggest that there are some events whose emotional effect on individuals is so extensive, so devastating, that they defy representation at the time that they are experienced. Representation comes only at the end of a period of latency, of silence, when the extent of the damage can no longer be denied. It is the act of representation, the moment of its utterance, that gives form to the initial pain in a way that was previously repressed. For Bacon, violence ‘can only be conveyed through paint’, through the means of its representation. Even there, whatever it is that generates this terror sits right on the edge of the representable, on the threshold of abjection; ‘the black cavern’ was how he described the screaming mouth.21 Yet the work of memory, including its traumatic form, is also a mode of representation, so in attempting to situate Francis Bacon’s work in relation to aspects of the past we are dealing with something that is always already mediated even before it enters into his paintings. In this case what is significant is the particular set of inflections of modernity that characterised the last days of the Anglo-Irish, and within which the artist grew up.

 

Anglo-Irishness and its discontents

According to Andrew Sinclair, in old age Francis Bacon was still very much the ‘Anglo-Irish gentleman’.22 The rule of the Protestant Ascendancy, relatively secure since Cromwell’s campaigns, was coming to an end with the struggle for Ireland’s independence in the early years of the twentieth century. Like any colonial presence, their grip on this status had been somewhat shaky, resulting in the building of Big Houses that surveyed and dominated their territory, and whose walls could keep at bay the con taminatory effects of the native Irish rabble. To be Anglo-Irish was a position marked by its instability in more ways than one. Declan Kiberd, for example, notes that Elizabeth Bowen, like one of her heroines, was only truly comfortable when in the middle of the Irish Sea, somewhere between Holyhead and Dublin.23 Consequently, to discuss Bacon as Anglo-Irish is not quite the same as reclaiming him as an ‘Irish’ painter; his work consistently resisted any kind of incorporation into the cultural politics of nationalism. Unlike other émigré artists from Ireland in London in the 1950s, such as the sculptor F.E. McWilliam or the painter Gerard Dillon — neither of whom came from similar backgrounds to Bacon — none of his work at any point engaged with issues of Irishness, at least on an overt level. And in any case his spectacularly flamboyant homosexuality would have been somewhat difficult to recuperate within the contemporary nationalist discourses of heroic masculinity that, within painting, showed themselves in the polarised gender roles of the west of Ireland peasantry.24

The Big House also had an ambivalent status in Bacon’s recollections, one that goes far beyond the external threat of danger from political forces. The bow windows at the rear of Farmleigh gave out onto an arc of space beyond, which Bacon later described as a possible source for the curved backgrounds of his triptychs.25 Yet Farmleigh, initially inhabited by his grandmother and her second husband Walter Loraine Bell, also became a site of terror; Bell was renowned for his sadism to both humans and animals. In other ways, too, Anglo-Irishness as it was lived in this environment was also potentially lethal to the young Francis Bacon. An asthma sufferer, his early years were spent in houses obsessed with hunting and dogs. The contact with animals produced an allergic reaction so severe that he was thought unlikely to survive; the future painter of such anguished, open-mouthed screams spent his childhood struggling against asphyxiation. It was also within this perilous domain that Bacon’s early sexual identity was formulated, firstly through an infatuation with the distant and authoritarian figure of his father, and subsequently through a series of sexual encounters with the grooms who worked in his father’s stables. One story often told of Bacon’s youth is that it was these grooms who, on occasions, allegedly horsewhipped the young boy on his father’s orders.26 Whether or not this was the case, the tale further helps to construct a reading of what Laura Mulvey has described as the ‘terrible violence and irrationality of the father /villain ... at the heart of the Gothic genre’.27

As any reader of Somerville and Ross’ Adventures of an Irish R.M. (1899) and its sequel will be aware, horses and the rituals of the hunt were deeply woven into the fabric of rural Anglo-Irish society. Hunting played a central role in maintaining social cohesion through ensuring a regular contact between families and hence distinguishing the Ascendancy from the ever present Irish other. To wilfully refuse to participate, as the young Bacon did, was to undermine the already threatened values of Anglo-Irishness from within. Not to hunt, but to have sex with the grooms and stable boys, only compounds the issue further. Yet there are further implications for the relationship between sexuality and ethnicity. In the nineteenth century Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold had both produced a typology of ethnicity that distinguished between the emotionally unstable ‘feminine’ Celt and the authoritative  ‘masculine’ force of the Teuton or Saxon. In her discussion of the fiction of Somerville and Ross, Roz Cowman has noted a further area of ambivalence in the constructions of their Anglo-Irish subjects, who can be  ‘androgynous amongst themselves, or male in opposition to the native Irish as female’.28 Although the Irish R.M. books were written at the turn of the century, they are set in an idyllic golden age by compari? son with the situation of the Anglo-Irish in the 1920s. In the Teutonic brutality of Eddy Bacon, the masculine politics of the garrison had further retrenched into a kind of survivalism; this was possibly not the best time for him to discover his son dressed up in his mother’s clothes. Infatuated with the violent and authoritarian father who rejected him, it is not hard to see the prototype for the sadomasochistic fascinations that characterised Francis Bacon’s relationships throughout his life ? given shape within the contained and suppressed passions of the Big House and worked through in the male bodies depicted in the paintings.

 

The Convulsion of Domesticity

The construction and regulation of domestic space clearly had some kind of fascination for Bacon, whose first appearance on the British cultural scene was not as a painter but a designer. However, in the streamlined sur? faces of his art deco interior photographed for The Studio in 1930 there is little sense of the profound anxiety erupting within the walls of his later pictorial spaces. As Christopher Reed has suggested, domesticity represse the meanings of modernism, in that the nostalgic evocation of the past suggests the temporality that modernism moves to deny.29 Yet the domestic can also be the site of unspoken trauma that eats away at modernism’s utopianism. In 1929 the Surrealist artist Max Ernst produced La Femme 100 Têtes, the first of his three collage novels, in which a visual narrative emerges through a sequence of images edited into chapters. The images themselves are derived from nineteenth-century illustrations from a variety of sources including trade catalogues, popular melodramas and scientific publications. Intermittently, the novel contains scenes of late-nineteenth century bourgeois interiors, which Hal Foster argues are  ‘reworked to suggest traumatic tableaux constitutive of subjectivity (e.g. primal scenes and castration fantasies)’.30 Scenarios of sexual desire and its repression are thus staged within a convulsive undoing of bourgeois domesticity. Although the mise en scene of Bacon’s paintings is different, there are some analogies. It is not too demanding to recognise the domestic sphere as the site of an Oedipal drama in Bacon’s early life, the theatre of his initial encounters with sexual desire and its brutal repression by his father. However, Foster also suggests that rather than being just examples of enactments of a psychic trauma, Ernst’s collages have a wider historical dimension as  ‘spatial allegories of a temporal crossing or historical change’.31 They evoke an outmoded moment in the formation of capitalism, when the late-nineteenth-century domestic interior attempted to serve as a refuge from the rampant industrialisation outside. Something of this can also be applied to Bacon’s uncanny spaces. Their fundamental unease can, perhaps, also be read as restaging an earlier historical moment: the last throes of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, also the period of Bacon’s youth.

These images of screaming popes in murky interiors were painted in the studio at Cromwell Place, where Bacon lived with Eric Hall and Nanny Lightfoot in a parodie reconstruction of the family he had once lost. In his youth, the impoverished gentility of the Bacon household was maintained through solidly Anglo-Irish pursuits such as horse breeding. Although financial support also came from Erica Brausen, Bacon’s dealer at the Hanover Gallery from 1946 onwards, the Cromwell Place ménage managed a relative degree of stability through its criminality. Not only was homosexuality still illegal, but the household’s income came largely from running an illicit gambling den with the addition of Nanny Lightfoot’s occasional shoplifting. Michael Peppiatt has observed that until middle age Bacon’s sexual and emotional life was marked by a preoccupation with father figures, as if, after his banishment, ‘he felt impelled to restore the original relationship, however traumatic, with another man’.32 As with Bacon’s earlier lover, the Australian artist Roy le Maistre who taught him the rudiments of painting, Hall provided a crucial level of support; it was within this context that Bacon was able to give form to the image of the terrifying patriarch. All of this, however, came to an end with Jessie Lightfoot’s death in 1951, followed by Bacon’s sudden ending of the relationship with Eric Hall and his leaving Cromwell Place, to be followed by years of instability. In the crisis caused by the destruction of yet another family there is the compulsion to repeat, re-enacting the trauma of earlier exile.

In eighteenth— and nineteenth—century Gothic literature, there is a preoccupation with both home and homelessness as those who are expelled from this domain incessantly wander the earth. The home itself becomes a place of danger and terror rather than its more normative associations of peace and security. As Kate Ferguson Ellis points out, the Gothic novel registers the ‘violence, danger and breakdown of community’ that were continual challenges to a sense of bourgeois superiority, even during its formation within eighteenth-century capitalism.33 Similar conditions ? although with very different causes ? also accompanied the birth of the modern Irish state in the early years of the twentieth century. The Anglo-Irish presence, embodied by the Big House, served to maintain a self-consciousness as a class under siege, within a space separated from the lower orders of the Irish, who would only penetrate it as servants, or indeed, as grooms. As the wider territory became reclaimed and renamed within the public discourse of the emergent state, so too was the destruction enacted of the private domain of the Big House, where the power relations of domination and subordination of aristocratic or bourgeois Anglo-Irishness were themselves replicated. As Ellis argues, ‘the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century foregrounded the house as fortress, while at the same time exposing its contradictions’.34These are tensions that in true dialectical fashion must burst apart and expel the hero, compelled to wander, like Melmoth, or indeed the young Francis Bacon. Cast out by his wrathful father after the shameful discovery of the ‘truth’ of his sexuality, he drifts through London, Berlin or France, but not Ireland, to which he never returns.

The fluid and transgressive tendencies of the Gothic are particularly applicable to reading of Bacon’s work. The paintings also contain elements of visual Gothicism, in their cavernous spaces reminiscent of Piranesi’s cavernous dungeons. Their articulation of terror deploys the language of the Burkean sublime: despite David Mellor’s claim for the situation of Bacon’s work in relation to a revival of interest in the sublime within British post? war culture, this further level of significance in relation to Irish cultural formations should not be overlooked.35 These visual associations work in conjunction with the prevalent literary associations of the Gothic in Irish culture. As Luke Gibbons has noted, early-eighteenth-century Gothic modes position Catholicism as the spectral entity that returns to haunt the present. In Ireland, as distinct from the England of Walpole, Catholicism was already laden with associations of savagery and licence.36 For the besieged ex-colony of the Anglo-Irish in the 1920s these were associations that were still current.

The antithetical conflation of the screaming Pope, the head of the Catholic Church, with the terrifying and vengeful Protestant father thus acquires a further level of significance. Through its active restaging within the paintings, individual psychic trauma begins to acquire a dialectical relationship with a wider historical crisis, whose traces are also embedded within Bacon’s pictorial spaces. One part at least of the emotive power of these pictures is their conflation of terror from both within and without the house’s walls. On one hand, the threat of annihilation by the rabble, while on the other, the punishment for the fantasy of incest, the taboo that can undo the foundations of civilisation. Once again the end-game of the Anglo-Irish is played out, haunting the viewer with the spectral return of a culture whose moment is long past.

 

Notes and References

1 Versions of this essay were given as papers in the session ‘Irish Studies and History of Art: Impossible Dialogues?’ organised by Lucy Cotter for Contestations, the Association of Art Historians thirty-third annual conference, University of Ulster, Belfast, 12-14 in April 2007, and at Irish Eyes: Visions and Revisions, Canadian Association of Irish Studies annual conference, University of Toronto, May 2008. This revised and expanded version has benefited from the valuable comments and observations of Aidan Arrowsmith, David Brett, Lucy Cotter and Eoin Flannery.

2 Bacon rented a studio in St Ives from September 1959 to January 1960.

3 See, for example, the discussion of formative characteristics of the Gothic in Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction: the Gothic in Western Culture’ in Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1-20.

4 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Orion Books, 1997); Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993).

5 David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).

6 Ibid., p. 81.

7 Robert Melville, ‘Francis Bacon’, Horizon, 20: 120/121 (1949/1950), pp. 419-23.

8 See Barbara Dawson and Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacons Studio at the Hugh Lane (Dublin: Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 2001) for an account of the studio’s reconstruction and a description of its contents.

9 For an account of the original design of Charlemont House, see Sean O’Reilly, ‘Charlemont House - A Critical History’ in Elizabeth Mayes and Paula Murphy (eds.), Images and Insights (Dublin: Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 1993), pp. 2?54.

10 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, 2006), p. 35

11 This is suggested by Wieland Schmied in his penetrating study of these works by Bacon, Francis Bacon. Vier Studien zu einem Portrait (Berlin: Frolich and Kaufmann, 1985), discussed in Armin Zweite, ‘Bacon’s Scream: Observations on Some of the Artist’s Paintings’ in Zweite (ed.), Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), p. 76.

12 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 71.

13 David Mellor, ‘Francis Bacon: Affinities, Contexts and the British Visual Tradition’ in Achille Bonito Oliva (ed.), Figurabile: Francis Bacon (London: Electra, 1993), p. 96.

14 Ibid., p. 96.

15 Frank Lauk?tter and Maria M?ller, ‘Paintings 1945-1991’ in Zweite, Francis Bacon, p. 115.

16 J.R.R. Christie and Fred Orton, ‘Writing on a Text of the Life’ in Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock (eds.), Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 301.

17 Sylvester, Interviews, pp. 81-82.

18 Julian Bell, ‘The Cunning of Francis Bacon’, New York Review of Books, 54: 8 (10 May 2007), 8.

19 See, for example, Michelle A. Masse, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Gothic’ in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 229-41.

20 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 4.

21 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 72.

22 Sinclair, Francis Bacon, p. 3.

23 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 367.

24 Some of the work of Gerard Dillon is an exception to this, suggesting a range of frequently submerged homoerotic narratives. This issue is discussed by Riann Coulter, ‘Nationalism, Homosexuality and the Modern Artist: Suppressed Narratives in Gerard Dillon’s Images of Connemara’, paper given in the session ‘Irish Studies and History of Art: Impossible Dialogues?’, organised by Lucy Cotter for Contestations, the Association of Art Historians thirty-third annual conference, University of Ulster, Belfast 12-14 April 2007. Also Fionna Barber, ‘Farset, Gomorrah and Kilburn: Reading Diasporic Queer Identities and Irish Painting in 1950s London’, International Association for the Study of Irish Literature annual conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 20-23 July 2006.

25 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 184.

26 This story was initially told by Caroline Blackwood, who was married to the painter Lucian Freud in the 1950s. A member of the Guinness family, she was familiar within the milieu of Bacon’s Anglo-Irish background. Peppiatt casts doubts on the veracity of this story, noting that Blackwood reported it as not coming from Bacon himself; Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, p. 66n.

27 Laura Mulvey ‘The Pre-Oedipal Father: The Gothicism of Blue Velvet’ in Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (eds.), Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 46.

28 Roz Cowman,‘Lost Time: The Smell and Taste of Castle T’ in Eibhear Walsh (ed.), Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing (New York: St Martin’s, 1997), p. 97.

29 Christopher Reed, Not Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996).

30 Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1993), p. 176.

31 Miriam Hansen quoted in Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 158.

32 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, p. 38.

33 Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domesticity (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. x.

34 Ibid.,p.xi.

35 Mellor, ‘Francis Bacon’, p. 97.

36 Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic: Race, Colonization and Irish Culture (Galway: Arlen House, 2004), p. 13.

 

 

 

 

 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 self-portraits 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

 

 

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  |  TUESDAY 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.

 

 


 

Francis Bacon

 

 

Tate Britain. London SWl

 

 

JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER  |  CRITICS’ CHOICE  |  VISUAL ARTS  |  FINANCIAL TIMES  |  DECEMBER 27/ DECEMBER 28, 2008 

 

The greatest postwar figurative artist receives an unforgettable retrospective to mark the centenary of his birth in 1909; don’t miss the final week before the show moves to the Prado and New York's Metropolitan Museum.

 

Bacon was a gambler: he wanted his pictures to end up in “either the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between”. Post photography, post-Holocaust, he knew that the stakes for an art of human figuration were high; while other artists fled to abstraction or pop art,

 

Bacon subsumed the blur and all-over texture of photography and film into his work while painting like an Old Master. His yelling, caged popes have the silk-and-velvet grandeur of their inspiration. Velásquez’s “Pope Innocent X", combined with the instant, rushing horror of a modern urban nightmare as expressed in their other source, the shrieking nurse in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

 

A highlight here is Frankfurt's grimly expressive “Study for the Nurse from Battleship Potemkin”. the,naked, curled figure set in a sumptuous deep green ground whose painterliness rivals the purple and gold harmonies of the pontiffs. In them all, formal splendour lends weight to the ugly panic that makes Bacon, with Giacometti. the towering visual exponent of existentialism. What is a man? This show presents almost a zoo — “Study of a Baboon”, “Chimpanzee”, “Man with Dog” — of screaming, squatting beasts. underlining the infantile desperation and animal violence of Bacon's human figures.

 

It was as a symbol of humanity’s reversion to barbarism — as well as for its art-historical resonance — that Bacon turned to the crucifixion; several versions are here, including one paraphrasing the sinuous body in Cimabue’s rendering, which reminded Bacon of a worm crawling down the cross. This is a show whose vision of humanity without redemption makes you shudder, yet. in bravura impasto passages depicting flesh as meat, thrills you by the conviction with which that vision is painted.

 

+44 (0)20 7887 8888. to January 4


 

 

 

 Desperately seeking Daddy

 

 

  Lewis Jones is fascinated and appalled by details of the

  demons that drove Francis Bacon

 

 

LEWIS JONES  |  BOOKS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2008 

 

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.

 

 

 

   

                                                  In search of a cruel father: Francis Bacon


 

 

 

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  |   CULTURE   |   NEWS   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   MONDAY 15 DECEMBER 2008 

 

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.

 

 

   

                                                 

                                                Muriel Belcher with Francis Bacon

 

 

 

 

True-Crime Temptresses, Bacon’s Rubbish Fill Holiday Art Books

 

 

 

MARTIN GAYFORD   |   REVIEW    |   BLOOMBERG   |   THURSDAY 11 DECEMBER 2008 

 

Dec. 11 (Bloomberg) – Ripped photographs and newspaper clippings spattered with paint: This isn’t what you expect in one of the year’s most intriguing art books.

Francis Bacon: Incunabula by Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels (Thames & Hudson, 224 pages, $75, 39.95 pounds) is devoted to sweepings from the floor of the world’s most expensive contemporary artist at auction.

Bacon often remarked that he drew his inspiration from an atmosphere of chaos. After his death in 1992, his London studio and its contents were moved to Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where they were sifted and studied like the detritus of an Egyptian tomb. This book presents some of the results.

Though these photos, clips and book illustrations were the raw material of Bacon’s art, you can’t help wondering how accidental those markings really are. Perhaps some of these altered images count as artworks themselves. 


 

 

 

 

The first dark image of Bacon’s death

 

 

 

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

 

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.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Human meat

 

 

 

   ALAN JENKINS  |  ART  |  THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT  |  FRIDAY DECEMBER 5 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 “Head”s) 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 Lacy, 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


Alan Jenkins is Deputy Editor of the TLS. Drunken Boats, his translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre, was published last year. 


 

 

 

 Bacon’s theatre of the absurd

 

 

  On Francis Bacon at the Tate Britain, London.

 

 

   BY DAVID YEZZI  |  REVIEW  |  FEATURES  |  THE NEW CRITERION  |  DECEMBER 2008

 

 

High-priced meat-under-glass has been a staple of British art for the better part of a century, long before Damien Hirst’s fashionable sharks and calves appeared on the scene. Witness the current career retrospective of paintings by Francis Bacon (surely the ultimate nom de charcuterie), timed in accordance with the artist’s centenary in 2009. [1] Bacon’s take on the human condition was simple: “We are meat,” he liked to say. His paintings of sixty years, from Crucifixion (1933) to Triptych (1991) in the Tate show, rarely stray off message, recapitulating his dark matter in image after traumatic image. (From the mid-1960s on, Bacon displayed most of his sanguinary subjects behind glass, placed in gilded frames.) It is worth noting that the exhibition originates at Tate Britain, not at Tate Modern, as I initially assumed—a far better venue for staking Bacon’s claim as the greatest British painter since Turner (and, in the eyes of many, as one Tate press release has it, Britain’s greatest painter period!). But Bacon’s ubiquity and collectability, abetted by his famously theatrical subjects and bravura technique, mainly confirm his star status, not his mastery.

Certainly, anyone possessed of a glancing acquaintance with modern art knows what a Bacon looks like: arrays of distended viscera, steaming sides of beef, screaming Popes in “space-frames,” crucifixions, menacing dogs, swirled faces, contorted nudes decomposing on divans, Muybridge-esque figures recast in blurs of paint. Brutal, bloody stuff. It’s also attention-grabbing stuff, both pictorially and commercially. Even those who couldn’t give a fig for art will have noticed Bacon’s recent record-breaking outing in the marketplace: Triptych (1976) sold in May at Sotheby’s for over $86 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a contemporary art work. Last month, Study for Self-Portrait (1964), estimated at $40 million, sat on the block at Christie’s without a bid, but one assumes this was due more to our economy’s recent resemblance to a Bacon painting than to any decline in Bacon’s blue-chip stock.

Only Bacon’s friend Lucian Freud, among the London School painters, comes close to rivaling his celebrity and mystique. Bacon worried that his biography would over-weight viewers’ interpretations of his work, and not without reason; his was a colorful life tinged with tragedy. One needn’t scratch the surface very deeply before biographical details emerge, particularly in the portraits and late paintings. Bacon’s reputed drinking, gambling, and masochism (he fled one severe beating clothed only in fishnet stockings) fueled his image as a peintre maudit. His greatest subject was ultimately Francis Bacon.

A darling of the bohemian intelligentsia, Bacon spent his bad-boy early years in London commuting “between the gutter and the Ritz” (as he put it): dodging rents, committing petty crimes, and living off of patrons and friends. He took pride in the fact that he never received formal training as a painter. Born in Ireland to English parents, he fled a violent homelife in which his horse-trainer father oversaw regular whippings of his son by the grooms. In 1927, Bacon traveled to Germany with Cecil Harcourt-Smith, a family friend (with whom he wound up in bed). He found Berlin in the Twenties much as Auden described it at that time—“a bugger’s daydream.” It was seeing Picasso’s work in Paris, where he traveled after Berlin, that set him on the road to becoming a painter.

Bacon’s earliest painting in the Tate exhibition is his spindly, Picasso-inflected Crucifixion (1933). Crucifixions became a signature motif for the artist. Among his most well-known images are Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), his first major triptych, and Painting (1946), a splayed cow carcass and bloody-mouthed figure arranged as an abattoir-altarpiece, which Alfred Barr acquired for the Museum of Modern Art. Bacon followed these with a series of Popes, beginning with Head VI (1949) and culminating in the streaked and gilded bombast of Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953). The Popes were one of a number of motifs Bacon would come back to later in his career with diminishing returns. (Bacon was extremely self-critical and destroyed a great deal of work, but by the time he came to repent the Popes presumably it was too late to get his hands on them.)

Bacon often equivocated when asked questions about his influences and the significance of his work, but certain things were repeated often enough to be believed: 1) that he was an Nietzschean atheist, 2) that Picasso had meant a great deal to him, 3) that he intended no religious meaning with his crosses and Popes, and 4) that his greatest guiding principle as a painter was the Surrealist notion of chance. According to Michael Peppiatt in his recently updated biography, [2] what Bacon most wanted was to “excite” himself, to stir emotion ruthlessly, to “remove veils” from experience, to provide direct access to the valves of feeling. His means: bloody mouths, bones, flesh, screaming heads. Peppiatt once claimed, in the September 1984 issue of Connoisseur, that “even his detractors would agree that there is nothing of the easy chair about the work of Francis Bacon. Far from ease, it offers extreme disquiet.” I can’t say that I’m convinced. A kind of bathos dogs Bacon’s work, arising from the fact that his disquiet is, so to speak, always in an “easy chair,” swathed in gorgeous magenta and crimson and served up with a Sargent-like facility of the brush.

Bacon’s seductive paint handling is the first thing that viewers notice after the carnage. His methods of applying paint were as idiosyncratic as they were versatile. Hugh Davies and Sally Yard describe his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, in which his materials ranged from

 

Brillo pads to cashmere sweaters, as brushes are joined by rags, cotton wool, sponges, scrub brushes, garbage-can lids, paint-tube caps, the artist’s hands, and whatever else he can find in the studio for the application and shaping of painterly passages… . Thick impasto coexists with thinned washes of pigment and raw canvas, sand and dust are occasionally used to give texture to the paint. A few works of the 1980s are veiled in the haze produced by applying paint with an aerosol spray.

 

Reviewing Bacon’s show at the Malborough-Gerson gallery in 1968, Hilton Kramer found him “one of the most dazzling pictorial technicians on the current scene.” Why, then, he asks, does the work “strike me as being clever rather than profound—brilliant rather than authentic?” Kramer ends with a recognition of “exactly how safe an artist Mr. Bacon really is.”

 

Safe and also stagey. Bacon’s characteristic space is theatrical, suggesting operating theaters, thrust stages, wrestling rings, circus rings, bull rings, throne rooms, closets, altars—all playing areas in Bacon’s theater of the absurd. Beckett is a name that tends to come up when considering Bacon’s vision, but it’s closer to Genet (whose plays he recommended to friends). Think of the bishop in Le Balcon, who is in fact a man in costume acting out a ritualistic sexual fantasy in a brothel that the madame calls a “house of illusions.” In the critic Martin Esslin’s description, absurdist theater portrays “a world that functions mysteriously outside our conscious control… . It no longer has religious or historical purpose; it has ceased to make sense.” This is Bacon’s world, in which the artist rejects both narrative and didactic purpose and attempts to confront, in Esslin’s phrase, “the spectator with the harsh facts of a cruel world and his own isolation.”

 

This sense of chance and of confrontation is a key element of Bacon’s most touted images, such as Painting (1946), with its absurdist illogic and raw imagery. Yet the “safety” that Kramer perceived in the late Sixties already exists here in the picture’s pink and mauve symmetrical background. Bacon’s paint handling is so delicious, it’s like a mountain of crème Chantilly—far from horrified by it, you want to eat it with a spoon. Bacon is continually betrayed by his beginnings as an interior designer, no where more so in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. As Peppiatt notes of the background colour of Studies, “It is worth recalling that cadmium orange, which had become the fashionable colour in avant-garde interior design in the 1930s, remained Bacon’s favourite colour.” Bacon’s fashion colours and mod furniture come off as frivolously elegant.

 

Frivolity is, of course, the last thing most people associate with Bacon’s work. As Bacon’s Soho crony and (unauthorized) biographer Daniel Farson writes: “To appreciate Bacon’s work, it helps to see him as a deeply moral artist.” This strikes me as exactly what Bacon is not, so much so that I wonder if Farson could really believe it himself. Elsewhere he says that Bacon repeatedly told him that he believed in “nothing.” John Richardson, the biographer of Picasso, repeats the error: “By holding a mirror up to our degenerate times Bacon proves himself to be one of the most moral artists of the day. Far from titillating us, he castigates us.” But Bacon does no such thing. Firstly, he is not concerned with our “times” in any historical sense, except in so far as he personally embodies them. For Bacon, images from news photographs and films—the screaming nurse on the Odessa steps in Potemkin or a Nazi armband, for example—have little to say about “our degenerate times” and volumes to say about Bacon’s roiling inner life. When a television commentator suggested that Bacon’s work was a condemnation of man’s inhumanity to man, Bacon retorted: “That’s the last thing I think of.”

 

It is not Bacon’s stark subject matter that disqualifies him as a “moral artist”; it is his aestheticization of the horror depicted. As the critic Yvor Winters explains, the moral artist does not shy from exploring the extremes of human experience, but he portrays evil as evil and makes us know it as evil. This is not the case with Bacon, either in his professed world view or in his practice:

 

 

In all the motor accidents I’ve seen, people strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is the strange beauty—the vision of it, before you think of trying to do anything… .

There’s no one more unnatural than myself, and, after all, I’ve worked on myself to be as unnatural as I can. I can’t really talk about painting because I only work for myself and just by chance it happens that for some reason I’ve been lucky enough to be able to live by something that obsesses me, but I haven’t got any morals to preach… . I just work as closely to my nerves as I can.

 

One leaves the Bacon show at the Tate feeling beaten up by images of the dying George Dyer (Bacon’s tragic lover) vomiting into a sink, the gaping wounds, the twisted flesh. Bacon sought to transmit emotion as immediately as possible, which in a sense he did, but it’s not emotion he transmits so much as sensation. Shock lends Bacon’s work its edge, but it diminishes it as well. The paintings register like a trauma on the spinal column, without ever reaching the more complex centers of the brain. Later in Bacon’s career, when shock gave way to chic, the game was lost. Second Version of Triptych 1944, his reworking of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, replaces the brushy energy of the earlier work with a spray-painted softness that makes Bacon’s phallic Furies look like tchotchkas in a Madison Avenue boutique. His Innocent X of 1965 replaces the pontiff’s rictus with the taffy-pull features of the later portraits. Bacon became convinced that he could have done the Popes better than he had, but this is no proof. Nor is the reworking of Painting from the 1960s (not included in the Tate show), which dresses the macabre scene up with a sunny yellow background and what look like paper garlands—a travesty of Gauguin’s Yellow Christ (1889). Bacon detested illustration, but in the end he failed to escape it, and the portraits moved him even further in this direction.

 

The Peppiatt book contains a revealing quotation: “When I was young, I needed extreme subject matter for my paintings… . Then as I grew older I began to find my subject matter in my own life. During the 1960s the Furies, the dictators and screaming Popes, the anonymous figures trapped in darkened rooms gave way to portraits of living identified beings.” And here is the disconnect: Bacon reviled abstraction because for him it was all design, empty aesthetics. Bacon relied on his figures to ground his work in reality, to lend his paintings the force and horror of the real world. But the triptychs and portraits of the Sixties and later marinate in the very aesthetic stew he had hoped to avoid. Bacon’s contortions of angst become so pretty, so tasteful. The large squares of pink and orange (orange is the new pink, or is it the other way around?), the natty black suits, the distinctive chaises and tables make the lot seem very “safe” indeed.

 

The selection of works for the exhibition is judicious, suggesting more variety in the work than is really there. After the monotony of the Bacon treatment—floating central figures against disconnected flat colors—sets in, the decline is steady: the final paintings are his least interesting. As David Sylvester prophesied in 1955, “many of the things that make [Bacon] exciting today may render him laughable for future generations.” The colored arrows pointing to newspapers and wounds and bodies on toilets; the globs of thrown white paint; the increased staginess—all seem like precious, empty gestures. The Tate retrospective carefully elucidates Bacon’s photographic sources; it includes BBC footage of Bacon in conversation with David Sylvester that highlights his considerable charm, but the work itself seems no different that it did at the MOMA retrospective in 1990—except that it has grown a little more tired with the passage of time.

 

Bacon’s paintings, ostensibly transmitting high-pitched emotion, are cut off from emotion. He never flinched from working on a grand scale, from putting his feet up against the masters—Grünewald, Titian, Vélazquez—but in the end his almost mechanical serialism and cool shocks bring him closer to Warhol, whose films Bacon admired even as he turned his nose up at the paintings. Rather than being the greatest British painter since Turner, Bacon may better be seen as the great precursor to the soullessness of Damien Hirst, whose shark is currently on view at the Met. When Francis Bacon arrives in New York next summer, viewers will have a chance to consider the two artists under one roof.

 

 

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).

2. Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, by Michael Peppiatt; Constable, 456 pages, £12.99 paper.

David Yezzi is the Executive Editor of The New Criterion

 

 

 

 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.

 

 

 

 

 

CHRISTMAS BOOKS

 

Bacon with trimmings

 

 

Charles Darwent recommends spending Boxing Day with Kandinsky’s

colours or on Francis’s studio floor 

 

 

 

CHARLES DARWENT   |   ARTS & BOOKS   |   THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY   |   30 NOVEMBER 2008

 

Prestel’s monolithic Kandinsky (£99) weighs a stone, has a handsome slip-cover and includes a good facsimile portfolio of Kandinsky’s Kleine Welten prints, originals of which fetch £150,000 apiece. All of which might lead you to think of this less as a coffee-table book than as a coffee table, in which you would be wrong. Prestel editions are as weighty in learning as they are in kilos. This one is edited by a pair of the world’s foremost Kandinsky scholars, Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg, and its unpublished archive material alone makes it a must-have for anyone with a yen for the father of abstraction.

Kandinsky fans with lighter pockets need not despair, thanks to Andrew Spira’s The Avant-Garde Icon (Lund Humphries £40). Spira’s compelling study unpicks the place of Orthodox iconography in Russian (and later, Soviet) modernism, arguing that the anti-illusionist tendencies of icon painting fed seamlessly into the experiments of painters such as Malevich, Larionov and, of course, Kandinsky. Kandinskyites can also track their hero through John E Bowlt’s excellent Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age (Thames & Hudson £24.95), an A-Z of tsarism’s last, magnificent flowering of the arts. Even as Russia teetered on the abyss, Proust was cataloguing the parallel slide of France’s Old Regime. In Search of Lost Time is Kandinskyesque in its eliding of the senses, most memorably in the case of literature and patisserie but also of writing and painting. Pictures are everywhere in Proust, from comparisons of a Veronese sunset to strawberry mousse, to Odette de Crecy’s resemblance to a Botticelli. In Paintings in Proust (Thames & Hudson £25), Eric Karpeles ferrets out all the passages where the author mentions artists and artworks, and then illustrates them with colour plates. Even hardened Proustians maybe surprised by the outcome, which reveals In Search of Lost Time to be the Gesamtkunstwerk it always was.

A century after Kandinsky and Proust, it is China that calls the cultural shots. For most of us, though, contemporary Chinese artists remain as hard to understand as they are to pronounce. Richard Vine gives a clearheaded account of what is going on in New China, New Art (Prestel £30), tracing the dual art histories, traditional and modernist, that do battle in the Chinese breast, while guiding us gently through the latest movements and schools in Beijing and elsewhere. It is a measure of the need for Vine’s book that Art Now Volume 3 (£24.99) — Taschen’s annual, self-styled "cutting-edge selection of today’s most exciting artists" — includes precisely six Chinese names among the 140 or so whose work it looks at. Still, ANV3 is pretty well compulsory reading for anyone who hopes to keep up with all that is newest and grooviest in the contemporary art world. Also, its texts are in English, French and German, so you can be pretentious in three languages as you walk around Tate Modern.

Heavier in all senses of the word is Phaidon’s Art & Today (£45), although it, too, devotes oddly few of its 440 large-format to things Chinese. Edited Eleanor Hartney, this tome to rewrite not so much art history as art historiography. Ever since MoMA’s founder, Alfred H Barr, doodled flow-chart in which Art Nouveau became Surrealism became Abstraction became Minimalism, modern art has been seen as a linear chain of cause and effect. By contrast, this book treats it as a series of broadly interconnecting episodes, which is easier to believe in if harder to remember.

An equally heterodox, if wackier, view of the current state of things comes from Formulas for Now (Thames & Hudson £12.95), edited by über-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. Obrist asked Yoko Ono (pictured inset), Richard Dawkins, Gilbert & George, etc, to come up with equations whose solution is "today". If you add a pair of dice, you could probably turn the book into a Boxing Day parlour game.

One unexpected twist in the history of now is the return to favour of figurai iii A bllf h,tion in painting. notable example of this is Elizabeth Peyton, a New Yorker whose washy oil portraits of friends, rock stars and princes William and Harry make her the mooted Warhol of our day. Phaidon’s monograph, Elizabeth Peyton: Live Forever (£35), peppered with unidentified photographs, is as enigmatic as the artist herself.

Richard Calvocoressi and Sebastian Smee’s handsome Lucian Freud on Paper (Cape £50) considers the work of the sulphurous Old Man of British Art via his drawings. By his own estimation, Freud reckons to produce 200 of these for every painting he does, which makes his sketchbook a vastly important resource. The drawings are also often tender, which may come as a shock to those attuned to the abattoir realism of his painting.

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 Pepiatt 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 Velazquez 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Rare works about Francis Bacon defy art auction gloom

 

 

Reuters, Monday November 24, 2008

 

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.

(Reporting by Pauline Askin, Editing by Miral Fahmy)

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

To complement the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain, this symposium considers spatial and architectural aspects in Bacon’s art. Bacon composed his pictures by risking spontaneous acts and chance effects of painting within carefully designed and projected spatial frameworks, often deploying traces of his early work in furniture and interior decoration.

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   |   MANDRAKE  |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   SATURDAY 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.

The Colony Room was established 60 years ago to provide a refuge for members when the pubs closed. Earlier this year, Michael Wojas, the club secretary and chief barman, said he would close it when he retires in March because of the impact of the smoking ban, an expiring lease and a general downturn.

 

 

 


 

Art boom over as auctions fail to bring home Bacon

 

 

 

 

BEN HOYLE   |   ARTS REPORTER   |   ART MARKET   |   NEWS   |   THE TIMES   |   FRIDAY, 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 million. 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.”


 

 

 

Art sales slump

 

Bacon self-portrait is withdrawn from auction

 

 

 

BY TOM LEONARD IN NEW YORK   |   NEWS   |   THE DAILY TELEGRAPH   |   FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2008

 

Francis Bacon’s Study for Self Portrait failed to sell at auction yesterday as the autumn art sales in New York limped to a close, with many lots selling at cut price.

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.

 

 

 

 

Upper East Side: Linger (Quietly) for a While

 

 

 

KAREN ROSENBERG  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2008

 

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).

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

ANNE BARROWCLOUGH   |   ART MARKET NEWS   |   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

 

In a bumpy sale of contemporary art at Christie’s on Wednesday, some paintings, drawings and sculptures were eagerly sought, but there were also big disappointments as the art market struggled to adjust to today’s financial climate.

What was expected to be the star — a 1964 self-portrait by Francis Baon that was estimated at $40 million — went unsold without so much as a bid. But other works brought prices that surprised even Christie’s executives.

“In the beginning we thought we were witnessing a gravity-defying auction,” Edward Dolman, Christie’s chief executive, said after the sale. “But it was disappointing not to sell the Bacon. There were some good prices, but it’s inconsistent.”

The evening, dominated by American buyers, brought $113.6 million, well below its low estimate of $227 million. Of the 75 works on the block, nearly one-third failed to sell.

Some works that were considered overpriced sold — but for what buyers wanted to pay, not what the house had envisioned.

After the sale, dealers and collectors milled about trying to make sense of the results. “The auction house may not have done well,” said Allan Schwartzman, an art adviser, “but some collectors did.”

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Jack Malvern, The Times, November 8, 2008

 

   

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.

 

 

 

 

  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, 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.

 

 


 

 

             AGONY AND PLEASURE:

 

 

FRANCIS BACON’S RETROSPECTIVE AT TATE BRITAIN

 

 

                                       (September 2008-January 2009)

 

 

 
By BEATRIZ  ACEVEDO  |  REVIEW  |  NOTEWORK  |  NOVEMBER 2008

 

Francis Bacon has been regarded as one of the most important artists of the Twentieth Century and even now his work does not cease to produce questions, reactions and controversy. The retrospective of his work at Tate Britain provides a unique opportunity to grasp at the power of his oeuvre and to experience the fascination that it exerts on the viewer. Bacon’s experiences were shaped by the whole Twentieth Century: he was born on October 28,1909 in Dublin, and he was brought up in the shadow of the First World War, he also witnessed the horrors of the Second World War. The experiences of these two wars, and the subsequent changes in the world during the century, may explain the most common reactions to his work: the violence, the horror, and the brutal. For many, Bacon’s work conveys all these adjectives; however, his work is more complex than a first sight of his paintings may show.

For the spectator, the sensation of being shocked, marvelled or horrified is part of the fascination exerted by Bacon’s paintings. As the artist stated, his intention was to make an impact on ‘the nervous system more violently and more poignantly’2, and he used the human figure as the main weapon for his mission. Although Bacon did not attend any formal education, his genius developed by following some of the most important trends of the earlier Twentieth Century: the work of Picasso and the Surrealists. His own life is the big canvass of emotions, experiences, pain and enjoyment, and although he would prefer that we separate his paintings from his personal life, it is undeniable that his work conveys the emotions of the modern man: the anxiety and the pleasure, the question of life and the presence of death, and the co-existing forces of Eros and Thanatos.

The exhibition is organised in ten rooms, covering certain historical periods in his work. In doing so, the curators aimed to show some echoes and dialogues amongst his paintings. Since Bacon was a fierce critique of his own work and he is famous for the amount of work that he destroyed when unpleased with it, hence, very few paintings from the earlier period (stemming from the 1930s) are exhibited here. Some of the survival paintings of his earlier period are grouped in the first room, titled Animal. Bacon’s concern with the bestial nature of human beings is largely explored in this first group of paintings painted during the 1940s: the scream, the pain and the convulsions of the flesh. In particular, the series of ‘Heads’ announce the seeds of further developments in Bacon’s work. For example, in Head I, the emphasis is put on the corporeity of the ‘head’, while only the open mouth with the carefully painted teeth suggests the singularity of a deaf scream.

As noted by Chris Stephens, one of the curators of the exhibition, in the Heads (Head I and Head II) ‘these details add a disquieting reminder of the figure’s humanity while the contrast of their stillness with the dynamism of the mouth makes it seem as if the figure is possessed, taken over by this animal force’ (Stephens, 2008: 94). However, it is not very clear if the figure is screaming or gasping for air, and here Bacon in his conversations with David Sylvester revealed his original intentions: “I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror.” The anxiety of the scream, the threshold between the sound and the total deafness of this gesture, and the conveyance of internal forces governing the flesh became common topics in Bacon’s future works. For Deleuze, the scream in Bacon establishes a relationship between the visibility of the scream (the open mouth as a shadowy abyss) and invisible forces, which are nothing other than the forces of the future (2003: 43).

In this group of paintings some of the most important elements in Bacon’s language start to appear. In particular, the Painting 1946, can be considered as the prototype for further developments in Bacon’s work: here a dominant male figure emerges, black tie and coat, yet, only his mouth in the gesture of the scream is carefully revealed. His physical features are crowned by an umbrella – the suggestion of a big bird with black wings – and the Figure is flanked by a couple of fleshy carcasses part bone, part dead meat in brilliant tones. The Figure is sustained by a tubular structure, and it stands out in a bright field of pink colour. It is said that Bacon based his Figure on some pictures of Nazi leaders, and the thick neck suggest the gestures of Mussolini. Nevertheless, Bacon wished to distance himself from the specificity of the Nazi references to something more universal in which the sense of threat and brutality had been distilled (Stephens, 2008: 92).

The image of authoritarian figures and leaders inspired many of Bacon’s paintings. In this room we can appreciate an early interpretation of Velázquez’s painting of the Pope Innocent X, titled Head VI (1949). As noted by Peppiatt: ‘in paraphrasing the Velázquez portrait, Bacon strikes not only at the highest personification of spiritual power, but also at the grandeur of the Western tradition of art’ (1996: 64). His poignant reinterpretation of Velázquez’s Pope can be also understood in relation to the influence of the surrealist spirit in transforming pieces of art, such as Duchamp’s moustache on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa thereby situating Bacon’s screaming Pope. Other explanations can be drawn from his difficult relationship with his father (Pope or Papa-Dad) or his disdain for the catholic religion.

The point here is to appreciate how Bacon’s painting of the Pope explores the depths of authority and leadership. Whereas in Velázquez’s painting the Pope appeared both regal, serene and cruel, Bacon’s explored the isolation conferred by his authority. By confining the Figure within the limits of a chair, and surrounded by a shuttered wall, a curtain, or a white parallelepiped, the Pope is isolated and somehow incarcerated. The Pope’s fists cling recklessly to the chair and this produces a sensation of both frailty and contained anger, while his screaming mouth oscillates between the agony and the fury. As developed by Deleuze: “Innocent X screams, but he screams behind the curtain, not only as someone who can no longer be seen, but as someone who cannot see, who has nothing left to see, whose only remaining function is to render visible these invisible forces that are making him scream, these powers of the future.” (Deleuze, 2003: 42)

In the view of his contemporaries, Bacon’s use of religious symbolism and the exploration of the human figure contradicted the artistic tendency toward abstractionism and conceptual art. While artists around the world were engaged in the exploration of abstract art – in particular the Abstract Expressionism and the playful potentialities of the Pop Art – Bacon followed a different route. He broke with figuration, but at the same time, he used the figure to accomplish his aim. His work “it is not impressionism, not expressionism, not symbolism, not cubism, not abstraction (…) Never (except perhaps in the case of Michelangelo) has anyone broken with figuration by elevating the Figure to such prominence.” (Deleuze, 2003: xiv)

During the 1950s and 1960s, Bacon had completed the basic elements in his work: (1) the Figure, not as narration or illustration, but as a Figure in motion, or transformation; (2) the place in which the Figure is located, normally a chair, a ring or inside a geometrical figure of ice; (3) and the field of colour (Deleuze, 2003). These pictorial elements aim to stretch the Figure toward more sensational (in terms of heightened sensations) effects while avoiding the ‘representation’ or the ‘description’ of an scene or an event. As Bacon remarked: “A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object: but there is no tension in the figure unless there is the struggle with the object.”3 The second room in the exhibition is called Zone and a number of examples concerning the creation of fields, places and figures as ‘matters of fact’ (using Deleuze’s words) are presented here.

By the 1950s Bacon’s work developed in amidst his hectic life and sexual explorations around London during the postwar years. The next room in the exhibition refers to this feeling as Apprehension: a number of paintings and studies for Figures, amongst them the series of the “Man in Blue”. These men are dressed as ‘executives’ or ‘business men’ although they look anonymous and innocuous. For example, in the Man in Blue IV the figure seems to sink in the depths of darkness and obscurity. Like the Popes, the businessmen are depicted as figures of authority, yet vulnerable and solitary (Stephens, 2008: 122).

Bacon’s obsession with religion and authority appears intermittently in his paintings. The series of Crucifixions reveal the many ways in which the artist approached this classic theme. He was not attempting to re-create a religious message, nor was he interested in challenging it. For Bacon, the crucifixion can be understood as an act of violence; and it is related to his concern about the bestiality of human beings. He developed his crucifixions by focusing on the fleshy characteristics of the subject. As he asserted, “Well, of course, we are meat, 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’4. For many, the reference to the Crucifixion can be understood within the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Notwithstanding, the first painting of the Crucifixion came from the earlier period of the painter and it was this painting which put Bacon in the map of artists in Britain.5.

Almost ten years later, the same topic is depicted in the Triptych format, also exhibited in this retrospective. Here we find the famous: Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) which is one of the jewels owned by the Tate Gallery (normally exhibited at Tate Modern on the Southbank). It consists of three paintings connected by a bright field painted in orange. On the central panel there is this ambiguous form, like an embryo, from which only an opened mouth appears – savaging and devouring – covered by a blanket (it looks more like a phallic figure – maybe a penis dentata?) in an orange background limited by angles. Because of the date of this painting, the second version of the Crucifixion has been linked to the horrors of the holocaust as an apocalyptic vision of the world although heavily influenced by the political responsibility of the artist illustrated by Picasso’s Guernica (exhibited in London in 1938). Guernica showed how the formal language of modernism could frame a response to contemporary events (Gale, 2008: 139). Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of Crucifixion goes beyond the depiction of a single episode by denouncing the ongoing nightmare.

Further versions of the Crucifixion are produced in 1962 and 1965. In Three Studies for A crucifixion (1962), and Crucifixion (1965), the main elements of Bacon’s language reached their maturity: the format of the triptych; the treatment, dissection and isolation of the figure; and the large fields of colour. In Deleuze’s brilliant analysis of Bacon’s work, these are the three fundamental elements in his painting: “the material structure, the round contour and the raised image. If we think in sculptural terms, we would have to say: the armature; the pedestal, which would be mobile; and the Figure, which would move along the armature together with the pedestal.” (Deleuze, 2003: 4).

These paintings became Bacon’s platform as a recognised artist and then his life changed. From living on a sort of roller coaster, hardly making means to meet ends (and yet indulging in drinks, parties and gambling), he found himself with a disposable income. Immersed in the chaotic relationship with his lover Peter Lacy, he travelled around Europe and North Africa engaging in compulsive gambling in cities such as Monte Carlo while trying to paint under different lights either in Tangier or in the South of France. Different experiments marked this period: coupled figures, interpretations of Van Gogh’s paintings and more expressive and colourful paintings are grouped in the exhibition in the room titled Crisis. Although in this new situation he was able to afford bigger premises, he kept the smaller atelier at the Reece Mews (London) as his favourite place for painting. An interesting feature of this exhibition is the ‘archaeology’ of his studio in which many objects, pictures, photographs and books may help to re-construct the creative laboratory of the artist. Amongst the objects shown in the ‘Archive’ room were: magazines with photographs of Nazi leaders; a medical document about mouth diseases; the studies of Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion; books with reproductions of his admired Velázquez; plentiful pictures from newspapers, sport magazines; and photos of friends, lovers and models.

Bacon relied on reproductions and pictures as the first step for most of his paintings. For instance, in the portraits of friends he preferred to rely on the picture rather than painting directly from the model. For him, photography has taken over the illustrative and documentary role so that modern painting no longer needs to fulfil this function. The challenge consists of extracting the Figure from the figurative and to overcome the descriptive or illustrative aspects of painting. He insisted on the fact that his paintings were not describing violent acts, neither were they trying to tell a story. Instead, what Bacon aimed was to convey the emotion behind the act, the horror prior to the scream, the convulsion of the body in anticipation of the movement.

To this aim, the combination of the three mentioned elements in Bacon’s paintings make sense: the large fields as a spatializing material structure; the Figure, the Figures and their fact; and the place – that is the round area, the ring, or the contour which is the common limit of the Figure and the field. Within the round area, the Figure is sitting on a chair, lying on the bed and sometimes it evens seems to be waiting for what is about to happen. But what is happening, or is about to happen, or has already happened is not a spectacle or a representation (Deleuze, 2003: 9). By isolating the Figure, Bacon attempted to condense the movement, the impulse and the emotion even before their materialisation. As argued by Deleuze: “the Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head, and acts through the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone” (p. 10). This complex mechanism may explain why Bacon’s painting impacts directly on our ‘nervous system’ and thus the conflicting sensations of agony and pleasure, anguish and convulsion, coexisting in the experience of seeing his paintings.

In the last rooms of the exhibition the dramatism of Bacon’s pictorial language appears more clearly. In the room called Epic, the format of the triptych reaches exquisite powers since the figures express drama, tragedy, and in some cases, abandon and pleasure. Furthermore, in the series of Portraits, Bacon aimed to reinvent portraiture in the age of the camera; he sought ‘to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance’6. The portraits of his friend, Isabelle Rawsthorne, convey the vision of a strong woman with a huge personality and charisma. As explained by Chris Stephens, the idea that an individual might be used by Bacon as the vehicle for certain aspects of the human condition seems especially evident in the paintings of George Dyer. Dyer, who became Bacon’s lover in 1963, had strong masculine features as his attire resembled that of a ‘gangster’ in East End London. In contrast, Bacon’s numerous portraits of Dyer suggest a fragile and sometimes comical individual. In the Portrait of George Dyer Riding a Bicycle (1966), the figure is silhouetted in fair depiction of the model and although the physical features of the face are distorted, the viewer can see the absurdity of his situation: riding in circles, heading for nowhere, chasing a shadow… unfortunately, this painting somehow anticipates Dyer’s tragic end.

By that time, Bacon had reached worldwide fame reinforced by the Retrospective at the Grand Palais of Arts in Paris in 1971. Ten years earlier, the exhibition of his work at Tate Gallery elevated Bacon as one of the most important British artists and this exhibition in Paris expanded his success. This was, however, a year of contrasts: in April his mother died in South Africa and another tragedy was looming over him. The evening before the triumphal exhibition at the Grand Palais while Bacon was busy with preparations – hanging paintings and sorting out the details of the night in which the President of France would open the ceremony – George Dyer committed suicide and his body was found in the room that he and Bacon shared. Not surprisingly, the events impacted Bacon deeply. As a way of grieving, Bacon embarked on a number of triptychs collected in the room Memorial. Amongst them, the Triptych in Memory of George Dyer (1971) brings to mind the scene of Dyer’s death: on the central panel a man opens a door, the key is just being removed from the keyhole, it is late at night as evidenced by a solitary light bulb at the top of the staircase; on the floor the cryptic typos of a newspaper sink into the strong red blood colour of the field. The rest of the canvas is painted in bright colours of lilac and pink which relate to the fields in the other two panels.

On the left panel, the convulsive yet athletic figure of a man lingers alongside a curve, a shadow pending on his existence. Bacon has often said that in the domain of the Figures, the shadow has as much presence as the body; but the shadow acquires this presence only because it escapes from the body. The shadow is the body that has escaped form through some localised point in the contour (Deleuze, 2003: 12). On the right panel, it is the figure of Dyer in a thick mirror, on the reflecting pair, the drop of life spilling carefully on the canvas. The use of mirrors represents another of the pictorial elements in Bacon’s work. As observed by Deleuze: “Bacon’s mirrors can be anything you like – except a reflecting surface. The mirror is an opaque and sometimes black thickness. Bacon does not experience the mirror in the same way as Lewis Carroll. The body enters the mirror and lodges itself inside it, itself and its shadow. Hence the fascination: nothing is behind the mirror, everything is inside. The body seems to elongate, flatten, or stretch itself out in the mirror, just as it contracted itself by going through the hole (Deleuze, 2003: 13).”

In general, the series of triptychs in the Memorial room are both haunting and remarkable. The fields of colours, the void of obscurity, the body in movement (in anticipation of death or pleasure), the shadows and the living flesh produces a long-lasting effect in the viewer. For instance, in Triptych May-June 1973 the treatment of the figure reveals Bacon’s heightened artistic powers. In this triptych, it is possible to imagine the last moments in Dyer’s life: the agonic figure crawling to the bathroom, clinging to the toilet, devoured by the dark void of death. The Figure is moving, yet it is fixed in a point; there is emotion, but there is also agony. The body is the focal point, but as in all his work, brushing or scrubbing deforms the features so the tones are subtle and alive. As argued by Deleuze, Bacon’s Figures represent one of the most marvellous responses in the history of painting to the question: ‘How can one make invisible forces visible? (…) Bodies and heads in Bacon’ paintings can look as deformations but they are not tortures, despite appearances. On the contrary, they are the most natural postures of a body that has been reorganised by the simple force being exerted upon it: the desire to sleep, to vomit, to turnover, to remain seated as long as possible.” (Deleuze, 2003: 42-43)

After almost eight decades of life, Bacon’s late paintings return to the common themes: new interpretations of the crucifixion such as the Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988), as well as a number of self-portraits. A general refinement of composition and expression is evident in the late paintings (Tant, 2008: 231). Getting to the end of the exhibition, I feel both isolated and stimulated. In fact, this is my third view of Bacon’s work. The first time was in March 2001 in the Netherlands when a small collection of his work was presented at the Gemeentenmuseum in The Hague where I made notes and drawings from this first encounter that I still keep. Whereas in The Hague I was fascinated with the colours and the effects of the skin, the movement and the passion; in London, I have been impressed by the complexity and depth of his work: the subtle qualities of movement, the dramatic scenes, his experience of war and the ambiguous sensations of pleasure and horror.

What is really remarkable about this exhibition is the opportunity to experience the power of Bacon’s imagery and the innovations of his treatment of the Figure. This Retrospective is the opportunity to go beyond appearances and prejudices, to embark into a solitary journey of reflection and sensation: to scream in silence, to agonise in joy, to vibrate in colours whilst touching the void, to live at the brink of a disaster. Although Bacon’s life and work referred to the last century, echoes of his paintings are still relevant today.

As Kenneth Clarke describes, he is ‘the interpreter of our contemporary nightmare’7. Bacon’s reminder of the ubiquitous disaster – evidenced in the latest worldwide financial crisis – of the horrors of human actions in a world without hope but driven by religious fundamentalism are ever-present in the works exhibited in this retrospective and demonstrate the perpetual power and relevance of his paintings. Although this review is a futile attempt to bring all the grandiosity of Bacon’s work together, it provides an invitation to forget everything you read and experience, this wonderful Retrospective.

REFERENCES:

Deleuze, Giles (2003) Francis Bacon. Original Title: Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation. Translation by Daniel W. Smith. Continuum: London

Gale, Matthew and Stephens, Chris (Editors) (2008) Francis Bacon. Catalogue Exhibition, Tate Publishing: London

Sylvester, David (1993) Interviews with Francis Bacon. London, 1975. Enlarged 1980, revised as “The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon” 1990, 4th Ed. As “Interviews with Francis Bacon”, 1993 Thames and Hudson: London

Peppiatt, Michael (1998) Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. The Orion Publishing Group: London

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon, Urbanist, at Tate Britain

 

 

 

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

 

 

TEXT BY NED BEAUMAN  |  DAZED DIGITAL  |  FRIDAY 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.”

 

 

 

 

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.

  

 


 

 

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

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Bacon makes a meal out of tragedy

 

 

 

 

 

 

CULTURE   |  REVIEW  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  SATURDAY, 25 OCTOBER 2008

 

 

Steadily, since the Thirties, the painter Francis Bacon had established himself as one of the greatest figures of 20th century British art. And, as a heavy-drinking Soho low-lifer with a string of violent boyfriends, he thought he had seen it all.

 

His first lover, Peter Lacy, an older man, would often tear up the young artist’s paintings or beat him up and leave him on the street half-conscious. But in 1971, he was to suffer a grievous blow.

 

George Dyer, an East End petty criminal Bacon had lived with since he caught him breaking into his home in 1964, committed suicide on the eve of a major retrospective in Paris.

 

The artist was devastated and started painting Triptych. An attempt to exorcise Bacon’s pain and guilt, it is a portrait of Dyer before his death and has been called one of his "supreme achievements", more tragic and sensitive than any of his other works.

 

In 2008, Francis Bacon’s Triptych 1976 became the most expensive work of contemporary art, fetching $86.3m.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 



 

 

AN UNFINISHED portrait of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud, one of

only two he ever painted of his friend and the only one whose…



 

 


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

 

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.

 

 


 


 Freud’s portrait of Bacon sold for £5.4m

 

 

 

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

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Glum sales

 

  Even a Freud cannot bring home the Bacon

 

 

MATTHEW MOORE  |  NEWS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2008

 

A LUCIAN FREUD portrait of his friend Francis Bacon has sold for £5.4 million at auction, significantly less than expected. The unfinished work, one of only two oil paintings that Freud ever undertook of Bacon, had been predicted to fetch £7 million when it went under the hammer at Christie’s in London yesterday.

It is the second disappointing price for a major contemporary work in file capital’s auction rooms in recent days, as the financial crisis takes its toll on what had been a booming market.

Skulls, a composite work by Andy Warhol, sold for £4.3 million — £2.7million less than had been expected — at Sotheby’s on Friday night Freud’s painting, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, depicting an overweight Job Centre worker asleep on a battered sofa, sold for £19.1 million in New York in May, a record for a living artist but there is now concern that prices for major works have passed their peak.

Freud and Bacon, both British painters, first met in 1945 and were friends until the latter’s death in 1992. The portrait which was completed in 1967 and had been owned by a private collector since 1972, was sold for £5,417,250.

The auction was timed to coincide with this weekend’s Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park, London. 

Matthew Moore

 

 

 

         Lucian Freud’s portrait of  Francis Bacon, above, had been predicted to fetch £7million at Christie’s
 

 


 

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

 

 

 

 

ALEXI MOSTROUS & RACHEL CAMPBELL-JOHNSON  |  NEWS  |  THE TIMES  |  MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2008

 

An economic chill blew through the art world yesterday when a rare painting of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud sold for £1.6 million less than expected. The unfinished portrait, one of only two Freud painted of his friend and fellow artist, was predicted to go for at least £7 million at the auction at Christie’s last night. The only other painting by Freud of Bacon was stolen in Berlin in 1988, making the one sold yesterday even more desirable.  

But in a sign of the frail financial climate, the sale netted only £5.4 million, perilously close to the auction house’s low estimate of £5 million. In contrast, Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping sold for £17.2 million in May, the highest price paid in an auction for a work by a living artist. The poor sale is likely to be seen as the canary in the coalmine in the art world – a clear warning that the market may be about to blow. 

 

On Friday, a Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art raised £22 million, far below the pre-sale estimate of between £31 million and £43 million. A spokesman for the London auction house said that it was pleased with the results but admitted that “the sale was assembled in a very different economic climate from that which prevailed today.” 

 

With both Christie’s and Sotheby’s due to stage key November sales in New York, experts fear that plunging stock prices, oil prices and the broader effects of the credit crunch could see the end of the art market boom. There are rumours that buyers reneged on their bids at the Damien Hirst sale last month, and both Sotheby’s and Christie’s have let it be known that they are not offering any credit. 

 

Art consultancies in New York are apparently being offered pieces at the sort of discounts that would not have been countenanced just a few months ago. At last week’s Frieze art fair in London, long regarded as a trusty indicator of the health of the contemporary art markets, the mood in some quarters was sour. 

 

“There is a lot of apprehension in the trade,” said Charles Dupplin of the art insurance company Hiscox.

“You could fire a cannon down the aisles this year and not hit anybody,” a dealer at the fair added. Top-end works have recently been fêted as a relatively safe bet compared with the turbulence gripping other investments, but the severity of falls in the value of equities, oil, property and other assets has left art – particularly contemporary pieces – vulnerable to a significant downward correction.

 

 

 

  

Portrait of Francis Bacon by Freud sells for £5.4 million

 

 

Irish Times, Sunday, October 19, 2008

 

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 today, auction house Christie’s said.

 

The 85-year-old Freud’s only other picture of his fellow artist Bacon, painted in 1952, was stolen from a show in Berlin in 1988 and has never been seen since in public.

 

The two men were firm friends. While Freud, who is regarded as one of the world’s greatest living artists, frequently sat for Bacon the latter, who died in 1992, returned the favour for only two portraits.

 

The unfinished portrait dates from 1956/7 and as with the missing painting it shows Bacon with downcast eyes.

"The present work offers a fascinating snapshot into the working methods of the artist at a critical point of his artistic development," said Christie’s in a statement.

 

"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."

 

Estimated to sell for between £5 and £7 million, the picture has been the property of the current owner since 1972 and has only rarely been seen in public, in 2002/3 and 2005.

 

In May Bacon’s Triptych, 1976 sold for $86 million setting a record for postwar art, while the day before that sale Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping established a new mark for a living artist when it sold for $33.64 million.

 

 

 

 

Lucien Freud’s portrait of Francis Bacon sells for less than expected

 

 

A Lucien Freud portrait of his friend Francis Bacon has sold for £5.4 million at auction,

significantly less than expected.

 

 

By MATTHEW MOORE  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  SUNDAY 19 OCTOBER 2008


 

The unfinished work, one of only two oil paintings that Freud ever undertook of Bacon, had been predicted to fetch £7 million when it went under the hammer at Christie’s in London. It is the second disappointing price for a major contemporary work in the capital’s auction rooms in recent days, as the financial crisis takes its toll on what had been a booming market.

 

Freud’s painting of an overweight JobCentre worker asleep on a sofa sold for £19.1 million in New York in May, a record for a living artist, but there is now concern that prices have passed their peak.

 

Freud and Bacon, both British painters, were friends for many years until the latter’s death in 1992. The portrait, which was completed [sic] in 1967 [sic] and had been owned by a private collector since 1972, was sold for £5,417, 250.

The auction was timed to coincide with this weekend’s Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park.



 

 

 

 

 

Christie’s Sale Misses Target as Crisis Quells Demand

 

 

 

By SCOTT REYBURN & KATYA KAZAKINA  |  BLOOMBERG  |  SUNDAY 19TH OCTOBER 2008

 

Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) – The contemporary-art market took another beating when Christie’s International failed to sell 45 percent of works at its October auction tonight in London.

Collectors are delaying purchases in the worst financial crisis since the Depression, dealers said. The evening sale, which included works by Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana and Lucien Freud , followed auctions at Sotheby’s  and Phillips de Pury & Co. that also fell below expectations. Christie’s 47-lot auction took 32 million pounds ($55.3 million) with fees, below the presale low estimate of 57 million pounds.

There was an eerie hush in a crowded room as auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen knocked down the lots in less than an hour.

Three of these failed to sell, including Bacon’s Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1969). The small yellow canvas flopped against a presale low estimate of 5.5 million pounds. These failed guaranteed lots were expected to fetch at least 7.95 million pounds.

"Things have been overpriced; they need to come down,'' said Glenn Scott-Wright, director at London’s Victoria Miro gallery, who attended the sale. "If Christie's had dropped the reserves by 20 percent, it would have done better.''

Freud's Bacon

London dealer Stephen Ongpin, bidding for a collector, bought the evening's other high-value lot, Freud’s 1956-57 unfinished portrait of Bacon. He paid 5.4 million pounds for the life-size face of the artist, against the presale low estimate of 5 million pounds.

  "Obviously we need to adjust our prices,'' said Ed Dolman, Christie's chief executive officer. "There isn't too much confidence out there.'' 

 

 

 

 

 Why this man terrifies us all

 

 

 

 

Tonight, Lucian Freud’s portrait of his friend Francis Bacon is to be auctioned.

The art world hopes it will net £7m, but there are signs the market is stalling.

 

 

So will the Christie’s sale indicate that the global financial crisis is about to get worse?

 

 

 

By ANDREW JOHNSON   |   NEWS   |   THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY   |   SUNDAY 19 OCTOBER 2008

 

 

The face seems to be peering through a tear in the canvas, lips pursed and eyes downcast. To the art world, and the rest of us, this could be the face of doom.

The portrait of Francis Bacon by fellow artist Lucian Freud is the centrepiece of an important sale today. Christie’s auction house hopes it will fetch £7m. If it doesn’t – as now seems likely – dealers in the previously lavish market for contemporary art will know that they face deep financial trouble. It will also indicate that the global financial crisis is affecting even the super-rich.

The Frieze Art Fair last week attracted stars such as Gwyneth Paltrow but sale prices were much lower than expected. The signs are that buyers are holding back until they know what happens to the Freud portrait: it’s seen as the canary in the coalmine that could tell everyone the market is about to blow.

"There is a lot of apprehension in the trade," said Charles Dupplin of the art insurance company Hiscox. Staff at Christie’s are said to be worried about today’s sale.

The first signs of trouble came on Friday when an auction of art at Sotheby’s in London, timed to coincide with Frieze, fell far short of what was expected. The estimated sales total of £30m had been low, but the actual figure was £22m. Even Andy Warhol, one of the most bankable artists of the 20th century, failed to live up to expectations: a series of skulls expected to fetch at least £5m went for £4.3m.

"People won’t be surprised if Frieze is quite muted," said Mr Dupplin. The global market is all but dead already, he said, except for buyers of "trophy art" whose fortunes have previously seemed unassailable. If they stop bidding, prices will plummet.

Among them is the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Earlier this year he paid £17.2m for Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, making Lucian Freud the highest-priced living artist at auction. He also made the late Francis Bacon the most expensive artist ever by spending £43m on Triptych (1976). So it seems reasonable to expect he might bid big for a portrait of one of those painters by the other.

The only other picture of its kind was stolen in 1988 and has never been found. This one was begun in the winter of 1956, but abandoned after Bacon refused to continue with the sittings. If it doesn’t sell well, it will be proof that even the trophy hunters are cutting back. If it does, then a surge in confidence will keep the market going. For now.

 
 

 

 Francis Bacon painting may sell for up to €10m

 

 

 

 

RONAN McGREEVY   |   NEWS   |   THE IRISH TIMES   |   SATURDAY 18 OCTOBER, 2008

 

FRANCIS Bacon painting which once hung in the drawing room of Luggala in Co Wicklow is to go for auction at Christie’s in London tomorrow and is expected to fetch €7 million to €10 million.

The Portrait of Henrietta Moraesb was bought by Guinness heir Garech Browne for his home at Luggala in 1970 and at one stage was the only Bacon painting in Ireland, even though the artist was born in Dublin. Browne (69), the founder of Claddagh Records and a long-time patron of the arts, was friends with both Bacon and Moraes. He met Bacon through the artist Lucian Freud. Freud was married to Mr Browne’s cousin Caroline Blackwood. Their friendship was strengthened through membership of London’s infamous bohemian Colony Club, which is shortly to close down.

Moraes was a famous 1960s model and socialite who was one of Bacon’s favourite subjects and the painting, to be sold on Sunday, is one of his first portraits of her. She was also regularly painted by Freud. Moraes was an alcoholic and addict, and was jailed at one time. She sobered up in later years and lived for several years as the caretaker of Roundwood House, Co Wicklow.

The painting is signed on the back by Moraes, who writes: “For the first time A vision of me by my friend Francis Bacon with Gareth at Luggala 30-6-767 I love y 2 good heavens Henrietta Moraes.” Mr Browne helped secure the Francis Bacon studio for the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin through his friendship with Bacon’s former lover John Edwards, who inherited the Bacon estate.

Mr Browne also lent the painting to the gallery. “It was the Edwards family who promised me, with the support of the Bacon Foundation, to donate something to Ireland. This was the most extraordinary gift that this State has received recently,” he said. Mr Browne said the painting is too valuable to insure and keep at his estate, but he is hopeful that a buyer will lend it to an Irish institution to go on exhibition.

“To my mind, Francis Bacon is, along with Lucian Freud, the greatest artist of the second half of the 20th century. Contrary to what people think, Bacon did not hate Ireland. This painting means so much to me and to other people and I would like to see it kept in Ireland in some form,” he said. The painting was admired by many of the hundreds of artists who have visited Luggala.

The film director John Boorman said: “For more than 30 years Henrietta Moraes has looked down from her Bacon portrait on the walls of Luggala and witnessed the parade of poets (including after her death, her former husband Dom Moraes), scoundrels and musicians that have enjoyed Garech Browne’s favour. We will miss her.”

The poet Seamus Heaney said: “Garech a Brún has played host to generations of writers, artists and musicians in his home at Luggala, and it was in that magical setting, half way between bohemia and Parnassus, that I met the distinguished Indian poet, Dom Moraes, one of the first contemporary poets I had read.” Interest in Bacon’s work has never been greater among the art-collectors.

A record price for a Bacon of $55.465 million (€41.2 million) was paid by Russian billionaire and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich in May for the Triptych 1976.

 

 

 

               From left to right: Stan Gebler Davies, Gloria MacGowran, Francis Bacon and the Hon. Garech Browne.


 

 

 

 

Freud’s Bacon Portrait Recalls Bohemian Soho

 

 

 

PREVIEW BY MARTIN GAYFORD   |   BLOOMBERG   |   FRIDAY, 17 OCTOBER, 2008

 

Great British artists, it seems, are like buses. None comes along for ages, then two arrive together. In the early 19th century there were Constable and Turner, then – with the arguable exception of Sickert – no painter of truly international stature until Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon appeared in the 1940s.

On Oct. 19, one of only two painted portraits of Bacon by Freud will go under the hammer at Christie’s International in London, with an estimate range of 5 million pounds ($8.6 million) to 7 million pounds. The other picture of Bacon by Freud was stolen from a Berlin show 20 years ago and has never been recovered. Bacon also painted Freud on numerous occasions, but for reasons that can only be guessed at never with such intensity.

In the past few years those two have come to bestride the contemporary art world like twin colossi. This year, Freud took the title of the world’s most expensive living artist at auction, with the sale of Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) for $33.6 million at Christie’s in New York on May 13.

A mere 24 hours later Bacon, who died in 1992, achieved the title of the most expensive contemporary artist when Triptych (1976) sold for $86.3 million at Sotheby’s in New York. Bacon, born in 1909, was 13 years Freud’s senior, but was only just emerging as a major talent when Freud first encountered him. They met through a common friend, Graham Sutherland.

Best in Britain

One day, Freud told me recently, he asked Sutherland who was the greatest artist at work in Britain. Since Sutherland himself was a celebrated painter, this was a distinctly tactless inquiry. "I was young at the time, though that’s no excuse,'' Freud said.

Sutherland took it well, however, and replied, "It’s someone you’ve never heard of called Francis Bacon.’’ Soon afterwards they were introduced. In the late 1940s and early '50s, Bacon and Freud shared a milieu, centering on certain bars and clubs in London's Soho area.

Another member of their circle was the wild and bohemian Henrietta Moraraes,  who had a relationship with Freud. She posed for Girl in a Blanket (1952), one of a number of rarely seen early works by Freud on show in a museum-quality loan exhibition of early Freud works at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery, 38 Bury St. (through Dec. 12).

Nude photographs of Moraes by John Deakin were later the basis for numerous paintings by Bacon in the ’60s. One of these is expected to fetch as much as 7.5 million pounds in the Christie’s Oct. 19 London sale. Freud’s lost portrait of Bacon (1952) was – and one hopes, still is, wherever it is hidden – a masterpiece. "I saw a lot of him at that time,'' Freud told me in 2001, "and we were very friendly, so it was natural for me to paint him.''

Bacon’s Gripes

In comparison with Bacon’s own methods – generally he worked from photographs – Freud’s paintings require an enormous investment of time from his model.

"Bacon complained a lot about sitting, which he always did about everything, but not to me at all," Freud said. "I heard about it, you know, from people in the pub. Really, he was very good about it.'' In an attempt to recover the lost portrait, Freud designed a "wanted'' poster (an example is on show at the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Gallery), which was distributed in Germany seven years ago, sadly with no success.

The later portrait of 1956-57 that is going to be auctioned is only the beginning of a picture. Still, because of Freud's unusual technique Bacon's face is almost complete. Freud tends to begin at a point and work outwards. In this case, when Freud had reached the fringe of his hair and the lower edge of his face, Bacon suddenly disappeared, probably on a jaunt to Tangier, leaving the picture a brooding fragment. Even so, it is a powerful record of one of the most intriguing pairings in 20th-century art.

 

 

 

 

John Russell: an appreciation

 

 

John Russell, art critic and author, born January 22, 1919.

Died August 23, 2008

 

 

RICHARD CORK  |  THE TIMES  |  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2008

 

Looking back, I realise that John Russell had a formative and wholly beneficial influence on my growing involvement with art. In 1960, when I was thirteen years old, I wandered into the Wallace Collection and had an unforgettable epiphany. The paintings there by Rubens, Poussin, Velazquez and above all Rembrandt overwhelmed me. From then on, looking at art became my obsession, and every weekend John’s art column in The Sunday Times enriched my mind.

Trapped at a boarding school in Bath, I envied John his ability to roam around London, Paris, Venice and the rest of Europe visiting the best exhibitions on offer. His life struck me as idyllic, and the fact that he also wrote books and curated exhibitions sharply increased my admiration. John’s inspiring example made me realise that art critics need not confine themselves to penning a weekly review. They can also write at length, and in depth, about the art that matters most to them. John, a famously and enviably swift writer, became a prolific author. He also curated a succession of impressive exhibitions, surveying the achievements of Modigliani in 1964, Rouault in 1966 and Balthus in 1968.

Reading his regular criticism, I warmed to a writer whose reviews were always informed by a discerning awareness of history. But I particularly liked John’s growing engagement with the art of his own time. During the 1960s he was quick to champion young artists at the time of their emergence. Painters and sculptors as outstanding as David Hockney, Ron Kitaj, Howard Hodgkin and Anthony Caro all benefited from his enthusiastic response at crucial points in their careers. Hungry for adventurous new art myself, I was fascinated by John’s reviews of these and other artists in the 1960s.

At a time when so many British gallery-goers still waxed vehement in their scornful dismissal of innovative art, John stood out as an enlightened exception. He realised, increasingly, that the 1960s was an extraordinary period for contemporary art in Britain. And he refused to court popularity with his more philistine readers by dismissing the boldest experimenters out of hand. Far from sneering and playing for easy laughs by condemning the most audacious young artists, he preferred to advance understanding and discover how they were enlarging the language of art.

In other words, John provided a tonic and played an important part in countering the knee-jerk hatred of modernism which had poisoned British culture for so long. At a time when plenty of people were ready to sneer at Warhol or Lichtenstein, he organised with Suzi Gablik a defiantly celebratory survey of Pop Art at the Hayward Gallery. And he was no less willing to stand against the antagonism so often aimed at Francis Bacon. When I first met Bacon in 1971, he made clear that he expected nothing but hostility from his fellow-countrymen. Without any self-pity, Bacon told me he had recently looked through “all the reviews I’ve had from my Marlborough shows over the years”, and “all of them, virtually without exception, were bad.” But in that very same year, 1971, John published a book on Bacon which provided a far more positive and insightful analysis.

Bacon’s work brought out the most dynamic, supple and visceral side of John’s critical writing. Just listen to this passage, where he closes with relish on the essence of Bacon’s restless and tormented vision: “Bacon wrenched, reversed, abbreviated, jellified and generally reinvented the human image. The paint-structure was by turns brusque and sumptuous, lyrical and offhand, pulpy and marmoreal. Swerving, pouncing, colliding with itself, taking for granted the most bizarre conjunctions of impulse, it produced a multiple imagery which was quite new in painting.”

I admired John’s open-mindedness, and respected his willingness to fight British philistinism with vigour. Even after he moved to New York, John was more than ready to weigh in on the side of audacious art. When the so-called bricks rumpus exploded on this side of the Atlantic in 1976, tabloid newspapers crowed over the Tate’s acquisition of Carl Andre’s sculpture. The Daily Mirror plastered its front page with the headline “What A Load Of Rubbish”, but John sent a fiercely supportive letter commending the Tate’s willingness to purchase the bricks.

When I started out at as a critic myself, on the Evening Standard, plenty of reactionaries dismissed my championship of conceptual developments. In 1973, when I curated a show of young artists like Richard Long, older critics deplored the exhibition. But John saluted my efforts by referring to D.H.Lawrence, who once declared that he would like his writing to make people “alter, and have more sense.” John claimed that Lawrence had defined “the eventual aim of all art that is worth talking about.” But I believe that Lawrence’s words could equally well be applied to John’s own work. He succeeded, through his energetic, incisive, eloquent and impassioned writings, in making us “alter, and have more sense.” I am delighted to pay tribute to John’s immense and indispensable achievement.

 

 


 

 

                     Russell was ever grateful to be allowed to “to conduct his education in public”


 

 

 

 

 

 Munch, Bacon and Warhol at Sotheby’s Show

 

 

 

 

MARINA KAMENEV  |  THE MOSCOW TIMES  |  ISSUE 4011  |  THURSDAY, 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.

 

 

 

 

 Brothers in art

 

 

 

Unfinished Freud portrait of Bacon may fetch £7m 

 

 

STEPHEN ADAMS  |  NEWS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2008

 

 A PORTRAIT of the painter Francis Bacon by his Mend Lucian Freud is expected to sell for up to £7million at auction this week even though it was never finished. Bacon abandoned the sittings, in 1956 and 1957, before the study was completed.

Despite a decades-long friendship, it is one of only two oil paintings that Freud undertook of Bacon, who died in 1992. The other, painted in 1952, was stolen from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1988 while on loan from the Tate and was never found.

Christie’s will auction the picture on Sunday evening, a highlight of a week which also sees the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park and two major auctions at Sotheby’s.

Both Freud and Bacon have broken auction records this year. Freud’s Benefit Supervisor Sleeping sold for $33.6 million (£19.1 million) in New York in May, a record for a living artist.

 A triptych by Bacon went for $86 million (£48.9 million) in the same month, a record for a piece of contemporary art.  Stephen Adams

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon painting by Lucian Freud expected to

fetch £7m at Christie’s auction

 

 

STEPHEN ADAMS  |  NEWS  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2008

 

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.

 

 


 


The modern Irish master

 

 

You don’t have to travel all the way to the Tate Britain in London to see

a unique piece of Francis Bacon’s legacy, says Caroline O’Leary

 

 

Trinity News, Ireland’s oldest college newspaper, Monday 13 October, 2008

 

As a country, Ireland prides itself on its cultural talent, having produced four Nobel Prize winners for literature and many important figures in the areas of acting, theatre, film, poetry and more. Yet few Irish artists have truly succeeded in making their mark on the world canvas and distinguishing themselves outside of their home country. Painter Francis Bacon is a unique exception to this rule, an artist of such talent and innovation that his works are now almost equal in value to those of masters Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet.

Such is Bacon’s success that last year his work Triptych, 1976 sold at Sotheby’s auction house for a post-war record of €56.465 million, making it the twelfth most expensive painting ever sold. In celebration of Bacon and his career, a major retrospective exhibition of his work is now on show at the Tate Britain in London, coinciding with the centenary of the artist’s birth next year. This exhibition, the first since Bacon’s death in 1992, is a cross-section of the artist’s life and works, celebrating his unique talent and inspiring us to examine the life and painting of this enigmatic artist who we seem to so rarely notice.

At first glance, there is something about Bacon’s work that intrigues the viewer. Triptych - August 1972 is a quintessential example of his technique. The flat, stark backgrounds throw the distorted foreground figures into high relief and expose the full extent of twisted limbs, gaping mouths and staring eyes. Curator of the Tate exhibition, Chris Stephens, describes Bacon as “probably the most important painter of the human figure ever.” Yet, as with Bacon’s greatest inspiration, Picasso, it is not the figures themselves that draw the viewer in but rather their unsettling manipulation. Such manipulation ranges from distorted limbs and features to the dissection of certain figures, exposing not only the blood and tissue that is common to man and animal but also the vulnerability they share.

A Francis Bacon painting is difficult to mistake, or, indeed, avoid and the artist was capable of both repulsing and fascinating the viewer – a rare ability possessed only by a few artists, such as master of surrealism, Salvador Dali. Also affecting the viewer is the texture of his works, a result of his preference for painting on the unprimed side of canvas and enhanced by his own deliberate “printing” with materials such as cotton, corduroy and cashmere. Looking at these paintings, you are transported into Bacon’s own garish world.

Bacon’s rather extraordinary life explains somewhat the inspiration behind both the artist’s subjects and his innovative techniques. Born in Dublin to English parents in 1909, his life reads like a bizarre, hedonistic soap opera. At the age of 16, he was banished from his Naas family home after being caught by his father cross-dressing in his mother’s underwear, the final nail in an already strained relationship with his family due to his homosexuality. Bacon then worked his way around London and later Europe, advertising himself as a “gentleman’s companion.”

The cultural influences of Paris and Berlin, specifically exhibitions of artists such as Picasso and Nicolas Poussin, eventually inspired him to return to London and take up painting. Seemingly entirely self-taught, Bacon first began a business as a furniture designer and interior decorator before moving onto oil paintings and rugs with the support of well-connected friends.

His first and most important painting of that time was Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, which established his signature style with its burnt orange backgrounds and stone gray monstrous figures. Based on the furies of ancient Greek mythology, the biomorphic quality of these characters are an obvious allusion to Picasso’s own distorted figures. The painting was both acclaimed for its originality and feared for its grotesque and unnerving creatures, the like of which had not been seen in art before.

Bacon’s talent and technique – and, thus, his acclaim – evolved steadily, but his personal life continued to be blighted with misfortune, something identifiable in his work. In particular, the suicide of his partner and muse George Dyer on the eve of his first major retrospective exhibition in 1973 can be seen in pieces such as In Memory of George Dyer and May-June 1973. In the latter, lost, shadowed figures of his former lover are presented in different poses and guises, expressing the figure’s dark, unhappy life and Bacon’s own grief at his loss. Less personal subjects were also dealt with in great detail, as can be seen in some of his most celebrated paintings, such as his series of studies based on Velázquez’s famous Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

After experiencing a difficult childhood in Ireland, Bacon was not a frequent visitor to his birth country. Yet, despite his constant travelling and home-base in London, his former partner John Edwards bequeathed the entire contents of Bacon’s studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin after his death. Draft material and papers, originally gifted to friend Barry Joule, were later donated to form the Barry Joule Archive in Dublin. These materials, particularly the studio, delighted critics by offing unprecedented insight into Bacon’s method, techniques and eccentricities.

In his studio, one can find piles of paint cans, pastels, crumpled photographs with creases coloured in and even the paint-stained walls of the room, which he frequently used instead of palettes. The most real part of Bacon, in a sense, then, can be found in Dublin and, while his Tate exhibition will soon leave for Spain and New York, this studio will remain in the city and allow us to enjoy the genius of Ireland’s greatest artist.  

 

 

 

On the giants’ causeway

 

 

Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and the agonies of sitting

 

 

The Economist, Saturday, October 11th 2008

 

LUCIAN FREUD and Francis Bacon, the two giants of post-war British painting, met in 1945. Bacon was 36, Mr Freud not even 23. Mr Freud had heard about the mysterious and distinctive Irish-born artist from Graham Sutherland. Shortly afterwards, Sutherland invited them both to spend the weekend at his English country house, and they met at the railway station on the way there. An intense bond quickly developed. “Once I met him I saw him a lot,” Mr Freud would recall later.

Close friends, it was inevitable that sooner or later each would begin to appear in the other’s paintings. Mr Freud was called to the studio for his first portrait by Bacon in 1951. This was unusual, as Bacon usually preferred working from secondary media, such as photographs.

 

Mr Freud quickly discovered why. When he returned to the studio after his first sitting, he found that in his absence the portrait had metamorphosed into something quite different; it now looked very much like the snapshot of the Prague-born early 20th-century writer, Franz Kafka, that was to be found among the debris littering the floor where Bacon worked.

 

Bacon’s freewheeling approach to portraiture, so visible in his intimate rendition of another larger-than-life character, Henrietta Moraes (pictured), was something that intrigued Freud deeply.

 

Throughout his 20s, Mr Freud painted in a meticulous, painstaking way, often using unusually fine sable-hair brushes. He liked to sit while he painted. But in 1954, he began to paint standing at his easel, something he still does today, even at the age of 85. He also began using thicker, hog’s hair brushes and stopped relying on underdrawing. All of these changes encouraged a style of painting that was far more spontaneous and direct.

 

Mr Freud’s friendship with the ever-moving Bacon was crucial to this. Later Mr Freud would recall that Bacon talked about “packing a lot of things into one single brushstroke, which amused and excited me, and I realised that was a million miles from anything I could ever do.” That did not stop him trying, though.

 

Mr Freud’s two portraits of Francis Bacon emphasise how much the younger artist was trying to change. The compositions are very similar. But in the 1952 work the influence of drawing has the effect of making the painting more fixed, less free; as in the curling combed hair, the cleft of the lips and the lines under the left eye. Mr Freud took three months to paint that portrait. The two men sat knee to knee, Bacon looking downwards (the same pose that had appeared a year earlier in a drawing Mr Freud made of his friend). Bacon, notoriously restless, “grumbled but sat consistently”.

 

Four years later Mr Freud began a second painting (pictured above). Although incomplete, there is already a remarkable stillness in the features. Again Bacon is looking down. It could be for a second or even an hour; there is no way of knowing. He looks a little jaded, made worse by the use of greens and yellows. Indeed the whole atmosphere of the face is created out of a rich palette of delicate colour, especially around the eyelids and eyelashes. 

 

 “I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them,” Mr Freud would say years later. “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.”

 

Mr Freud’s 1952 portrait of Bacon was bought by the Tate Gallery. In 1988, while on loan to an exhibition in Berlin, it was stolen. It has never been recovered. The portrait that Mr Freud began in 1956 remains his only surviving painting of Bacon. The older artist, ever restless, abandoned sitting for this work to pursue his lover, Peter Lacy, to Tangier. It was never finished.

 

Portrait of Henrietta Moraes by Francis Bacon will be sold at Christie’s on October 19th. The estimate is £5.5m-7.5m ($9.5m-13m). Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud is in the same sale, estimate £5m-7m.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon (1909—1992)

 

 

Linda Nochlin, Milan Kundera and others on Francis Bacon 

 

 

To coincide with the Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain, we bring together a mix of writers,

 

museum directors, artists, musicians and film-makers — some of whom knew him and some

 

who came to his work through art books or exhibitions — to pay homage.

 

 

 

TATE etc, Issue 14 / Autumn 2008

 

“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 re-read Aeschylus, I tried to create images of the sensations that some 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. When I look at grass, sometimes I feel like pulling out a clump and transplanting it inside a frame, but of course that would not 'work', and we are rightly forced to invent methods by which reality can force itself upon our nervous system in a new way, yet without losing sight of the model’s objectivity.”

— Francis Bacon, letter to Michel Leiris, 20 November 1981

 

 

Linda Nochlin on Triptych – May–June 1973

 

Francis Bacon created this ambitious Triptych in May and June of 1973. In the artist’s terms, as scrupulously articulated in the letter to the French critic Michel Leiris cited above, it is certainly a realist work, although it hardly corresponds to less personal definitions of realism. Its iconography refers to a real event, the death of his lover; its mode of expression to the visceral profundity – Bacon’s reality – of the effect produced by this terrible occurrence.

It was in the late 1960s and 1970s that Bacon created his series of triptychs, not all of them completely successful, but many of them powerful and disturbingly original. According to the French theorist Gilles Deleuze in his Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation, 1981), the triptych form enabled the artist to engage with the human figure without being drawn into the conventional storytelling mode. “It’s not only that the painting is an isolated reality, and not only that the triptych consists of three isolated panels and the fundamental rule that they never be united into a single frame: it’s rather that the Figure itself is isolated in the painting… And Bacon has often told us why: in order to avoid the figurative, illustrative and narrative character that the Figure would necessarily assume if it weren’t in isolation.”

In this work, however, one of the most memorable of the great triptychs of the 1970s, Bacon is less set than usual on staving off the demon narrative. Here, contrary to Deleuze’s assertion that the form serves an isolating function, it seems to me that the images beg to be read as a story, from left to right. And the story, at once personal and melodramatic, is riveting: the suicide, just before the opening of a major retrospective of Bacon’s work in 1971–1972 at the Grand Palais, of George Dyer at the Hôtel des Saint-Pères in Paris. The ignoble furniture of daily recuperation – the toilet, the sink, the starkly singular light bulb – become the instruments of Dyer’s Passion. To the left, he shits; to the right, he vomits; in the centre, he hovers against the black background, which is transmuted into a giant shadow, his shadow.

In the opaque darkness, death itself assumes the form, however inchoate, of a giant bat, a consuming demon, a revenging angel. Sex, death and the throes of creation are at one here, as Jean-Claude Lebensztejn pointed out in a brilliant catalogue essay for the 1996 Bacon retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, an extended analysis of the recurrent squirt of white paint streaking across the surface of many of the artist’s most intense canvases of the period. Figured as a kind of materialised sexual spasm, a jet of sperm, the white spurts up in the final, right-hand image of the triptych, in which Dyer, who has overdosed, spews up his soul into the hotel washbasin.

Why this persistent “fear of narrative”, permeating not only Bacon’s own statements about his work – “ 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” – but most of the critical analyses of his work, both pro and con? Almost everyone who has discussed Bacon – most prominently Deleuze, but David Sylvester as well – hastens to defend the artist from charges of illustrativeness, calling attention to his anti-narrative strategies, strategies in which the format of the triptych, the isolation of the human figure and the patent flatness of the pictorial siting play an important role. Yet if one examines the formal structure of Triptych – May–June 1973, one cannot help but be struck by Bacon’s deliberate effort to create connection among the three images, rather than isolation of the individual elements. The human protagonist at various stages of his dying is bound to his tragic fate by the repeated vertical counter­point of the architectonic framework of wooden panelling, a motif that plays against the dynamic curvilinear interjections of the human form and its appurtenances, and is bracketed at either end by a realistic light switch and wire, such as might be found in the Hôtel des Saints-Pères and marks the event’s specific time and place. The story is narrated in terms of this structure, its sequential agonies staged against the repeated greyish blankness of the rug at the bottom of each panel. Certainly in terms of Bacon’s definition of realism, it is a realist work, but, to me, it is a realist narrative as well.

Anti-narrative defensiveness is understandable enough in the context of the heady days of Abstract Expressionism (which Bacon ostensibly hated, but which obviously exerted a certain seductive power on his formal language), an era when “illustration”, “decoration” and “narrative” functioned as the signs of artistic failure. Nobody, however, really explains just why illustration and narration are such terrible sins, temptations to be avoided at all costs. After all, British art, from Hogarth to the Pre-Raphaelites and beyond, has had a considerable positive engagement with narration – and often narration in the service of morality at that.

Perhaps that is why Bacon and his supporters have been particularly keen to separate the artist from this tradition, to make sure that he is seen and judged as a player in the game of international modernism, as a painter whose formal inventiveness and up-to-date kinkiness and anguish sever his work completely from all connection with the fuddy-duddy past of British pictorial history. But this would be a shame, especially in the case of the 1973 Triptych and some of the other ambitious works relating to it, such as Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer (1971), or Triptych – August 1972, also three-part pictures, recalling, however dimly, the religious triptychs of Christian art.

 

Milan Kundera

For a long time, Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett made up a couple in my imaginary gallery of modern art. Then I read the interview Bacon did with Michel Archimbaud: “I’ve always been amazed by this pairing of Beckett and me,” Bacon said. “I’ve always felt that Shakespeare expressed much better and more precisely and more powerfully what Beckett and Joyce were trying to say.” And then later: “I wonder if Beckett’s ideas about his art haven’t wound up killing off his creation. There’s something at once too systematic and too intelligent in him, that may be what’s always bothered me.” And again: “In painting, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough, but in Beckett I’ve often had the sense that as a result of seeking to eliminate, nothing was left any more, and that nothingness finally sounded hollow.”

When one artist talks about another one, he is always talking (indirectly, in a roundabout way) of himself. In talking about Beckett, what is Bacon telling us about him­self? That he is refusing to be categorised. That he wants to protect his work against clichés. Next: that he is resisting the dogmatists of modernism who have erected a barrier between tradition and modern art as if, in the history of art, the latter represented an isolated period with its own incomparable values, with its completely autonomous criteria. Whereas Bacon looks to the history of art in its entirety; the twentieth century does not cancel our debts to Shakespeare.

And further: he is refusing to express his ideas on art in too systematic a fashion, fearing to stifle his creative unconscious; fearing also to allow his art to be turned into a kind of simplistic message. He knows that the danger is all the greater because art is now clogged with a noisy, opaque logorrhoea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media-free contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener). Wherever he can, Bacon therefore blurs his tracks to throw off interpreters who try to reduce his work to an over-facile programme: he bridles at using the word “horror” with regard to his art; he stresses the role of chance in his painting (chance turning up in the course of the work – an accidental spot of paint that abruptly changes the very subject of the picture); he insists on the word “play” when everyone is making much of the seriousness of his paintings. People want to talk about his despair? Very well, but, he specifies immediately, in this case it is a joyous despair.

From the reflection on Beckett quoted, I pull out this remark: “In painting, we always leave in too much that is habit, we never eliminate enough…” Too much that is habit, which is to say: everything in painting that is not the painter’s own discovery, his fresh contribution, his originality; everything that is inherited, routine, filler, elaboration considered to be technical necessity. Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with “filler”, do away with whatever comes from habit, from technical routine, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say). So it is with Bacon: the backgrounds of his paintings are hyper-simple, flat-colour; but in the foreground, the bodies are treated with a richness of colours and forms that is all the denser. Now, that (Shakespearian) richness is what matters to him. For without that richness (richness contrasting with the flat-colour background), the beauty would be ascetic, as if “put on a diet”, as if diminished, and for Bacon the issue always and above all is beauty, the explosion of beauty, because even if the word seems nowadays to be hackneyed, out of date, it is what links him to Shakespeare.

Like Bacon, Beckett had no illusions about the future, either of the world or of art. And at that moment in the last days of illusions, both men show the same immensely interesting and significant reaction: wars, revolutions and their setbacks, massacres, the imposture we call democracy – all these subjects are absent from their works. In his Rhinoceros (1959), Ionesco is still interested in the great political questions. Nothing like that in Beckett. Picasso paints Massacre in Korea (1951). An inconceivable subject for Bacon. Living through the end of a civilisation (as Beckett and Bacon were or thought they were), the ultimate brutal confrontation is not with a society, with a state, with a politics, but with the physiological materiality of man. That is why even the great subject of the Crucifixion, which used to concentrate within itself the whole ethics, the whole religion, indeed the whole history of the West, becomes in Bacon’s hands a simple physiological scandal. “I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughter­houses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There’ve been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death…” To link Jesus nailed to the cross with slaughterhouses and animals’ fear might seem sacrilegious. But Bacon is a non-believer, and the notion of sacrilege has no place in his way of thinking; according to him, “man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason”.

Bacon often spied on that workshop of the Creator; it can be seen, for instance, in the pictures called Studies of the Human Body (1970), in which he unmasks the body as a simple “accident”, an accident that could as easily have been fashioned some other way, for instance – I don’t know – with three hands, or with the eyes set in the knees. These are the only pictures of his that fill me with horror. But is “horror” the right word? No. For the sensation that these pictures arouse, there is no right word. What they arouse is not the horror we know, the one in response to the insanities of history, to torture, persecution, war, massacres, suffering. No. This is a different horror: it comes from the accidental nature, suddenly unveiled by the painter, of the human body. 

 

Hugh Davies on Triptych – May–June 1973

Triptych – May–June 1973 is Bacon’s tribute to his friend and lover George Dyer. I saw this painting in his studio over a number of weeks as it was being painted. At the time I was doing my doctoral dissertation on Bacon’s work, so I got to meet and talk with him many times during the course of 1973. The studio was small, so he could do only one panel at a time, and would lean the others against the wall.

This is more or less his record of what happened. In 1971 Dyer committed suicide on the eve of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in the Paris hotel in which they were staying. Dyer overdosed from pills and alcohol and, from the evidence in the bathroom, he vomited in the sink. He was found slumped on the toilet. They had two bedrooms with an adjoining bathroom, so Bacon then painted the panels from different perspectives. One is from Dyer’s side and the other is from Bacon's. He was very influenced by film as we know, and using the triptych format was a way of capturing time, but he wanted to avoid the obvious linear narrative, which is why he changed the order of events in the picture so you can’t read it from left to right. Dyer vomits in the right panel, and is dying, or dead, in a foetal position in the first panel.

When I was first writing about the work, Bacon was still alive, so we tended not to write about the fact that Dyer had committed suicide. People who have written subsequently have criticised me for making a literal interpretation of events, as they believed the artist was painting a metaphorical depiction of death. However, the reality is, I believe, that this painting is the most graphic narrative engagement he ever made. When I spoke to Bacon at the time, I might have expected him to be dispassionate about the event, and to talk about the painting in formal terms, but it was clear that he was deeply affected by it. The painting was, for him, a form of catharsis. He had said how extraordinarily unfortunate and sad the incident was, but not in terms of “oh, I wish I’d come back to the room a few hours earlier”. I felt that he thought there was a sort of inevitability about Dyer’s death.

Bacon painted two earlier triptychs that also deal with the subject, which to me are works that lead up to Triptych – May–June 1973. The first is Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer (1971), which is like an honest diaristic memory of him. In the centre panel you see Dyer turning a key in the door – a reference to T S Eliot’s “I’ve heard the key turn in the lock”. But, for me, it’s Bacon envisaging George returning to the hotel room. In the second, Triptych – August 1972, he has painted a grey section roughly in the centre of each of the three canvases. It resembles a wrestling ring, a platform or a theatre stage. The figures sit on the “stage”, projecting out to the viewer, their forms highlighted by the black background. However, in Triptych – May–June 1973 the figures have crossed the threshold and into the darkness, which I think was a very conscious decision on his part to represent Dyer’s passage into death. As for the two arrows that he painted in the bottom section of both the left and right panels, he said that these additions gave the figures a specificity and formality that he likened to police photographs. He wanted to make the paintings seem more clinically distanced. He also told me that the source of these arrows – aside from police photographs – were sports books, and in particular a golfing book by Jack Nicklaus. The illustrations of Jack playing out of various predicaments were embellished with blocky red arrows indicating the direction of the club and intended ball flight.

In a similar fashion, Bacon used the arrows in Triptych – May–June 1973 in an attempt to bring a form of professional objectivity to the painful process of both recording and coming to terms with the death of his partner. I think he managed to depict that loss with great honesty and empathy. It’s a singularly powerful, contemporary and cathartic depiction of the death of a loved one.

 

John Maybury on Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)

I used to live in a squat in Queen’s Gate, Kensington, and on my way to art school I would often see Francis Bacon pottering about, as his studio was nearby. When I was researching the making of my film Love is the Devil, I would revisit his work. Actually, it didn’t require that much revisiting because he had been my hero since my student days. If you like Bacon, you tend to obsess about him. He was, and is, a part of my language, and I continue to use his work as a reference.

His paintings dictated the palette of Love is the Devil, the key colours being those of bone, blood and flesh. We couldn’t include either the actual paintings or direct quotes from Bacon in the film, which turned out to be an advantage, as it forced me to use the mechanics of film-making in a Baconesque way. Distorting mirrors – well, mirrors in general – which are such a central part of his work, leant themselves beautifully as a device within the film. It was also exciting that Bacon had such a cinematic approach to his own paintings – from being influenced by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of humans and animals in motion to the triptych format which made me think of Cinemascope. I wanted to get across a sense of that fragmentation that would relate both to him and his work.

I made a very deliberate decision to focus on George Dyer, Bacon’s lover, partly because the Dyer paintings were always my favourites and partly because his suicide played into the theme of Bacon as this dark painter. However, despite the darkness, I have always found an incredible beauty and affection in his work – words, I suspect, that he would have hated. Even in something as visceral as the figure of Dyer vomiting in the sink, Bacon manages to put across a poetry that is amazingly moving. In the film I gave one of the characters a line about the sensitivity of the brushstrokes in the Dyer paintings being like the caress of a lover. I do believe there is tenderness towards his friends and lovers in his paintings.

One of the things that came out of all the interviews and conversations that I did at the time was that very few people could tell me anything about Dyer. Few people liked him. They resented him and his closeness to Bacon. I think the same thing translated into John Edwards’s relationship too. So I deliberately portrayed Dyer as a character who was completely outside the whole Colony Room scene. He was an outsider in Bacon’s world on every level, but there was an intimacy between the two of them which nobody could penetrate. I think that’s what Bacon loved about him, and loved about John Edwards. They weren’t intellectuals or people who had much interest in his work.

When I made the film I can’t really say I got to know Bacon (I had met him at the Colony Room in 1980 when I was a young little punk, and found him terrifying). There were still enough of his friends alive to talk about him to give a degree of insight, but he was almost sphinx-like in his ability to mislead and misinform, and he hated people talking about his work. So the mythology around him is thick and dense. There was a kind of dark, sarcastic witticism at large with all those people, and Bacon in particular.

I think he was very much of his time, in that up until 1967 he was carrying out illegal practices and actually making very public statements about it in his painting. For example, the beautiful picture of two men on a mat­tress, Two Figures (1953), is clearly a homosexual image. But beyond that, he’s certainly not a gay artist. That point was very much top of my agenda in Love is the Devil. I got a lot of criticism from the gay community about this – but I was insistent that this isn’t and wasn’t a gay film, because there was no such thing as “gay” in that sense, and “homo­sexual” was something else, even, at that time.

 

Mark-Anthony Turnage

I knew about Bacon’s work from a young age. I voraciously read everything about him, in particular the interviews that he did with David Sylvester. I’ve never marked up a book in the margins as much as that one. I agreed with the ideas about process that Sylvester and Bacon discussed, and it correlated with what I was thinking about in my music at that time.

In 1985 I went to see the Bacon retrospective at Tate and was so knocked out by it that I went back several times. I became obsessed with his paintings. I’m not sure why; it was a strange combination of feelings. Despite the gruesome imagery, I thought his work was beautiful and visceral, and that really stimulated me. As well as the classic triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c.1944), I liked the series of paintings of the screaming popes based on Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. In the exhibition they showed three in a row, so they also looked like a triptych. The open screaming mouth in some of them implies something vocal – but, of course, we don’t hear anything. I found that very powerful. I knew that Bacon was obsessed by mouths – he sourced images of diseases of the mouth from medical books, but he had also been influenced by the image of the screaming nurse in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925).

I stored up the title of “screaming popes” in my head, but it would be three years before my thoughts and ideas would turn it into music. I had originally contemplated doing a requiem, and then I thought about writing a piece which distorted a set of Spanish dances, in the same way that Bacon had distorted Velázquez, but in the process of writing it, the dances – a bit like the first layers of paint being put on canvas – became so submerged in the other textures of the music that only a faint trace is visible. I ended up doing something more spontaneous. What I hope that comes across is the coloured intensity and emotional immediacy of his paintings.

I met Bacon twice in 1987, both times with my teacher Hans Werner Henze, who had commissioned me to do an opera for the Munich Biennale festival – Greek, based on Steven Berkoff’s East End reworking of the Oedipus myth. I was meant to ask Bacon to design the set for Greek, but I just knew he wouldn’t say yes. Instead, we got drunk. I was terrified, and completely in awe of him. Several years after that, another one of his works – a late painting from 1988 called Blood on the Pavement – was the influence for a movement in my piece Blood on the Floor. His works have stayed with me.
 

 

Chantal Joffe

The first Bacon picture I saw was Study of a Dog (1952) at what is now Tate Britain as a seventeen-year-old teenager. I tried to paint a version of it, thinking it would be easy, but of course it wasn’t. The composition reminded me of the view out of the bay window in our house. I liked it because he was painting everyday things. Several years later, when I went to art school, I wanted to be Bacon, to be closer to him in some way. He always painted on the unprimed backs of canvases, so as a student I would paint on canvas that had only been sized with rabbit skin glue. It made the paint seem fresher, and I liked the touch of it on the canvas, as you got seepage into the surface that you don’t get with acrylic paints, for example. I also liked the directness of his method. I learned that in the middle of doing one painting, Figure in a Landscape (1945), he picked up dust and fluff from the floor and pressed it into the canvas.

I think Bacon used colour to great effect: black, purple, cobalt blue, egg-yolk yellow. In Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1963) the figure has been flattened out with pink and yellow colours. When you see one of these paintings from a distance, there is a seductiveness, a creamy beauty about the colours – especially those beautiful tangerines. But then when you see it close up, everything seems more destructive.

Bacon managed to balance his art well. As well as the seemingly spontaneous approach to his painting, he depicted scenes that gave a sense of control – figures in cages and enclosed spaces. I think he reinvented space for an artist. He was able to conjure a specific place or time without using a kind of realistic linear language, placing the viewer above, so it’s almost like looking down into a floodlit operating theatre. Often the spaces appear circular, rather than ones that you might read from left to right. A good example is Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967). Even though it’s based on a real place, he has re-imagined it. When you look at other artists at that time, their sense of space was much more turgid. In one sense, Bacon is a figurative painter without being a realist, but his spaces feel incredibly real. He never strays into the territory of whimsy or mannerism.

 

Rudolf Stingel

I don’t remember when I first saw Bacon’s work, and honestly, I never really thought that much about it. Obviously, I knew about it, had seen it and respected it. It was only recently, as I started doing my own self-portraits, that I began to run into Bacon, or he began to run into me. It was as if I had found myself in a place similar to where he was. His work became something that I had to deal with somehow; to navigate around or take on. So I decided to take him head-on; to do Bacon as I would do Bacon, to remake him as I would make him, only to amplify and isolate further the same thing in my own language, in the same way musicians do a cover song, to play it air guitar. I don’t really know how to explain the decision I made in remaking his work; I bought all the Bacon books I could find, and found the image that resonated the most. And then I distorted it until it was my own image, until it was no longer in my way. The cliché is to kill the Buddha when you meet him on the road, so I suppose this is just the corpse of that Buddha.

 

 

Nigel Cooke on  Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI (1957) and Van Gogh in a Landscape (1957)

These two paintings are from a larger group of “assaults” on Van Gogh produced in 1957. Bacon works the Dutch­man over thoroughly in the riveting series, throwing up a vividness of colour and handling rarely seen elsewhere in his output. There is a magnetic ambivalence to these works that sees Bacon squeezing out his own twisted homage from the contrary need to bury Vincent’s ghost in paint. The man himself is scarcely a shadow, a comical little black spider in a web of expression, which is the trace of Bacon’s drive to compress the space and make it his own. Although we get to see him up close, he is featureless; carbonised under the glare of the sun (Vincent’s own personal obsession), this charred multi-legged thing with his textbook straw hat and wretched easel has been supplanted by the language he himself set in motion 70 years earlier, on his daily pilgrimage to paint out in the fields and streets surrounding his little yellow house.

Pillaging for his own ends, Bacon’s “portrait” despatches Van Gogh to an elsewhere of painterly rivalry, mad brushwork and screaming colour. Picasso went after Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) in his way too, squaring up to Velázquez at ground level like a boxer; Bacon is more pitiless, an assassin – we see the painter from an aerial distance as though through a telescopic sight. Bacon’s vulnerable quarry is loaded up with painting gear and dwarfed by a vigorously painted grassy arena. The speed of the painting is all here – in the grass.

Bacon’s journey through painting is a story of manual thought, a narrative at the intersection of action and image. The grassland that threatens to engulf Van Gogh is the paint speaking on its own terms, scrubbing up an amalgamation of both natural space and human energy. This is the forerunner to Bacon’s “clear and precise” abstraction, as David Sylvester called it, the formally defined zone of action that exerted such strange pressures on his bodies in later years. Yet the trapezes and arenas are present in the Van Gogh series in a surprising way. Bacon has imported his London-made, circus-like arena into Van Gogh’s Arles.

A reproduction of the painting Vincent made of himself on the road with painting kit and straw hat in 1888 is the starting point for Bacon’s picture, yet the highway has been warped into a bowl-like mini-stadium. The road to Tarascon, a linear dirt track that took Van Gogh to many of his favourite painting sites from the house he shared for nine weeks with Gauguin, has been bent into an inescapable ring, the flatness of which recalls the interest in oriental art shared by both Van Gogh and Bacon. We get the sense of a Beckett-like habitual routine being ground out, a clockwork daily round on a provincial scale. Bacon has created a feedback loop of this dirt road that amplifies the agony Vincent faced when tackling the impossible project of recording his sensations on canvas. In this florid and critical painting series, the daily slog of Vincent’s painting routine is parodied in an infinite return to the site of disappointment. In this way, Bacon’s Van Gogh paintings represent one of twentieth-century art history’s most passionate, if slightly sadistic, back-handed compliments.

 

Barnaby Furnas

I went to an arts high school. My painting teacher would bring books of his favourite artists for us to look at for inspiration. Bacon was an instant hit – he is probably the first contemporary artist I felt I could understand. His combination of visceral subject matter and magic painting style – a style so slick as to make accidents appear perfect. For a teenager who has pulled the wings off flies and poked at road kill, Bacon’s horrifying beauty fitted perfectly into my primal scream phase – his screaming popes echoed my screaming hormones. The paintings should be corny – maximum subject matter delivered with maxi­mum skill. The wonder of them, I think, lies in their perfection – they look found, they are so perfect. There is a seeming absence of intentionality in their making, which is why I think they are so hard to copy and why the images startle, as if glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.

In graduate school, while casting about for a way to begin painting again, I came across Jet of Water (1988). The jet of water is not painted in a conventional sense, rather it’s splattered à la Jackson Pollock – it must have been done flat (no?) – which is analogous to the way real water would behave. This suggested to me the possibility of a kind of material realism, found in the employment of paint itself. Making paint a voodoo substance in its own right, devoid of the need to capture an image, which, as Bacon has said, was photography’s job anyway. This is why I think his paintings resonate so terribly, and, of course, we are fascinated by what scares us. This is why pictures of something so horrible can become so ravishing and is a big part of how a spectacle (capital S) works. A spectacle offers a safe glimpse of death, a safe perch. It’s also what a photograph does. Bacon talks a lot about loving photography, but it seems telling to me that he would treat them so harshly in his studio. It is as if he had to kill them to get his paintings to exist.

 

Peter Doig

I first saw Bacon’s work in reproduction – I was painting and decorating a home in late 1970s Cabbagetown, Toronto, and I leafed through a coffee-table book. I was surprised, shocked and excited by what I saw. There was an immediacy and aggression to the work that was appealing to my adolescent self; paintings that included sinks and toilets, hypodermic syringes, swastikas, blood and flesh. There seemed a cockiness and swagger in his relation to his subjects, and his photographic source material was alarming and daring and sometimes disturbing. Seeing this as a young artist (seventeen years old), he appeared to be looking in very unlikely places for painting material.

The immediacy of his work is partly because he has such a strong sense of design. Not just in the way he frames and glazes his works, but especially in the settings he creates within his paintings – these rooms and spaces where the activity takes place. Bertolucci picked up on this and used this room idea in Last Tango in Paris. The back­ground setting is often very precise and designed, whereas the figures are where all the action and painting takes place. I don’t think Bacon could really draw, but he could really paint, and although there is control, he also seems able to do this by any means necessary when it comes to his figures. Having said this, I think he also has the ability to find the appropriate way to describe whatever he needs to in paint; be it grass or an umbrella, he makes it work without killing it. His painting technique seems wholly evolved out of his own acts of trying; even when he famously makes reference to other artists’ works, his language remains his own – one that he has invented.

Up until the Van Gogh paintings, Bacon seemed to be a tonal painter. In this series he starts really to work with colour. These are some of my favourite works of twentieth-century painting. After this, his colour palette appears to become more distinctive and considered. He is certainly the best ever painter to use orange – although when I first saw the cricket paintings, I found them repulsive. The stumpiness of them. In the end, I think the colour is electrifying, and he uses it in a way to draw you into the picture so that you almost no longer are aware of it being a colour.

 

‘Francis Bacon’, sponsored by Bank of America and curated by Matthew Gale, head of displays, Tate Modern, and Chris Stephens, head of displays, Tate Britain, Tate Britain, 11 September – 4 January. Tours to Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 3 February – 19 April, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 18 May – 16 August. Francis Bacon, with essays by the curators, Martin Harrison, David Alan Mellor, Simon Ofield, Gary Tinterow and Victoria Walsh, is published by Tate Publishing.

Linda Nochlin is a professor at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. She specialises in the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also writes contemporary criticism.

Hugh Marlais Davies is the David C Copley director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and serves on the Francis Bacon authentication committee. His Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953 was published in 2001.

John Maybury is a film-maker. He is currently working on a feature film version of Emily Brontë’s WutheringHeights.

Mark-Anthony Turnage is a composer.

Chantal Joffe is a painter who lives and works in London.

Rudolf Stingel is an artist based in New York and Bolzano, Italy.

Nigel Cooke is an artist who lives and works in London and Kent.

Barnaby Furnas is an artist based in New York.

Peter Doig is an artist who lives and works in Trinidad.

 

 

 

 

Master of forbidden, malevolent territory

 

 

 

No smiles in sight at this exhibition of the works of Francis Bacon,

 

the greatest painter of the 20th century, writes Gerald Isaaman

 

 

GERALD ISAAMAN   |   THE REVIEW   |   CAMDEN NEW JOURNAL   |   THURSDAY, 2 OCTOBER, 2008


WE live in tough, corrupt, coruscating times.

So perhaps the last place you might want to be is Tate Britain where, appropriately, the bottom galleries are devoted to Francis Bacon. And those touring the rooms look as grim as his distorted, tortured subjects hanging – and that too is appropriate – on the walls.

There’s no smile in sight, just silent sadness, even sickness as Bacon’s big, soulless portraits devour you like animal fodder, leaving you devastated, both by their brutal impact and their ability to expose his victims’ vulnerability. Indeed, the Irish painter, who died in Madrid in 1992, aged 82, and whose works now command millions, once declared: “When I’m dead, put me in a plastic bag and throw me in the gutter.” And he told a journalist: “I would paint your vulnerability.”

This exhibition reviews his gutter life chronologically – much in his beloved Soho, with some 70 major paintings – and shows how photographic images, of the body and of conflict in particular, played an essential role in how he looked on life. His portraits are undoubtedly not as instantaneous as he often suggested, but deeply structured and thought out examples of how he virtually trapped his subject in cage-like frames where they could be torn apart.

Simple lines like prison bars and steel shutters pervade so much of his work, making his subjects powerless in some forbidden, malevolent territory, their passion and beliefs engulfed by Bacon’s own insistence that, without God, humans are subject to the same urges of violence, lust and screaming fear as any other animal.

Worse still, his work is unrelenting – he was, after all, an atheist – as he tackles now well-known subjects like Pope Innocent X, the Crucifixion and paintings inspired by Velazquez and Van Gogh. Even his memorial portraits of his dead lover George Dyer, often his model, fail to show a glimmer of either affection or hope.

Insecurity rules the day. No doubt it did in Bacon’s own life. His wit could be devastating; his insistence on drinking only the best champagne and vintage wine the result of his belief that the finest never created a hangover; and his desire for sex dominating his utterly scornful, devil-may-care attitude to everything around him.

While his studio was in West Kensington, Soho was his haunt and playground, the Colony Room and French House the background for his mischief, which so mesmerised his circle. “When I first knew Soho,” he said, “the prostitutes were all over the streets. The streets were more fun, more amusing. The prostitutes gave a living sense to the streets.”

And he was fatalistic to the end, making his final trip to Madrid in search of “the Spanish boy” despite medical advice not to do so. “We are born and we die and there’s nothing else,” he insisted when interviewed by Melvyn Bragg. “We’re just part of animal life.”

Not true, of course, in the sense that we can control our animal urges and use our talents to reflect life in art, in all its magical beauty, as well as the terrible turbulence Bacon depicts.

That is true difference, Bacon undoubtedly shattering civilised life and reducing us to dread and, maybe, truthful tears.

Certainly Bacon can be considered vulgar, cynical, theatrical too. He had, as well, a touch of the flamboyant showman who wishes to tease and tantalise. So did Turner, who would turn up at the Royal Academy on varnishing day to add an unexpected dash of red paint to a landscape, which his mean critics crushed as rubbish but which endured and ended up an admired masterpiece.

Bacon is considered today’s Turner, our greatest painter of the 20th century, drastically confined in content though he was compared to Turner. Do go and judge for yourself before meltdown overtakes us.
• Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, SW1, until January 4.

 

 

 

                              (Detail of ) Triptych – In Memory of George Dyer, 1971
 

 

 


 

The modern Irish master

 

 

You don’t have to travel all the way to the Tate Britain in London to

 

 

see a unique piece of Francis Bacon’s legacy, says Caroline O’Leary

 

 

Trinity News, Ireland's oldest college newspaper, Monday, 13 October, 2008

 

As a country, Ireland prides itself on its cultural talent, having produced four Nobel Prize winners for literature and many important figures in the areas of acting, theatre, film, poetry and more. Yet few Irish artists have truly succeeded in making their mark on the world canvas and distinguishing themselves outside of their home country. Painter Francis Bacon is a unique exception to this rule, an artist of such talent and innovation that his works are now almost equal in value to those of masters Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet.

Such is Bacon’s success that last year his work Triptych, 1976 sold at Sotheby’s auction house for a post-war record of €56.465 million, making it the twelfth most expensive painting ever sold. In celebration of Bacon and his career, a major retrospective exhibition of his work is now on show at the Tate Britain in London, coinciding with the centenary of the artist’s birth next year. This exhibition, the first since Bacon’s death in 1992, is a cross-section of the artist’s life and works, celebrating his unique talent and inspiring us to examine the life and painting of this enigmatic artist who we seem to so rarely notice.

At first glance, there is something about Bacon’s work that intrigues the viewer. Triptych – August 1972 is a quintessential example of his technique. The flat, stark backgrounds throw the distorted foreground figures into high relief and expose the full extent of twisted limbs, gaping mouths and staring eyes. Curator of the Tate exhibition, Chris Stephens, describes Bacon as “probably the most important painter of the human figure ever.” Yet, as with Bacon’s greatest inspiration, Picasso, it is not the figures themselves that draw the viewer in but rather their unsettling manipulation. Such manipulation ranges from distorted limbs and features to the dissection of certain figures, exposing not only the blood and tissue that is common to man and animal but also the vulnerability they share.

A Francis Bacon painting is difficult to mistake, or, indeed, avoid and the artist was capable of both repulsing and fascinating the viewer – a rare ability possessed only by a few artists, such as master of surrealism, Salvador Dali. Also affecting the viewer is the texture of his works, a result of his preference for painting on the unprimed side of canvas and enhanced by his own deliberate “printing” with materials such as cotton, corduroy and cashmere. Looking at these paintings, you are transported into Bacon’s own garish world.

Bacon’s rather extraordinary life explains somewhat the inspiration behind both the artist’s subjects and his innovative techniques. Born in Dublin to English parents in 1909, his life reads like a bizarre, hedonistic soap opera. At the age of 16, he was banished from his Naas family home after being caught by his father cross-dressing in his mother’s underwear, the final nail in an already strained relationship with his family due to his homosexuality. Bacon then worked his way around London and later Europe, advertising himself as a “gentleman’s companion.”

The cultural influences of Paris and Berlin, specifically exhibitions of artists such as Picasso and Nicolas Poussin, eventually inspired him to return to London and take up painting. Seemingly entirely self-taught, Bacon first began a business as a furniture designer and interior decorator before moving onto oil paintings and rugs with the support of well-connected friends.

His first and most important painting of that time was Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, which established his signature style with its burnt orange backgrounds and stone gray monstrous figures. Based on the furies of ancient Greek mythology, the biomorphic quality of these characters are an obvious allusion to Picasso’s own distorted figures. The painting was both acclaimed for its originality and feared for its grotesque and unnerving creatures, the like of which had not been seen in art before.

Bacon’s talent and technique – and, thus, his acclaim – evolved steadily, but his personal life continued to be blighted with misfortune, something identifiable in his work. In particular, the suicide of his partner and muse George Dyer on the eve of his first major retrospective exhibition in 1973 can be seen in pieces such as In Memory of George Dyer and May-June 1973. In the latter, lost, shadowed figures of his former lover are presented in different poses and guises, expressing the figure’s dark, unhappy life and Bacon’s own grief at his loss. Less personal subjects were also dealt with in great detail, as can be seen in some of his most celebrated paintings, such as his series of studies based on Velázquez’s famous Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

After experiencing a difficult childhood in Ireland, Bacon was not a frequent visitor to his birth country. Yet, despite his constant travelling and home-base in London, his former partner John Edwards bequeathed the entire contents of Bacon’s studio to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin after his death. Draft material and papers, originally gifted to friend Barry Joule, were later donated to form the Barry Joule Archive in Dublin.

These materials, particularly the studio, delighted critics by offing unprecedented insight into Bacon’s method, techniques and eccentricities. In his studio, one can find piles of paint cans, pastels, crumpled photographs with creases coloured in and even the paint-stained walls of the room, which he frequently used instead of palettes. The most real part of Bacon, in a sense, then, can be found in Dublin and, while his Tate exhibition will soon leave for Spain and New York, this studio will remain in the city and allow us to enjoy the genius of Ireland’s greatest artist.

 

 


 

Liver: A Fictional Organ With A Surface Anatomy Of

Four Lobes, By Will Self

 

 

 

You'll need a strong stomach for Self's stories

Reviewed by Christopher Fowler


 

 

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER   |   THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY  |  SUNDAY 5 OCTOBER 2008

 

As the literary equivalent of Francis Bacon, Will Self continually challenges readers with biological overload. In Liver he has found an appropriate method of anatomy, via four pieces connected by the body's largest internal organ. Stepping into Self's world is like opening one of the Wellcome Institute's cabinets of medical curiosities.

We start with the portraiture of pickled specimens in "Foie Humain": the inhabitants of a Soho dive called the Plantation Club. The real-life Colony Room on Dean Street is hitting 60 and heading for closure, a watered-down version of its past persona now mainly famous for outliving its competitors, and self-conscious enough to host a trendy website, so it's appropriate that Self should restore some of its lustre with this stagger up its filthy Soho stairs. The characters who populate his drinking den are so closely drawn over their originals that I imagine the only reason they won't sue is that they're either dead or unwell. The Bacon comparison is openly invited; drinkers are described as having "their fleshy convolutions trapped in the gelatinous atmosphere like whelks in aspic".

The story captures this necrotic miniature universe exactly, autopsying the alkies as they submit to the gavage which leads to engorged livers, gin-blossomed features and a blurry reduction of thought that no longer differentiates between male and female, sin and redemption, or even life and death. It covers the demise of the club's Frankenstein-like owner Ian Board, after which the place could never be the same again – but it had collapsed long before, with the loss of the original patrons, so that we watch the decline of something already dead.

As Board's nose pales in death and the reluctant mourners are forced into natural light by the funeral, we gaze upon the denizens "who, even in the brilliance of a summer's day, have the dazed-grey look of ghetto-dwellers about to be relieved of their remaining teeth by Nazis with pliers". To coat these ghastly apparitions with a patina of nostalgia that actually makes their company desirable is a feat which deserves some kind of recognition, although the ending is harder to swallow than Ian's gin. A typescript of the story should perhaps be wedged on the shelf behind the Colony Room's bar, to yellow beside the shoddy accretions of the decades.

The remaining material is tangentially linked. There's a trip to Switzerland for a terminal liver-cancer patient seeking absolution, and a media-life-is-hell tale that doesn't ring true, featuring a copywriter in a Promethean trap. The last story, "Birdy Num Num", roars back to full strength as a gathering of users and abusers in a crepuscular London basement is conflated and contrasted with the antiseptic world inside an old Peter Sellers film, The Party.

What counts most throughout is Self's enthralling, muscular and sometimes even joyous use of language. His writing propels one of the greatest arguments for freedom of speech that I can think of; you may not like his subject matter but his obsidian brilliance is incontrovertible, shocking and humane.
 

 

 

 

Scraps of Bacon

Radio 4, 11.30am 

 

 

Chris Campling, Radio Choice, The Times, October 2, 2008

 

Scraps Of Bacon investigates the rumours suggesting that artist Francis Bacon gave away works of art to settle outstanding debts.

Novelist James Maw turns investigator to uncover the truth about Bacon – a “bon viveur”, gambler and inveterate drinker who ran up enormous bills in the drinking dens of Soho. Maw, who met Bacon in Soho in 1983, tries to track down some of Bacon’s works of art and unravel the stories behind them.

Among those he hears from are the owners of the now defunct Wheeler’s Oyster Bar, where Bacon amassed such huge debts that he painted rare special commissions in lieu of payment. Bacon's electrician was another lucky beneficiary of the artist's largesse. 

Padding the streets of Soho, Maw searches for the waiters, drinkers and tradesmen to whom the great painter was drawn. The programme also uncovers sides of Bacon which, until now, have rarely been glimpsed.

 

 

 

 

A Profoundly Personal Portrait by Francis Bacon

Highlights Christie’s October Auction

 

 

 

AUCTION NEWS   |   ART DAILY    |   ESTABLISHED IN 1996   |   SUNDAY 28 SEPTEMBER 2008

 

LONDON.  —  Christie’s will offer Francis Bacon’s Portrait of Henrietta Moraes at the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 19 October 2008 in London. An intimate painting which offers a fascinating insight into the characters who shaped the thriving bohemian scene of Soho in the 1960s, the work is expected to realise £5,500,000 to £7,500,000. The painting was acquired by the Hon. Garech Browne in 1970; he was a close, personal friend of Francis Bacon, as well as many of the other leading figures of the time including Lucian Freud, the poet Dom Moraes and the sitter, Henrietta Moraes. Garech Browne’s romantic home in the Wicklow mountains, Luggala, has been a creative centre of Irish culture for the last 50 years, and was described recently by U2’s Bono as ‘our epicentre’ and ‘our inspiration.’

Pilar Ordovas, Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie’s London: ‘This portrait of Henrietta Moraes is a wonderful painting which offers a fascinating insight into life and the characters of 1960s Soho. The painting was bought by Garech Browne in 1970, shortly after it was painted, and has remained in his care since. Garech Browne’s influence on British and Irish culture in the last 50 years, combined with both the artist and the sitter of this work being close friends of his, makes it a wonderfully appealing painting which is sure to attract the interest of international collectors and institutions.’

The Hon. Garech Browne: ‘I remember well my years in Soho even sometimes with my younger brother Tara, who inspired the Beatles song ‘A Day in the Life’. We often went to the Gaston Berlemont’s French pub officially called the York Minster and had lunch with Francis, my first cousin Caroline Blackwood (then Caroline Freud) and Lucian in Wheelers restaurant with my mother. We would then proceed to the Colony Club where the proprietress Muriel Belcher, one of the three known women Bacon ever painted, told me I was the only “member” ever allowed in under the age of 12. Later, Lucian would take me to the Gargoyle Club where Johnny Minton, Francis Bacon and Stephen Spender were often to be found. I would not be allowed in by the bouncers so Lucian would put me under his long overcoat and I walked on his feet to gain entry. It was only the doorman and not the proprietors who felt that I should not be allowed in to meet such “disreputable people” at such a young age. Many of the inmates were to be painted by both Francis and Lucian.’

Henrietta Moraes was an integral character in Soho in the 1950s and 1960s, and she played a major part in making the scene so legendary. She was a great friend and drinking partner of artists, writers, musicians and poets, and she befriended Francis Bacon in the early 1950s before he had found fame. In the 1960s, Bacon turned to painting portraits of the people around him. He would ask John Deakin to take photographs of his proposed subjects, and then paint from the photographs themselves, ensuring that the presence of the sitter could not merge their appearance with the character and emotions which the artist wished to portray in them. The present work was painted in 1969; it is a profoundly personal portrait of one of the artist’s greatest friends, and a searing, universal exploration of the human condition, and of the battle that is life itself.

The portrait was acquired by the Hon. Garech Browne in 1970 in London, and inscribed by the sitter on the reverse of the canvas. The inscription reads: 'For the first time A vision of me by my friend Francis Bacon with Gareth [sic] at Luggala 30-6-76&7 I love y 2 good heavens Henrietta Moraes’. It has been exhibited at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin in conjunction with the opening of the Bacon studio in its new permanent home; The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh; and the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. It will be on public view in London for the first time from 15 to 19 October at Christie’s South Kensington.

Garech Browne was born into the Guinness dynasty, his mother being Oonagh Guinness, the youngest of the three ‘Golden Guinness Girls’. In 1937, Ernest Guinness gave his daughter Oonagh the Luggala Estate as a wedding present and it fast became the gathering place for the Irish intelligentsia, as well as for artists and musicians from around the world. Garech Browne was first introduced to Lucian Freud at the age of 12 and he soon built friendships with many of the artists, musicians and poets of both London and Ireland, as Luggala continued to thrive as a creative centre for Irish culture. Garech Browne founded Claddagh Records and oversaw the founding of Irish group The Chieftains. He recorded traditional Irish music, as well as the works of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Robert Graves. Lucian Freud has painted his portraits, John Boorman chose Luggala as the setting for the film Excalibur and the house has hosted a diverse range of artistic guests including Mick Jagger, John Hurt, Patrick Kavanagh and Lucian Freud. In an article in Vogue in 2005, U2’s Bono stated that Luggala had ‘become our epicentre’ and was ‘our inspiration’.

Christie’s will present a series of exhibitions and auctions dedicated to Post-War and Contemporary art and 20th century Italian art from 15 to 21 October 2008, during a week when the international art world will gather in London for a showcase of contemporary art exhibitions and events including The Frieze Art Fair. A leading highlight is one of only two oil portraits of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) ever painted by Lucian Freud (b. 1922). The last known remaining oil portrait (the other was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin in 1988), the rarely-seen painting offers a tangible and intimate glimpse into the inspirational friendship of two of the greatest British artists of the 20th century. It will be exhibited to the public for the first time in London from 15 to 19 October at Christie’s, 85 Old Brompton Road, and is expected to realize £5 million to £7 million.

The auctions will take place at the newly refurbished salerooms at Christie’s, 8 King Street, St James’s, and are scheduled as follows:

Sunday 19 October at 4pm: Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale
Monday 20 October at 7pm: The Italian Sale
Tuesday 21 October at 10am and 2pm: Post-War and Contemporary Art

The public exhibitions for the sales will take place as follows: Post-War and Contemporary Art: 15 to 19 October 2008 at Christie’s, 85 Old Brompton Road

 

 


 

 

 

                                  JANE RYE

 

 

The Wild Shores of Buggery

                 Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma

 

                                                 By Michael Peppiatt

                                          (Constable 456pp £12.99 pbk)

 

 

                      Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait

 

                                                    By Michael Peppiatt

                                       (Yale University Press 272pp £18.99)

 

 

JANE RYE  |  BOOK REVIEW  |  BIOGRAPHY  |  LITERARY REVIEW  |  OCTOBER, 2008

 

Michael Peppiatt was Francis Bacon’s close friend and self-acknowledged Boswell for thirty years, from the moment in 1963 when he lay in wait for Bacon in the French House hoping to interview the painter for his undergraduate magazine, and, instead of being sent on his way with a crashing snub, was swept off to lunch at Wheeler’s.

To sustain a friendship of thirty years with the seductive but dangerously unpredictable Bacon implies stamina (even close friends like Lucian Freud failed to stay the course), and not the least of the fascinations of Anatomy of an Enigma, his shrewd and fluent biography, is how on earth the author managed to make notes and recall conversations during and after the epic benders on which it was his privilege to accompany his hero.

Four years after Bacon’s death in 1992, Peppiatt wrote what he legitimately describes as ‘the first comprehensive account of the artist’s life and of his work, and the vital interaction of the two’, which is reissued here with ‘confidential’ new material. Studies for a Portrait contains recent essays on Bacon’s friendship with the French writer Michel Leiris, and an expanded account of his dealer and devoted factotum Valerie Beston, together with a good deal of recycled material, both books being published to coincide with the splendid Bacon retrospective at the Tate (11 September–4January) that celebrates the centenary of the artist’s birth.

One of the themes of Peppiatt’s biography is the way in which, although so engagingly revealing of himself and his art in conversation, the artist sought to control his legacy as assiduously as any contemporary politician by the suppression of early paintings and biographical information, and the deliberate creation of his own myth. Also, of course, he strongly resisted biographical interpretation of his work which he insisted ‘says’ nothing and ‘means’ nothing, just as he denied any narrative content. He wanted his paintings to be felt as sensation, not read and understood, and protected their mystery, we are told, ‘with the zeal of a priest preserving the sanctity of his shrine. Enigma was the lifeblood of an image.’ He might as well have saved his breath.

Peppiatt, while faithfully relaying Bacon’s arguments, compares his body of work to a murder mystery demanding solution, and although one may feel that Bacon is essentially right, and know that when the conjuror’s sleight of hand is explained there will be a sense of disappointment, and even loss, still the longing to know is paramount. Scholarship will inevitably try to deconstruct, if it can, all Bacon’s careful and potent mysteries. The dismantling of the artist’s studio with its famous deep litter of more or less artistic detritus, and its removal to Dublin, where every last crumpled snapshot and discarded sock had been recorded and analysed as a source of Bacon’s imagery, has given a great boost to the deconstruction process and uncovered exciting new sources such as Baron von Schrenck-Notzing’s photographs of mediums extruding ectoplasm. At the Tate retrospective, where 100 prime works are displayed chronologically, one room is devoted to this mainly photographic archive together with examples of the painted scrawls that caused such an outcry on their discovery a few years ago by appearing to out Bacon  as a closet draughtsman.

Although afternoon drinking sessions in the Colony Room with Muriel Belcher may sound like purest hell, and the wilder shores of buggery are likely to remain unappealing territory for most of us, it is impossible not to be bowled over by Bacon’s vitality and the powers of endurance that made it possible for him to flourish on a regime of all-night eating, drinking and gambling, with perilous trawls after sadomasochistic sexual adventure (often ending in dreadful beatings), and very little sleep, followed by an arduous morning in the studio. Peppiatt reveals with beguiling detail the remarkable inconsistencies  and paradoxes of Bacon’s life and character: the fishnet tights beneath the Savile Row trousers; the patrician dandy who dyed his hair with Cherry Blossom boot polish and cleaned his teeth with Vim; the gourmet who frequented dear old Dino’s in South Kensington; who was equally at home with intellectual society hostesses and with East End petty criminals and thugs, and shared his life for many years with a shoplifting nanny who slept on the kitchen table.

Peppiatt shows the open-handed generosity and disinterested acts of kindness that accompanied the undeniable cruelty, ruthlessness and deviousness, and there are frequent references to  to Bacon’s tenderness — a quality not so easily discernable among the works at the Tate, but which is surely there, nevertheless, in the form of pity, and without which the horror would lose its impact. It is horrified pity that moves us in front of the creatures at the base of a crucifixion in Bacon’s first masterpiece. Their suffering makes them ferocious and repellent, and their ferocity makes them suffer; even the bellowing Pope, a male bully in petticoats, is both terrifying ogre and impotent victim. With the exception perhaps of the ghostly little ‘Crucifixion’ of 1933, Bacon’s extraordinary energy is apparent in almost every brushstroke, from the brilliant depiction of heavy tweed in ‘Figure Study I’ of 1945 (emulating the Old Masters’ expertise with lace and velvet) to the more frenetic, cartoon-like energy, the syrupy, exaggerated contours and brutalised flesh of later works. What John Rothenstein sedately referred to as ‘an innate capacity for the application of paint’ is as evident in the curdled, clotted paint of ‘Head II’ and the diaphanous washes from ‘Study from the Human Figure’ (both of 1949) as it is in ‘Jet of Water’ right at the end of his career.

Peppiatt’s generous, well-balanced biography is intimate without being self-obtrusive or possessive and it feels, somehow, trustworthy. One may not always subscribe to his interpretations of individual works, and some of the conclusions in this revised edition (for example, that Bacons choosing to be looked after by nuns when he was dying in Spain may indicate a deathbed retreat from his atheism) seem a bit far fetched. However, Anatomy of an Enigma will surely remain a uniquely authoritative and readable account of the man who once confided, it may sound pretentious but you see I have had the most extraordinary life. The life is more extraordinary than the paintings ... it would take a Proust to tell the story of my life, and who thought that round about now, sixty years later, we would be approaching the moment when we could decide whether his work was worthy, as he hoped, to take its place in the great European painting tradition.

 

 

 

                 

                             Bacon: cleaned his teeth with Vim


 

 


Francis Bacon

 

 

Tate Britain

 

By JOHN MOLYNEUX  |  ART  |  EXHIBITIONS  |  SOCIALIST REVIEW  |  OCTOBER 2008  

 

Reviewing an exhibition is an invitation to comment both on the exhibition as such and on the art presented. Since performing both tasks satisfactorily is impossible in the space available I shall concentrate on questions raised by Francis Bacon’s work and say only this about the exhibition. Bacon is now widely proclaimed the greatest British artist of the 20th century and this show offers a selection of his best paintings from each phase of his career — it contains all the really ‘iconic’ works such as the ‘screaming popes’, the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the Dyer triptychs, the Self Portraits. For anyone interested in modern art this is definitely a show to see.

Regarding Bacon’s overall standing I would say that he is not one of those artists, like Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian or Andy Warhol, who drove modern art forward to new forms of visual representation, and changed it so fundamentally that it became possible to conceive of an athlete sprinting through the Tate Britain as a work of art. He is, however, one of those like Chaim Soutine or Alberto Giacometti, who, while using relatively traditional methods, made images of exceptional emotional power.

The source and nature of this emotional power remain much debated. One can point to a number of influences — Michelangelo, Diego Velazquez, Francisco Goya, Picasso, Giacometti, the photographs by Eadweard Muybridge among others — and to certain repeated techniques and devices. For example, the way he uses cage structures to suggest his subjects are prisoners or creatures on display; the way, often, they are placed on plinths, or beds, with a sense of space around them, so that they appear served up like meat or specimens on a dish; or the way he used cubist forms, in his portraits, to knead the flesh round the bones of the skull. But if these are some of the means by which Bacon achieved his effects they leave the driving force of those effects unidentified.

In other words, why is Bacon’s pope screaming? Alternatively, what or who is he screaming at? I pose this question not just as a means of interrogating Bacon’s best known image but also as a way into discussing the general purport of his work.

We don’t get a clear answer from Bacon himself. Like many artists he preferred to let his paintings speak for themselves, and his response to questions of this nature was to cite the visual sources of his imagery (Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X, the nurse’s scream in Battleship Potemkin) while saying nothing about its emotional sources.

Nevertheless, there is a range of plausible answers on offer. The pope is Bacon himself screaming at the fear and loneliness of being a gay man at a time when homosexuality was still a crime. The pope is the pope and Bacon screaming at the horrors of the world at the end of the war (Auschwitz, Hiroshima). The pope is the pope screaming at the wreckage of his faith in a godless world. The pope is Papa, Bacon’s brutal father, who attempted to beat his homosexuality out of him. This obvious Freudian interpretation was put to Bacon directly by the art critic David Sylvester in one of their famous interviews — Bacon simply deflected it.

The pope’s scream, like the figures at the base of a crucifixion, is Bacon’s visceral response to the human condition as a whole — a world of violence and despair, hopelessness and terror, essentially meaningless, in which we are all simply ‘meat’. There is probably truth in all these answers. Artists often choose images precisely because they carry multiple associations.

However there is no doubt that the final reading is the one favoured by the art establishment and by Tate Britain. This is because it enables them to assimilate Bacon to Michelangelo, Rembrandt and others, as a producer of ‘timeless’ truths about life and because it dovetails with the notion of an unchanging human nature. The bourgeoisie has a place for art that shows the horribleness of life, so long as they can also claim it shows that nothing can be done about it.

For this reason many on the left, including John Berger, have long been suspicious of, even hostile to, Bacon. And it has to be said that much of Bacon’s outlook was reactionary: he was a kind of Nietzschean, adhering to a sort of ‘exhilarated despair’, and a positive supporter of social inequality as part of ‘the texture of life’.

Nevertheless, I do not believe that the left should reject Bacon’s work, as opposed to his views, and I’m pleased that Berger has recently revised his judgment. The horror he so powerfully expressed is in reality a product not of human nature but of alienation, in all its aspects, internal and external, and that can be changed. Moreover those artists such as Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Bacon, who look into the abyss, who take on the horror and stare it down, do, through their work, make a form of resistance, a defiance, from which we can benefit and draw hope, whether they did or not.


The Francis Bacon exhibition is at the Tate Britain in London until 4 January 2009

 

 

 

 

Architecture and Design in the Bacon Era: Texture

 

 Mark Cousins

 

 

MARK COUSINS   |   LECTURE   |   TATE BRITAIN AUDITORIUM   |   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.

 

 

 

 

Bacon painting to fetch €9.4m

 

 

A FRANCIS BACON portrait of his friend is expected

to fetch £7.5 million (€9.4m) at auction

 

 

IN FOCUS   |   IRISH EXAMINER   |  MONDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER 2008

 

The work has been owned by Garech Browne, a member of the Guinness brewing dynasty, since 1970, a year after it was painted. The portrait is of socialite Henrietta Moraes, who sat for several artists and was one of a small number of women that Bacon painted.

She became a close friend and Soho drinking partner of Bacon in the 1950s, before he found fame, and sat for the artist several times. The model inscribed the reverse of the canvas, which will go under-the-hammer at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in London on October 19.

Pilar Ordovas, head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, said: “This portrait of Henrietta Moraes is a wonderful painting which offers a fascinating insight into life and the characters of 1960s Soho.” Earlier this year, Bacon’s 1967 work Study for Head of George Dyer sold for £13.8 million pounds at Sotheby’s in London.

Moraes, who died in 1998 and battled drink and drug addictions, was also painted by Lucian Freud. Browne, the seller of the painting, went on to become a patron of the arts. Bacon, who died in 1992, is currently the subject of a retrospective at Tate Britain.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: Tragic Genius

 

 

 

 By RICHARD LACAYO  |  TIME  | THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2008

 

 

 

Francis Bacon did for despair what Michelangelo did for faith. He made it majestic. The Bacon retrospective that just opened at Tate Britain in London is one of the most powerful shows I've seen in more than 40 years of museum-going. This is Bacon’s fifth retrospective, and by now his screaming Popes, wrestling lovers and tread-marked faces are so famous it’s impossible to make them new. But the Tate show, which runs until Jan. 4, does something better.

 

It brings almost five decades of Bacons together into a kind of collective cry, one that makes you realize how rare it is to see contemporary art that attempts, much less achieves, a genuine tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, also low comedy, puerile cool and enigma. But in a time that has its share of tragedy, where is the art that tries to strike an equivalent note? What we have no language for anymore, at least not in art, is acute pain. Except in room after room at the Tate, in a show that moves later to Madrid and New York City.

 

After the butchery of World War II, Bacon was one of the artists, along with Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet and a few others, who found a way to make the painted human figure plausible again by subjecting it to extreme pressure. The soft tissue of Bacon’s boiling men and women is wrenched, smeared and vaporized by their own drives and desires, and by whatever it is they do to one another. Their heads are fissured, their torsos are invertebrate; their limbs, stretched and exploded, truly deserve to be called extremities — because with Bacon the body is always in extremis.

 

For Bacon none of this was a statement about his particular life and times, though his life played a part in it, and so did his times. What Bacon was after was something deeper. He wanted to make the body the visible sign of the eternal devils of human nature, the dog beneath the skin that bares its fangs in war and in bed.

 

To do that he took whatever he needed from art history. From Poussin came the mouth of a screaming mother in The Massacre of the Innocents and from Degas the arched back of a woman bathing herself in a tub. He also drew on sources from far outside art, things like an illustrated medical text about illnesses of the mouth. He worked from reproductions, and from photographs of all kinds pinned to walls and scattered on the floor of his studios in a muck of paper, rags, used brushes and broken furniture that he dived back into for ideas.

 

But Picasso was the first source. In the central panel of one of Bacon’s great works from the 1970s, Triptych — In Memory of George Dyer, a shadowy man stands near the landing of a darkened stairwell, turning a tiny key in a lock. That key is surely borrowed from an odd creature doing the same in several of Picasso’s seaside pictures from the late 1920s, when he was flirting with Surrealism. Those elastic Picassos, with their biomorphic figures that are part human, part dirigible, part swollen breast or phallus, turned a key in Bacon. They showed him the way to the nightmare distortions of anatomy that he arrived at by the end of World War II, a time when living flesh had been twisted every which way.

 

One of the first of those images he set loose in public was Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, a triptych he exhibited in 1945, when he was 35 years old. On three panels of bright reddish orange scuffed with grey, a trio of mutant figures grimace, snarl and bark. In two of them, the most expressive feature is the gaping mouth. What the eyes represent for most painters, the mouth was for Bacon, the locus of human identity. The mouth is what bites, suckles and howls at the moon. By contrast, the eyes in any face painted by him are likely to be missing entirely or smeared shut or obscured by a milky scrim. In Bacon’s pictures, the windows of the soul — not that he believed in the soul — always have the curtains drawn.

 

By the mid-1940s Bacon had been making art for almost two decades, but he had exhibited very little before the Three Studies. Until the postwar years, he was largely unknown except perhaps to the older men who supported him, his multitude of male pick-ups on the side and whatever clients he attracted for a time as an interior designer in London. Decades later, stripped of any associations with fashion or taste, the ghostly outlines of his Bauhaus-flavored interiors and steel-tube furnishings found their way into the stark spaces and barred enclosures of his paintings. You detect them for the first time in the series of paintings he made from the great Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X, in which Bacon’s flickering white perimeters form a cage for the Pontiff’s impotent fury.

 

Why a Pope? With Bacon there’s never one answer. His great gift was for conflation, visual and psychological, for compressing multiple possibilities into a single sliding form. From a 19th century photograph by Eadweard Muybridge he could take the squatting silhouette of a man and dissolve it within the outlines of a crouching boy attributed to Michelangelo. He could borrow the eyeglasses from a famous shot of a screaming nurse in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and perch them on a Pope’s nose. In the same way, the meaning of his screaming Pontiff in Head VI fluctuates. Trapped in a kind of isolation booth, where a thunderstorm of granular black strokes rains down on him, this Pope suggests the baying, baboon madness of authority. (Indeed, one source for the painting was a photo of Joseph Goebbels in full harangue.) Yet at the same time, he’s the face of the powerlessness sometimes even of absolute power.

 

And the same picture of the Holy Father could also bear traces of Bacon’s anguished dealings with his own father, a truculent English army officer turned horse trainer who moved the family to Ireland, where Bacon was born in 1909. "Eddie" Bacon eventually rejected his girlish son and, if Bacon’s not always reliable stories can be trusted, even had him whipped by stableboys to make a man of him.

 

But it’s always a mistake to understand Bacon’s work too quickly by way of his life. That’s true even of the ferocious triptychs he made after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, a onetime London hood who killed himself in their hotel room on the eve of Bacon’s 1971 Paris retrospective. With a picture like Triptych — August 1972 Bacon didn’t simply unload his grief. He used it to find his way to an even starker abbreviation of a pitiless world. All through the ’70s Bacon would flatten and simplify the spaces within which he put his liquid people. That made those places even colder and more clinical, and set off more sharply the wide passages of black he used as the threshold of mortality.

 

Not every Bacon is a triumph, however. As early as the mid-1950s, inspired by Van Gogh and by the keen sunlight of Tangiers, where he was spending much of his time in a miserable love affair, he attempted to work in brighter colors and with looser brushwork. The result was a few congested, conventionally expressionist canvases. But the movement to a high-key palette also opened the way to the orange, lilac and pale beige backgrounds that make his work of the ’60s and ’70s so unnerving, precisely because the agonized figures struggle in such bright spaces.

 

And by his last decade — he was 82 when he died in 1992 — Bacon was almost too fluent in his own idioms of despair. There are cluttered, over-determined pictures in the last galleries, where you watch him trying to find a way to make it new. But there are also great ones, like the 1991 Triptych. In all three panels, a large black square is placed like a window within a flat, beige background. In the center, a figure barely recognizable as human flows over the lower edge of the black square. On each side panel, Bacon appears as a painted photograph of his own head pinned to the space above a pair of disembodied legs. Each of these has one foot stepping into the blackness. It’s a portrait of the artist bowing out, dying as fearlessly as he lived. And without a trace of sentiment, making death majestic.
 

 

 

Old School Bad Boy’s Messy World

 

 

 

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN  |  ABROAD  |  THE NEW YORK TIMES  |  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

 

LONDON — That the Francis Bacon retrospective here at Tate Britain has been mobbed since opening several days ago should surprise nobody. The show is a landmark, a knockout, and its timing turns out to be nearly perfect. Sixteen years have passed since the Irish-born Bacon died, at 82, during which the art world has radically changed, and the generation of Americans weaned on postwar abstraction and congenitally skeptical of Bacon is being gradually displaced.

 

The other day there were dozens of young art students, not a few of them sketching, in front of the pictures. I suspect the same will happen when the show, judiciously organized by Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, lands in Madrid, then New York. Bacon suddenly looks fresh.

 

How so? Late in life, it’s true, he became, contrary to his sensational art, a sort of old-school gentleman, chivalrous and immensely kind when he wished to be, reticent otherwise, a monument of postwar Britain who, for a curious guest, would rehearse the old lines and visit old haunts like the Colony Room, the run-down drinking club where he paid for bottles of Champagne from a thick wad of cash he kept rolled up, à la Al Capone, in a pocket of his suit. (The ill-fitting suits, long after he could afford Savile Row, came from a neighbourhood tailor to whom, typical of Bacon, he remained loyal.)

 

In those days he was painting works like a second version of the triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, the original of which in the mid-1940s had confronted a battered, convalescent nation with what’s commonly called the shock of recognition. Now he was remaking the work, as his friend the painter Lawrence Gowing put it about late Bacon generally, to look more “classically serene.”   

 

“I’m an optimist, but about nothing,” Bacon kept repeating, while lamenting his old age as “a disease, a desert, because all one’s friends die.” He loved to quote Yeats and Proust and T.S. Eliot and remained enmeshed in what Michael Leja, an American art historian, has in a different context called “Modern Man discourse” — a serious hand-me-down passel of existentialism and other philosophy from the 1940s and ’50s, popularized, as David Alan Mellor writes in an essay in the show’s excellent catalogue, by the claustrophobic spaces of film noir. This netherworld of dingy hallways and shuttered rooms had long been the arena of Bacon’s art. 

 

So in various respects, by his late 70s, Bacon had come to seem something of a throwback; it was widely said his best work was behind him. But since then historians have mined the sources from which he cribbed images and opened up the crucial subject of gay sexuality in his work, which was long repressed, and this, along with his bad-boy reputation, which never goes out of fashion, has made him a source of steady fascination, never mind the lurid films and biographies and the admiration of art-world celebrities like Damien Hirst. Most important, with the breathing space of a little time, it’s become obvious how pure a painter he was, not just early on.

 

His repertory — “brand” would be the word Mr. Hirst might use — of bloody carcasses and monsters; the mutilated, decomposing heads with immaculate teeth; the mangy dogs and screaming popes and salary men, silent and watchful, caged like zoo animals, then enclosed behind the gold frames and reflective glass, in which we too appear like ghosts: it’s all already there in his work by the mid-1950s.

 

So is the touch. In Figure Study I or Head II, from the ’40s, the surfaces are busy and dense like stucco or tweed, or thick as an elephant’s hide, but with exquisite veils on top — a mix of roughness and fragility, aggression and sensuality that would define the work across the career. Bacon also swiped thin washes of purple, black and white over what looks like raw canvas to paint his first pope, fussing the gaping mouth, creepily. Spectral hints of gold brocade, refined like Chinese calligraphy, glimmer in the ether.

 

Elsewhere beefy men wrestle and dive into pools of blue-black nothingness. Against high-key fields of red and orange, half-animal, half-human blobs recline like patients on an operating table or they melt and evaporate. Bacon traveled during the late ’50s to Tangier, absorbing local color, allowing his technique to loosen, producing Study for a Portrait of van Gogh VI, a clangorous mass of red and green, improbably successful, and he painted a few messes too, like Figure in a Mountain.

 

Out of all of that came, by the ’70s and ’80s, we can see in the Tate show, yet more complex architecture, a widened palette, and a calculated willingness to risk failure. Within the narrow terrain he mapped at the start, with its melancholy and blend of private with literary iconography, Bacon didn’t just repeat himself.

 

Several triptychs and portraits, reflecting on the suicide of his companion George Dyer in 1971, mark a clear experiment in conflicted sentiment; they’re heartbreaking but simultaneously clinical. As a friend of Bacon’s, the editor Nikos Stangos, once put it, Bacon “never expressed moral indignation about anything.” That in a nutshell explains the work’s ruthless elegance.

 

Some really appalling late pictures, like a large triptych from 1976, which some squillionaire recently paid a fortune to buy, look horribly overstuffed with ugly heads and tired gimmicks, as if Bacon, worried he had exhausted the empty stretches of color he so often painted, didn’t know when to stop filling the canvas up. Whether, during these last decades, he came merely to parody himself, painting too slickly, is the only real subject of debate the exhibition has aroused. The answer is, yes, sometimes he did.

 

All the same, he made, out of the blue, Jet of Water, a great ejaculation of splashed white pigment, which looks stunning. Despite his blindness to pure abstraction — which, having a tendency toward decorativeness, he feared led only to empty gesture — he devised a Rothko-like picture, sinister and wry, called Blood on Pavement. Even the second version of that early triptych of figures at the base of a crucifixion turns out to have its own eloquence, almost daring a viewer to find it too beautiful.

 

Cunning and self-conscious, glad to outrage, with the delicacy of those blurry but somehow distinct faces and electric palette, conjuring up Carnaby Street, his work translates quite easily to a new century. So does the sweaty sex and violence, luxuriant but couched in aloofness and girded, always, by grand allusions to old masters and learned texts.

 

Karl Georg Büchner, the 19th-century German playwright, speaking of which, once asked a question that Bacon must have come across. “How,” Büchner inquired, “can you not hear the terrible screams all around that we call silence?” Through the popes and Willy Lomans and so much else that Bacon painted, they make this exhibition sing.

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

                                            Figure Study I, a work in the Francis Bacon retrospective through Jan. 4 at Tate Britain
 

 

 

 

Bringing Home Francis Bacon: 

 

 

The Tate Britain Retrospective

 

and The Colony Room

 

 

 

JOHN DORAN  |  FEATURES  |  THE QUIETUS  |  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2008


                                                        

      "If you see someone lying on the pavement in the sunlight, with the blood streaming from him,

that is in itself – the colour of the blood against the pavement – is very invigorating . . . exhilarating."

 

It is perhaps fitting that the most important retrospective of the work of Francis Bacon – the greatest British painter of the 20th Century – opened in the same week as his old watering hole, The Colony Room called last orders for the final time. You probably didn’t have to strain too hard to hear the spectral voice of Muriel Belcher snapping waspishly: "Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, cunty", as the last of the disparate crew of drinkers dispersed into Soho for the last time; descending its creaking wooden stairs past the sign that announced sternly: "This Is Not A Brothel".

The first time I ascended those stairs I nearly got knocked back down again by John Hurt who was being helped on his way by alcohol, gravity and a gentle push from some burly chaps, who shouted after him: "Fuck off!" I was signed in by a journalist friend; even then the membership was on the wrong side of £500 per year. It was a lot of money just to have access to a bar ("Don’t call it a club – they’ll tear your eyes out") not much bigger than the bathroom of your average Wetherspoons dive. The dingy green paint work ("Emerald? EMERALD?! That’s bloody peacock green!") contained a motley bunch of characters; professional ponces, the almost destitute aristocracy, resting poets and actors, artists – all of them entertaining; all of them thirsty.

While waiting for a drink I noticed a slightly nicotine enhanced Damien Hirst spot painting propped up behind the optics, gathering ash and other detritus, money knocked off its six figure value with every shot of whisky poured no doubt. (The urbane manager Michael Wojas told me that if the insurance on the art contained in the little space got any more expensive then he’d have to shut up shop for sure – perhaps this is what happened? One thirsty punter Michael Andrews had his slate cleaned in return for painting a mural for the bar known as Muriel’s. It is estimated this piece will fetch around £30,000 when auctioned this month.) It was, they said, the anti-Cheers. A bar where everyone knew your name but called you cunt all the same. 

 

A good looking woman of indeterminate age spied me and announced: "Darling, there’s something wrong with my tits. Would you give them a squeeze for me please?"

I stuttered for a second before she grabbed my hands and placed them on her chest. "Go on!" she yelled. "Give them a good squeeze." I obliged and she demanded: "Well?"

"They’re fine."

"FINE?!"

"They’re fabulous, I mean."

She brightened, released my hands and said: "Excellent. EXCELLENT! You’d better buy me a gin and tonic then!"

I reeled from punter to punter who in turn reeled me in. I stood at the bar ordering a G&T while some clattered posh guy told me about the ideal shoes to wear for fighting. ("For God’s sake don’t wear sandals or Wellington boots.") What a bunch of freaks. I felt immediately at home.

Later on that evening, the atmosphere of the room changed immediately when the loud and rambunctious crowd became respectful and parted for Francis Bacon’s brother, who had come to visit patrons of the bar.

 

"In all the motor accidents I’ve seen, people strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is the strange beauty — the vision of it, before you think of trying to do anything. It’s to do with the unusualness of it. I once saw a bad car accident on a large road, and the bodies were strewn about with broken glass from the car, and the blood and various possessions, and it was in fact very beautiful. I think the beauty in it is terribly elusive, but it just happened to be in the disposition of the bodies, the way they lay and the blood, and perhaps it was also because it was not a thing one was used to seeing . . . It was midday, when the sun was very strong and on a white road."

 

Francis Bacon was The Colony Room’s first ever regular. It opened its doors in 1949 and he had just had his first one man show and painted Head VI the iconic painting of a screaming bishop in a clear box that the Tate have used on their posters for the retrospective. However he was far from established — he also became a tout for Muriel’s that year. He was paid £10 a week and given free drinks, just to hang around in the bar. He at once attracted and repelled the right and wrong sort of people respectively to the afternoon drinking den. The focal point of the painting is the gaping mouth screaming in fear, with the rest of the face obscured by thick, vertical lines of black paint, leaving masses of inverted canvass still bare. It was as if he had taken sandpaper to the vision of the surrealists and the American abstract impressionists who had captured the imagination before the war, scrubbing away at the cinematic visions leaving just bloody and raw reality in place. A religious figure experiencing nihilistic terror predicted a bleak second half of the 20th Century. The paint on the earliest surviving Bacon pieces (exhibited here) was still drying when the Potsdam Agreement was being finalized at the end of World War II but there was no VE Day for the painter. He proceeded immediately from WWII to the cold war as he’d proceeded directly from a strict, middle class Irish Catholic upbringing to a life of brutal masochism in the flesh pots of Soho and Tangiers. From enforced and hypocritical civility to bestial aggression.

The strips of bare canvas acted as a reminder of the reality of what you were looking at. He stripped away at the layers between viewer and painting in other ways as well. Early works showed a fascination with the bared teeth of the baboon, which would scream from the outline of a human bust (Head I 1947). Man’s brutalizing nature had been exposed permanently by the war; it was impossible to disguise the fact any more. This theme would always be with him. His unsettling picture of Peter Lacy (Study For A Portrait 1953), mocks us by thrusting our own mortality in our faces; his rictus, skeleton grin, pokes through the flesh of his face. We were animals, there was no pretending any otherwise. 

 

"Nietzsche forecast our future for us — he was the Cassandra of the nineteenth century — he told us all it’s all so meaningless we might as well be extraordinary." 

 

To Bacon, the body was a cage and he showed it captured and capturing; his subjects were pinned to the canvas as if by a lepidopterist. Arrows, pins, Nazi arm bands, hyperdermic syringes held the wriggling carcasses in place. In the 40s and 50s he favoured implacable vertical stripes of paint that looked like prison bars (it’s widely held that Jonathan Demme based Hannibal Lecter’s perspex cage in Silence Of The Lambs on a Bacon painting). He expanded this further when started portraying subjects inside a 'space frame', thin white lines suggesting a translucent cage restricting movement within the painting itself. Through his screaming bishops (such as Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1953) he put religion itself on trial as if it were Adolf Eichman 'the architect of the Holocaust' on trial in Israel.

His detractors saw his paintings as an expression of the nihilism and self-loathing of a masochistic and alcoholic homosexual — and such is the power of his vision, some still see him like this. Bacon saw beauty in the horror of our condition though. The sublime pleasure of the here and now replacing supernatural belief and arbitrary morality. While it was true he had a drink problem, he probably wasn’t an alcoholic but rather he liked their company. He spent a lot of his time in places like The Colony it is true but his modus operandi was to buy others drinks, constantly topping up everyone else’s glass and slopping the rest on the floor. He certainly drank less than his lovers, and especially less than George Dyer who was the muse for so many of Bacon’s masterpieces, including the stunning Triptych May—June 1973 painted after the suicide of the subject in Paris. The panels show him shitting, vomiting and dying, no longer trapped by life. And even here Bacon finds a moving beauty in the indignities of life that very few other painters have ever dealt in let alone captured. 

 

Francis Bacon Tate Britain   11 September 2008 – 4 January 2009     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bacon Portrait of Model May Fetch 7.5 Million Pounds in London 

 

 

 

 

BY SCOTT REYBURN   |  MARKET NEWS   |   BLOOMBERG  |  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

 

Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) – A Francis Bacon painting of his friend Henrietta Morase, one of the few women the artist painted, is expected to fetch as much as 7.5 million pounds ($13.9 million) when it comes up for auction in London.

The 14-inch-high (36-centimeter) head-and-shoulders portrait, showing the sitter turning to her left against a plain yellow background, will be included in Christie’s International’s Oct. 19 sale of contemporary art, the auction house said in an e- mailed statement. The sale takes place on the concluding Sunday of the Frieze Art Fair.

Moraes, a model, was a close friend of Bacon’s during the 1950s and 1960s, spending evenings drinking with him, Lucien Freud and other Soho bohemians at the Colony Room Club. Bacon included Moraes in a number of his paintings using photos taken of her by John Deakin.

Dating from 1969, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes has been put up for sale by fellow Colony Room regular Garech Browne, a member of the Guinness family, who bought the work in 1970. The painting is inscribed by Moraes on the back of the canvas.

"I remember well my years in Soho,'' Browne said in the e-mailed release. He met Freud at the age of 12. "Lucian would take me to the Gargoyle Club where Johnny Minton, Francis Bacon and Stephen Spender were often to be found. I would not be allowed in by the bouncers so Lucian would put me under his long overcoat and I walked on his feet to gain entry.''

Browne went on to found Claddagh Records and oversee the formation of the Irish folk group the Chieftains, said Christie’s. In July at Sotheby’s, in London a similar-sized 1967 Study for Head of George Dyer by Bacon sold for 13.8 million pounds with fees, said the saleroom result tracker Artnet.

Bacon is the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain that runs through Jan. 4, 2009. Moraes battled drink and drug addictions, had many lovers, once shared a flat with singer Marieanne Faithful and was sent to prison after an unsuccessful attempt to become a cat burglar.


 

 

 

Bacon and Rothko in London

 

 

 

BY VALERIE GLADSTONE  |  NEW YORK SUN  |  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

 

LONDON — Art lovers will soon be able to take a picturesque boat ride on the Thames River between two of the most important museum exhibitions of the year. Tate Britain is celebrating the centenary of Francis Bacon, widely regarded as Britain’s greatest painter, by bringing together 70 works never before shown in one exhibition and representing every period of his life. Later this month, the museum’s provocative young sibling, the Tate Modern, will feature the first major exhibition dedicated to the late works of Mark Rothko (1903-70), the American painter who created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting. The show includes more than 50 paintings and works on paper from between 1958 and 1970. For the first time, 15 of Rothko’s monumental Seagram murals will be shown alongside more than 30 other landmark paintings. Coincidentally, sales of Bacon’s and Rothko’s paintings broke records for sales of postwar art at Sotheby’s last May, a work by Bacon fetching $52.7 million and one by Rothko, $72.8 million.

 

"What’s particularly interesting about this Bacon show," a Tate Modern curator, Matthew Gale, said, "is that it looks back on his career in light of new research that emerged with the opening up of his studio and its contents since his death. Altogether new aspects of the man have been revealed that shed enormous light on his visual lexicon."

 

Bacon was born in Dublin to English parents. His studio was recently dismantled and then reconstructed within the Dublin City Gallery. As a result, scholars have been able to evaluate more than 7,500 objects related to the artist. These include illustrated publications, photographs, press cuttings, notes, drawings, medical textbooks, books on psychic phenomena, artists’ materials — among them several pairs of corduroy trousers used to apply paint — and slashed canvases. Through them, scholars now better understand Bacon’s working methods and sources of inspiration. Some objects will be exhibited in an archival room adjacent to the paintings’ galleries. Mr. Gale co-curated the exhibition with Chris Stephens, head of displays at Tate Britain.

 

"We learned that he took far longer to paint his works than he admitted to," Mr. Gale said. "And that he extensively used photographs and other illustrative material. He drew inspiration from things as disparate as the works of Michelangelo and Eliot’s 'The Wasteland.' We now better understand the incredible processing that he went through to make his art."

 

To demonstrate the relevance of Bacon’s sources, such as clinical representations of animals and emotional landscapes, these objects will be displayed next to his representations of the body. In Three Studies for Figures at the Base of Crucifixion (1945), which features writhing half-human, half-animal forms, he overthrew artistic conventions by using the triptych format of Renaissance altarpieces to show the evils of man, rather than the virtues of Christ. While this work has long been at the Tate, in this exhibition it will be shown for the first time with other related, celebrated paintings and triptychs including Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of the Pope Innocent X (1953), Crucifixion (1965), and In Memory of George Dyer (1971).

 

"What I find amazing," Mr. Gale said, "is that even after all the preparation for this exhibition, looking at Bacon’s paintings still makes my spine tingle. I never stop being overwhelmed."

 

The curator of Modern and Contemporary art at Tate Modern, Achim Borchardt-Hume, who organized the Rothko exhibition, is equally passionate about his subject. "The key to this period," he said, "is the 30 monumental Seagram murals that Rothko made between 1958 and 1959 for the Four Seasons Restaurant [within New York’s Seagram building]. He never gave them to the restaurant because he eventually felt they wouldn’t be appropriate there, and toward the end of his life donated nine of them to the Tate because of his love of our Turners."

 

Rothko wanted the works to be shown together, and so the museum created the Rothko Room. Other important Rothko murals were borrowed from Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and Washington’s National Gallery for this exhibit. "It is a huge coup for the Tate to have the loan from the Kawamura, which never lent works to an international exhibition before," Mr. Borchardt-Hume said. Shown with Rothko’s Black-Form and Black on Gray paintings and his Brown on Gray works on paper, the result is a very different impression of the artist.

 

Maintaining his focus on formal elements, such as colour, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale, Rothko began to darken his palette dramatically during this period, turning from bright, intense colours to deep red, maroon, brown, and black. He also turned from closed forms to open ones that look like a threshold or entrance. "I believe he would have wanted viewers to see these together," Mr. Borchardt-Hume said. "Like his chapel in Houston, they create a meditative experience. They need time to be appreciated. Only as you look carefully do your eyes begin to adjust. It’s a curious dynamic, almost like listening to music."

 

After London, the Bacon exhibition will travel to the Prado Museum in Madrid from February 3 to April 19, and then to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 18 to August 16. The Rothko show will travel to the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art in spring 2009.

 

Francis Bacon, until January 4 at the Tate Britain  Mark Rothko, September 26 to February 1 at the Tate Modern
 

 

 

 


 Painting that packs a punch

 

 

He may be the newly crowned darling of the auction world, but

Francis Bacon’s work can still raise the hairs on your neck

 

 

ELIZABETH RENZETTI   |   GLOBE & MAIL   |   TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2008

 

LONDON — News arrived recently that it will soon be last call at the Colony Room, that dank thimble of iniquity above the streets of Soho. During the 1950s and 1960s, the club’s proprietor, Muriel Belcher, presided like a foul-mouthed mother hen, referring to male patrons as "she" (and worse) and railing against the actions of "that nasty Mrs. Hitler." Dylan Thomas once graced the floor with his evening’s alcohol intake. Artists and tradesmen were indistinguishable under cover of booze and profanity.

On most days, Francis Bacon could be found at the bar. At last orders, he would be bounced out with the other patrons, celebrated or not — the Colony did not discriminate — to begin a nocturnal adventure than might include gambling, rough sex and almost certainly more drinking. Whatever the evening had brought, the morning would find him at his Chelsea studio, painting.

As Tate Britain launches its new Bacon retrospective (a highlight, along with the Mark Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern, of London’s gallery season), it’s odd to think how the life of the painter, who was so secretive and so resistant to biographical interpretations of his work, has come to the forefront of the public imagination. "I have had the most extraordinary life," he told his friend and biographer Michael Peppiatt. "The life is more extraordinary than the paintings."The paintings, however, will long outlive Bacon, who died at the age of 82 in 1992. What a strange journey it has been: The man whose life was so outré, whose art was once so shocking that it was the subject of obscenity complaints, who viewed human flesh as meat (meat to be beautifully rendered on canvas, but still), is now the darling of the corporate world and the auction house.

Bank of America is sponsoring the show, which is the Tate’s third Bacon retrospective; this year, he became the world’s bestselling artist, with his work fetching $190-million in one year alone. (One painting, Triptych, 1976, sold for $89-million in New York this spring.) In the 6½ decades since Bacon’s first major shows, we have had pickled sharks and sacred religious figures modelled in excreta, so what are the chances of a neck-prickling experience with mere painting, especially ones so familiar from reproductions? But Head VI, in the first room of the eight rooms of the exhibition, is still as jarring as a shriek in a quiet room. Painted in 1949, it’s the first of the "screaming pope" pictures (responding to Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X), the figure’s gaping mouth intended by Bacon to be "like a Monet sunset."

As a young man living in London — he had been expelled from the family home in Ireland at the age of 16, possibly for wearing his mother’s underpants — Bacon would visit the food hall at Harrods to study slabs of raw meat. He was deeply influenced by Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and the film’s screaming nurse was a likely source for the gaping mouth-wounds that recur in his work.

"Is the snarling mouth aggression or pain? It’s not clear," says the exhibition’s co-curator, Chris Stephens, standing in front of the Man in Blue series from the mid-1950s. Anyone who doubts Bacon’s relevance to the contemporary world should check out these paintings, which could be titled Mad Men, This is Your Life. In each, the figure is dressed in a sharp suit and narrow tie, spectral face obscured but for the grimacing mouth, shoulders hunched and hands clenched, hemmed in by a claustrophobic blue background. If the point isn’t clear enough, Bacon’s painting of a shrieking baboon hangs in the same room: The only thing that separates us from the monkeys is that we learned to weave cloth and lie.

Stephens and his co-curator, Matthew Gale, have gathered 65 of the major works, with a couple of aims in mind: The first, says Stephens, to demonstrate Bacon’s "passionate embrace of a Nietzschean atheism, that man exists in a godless state." One room has been set aside for Bacon’s three major crucifixion triptychs, with their howling, tormented figures set against livid orange backgrounds.

The first, 1944’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, brought Bacon shuddering into the public consciousness, as it was shown in the same month that the Allies liberated the death camps. In the other crucifixions, painted 20 years later, each panel is filled with senseless meat where in previous centuries the viewer would have found the glowing symbolism of afterworldly reward. Indeed, the curators have done such a good job in these eight relentless rooms that they perhaps should have set aside a stall at the end of the show for the distribution of Valium and nooses.

Maybe Bacon couldn’t escape a brutal world view, given his early life — though he would surely have hurled abuse at such easy psychobiography. Born in 1909 to English parents in Ireland, Bacon was weedy and asthmatic and a constant disappointment to his overbearing father, who had the boy whipped by the family grooms for any transgressions (this, according to the Bacon myth, is what gave him his taste for sadomasochism.) He was chucked out at 16, and wandered through the decadence of Berlin and the richness of Paris before settling in London. He taught himself to paint, but he was a bitter self-critic and after early ambivalence from the art world gave up for 10 years, and destroyed most of what he painted in the 1930s and early 1940s.

A giant photograph of Bacon’s studio dominates one of the rooms in the exhibition, although it looks less like a studio than a paint shop ransacked by a pack of Tasmanian devils. The floor is ankle deep in paper; hundreds of brushes are jammed into pots; stacks of books teeter in every corner (with a giant volume about Velazquez on top). Bacon was a compulsive collector of images — from medical books, newspapers, films, anywhere. A radiology textbook was as valuable as a newspaper clipping of a dying matador. His celebrated male nudes — it’s unclear whether they’re scrapping or loving, or possibly both at the same time — were inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s photos of Victorian wrestlers.

This is the other thread the curators drew upon — Bacon as the link between painting and photography, the artist most forcefully concerned with how to truthfully express the human figure in the age of the photograph.

"He could only paint people he knew," Stephens says, "and only in their absence." To that end, Bacon got his friend John Deakin to take pictures of the people central to his life: Muriel Belcher and artist Isabel Rawsthorne, his lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer. The original photos are here, crumpled and torn and paint-spattered, a reminder of the roughness Bacon often showed to the people who loved him.

Dyer killed himself in a Paris hotel room the day before Bacon’s major retrospective opened at the Grand Palais in 1971. He had already been a subject of several portraits, many of them at the Tate, in which he often looks ill at ease, his body twisted as he looks in a mirror or awkwardly rides a bicycle. Immediately after his death, Bacon began work a new triptych to memorialize his former lover; in it, he’s fleshy, muscular, even a touch heroic.

For Stephens, the portraits of this period are "some of the great achievements of postwar painting." The subject matter may, unfairly, overshadow the technique, and so viewers are encouraged to get up close to the canvases, to see how Bacon layered and endlessly worked the paint — often using trousers or old shirts he had lying around the studio.

If Bacon resisted attributing any kind of meaning or narrative to his paintings, equally he was looking for that spark, the alchemy that happens when image and paint, foreground and background come together to deliver the equivalent of a roundhouse punch. How uncanny that someone often considered the greatest postwar painter, whose works are the centrepieces of auctions around the world, taught himself to paint.

Francis Bacon runs at Tate Britain in London to Jan. 4.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an enigma

 

 

Revised and updated edition 

 

 

PREVIEW   |   THE TIMES   |   MONDAY 22 SEPTEMBER 2008

 

Published in 1996, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma was the first in-depth study of the artist’s life. It has not been superseded. In this substantially revised, updated edition — to coincide with the artist’s centenary, which will be celebrated from autumn 2008 through summer 2009 — Peppiatt will incorporate confidential material Bacon gave him, which he did not include in the first edition.

This valuable, first-hand information comes from the hundreds of conversations Bacon had with Peppiatt, often late into the night, over thirty years, particularly during the periods Bacon spent living and working in Paris. It includes insights into Bacon’s intimate relationships, his artistic convictions and his general view of life, as well as his acerbic comments on his contemporaries. 

Peppiatt will draw on some of the fascinating information that has become available in the fifteen years since the artist died. Once jealously guarded by the artist himself, the contents of Bacon’s studio can now be freely consulted; Peppiatt has had privileged access to these archives, and he will show how a number of recent discoveries — including wholly unexpected source material — have radically changed the way we look at Bacon’s work.

Similarly, his recent research into the artist’s background — his tortured affair with the sadistic Peter Lacy in Tangier, for instance, and the baffling circumstances of his death in Madrid — will shed light on unexplored areas of Bacon’s life and work. Peppiatt will also unveil new information from several people who knew Bacon intimately and who have never gone on record previously.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon

 

 

|  

 

ALEX LARMAN   |   BOOKS   |   REVIEW   |   ART & DESIGN   |   THE OBSERVER   |   21 SEPTEMBER 2008

 

 

Republished to coincide with the Tate’s major retrospective of Bacon’s art, Michael Peppiatt’s biography has long been viewed by Bacon scholars as the definitive life of a fascinatingly flawed figure. The ‘revised and updated’ label is less exciting than it might appear, mainly consisting of extra gossip about people who have died since the book was first published in 1996, but there is no denying the often disturbing cumulative force with which Bacon — the man, the artist and, towards the end of his life, the commercial wonder — is presented. As an examination of his life and art, Anatomy of an Enigma is superb, but arguably it’s even better as a portrait of the Soho demimonde in which Bacon thrived, vividly capturing the grubby ennui of postwar Britain that suited his grim sensibilities so well.

 

 

 

 

Saving the Bacon

 

 

 

By Emiliya Mychasuk and Emiko Terazono

 

 

 

   WEEKEND PEOPLE  |   FINANCIAL TIMES WEEKEND  |   SEPTEMBER 20/SEPTEMBER 21 2008

 

The hedge fund managers being demonised by regulators can’t be all bad — some of them are making a contribution as patrons of the arts, judging by the works shown at the Francis Bacon exhibition sponsored by Bank of America at the Tate.

Among the artworks featured are those owned by J Tomilson Hill , the one-time head of investment banking at Lehman Brothers, now at Blackstone as the chief executive of the fund of hedge funds.

Hedge fund legend Samuel Heyman and his wife Ronnie have loaned the gorilla-like Study for Nude, painted in 1951. A 1980s corporate raider using debt provided by Drexel Burnham Lambert, he was prominent last year in the LSE/Nasdaq battle.

Another hedge fund titan with a Bacon at the Tate is the founder of SAC Capital Advisors, Steven Cohen and wife Alexandra.

They own the surreal Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, in the “screaming popes” series.

 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon: Old Master

 

 

 

BY RICHARD  LACAYO | LOOKING AROUND | TIME | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

       

I’ve been making repeat visits to the phenomenal Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain. To get right to the point, it’s one of the most powerful shows I’ve seen in more than 40 years of museum going. This is Bacon’s fifth retrospective, and no show can hope to make his work new. His screaming popes and wrestling lovers and smeared portrait heads are too familiar for that. But this show, which was beautifully curated by Matthew Gale of Tate Modern and Chris Stephens of Tate Britain, organizes the work intelligently — by useful and roughly chronological themes, like Animal, Crucifixion and Memorial — chooses well, introduces the galleries with intelligent texts and then just stands back and lets this majestic work hit you.

The only important canvas that didn’t make it to London is Painting 1946, which belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York because Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first director, was prescient enough to buy it when he saw it two years later. (Will MoMA lend it to the Metropolitan Museum when the show travels to New York next spring after passing through the Prado? I’ll ask.)

I’ll have a lot to say about this show on and off in days to come, but here’s one impression I came away with repeatedly. To see this many Bacons gathered together reminded me again how rare it is to see new art that attempts, much less achieves, a genuine tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, also low comedy, puerile cool and industrial strength enigma. But in a time that has its share of tragedy — have you noticed? — where is the art that even tries to strike an equivalent note? What we have almost no language for anymore, at least not in art, is acute pain.

Yes, I can think of exceptions. Some older artists like Magdalena Abakanovich, Christian Boltanski and of course Anselm Kiefer. (And let me add that little video I saw at the Venice Biennale last year that Sophie Calle made of her mother’s last moments.) And there’s a lot of great work by photojournalists — James Nachtwey is the obvious example but there are many, many more — that in a way has taken up where art has left off. But grief without irony, anguish without a punchline? It’s hard to do. And it’s hard to find.

 

 

 

 

 

 The horror of the ordinary

 

 

 

 

Ireland’s Hugh Lane gallery can take credit for some of the insights into Francis Bacon’s

methods that are a feature of Tate Britain’s outstanding exhibition of the painter’s work,

writes Aidan Dunne

 

 

 

AIDAN DUNNE   |   CULTURE   |   THE IRISH TIMES   |   FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 19 2008

 

A YEAR IN advance of the centenary of Francis Bacon’s birth, Tate Britain has stolen a march on the opposition and put together an outstandingly good retrospective of his work. While the Tate has the budget and the clout to bring in paintings on loan from far and wide in a way that is beyond the reach of any Irish gallery, the Hugh Lane gallery can afford to feel quietly pleased that the exhibition draws substantially on the research into the Francis Bacon Studio done here in Dublin, and incorporates some material from the studio. While other archival documents are also in evidence, the contents of the studio, which were excavated and researched in a meticulous, archaeological fashion, have proved to be enormously revealing of Bacon’s working methods.

He has been periodically acclaimed as one of the most important figurative painters of the 20th century, and the greatest British artist since Turner, though there are doubters and detractors. There’s always the risk that, subjected to the intense scrutiny afforded by a substantial retrospective, even the most established reputation will crumble. In this case, however, the Tate exhibition should confirm his reputation as a major artist, if not quite as brilliant a star as his most enthusiastic advocates would claim. He is not without artistic failings, including a progressive inclination towards self-parody and a certain carelessness that could work both for and against him, so that the paintings, even in a show as well selected as this one, are uneven. But, without question, the better ones, in their bravura audacity and inventiveness, are tremendously exciting to encounter.

Bacon, who died in 1992, was born in Dublin in 1909. Throughout his adult years Bacon retained a dislike of Ireland, largely because, while still in his teens, he was summarily banished by his father for, reputedly, dressing up in his mother’s underwear and/or being caught in flagrante with a groom. He found himself alone in London, subsisting on an allowance from his mother, and drifted for several years, eventually spending time in Berlin and Paris and working as an interior decorator before seriously applying himself to being a painter.

The Tate’s show is arranged thematically, rather than chronologically and, though a broad chronology does emerge, we get a welcome chance to see Bacon’s work as a unity.

It is immediately apparent that he was brave enough to take real chances and, while he was not at all a technically adept painter, unlike say the astonishing Velásquez, of whose Portrait of Pope Innocent X he made several versions, he was frequently an inspired one, willing to make technical leaps in search of startling effects. In a way he had to take leaps, because his art is not academic, not built-up cumulatively on a solid armature of drawing and tone, volumes and spaces. It is something fleeting and glimpsed in the corner of the eye, blurred and ambiguous, and often its power derives from what we can’t actually see in the work but what we think we might be seeing, something forbidden or dark or disturbing.

Bacon’s descriptions of his own work, as trying to capture "the brutality of fact", or as going straight to the nervous system, are a clear statement of what he’s after. Coming out of the second World War, and entering the age of uncertainty that ensued, he addressed an awareness of the human capacity for cruelty and atrocity, and a more personal, existential anxiety. An atheist, he drew extensively on religious iconography and the classical altar-piece format of the triptych. But, disconcertingly, his imagery modulated from such generalised symbols of human suffering to the domestically prosaic.

The Tate’s own Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is quintessential Bacon. The weirdly hybridised bodies, conflations of internal and external anatomies, with predatory jaws, influenced by Surrealism and inspired by the Furies in The Oresteia of Aeschylus, anticipate the monstrous baby in David Lynch’s film, Eraserhead, and, in subsequent incarnations, the toothy title creature in Ridley Scott’s and HR Giger’s Alien. Bacon’s high art does recurrently veer close to the lowbrow thrills of pop-gothic sci-fi.

He returned to the Base of the Crucifixion several times and, despite the over-ripeness of some of his imagery, the paintings are quite powerful, with distinctly Pinteresque notes. But then many of Bacon’s most powerful paintings from the 1950s, the studies of individual animals, of businessmen in suits, of popes and nude figures, could also be described as Pinteresque – except that they comfortably pre-date Pinter’s emergence as a dramatist late in the decade.

RIGHT FROM THE first, Bacon tended to ratchet up the melodrama. Although influenced by cinematic imagery and montage (most famously the screaming nurse in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin), he was an explicitly theatrical painter, placing his actors centre-stage against plain backdrops, augmenting the action with a few strategic props: light bulb, chair, bed, toilet bowl, washbasin. But the heads and bodies are often violently disassembled, their flesh hideously contorted. Painted equivalents of bodily fluids – blood, spittle, semen, vomit – swirl about the canvases.

Much of the time, the distortions relate to ordinary states of being, dramatically reconfigured, but Bacon also inclined towards graphic, visceral imagery, drawing on such sources as medical textbooks and photographs of the aftermath of atrocities. Bodies are torn apart and Snow’s "secret", as revealed to Yossarian in Catch-22, is reiterated again and again: Man is meat.

While the figures and props in a great deal of Bacon’s work, particularly in the 1950s, emerge like shimmering apparitions from velvety dark grounds, he became fond of using brighter, bolder colours as backdrops. These flat, often extensive expanses are thinly painted in contrast with the heaped, turbulent pigment that describes the figures. The effect can be starkly effective, though as time went by the backgrounds could come across as being just cursory or even misjudged.

Several critics have observed that the intense emotional pitch of the work is at variance with the mundane facts of Bacon’s life when he made it. The critic Peter Schjeldahl, for example, has commented on his "histrionically miserable homosexuality". And there is an apparent mismatch between his relatively comfortable life – painting, usually with a hangover, from 7am, leisurely lunches at Wheeler’s in Soho, afternoons drinking and conversing in the Colony Room just along the road, late-night drinking, and gambling at such places as Charlie Chester’s Casino – and the tales of terror told in the paintings. But then the work can certainly be interpreted as being about the horror of the ordinary.

By all accounts, as well, Bacon was profoundly miserable at some level. Smart and acerbic, he was certainly difficult to live with. His romantic relationships were bristly, fraught, and tragic. One companion, Peter Lacy, died on the day a Bacon retrospective opened at the Tate Gallery in 1962. Nine years later, Bacon’s companion, George Dyer, committed suicide by taking an overdose two days before the opening of another major retrospective, in Paris. The physically imposing but psychologically vulnerable Dyer was the inspiration and subject of some of Bacon’s finest paintings, in life and death, works full of helpless, edgy tenderness.

Several accounts attest to the fact that Bacon was also a generous, loyal and affectionate friend. He courted the company of East End geezers, knew the Krays, and liked there to be a certain level of menace in the atmosphere. Several sources claim that he had a masochistic streak that could, and occasionally did, get him into real trouble. In his work, the union of two male figures, the subject of several of his most compelling paintings, is always an occasion of ambiguously violent grappling. Photographs of wrestlers served as a visual source. He was famously dismissive of most other art and artists, but then artists, intensely committed to their own vision, often are, and there was something defensive about Bacon’s aggression, because he did doubt himself.

An avid and witty conversationalist, he was fortunate in finding a Boswell to record his thoughts. David Sylvester’s Interviews with Francis Bacon, originally published in 1975 (though they’d been friends for a long time), is a classic of contemporary art writing.

For many years, virtually every art student prized it and read it out of interest rather than duty, identifying with Bacon’s breezily offhand bohemian attitude and his frankness about the business of being a painter. It is still popular, though more recent research suggests that Bacon wasn’t entirely frank, and some self-mythologising was involved. The association between Bacon and Sylvester strengthened and became a major factor in the perception of his work. Pretty much every major exhibition was overseen by the guiding spirit of Sylvester up to the time of his death in 2001.

THE QUESTION OF whether, and to what extent, Bacon made and used drawings, preparatory or otherwise, is oddly contentious and still partly open. He told Sylvester flatly that he did not make preparatory drawings. Perhaps, having made that assertion, he didn’t want to contradict it, but it’s hard to see why he should want to conceal the perfectly legitimate use of drawings when he was absolutely candid about using photographs as direct sources, and even central points of inspiration, something that was frowned upon in certain fine art circles at the time.

In any case, several accounts and examples of his drawings have emerged since his death. Even Sylvester owned up to seeing some casual sketches. Bacon certainly did make notes and thumbnail sketches, though not consistently. At least one person who was close to him during his lifetime claims to possess a group of more finished drawings. And his neighbour and occasional handyman, Barry Joule, controversially produced a trove of material, some of which resides in Dublin and some of which was acquired by the Tate. Whatever its status, this work is rudimentary in nature and never intended for exhibition.

Later on, one feels that Bacon would have reinvented himself but just didn’t know how to go about it. The labyrinthine forms and empty backdrops became increasingly forced and mannerised. Uncertainties are apparent even in some work from the 1960s. In the Tate show we get to see a big 1976 triptych, apparently the painting for which Roman Abramovich set a new auction record earlier this year, and it’s hard not to think, uh-uh, that’s a second-rate Bacon, nowhere near the edgy uncertainty of the first-rank works. There’s no invention or discovery; instead, the artist riffled anxiously through a collection of stock motifs, packing more and more of them in for added value. When working, he referred constantly to reproductions of his own paintings, and spoke of his frustration at not being able to recapture the spirit of paintings he’d made years earlier.

Yet he was still capable of bold strokes: Blood on Pavement, from 1988, is almost abstract, apart from a mess of blood and tissue smeared into the ground. It’s an example of a route Bacon might have followed, one in which figure and ground are perfectly fused in an image of subtle menace.

Francis Bacon is at Tate Britain, Millbank, London, until Jan 4.

 

 

 

 

A dark prophet

 

 

The impact of Francis Bacon’s disturbing paintings has not diminished one jot

 

     

SUE HUBBARD  |  ARTS & CULTURE  |  NEW STATESMAN  |  THURSDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2008

 

With his pimento-shaped face, reminiscent of an overstuffed hamster, Francis Bacon appears in photos taken by his contemporaries and in a famous portrait by his friend Lucian Freud — stolen in 1988 never to be seen again — as one of the most recognisable artists of the 20th century. Doyen of Soho drinking clubs, he led a reprobate life that has been well documented, from an Anglo-Irish childhood, with a repressive father who threw him out for showing an overdeveloped penchant for stable grooms and for his mother’s underwear, to his sadomasochistic love affairs with numerous men of the demi-monde.

The new Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain, the first since 1985, allows for a reassessment of his work in an age when shock and violence are common fare, in the art world and in daily life. An avowed nihilist and atheist, he was fraught with contradictions. "You can," he claimed, "be optimistic and totally without hope . . . I think of life as meaningless; [but] we create attitudes that give it meaning while we exist." Painting, alcohol and sex were the ways he sought that meaning.

Bacon, widely regarded as Britain’s greatest painter of the figure, aimed to inherit a place in the pantheon beside Michelangelo, Velázquez and Rembrandt. He insisted that his pictures "were to deserve either the National Gallery or the dustbin, with nothing in between" – and undoubtedly won that gamble. Yet despite his extraordinary innovation and recasting of the human form, he cannot be seen as a true modernist. He was, for most of his career, sidelined by the American critics, who saw him as too figurative, too narrative, and too concerned with European art history and Christian iconography. Neither did he share their boundless optimism nor care much for the abstract expressionism promoted by the American critic Clement Greenberg. As he said: "I do not believe in abstract art because you must have a starting point in reality."

Today, as one looks back, more than a decade after his death in 1992, Bacon’s sensibility seems supremely European. His postwar angst springs from the same ground as that of Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Jean Cocteau, whose bleak dictum "If you see your whole life in a mirror, you will see death at work" Bacon admired. His 1955 painting based on the life mask of William Blake, that great outsider of British literature, nails his colours to the mast of iconoclasm and individuality. He lived by his own rules, both in his art and in his relish for the bohemian lowlife (homosexuality was still illegal) of Soho and the Colony Room. T S Eliot was a huge influence. The poet juggled with religious imagery for a secular age, whilst Bacon was a committed atheist, but both caught something of the existential isolation and abjection that defined postwar Europe.

Yet Bacon strongly denied a narrative message. He wanted his paintings to address the viewer’s "nervous system directly" and to "unlock the valves of feeling" with his distorted forms, derived through chance, accident and appropriation. His paintings, he claimed, were a form of "exhilarated despair", and mankind "nothing but meat". He rejected the idea that his screaming popes, based on Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, shut in their claustrophobic glass cases, had anything to do with the image of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, standing in a glass witness box during his trial in Jerusalem, or that his mauled, contorted bodies were born out of the horrors of the Second World War. Yet the famed detritus of his studio, posthumously saved by his heir John Edwards, reveals not only Bacon’s passion for photography and film, but that his paintings were informed by images as diverse as illustrations from medical textbooks on diseases of the mouth, or the nanny’s blood-spattered face from Battleship Potemkin. They were not, in other words, totally intuitive. It has long been acknowledged that Eadweard Muybridge’s early photographs of movement were fundamental to Bacon’s work.

So where should we place him now? To stand in front of his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, painted in the 1940s, is still a deeply visceral and gut-wrenching experience. Bacon had come to know Aeschylus’s Oresteia through Eliot’s 1939 play The Family Reunion. The artist’s three writhing Eumenides are barely recognisable as human figures. They have no eyes, only silently screaming mouths, bespeaking the fascination of that first generation of post-Freudians with the id and "the hidden presence of animal trends in the unconscious". Bacon’s screaming baboons, sniffing dogs and bulls all blur the line between culture and abject nature.

There is also something prescient about both the popes and Bacon’s men in suits. Study for Figure II (1953-55) shows a solitary man with blank eyes and gaping mouth, in a jaundice-yellow suit, isolated on some sort of platform against an empty, black space. This figure, which bears an uncanny resemblance to George W Bush, is one of Eliot’s hollow men, heads stuffed with straw, whose "dried voices, when/We whisper together/Are quiet and meaningless". There is nothing, Bacon seems to be saying, so isolating and dehumanising as power. His impact has not diminished one jot.

Francis Bacon is at Tate Britain, London SW1, until 4 January 2009.

 

 

 

 

An object lesson in bringing home the Bacon

 

 

The life of the painter Francis Bacon was laid before us

with exemplary clarity and some great stories

 

 

CHRIS CAMPLING  |  THE TIMES  |  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

 

 Louisa Buck’s Sunday Feature, Broken Images (Radio 4) accomplished a little miracle – it explained to the ignorant listener what it was that made up Francis Bacon, both the man and the painter, in 45 minutes of intelligent, informed and above all clear narrative and interviews. The discussion of modern visual art is notorious for encouraging, even relying on, waffle, buzzwords and opaque jargon – Buck’s programme was an object lesson in how to do it right.  

Of course, Bacon could be one of those artists whose character and influences spread themselves in front of the idly curious like an A-Z. But if not, and Bacon’s worth can be obscured just as easily by the skilled arty show-off as any conceptualist, then Buck’s achievement is all the greater, for not taking the easy route.

It helped that Bacon’s life was fascinating. He spent the first 16 years of his life as the misfit son of a wealthy English Protestant family in an Ireland going through a revolution. His family were avid hunters and he, an asthmatic, couldn’t go near horses or dogs. He was gay, was sexually attracted to his father and was banished from home when he was caught wearing his mother’s knickers. He could have turned out a serial killer. Thank God he could draw.

 

He was a product of his background and his time. He was a child during one world war and a man during the other. He was influenced by film, by literature, by poetry, by sex, by everything. He embraced the chaos of the 20th century and participated in it as much as he reflected it.  

 

There were some great stories told, too. Here’s one – he was painting a picture of a gorilla in a cornfield. It wasn’t working. So he did what he usually did and added a few more strokes to see what happened. Could it be a bird? More paint – and it became a painting of an eviscerated crucified man, with a figure in front of him holding an umbrella. Wonderful. They should stick this programme on the tape guide to the Bacon retrospective at the Tate. But they won’t.

 

 

 

 

Best of Bacon

 

 

 

ISABEL ANDREWS  |  APOLLO MAGAZINE  |  TUESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2008 

 

The press view at Tate Britain for its latest retrospective of Francis Bacon (the first was in 1960, the second in 1985) buzzed with a level of anticipation I’ve not often encountered. A self-taught painter, Bacon mutilated most of the work he produced between 1933-45 at the time, but once his work became known his popularity was quickly established, lasting throughout his life, and is, it seems, growing by the day.

Tate’s current retrospective is very much a ‘best of Bacon’, taking a chronological approach through a selection of 71 works, broken only by two thematic rooms that group his Crucifixion works (a theme the artist drew on throughout his career) and selected archival material taken from Bacon’s studio that, after his death, was painstakingly uplifted and moved in its entirety to public display in his birthplace of Dublin.

I was more than slightly interested to see this show, principally because I’ve never really been able to make up my mind about Francis Bacon’s work. I first came across Bacon’s name as a teenager under the spell of Lucian Freud’s drawings – in particular Freud’s 1951 portrait of Bacon – but never quite felt the impact that Bacon intended in his works so that the ‘paint comes across directly onto the nervous system’ – but I wanted to. Granted, the colour, scale (from the 1960s onwards Bacon rarely deviated from the 2-metre high by 1.5 metre wide format; three for the triptychs) and compositions are both arresting and impressive. But the paintings’ essence of human vulnerability, of man existing as just another animal or mound of flesh in a godless void (Bacon in a butcher’s shop apparently wondered why he himself wasn’t one of the carcasses), didn’t for me deliver the haunting psychological darkness and brutal isolation evident in the harrowed lines and down-turned eyes of some of Freud’s etched sitters. And walking through the Tate galleries, it still doesn’t. Put simply, it’s a big idea, boldly done, to the same effect each time. But it’s also an idea that’s been given more depth of treatment elsewhere, for my money in words more than paint. It’s not for nothing that Bacon references the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Aeschylus in his paintings from 1967-84. I wonder what he made of Beckett.

It may be that some of the impact of Bacon’s paintings has diminished with familiarity and time. The same is not true of the artist’s persona. Only recently did I discover Freud’s opinion that his portrait of Bacon, stolen in 1988 while on show at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, was probably lifted by a fan of Bacon rather than one of his own. Bacon’s reputation for mutilating paintings, frequenting Soho drinking dens, having intense and abusive relationships in a time when homosexuality was illegal, and as the figurehead of London bohemians in a period now revered for its creativity, has secured his iconic status.

And the sort of material emerging from the detritus of his studio will do nothing to harm this image. It includes photography by John Deakin of Bacon’s close friends only (Isabel Rawsthorne, Freud, his lover George Dyer) commissioned by the artist who then painted them in isolation, using the image as reference. In addition, scraps of magazine and newspaper cuttings with photography of sportsmen and wrestlers or drawings by Michelangelo have been resurrected from the litter of Bacon’s studio and smartly framed and hung on the wall. I can’t help feelings it’s slightly voyeuristic to riffle so fastidiously through this material – particularly when these sources were often and openly acknowledged by Bacon during his lifetime. Tate curators have brought to our attention the lists of potential subjects they have found in the studio – lists Bacon denied making, instead asserting the spontaneity of his approach. There’s also a wall of so-called drawings – another process that Bacon denied – but these are simple outlines of position rather than the finished drawings being produced by Bacon’s contemporaries. No doubt interesting discoveries will be made about Bacon’s process and technique, but the real essence of Bacon is, ultimately, in his scream alone.

 

   

 

 

Francis Bacon: ‘The man’s a bloody genius’

 

 

Jonathan Jones on art

 

 

BY JONATHAN JONES  | ART & DESIGN  |  THE GUARDIAN  |  MONDAY 15 SEPTEMBER 2008

  

Have you had a chance to see Tate Britain's Francis Bacon retrospective yet? If not, get tickets, now. Get several. Join the Tate. Do anything to see it as much as possible. Follow it to the Prado and the Metropolitan.

This is one of the most moving exhibitions I’ve ever seen. While recording a podcast tour, I nearly started to cry. Why? It was just the thought that such a giant among painters was alive and working so recently, here, in the city where I live. It thrills me to have been a baby when Picasso was alive, to have breathed the same air, and it thrills me in the same way to have shared the Earth with Bacon

He’s not as good as Picasso – you can see that for yourself in a room at Tate Modern that puts their works side by side – nor is he as good as Matisse. But nobody else in the 20th century painted better than him.

That’s putting it modestly. Bacon invited direct comparison with the old masters and stands up to the challenge he set himself. The supreme thrill of this show will come when it reaches the Prado and he encounters his hero Velázquez directly. I hope I get a chance to see it there – although I found the Tate showing superlative.

 

 

  

 

 

 

Francis Bacon  

 

 

Until Jan 4 2009  Tate Britain

 

 

   BY OSSIAN WARD  |  TIME OUT   |  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

 

Despite the post-war gloom into which Francis Bacon’s early hunchback characters shambled, the world wasn’t, and thankfully still isn’t, anywhere near as dark as he made out. At art school they teach you that there’s no such thing as total black, that even the darkest anthracite coal or most pitch-matte surface still reflects neighbouring colours. But Bacon never went to art college. Indeed, walking around Tate’s magnificently murky retrospective of the Irish-born Londoner, one might think he arrived fully formed as a fearsome talent in 1945, without ever having picked up a brush before. This is part of the myth of Bacon as self-taught, closeted Nietzschean genius who wore his mother’s dresses and advertised his escort services as ‘Francis Lightfoot’ to make ends meet.

Personally, I can’t stand the seedy biographical emphasis put upon Bacon, and while he’d be delighted that it wasn’t still illegal, he’d surely hate the constant harping on about his homosexuality. Get all that out of your head, ignore the tittle-tattle about his racy lifestyle and the show’s pointless ‘Archive’ room of source materials and Soho-scenester photos, and look closely at his pictures – especially at their blackness. Bacon seemed intent on being the greatest painter of black and white since his idol Velázquez, by concealing overcoated or besuited men and mangy monkeys in seas of inky infinity and by only flicking on the lights when absolutely necessary, either to hint at a wretched form or to provide outright shock.

Organised by theme, this exhibition whisks you through the ‘Crucifixion’, ‘Crisis’ and ‘Apprehension’ in his work but then downshifts into disappointing sections on ‘Portrait’, ‘Memorial’ and ‘Late’ periods. Even the first gallery, dedicated to depictions of the ‘Animal’, suffers by not including the dogs, chimps and bulls that crop up in subsequent rooms. The topics could have been much gorier, too: screaming heads, gnashing Popes, discombobulated torsos and ugly sex are just some of the treats in store for the kids.

Oh, and there’s lots of meat – as in Rembrandt, Hogarth or Soutine – there are limbs here that are nothing more than joints of beef, chests that are racks of ribs, as well as bloody loins, hocks and shanks. Bacon the Butcher has a better ring to it than that of his chosen profession, Bacon the Interior Decorator. The gruesome reaches camp crescendo in the cawing ravens and overflowing cups of blood in later, more melodramatic pictures, but you can’t help but admire his continuing lust for paint.

Like in life, so too in art, Bacon was better when not prevaricating, because his constant overworking could turn paintings into brass rubbings, whereas the thin washes on unprimed surfaces (or as ‘legend’ has it, on the rough backs of canvases) disappear deliciously into the backgrounds. These backdrops are almost the most fascinating elements in Bacon – odd spaces that are part boxing ring, part zoo enclosure and which eerily prefigure the see-through boxes that would imprison Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and also Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.

Pummelled and melting faces suggest that he struggled with portraiture, but there’s no disputing Bacon’s mastery over the body. Most of the paintings here (thankfully not the usual suspects from easily accessible collections) are well over six-foot tall, meaning that we are both physically challenged by his figures and psychologically confronted by his malformed vision of humanity – that much discussed existential dimension of his work. The preponderance of triptychs also makes this display a must-see, with each panel like an increasingly contorted snapshot of a tri-partite metamorphosis – typically going from a standing, then splayed and disembowelled torso, perhaps on a chaise longue, to the final, upended hanging carcass.

The hype that puts him above all other painters of the twentieth century isn’t justified, but what he lacked in beauty and sensitivity he made up for in originality and honesty. What new do we learn of Bacon? That he worked on a bigger scale than generally imagined, that he could use colour if the subject demanded it and that, alas, the cult of personality will never let him rest in peace. He may even be happier merrily turning in his grave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Bacon’s lost his sizzle

 

 

Francis Bacon

Tate Britain, London

 

 

BY PHILIP HENSHER  | ART  |  SECTION 2  |  THE MAIL ON SUNDAY  |  SUNDAY 14 SEPTEMBER 2008

 

 

Surprisingly, this is the first exhibition of Francis Bacon in Britain since his death in 1992. So, 16 years later, how do his paintings look?

 

Do the repetitions now appear less like a powerful personal mythology and more like the routine appearances of a small body of useful props?

I don’t think its quite as easy to be overwhelmed by his art as it was 25 years ago at the Tate’s last Bacon exhibition. Bacon starts to look grotesque rather than tragic, mannered rather than intense. Not that there isn’t a high place in art for the grotesque and the mannered. If fashion is moving away from Bacon towards the more richly humane possibilities of his contemporary, Lucian Freud, fashion, I think, will return.

Bacon’s art emerged from the last days of the Second World War with an unforgettable triptych, Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion. The figures are all teeth and neck – they reach for their prey as if waiting for gobbets of flesh to fall. Forty-four years later, Bacon repainted it.

The first version is raw, ferocious and painfully awkward in both its orange ground and its savage, and unsophisticated gestures of the brush. The later version has a luxurious feel, the effects produced against a backdrop of theatrical purple. It is somehow a very moneyed, Eighties triptych. What changed? A critic once said that Francis Bacon was an example of ‘inspired safe taste’. That’s an unexpected thing to say. Bacon’s art is full of faces screaming in pain or figures writhing bonelessly, suffering in obscene and unspecified ways.

The thin texture of his paint, looking more like something poured or melting rather than anything applied with a brush, gives the art the appearance of something tender. You feel that the surface of the art itself has a sore quality. It certainly corresponds, in the best of Bacon, to an emotional rawness. For me, the most powerful moment in Bacon’s art comes in the work he made to commemorate the death of his lover George Dyer.

Dyer cropped up before, as a distinctive profile, interacting with a bicycle in a heroically futurist manner. After his death, he flitted in and out of triptychs, being consumed by shadow, hunched over, his face turned away, disappearing casually up a staircase. He is the man on the stairs in the rhyme, who ‘wasn’t there again today/I wish to God he’d go away’. Memory summons him, incompletely and traumatically, and the painting records only what memory can achieve.

After that moment, the sneer about Bacons inspired safe taste grows more plausible as he revisits the old scenes of torment without real engagement, rather like a lottery winner driving past the tenements of his childhood. Most of his late art looks expensive, expert and very slightly knowing. It can be shocking but never surprising. Perhaps that is what he really wanted – the vulgar insistence on his art being always framed in heavy gold and placed behind glass certainly suggests so.

In the end, he is going to seem like a painter capable of great intensity whose attempts to broaden his range all fell pretty flat. If Bacon is quite new to you, this show will make you fall in love with him, He doesn’t, however, now seem like the grand and universal genius he did in his lifetime.

 

   

                                                                            LOST LOVE: Bacon’s 1971 Triptych – In Memory Of George Dyer

 

 

 

 

 

A wayward genius and his chambers of horror

 

 

The visceral punch of a Francis Bacon painting is beyond dispute.

 

But at Tate Britain’s world-class exhibition — which brings together 100 of his works and

reconstructs the photo-plasteredwalls of this London studio  — we come face to face with

the existential agony at the heart of his anarchic vision

 

 

 

LAURA CUMMING   |   THE OBSERVER   |   SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 14 2008

 

There are exhibitions – rare, superbly curated – that redefine an artist for a generation. The presentation of 100 works by Francis Bacon at Tate Britain until January, then at the Prado and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is just such a world-class event. Everyone knows what a Bacon looks like, and since his death in 1992 there have been other shows to remind us, but none has revealed quite as clearly as this one just how mysterious and anarchic his art remains.

Take the content of the paintings. What exactly is going on here? Clearly there are the simple auction-house categories: screaming popes and writhing figures, suicides and crucifixions, grand triptychs of agony and violence bought for record sums by Russian oligarchs.

And perhaps it seems that violence must therefore be Bacon’s theme: bodies splayed and disembowelled, heads twisted and split as in some motorway pile-up. The naked bulb dangles over an amputee (or so it seems). Tobacco bursts from the stubbed fag like the innards of a corpse and the suicide retches his last breath. Even the beds on which lovers grapple are more like mortuary slabs.

It is certainly true that Bacon did not paint flowers – although there is in fact an amazingly eerie image of hydrangeas in the opening room – and that his popes and martyrs are consummate horror shows. Ectoplasm, gore, mucus, all sorts of nameless substances are evoked and even imitated by the paint itself, and his stated ambition was to make the pictures look ’as if a human being had passed between them, leaving a trail of the human presence as a snail leaves its slime'.

But Bacon was a gregarious Soho bohemian. His people are almost always portraits of lovers and friends. What might look like botched surgery – and like is the operative word since one is always searching for analogies to make sense of his art – is performed on images of drinking companions. Nor could anyone fail to notice just how gorgeous and balletic his pictures are, with their jewel-rich colours and precise choreography; or that his draughtsmanship is so buoyant and deft, even cartoon-like.

John Berger long ago compared Bacon to Walt Disney and, before reeling at the supposed heresy, ask yourself whether these paintings don't have a similar sort of fiendish exuberance in their leaping lines and curves. Tom the cat runs smack into the frying pan, his face flattens, but he bounces back. What is shocking is that Bacon’s figures stay stuck in their extreme distortions.

The truth is that time passes and Bacon no longer comes across as the master of the bloody chamber, of images of torture and degradation the like of which had never before been seen in British art. This is partly because he is practically an old master by now, sanctified in museums the world over, his newness erased by familiarity, his revelations superseded by the pictures of real-life horror that flood into our living rooms. But it is also because what he made of his subject matter now seems so much more important – and this is the true action of the paintings: Bacon’s obsessive reinvention and restatement of those isolated figures in their cages and cells.

A very early work from 1945, for instance, shows a howling woman bent over naked, a man’s overcoat slung across her hindquarters. It is a subject fit for any number of 20th-century artists. But what makes it so devastating here is some sort of nerve-wracking tension between the ravishing orange backdrop and the disembodied mouth with its animal teeth, between the beautifully described tweed of the coat and the outlandish body forms, anticipating David Lynch’s Eraserhead by 30 years. And all capped by a funereal umbrella: once seen, never forgotten.

It is a tremendous piece of image-coining and there are so many others in this show, the screaming popes immured in their thrones, the stripped child lolloping on all fours, the dog straining at its chain in the drowning darkness. And put like this, the irresistible comparison ought to be Goya. But the stylishness, the sheer operatic charge of these works has nothing to do with the Spaniard, no matter that Bacon studied the old masters from first to last, harking back to them in his heavy gold frames.

Often, Bacon’s showmanship is deliberately apparent. The way he uses the rough reverse of the canvas, the colour seeping into the hessian like blood – burnt orange, royal purple, midnight blue, crimson – or congealing stickily on the surface. The way he keeps every flailing figure in check with a precise geometry of glass boxes, elliptical arenas, the vertical striations of those dividing curtains at the back that suggest that this is just the ante-chamber to something worse.

Look at a particularly camp pope in a monocle – one revelation here is of Bacon’s humour – wedged to the waist in his chair like Winnie in Happy Days (Bacon, incidentally, precedes Beckett) and you see that what appears to be an accidental black spatter has been primped up with red so that it looks as if the painting itself spurts blood.

But it is what Bacon does to the figures themselves that resists analysis. The curators of this show have reconstructed the photo-plastered walls of his London studio, about which so much nonsense has been written as if Bacon simply transcribed Eisenstein, Eadweard Muybridge, photos of Nuremberg, textbook shots of mouth diseases or patients positioned for X-rays. This proves crucial. It shows that Bacon never paints an exact moment of violence, nor its aftermath, nor anything captured in a photograph; he invents some split-second transition – his characteristic stop-start mutation.

And where do those wildly aberrant faces come from? They might recall Henry Tonks’s studies of First World War soldiers, but Bacon is not recording actual injuries; and this is not just some new variant of modernism either. The eyes want to straighten them out, these heads, put them back together. But the mind cannot.

One of the greatest works here is also the smallest, a portrait of Bacon’s lover George Dyer. A nearby photograph shows the same handsome profile, the curved nose echoed by the gleaming black quiff. But the painting, with its swerves and swipes, despite being instantly recognisable, is another thing altogether. Photo-real yet caricatural, molten but graphic, muscular and yet diaphanous, it moves seamlessly through its transitions.

Whatever Dyer once was before his suicide, he has become a force-field of deathless matter. No stories, only images: that was Bacon’s claim for his art and even though the late works seem to imply a narrative with their props and locations – the hotel, the telephone, a door flung open, a man hunched over a mirror – they never resolve into simple conclusions. His images are indelible, irrational and beyond summary, and his modest ambition for them – that they should be as vividly realised as possible – has surely turned out to be true. 

Francis Bacon
Tate Britain, London SW1, until 4 Jan

 

 

 

 

Magnificent, exuberant despair

 

 

 

Francis Bacon at Tate Britain

 

 

  ANDREW GRAHAM-DIXON   |   REVIEWS   |   THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH   |   14 SEPTEMBER 2008

 

“I have a feeling of mortality all the time,” Francis Bacon once told the art critic, David Sylvester. “Because, if life excites you, its opposite, like a shadow, death, must excite you.

Perhaps not excite you, but you are aware of it in the same way as you are aware of life, you’re aware of it like the turn of a coin between life and death. And I’m very aware of that about people, and about myself too, after all. I’m always surprised when I wake up in the morning.”

The skull beneath the skin; the mortified flesh; the crucified figure hung upside down, “like a worm crawling down the cross”; the screaming mouth, twisted into a rictus of horror – such intimations of mortality are everywhere in Tate Britain’s darkly magnificent survey of Bacon’s art. There have been a number of retrospectives of the painter’s work in recent memory – notably in Moscow, Paris and Venice – but this is the first such show to have been staged in Britain for a generation. Considerably smaller than the last Tate exhibition, held in 1985, it consists of only around 70 works. Its tight focus is the source of its great strength. Bacon was an uneven painter, but here, thanks to an admirably fastidious selection of pictures – borrowed from all four corners of the globe – he is shown at his vibrant and disconcerting best.

The son of a racehorse trainer, he was born near the Curragh, in Ireland, in 1909. He was conspicuously slow out of the stalls for someone destined to become one of the great painters of his century. Having moved away from Ireland following the discovery of his homosexuality, which led his father to disown him, he knew that he wanted to be an artist. But he was no prodigy, remaining so dissatisfied with his own work that he destroyed almost everything that he painted until the mid-1940s. By that time, he had lived in Paris and Berlin, “through all those disturbed years” of the inter-war period, and then through the Second World War itself (he was exempted from military service due to chronic asthma). By the end of the war, he was in his mid-thirties and more than ready to give vent to his decidedly bleak view of the human condition.

Figure in a Landscape, of 1945,shows a mutilated and headless figure, manning a machine gun in a landscape spiked by wiry scribble. Figure Study I, of 1945-6, is the literal depiction of a hollow man, hat and overcoat discarded in a lurid interior. Figure Study II is inhabited by a screaming maenad on a bright red dais. The mouth gapes, but the eyes are blind. Painting, 1946, owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, brings Bacon’s early theatre of the absurd to a Grand Guignol denouement. This time the screaming figure occupies a stage-set of livid pinks and mauves, in the middle of which is a circular construction of tubular steel on which sides of beef have been skewered. Behind hangs an entire carcass, resembling the flayed ox famously painted by Rembrandt. Pink blinds with tassels have been half pulled down, while the ceiling is festooned with what look like coils of bluish-purple intestine.

Bacon specialised in such haunting incongruities, the legacy perhaps of his formative years in Paris, when the studios of most avant-garde artists – including Picasso – were infused with the ideas of the Dadaists and Surrealists. But the works of his early career give a particular, British twist to international Surrealism. What makes these pictures so distinctive is not just the manifestly strange and sinister mises-en-scenes that they conjure up, but the teasingly genteel accessories included as set-dressing and costume. Bacon’s headless machine-gunner is clothed in the ragged remnants of the kind of double-breasted suit that Bertie Wooster might have worn. There are blue begonias and potted ferns in Figure Study I and II, while the figures themselves are kitted out in heavy tweed coats. Umbrellas are often included. The surprising richness of palette and handling in these pictures recall a certain kind of Edwardian painting, exemplified by the opulent still lifes and portraits of William Nicholson. An element of pastiche may well have been intended. Bacon’s early works carry the suggestion of a comfortable, padded world that has gone mad. It is as if Edwardian gents with brollies have suddenly become embroiled in Bacchic rites, baring their teeth and tearing wild animals to pieces.

Bacon had an inherently satirical imagination, uneasily allied with the ambition to paint like an Old Master. His art is satirical in the sense that its fundamental purpose is always to strip back and to lay bare, to expose the frailties that lie beneath the facade most people present to the world. He insists, unwaveringly, that whatever else human beings might aspire to become, we are all, essentially, just animals. Head I and Head II, both painted at the end of the 1940s, are witheringly nihilistic pictures of man devolving back into monkey. The images emerge from slurries of paint, a kind of dragged screed of grey half-obscuring a misshapen, snarling simian head. Study of a Dog, of 1952, is a painting with one foot firmly in the world of the cartoon or comic-strip. A blurred dog, caught in the circle of its own obsessive motion, endlessly scratches at its ear. In the background, a series of beautifully drawn saloon cars trundle along what looks like a schematic version of the sea front at Nice. The rutting, scratching dog is Bacon’s truth. Notions of progress and civilisation are mere diagrams.

The satirist turns Old Masterly by degrees. One tactic is to appropriate and transform actual compositions from the art of the past. Velazquez’s celebrated and sinister portrait of Pope Innocent X is the first to get the treatment. Bacon subjects the authority figure to multiple indignities, giving him a mouth that screams and snarls and putting him in a glass box seemingly intended to evoke the Nazis under interrogation at the Nuremberg war trials. Cimabue’s Crucifixion in the museum of Santa Croce, Florence, is subjected to an equally violent transformation. Turned upside down, painted to look like dead meat rather than human flesh, the image becomes a source of mild entertainment and diversion for assorted spectators, including several bored Americans in trilbies and at least one card-carrying, swastika-armbanded Nazi. Bacon paints not only his sense of history as atrocity, but his sense of how soon atrocities are forgotten – how quickly they become mere stories that people tell themselves.

Many of the most powerful pictures in the show are portraits of Bacon’s friends and lovers – Isabel Rawsthorne, Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, John Edwards and George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of the artist’s retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1972. Bacon’s portraits of Dyer, in particular, are among his grandest and most inventive works. He paints him before and after his death, but always as a sad, fractured, individual, whether blurred in motion on a bicycle or staring glumly at his own, broken reflection in some strange, empty limbo of a hotel room. Inventing a form of molten Cubism, Bacon the portrait painter found a way of painting a human being as a malleable, immensely vulnerable creature – full of pathos and, despite the implication of his bleakest work, full of the capacity for affection.

Bacon lost his edge in his later years. He continued to paint on the grand scale, the triptych his favoured form, but the energy that had once whipped paint into forms like rivers of flesh had abandoned him. The result was a curious blandness verging on blankness, in a series of pictures that begin to resemble emptily tasteful self-parodies. This is implicitly acknowledged in Tate Britain’s exhibition, which squeezes most of the last two decades of the painter’s life into a single gallery – the briefest of codas. But the work of the mid-1940s, through to that of the mid-1970s, looks stronger than ever.

Like his contemporary, Samuel Beckett – another cosmopolitan Irish emigre gripped by dark and obsessive morbidity – Bacon gave a theatrical twist to post-war pessimism. But the differences between the two are as revealing, perhaps, as the similarities. Beckett’s theatre was spare, his humour dry, his sense of the absurd allied to an aesthetic of utter austerity. Bacon, by contrast, was a carnivalesque dramatist of despair with an almost Baroque sense of colour and composition. His pictures might be fundamentally gloomy, but there is an exuberance about them too, a decadence and hilarity bordering on outright hysteria. As he himself put it, “It’s concerned with my kind of psyche, it’s concerned with my kind of – I’m putting it in a very pleasant way – exhilarated despair”.

 

 

 

 

The kiss of death  

 

 

 

TIM WALKER  |  THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  |  SUNDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER 2008 

 

If David Hockney believed that Francis Bacon was a friend and admirer of his, it appears he was mistaken.

 

In his updated biography of the late artist to coincide with the new exhibition at Tate Britain, Michael Peppiatt retails an entertaining vignette that casts new light on the relationship between the two. 

 

“The two painters greeted each other cordially whenever they met, but Bacon always remained on his guard,” writes Peppiatt.

 

“At one meeting Hockney kissed Bacon on the cheek. As soon as he was out of earshot, Bacon said: ‘I wonder why he did that? I suppose he must have some ghastly disease.’ ”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A career in three slices

 

 

The Tate’s blockbuster show reveals Francis Bacon’s fierce genius

— and limited range, says Waldemar Januszczak

 

 

WALDEMAR JANUSZCZAK  |  THE CRITICS: ART  |  CULTURE  |  THE SUNDAY TIMES  |  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

 

It is the perfect time for a Francis Bacon retrospective. History has had a good tinker with the circumstances and arranged for everything to be just so. In May, the auction record for a post-war artist was smashed like an empty vodka glass by Roman Abramovich, who paid £43m for a Bacon triptych, pushing him into art’s super-duper-league, alongside Picasso and Van Gogh. Among scholars, meanwhile, the opening of Bacon’s re-created studio in Dublin has triggered a frenzied exploration of his sources and meanings.

And to cap it all, next year is the centenary of his birth. It all adds up to one of those stellar moments when the planets are in exactly the right alignment for a really good reassessment. The Bacon retrospective that has opened at Tate Britain is actually the third such show. The first was in 1962 and the second in 1985.

I was too young for the 1960s exhibition, but I remember the next one. It was disappointing. Bacon was still alive — he died in 1992 — and his wilful tinkering with the trajectory of the display ensured that it offered no revelations at the beginning, then dragged on at the end, with too many late paintings. In particular, his superficial interest in cricket resulted in a long and flippant finale devoted to images of Ian Botham in action. Whither the dark angel of the 20th century?

So, although this is technically the third such retrospective, it actually counts as the first objective assessment mounted without the controlling presence of the artist. One thing I was certainly expecting from it was fresh insight into his origins as a painter. Bacon was notoriously coy about his beginnings. A mixture of fierce determination to control his image and what appears to have been some unnecessary shame about his late development resulted in a remarkable lack of information about his early art.

We know he was self-taught and that, according to his own version of his story, he found his true voice only in 1944, when he painted the three screaming blobs that direct so much noisy anxiety at us in the Tate’s savage masterpiece Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. By 1944, however, Bacon was already 35. What on earth had he been up to before that?

Alas, this is not the show that tells us. Either they could not get hold of the material or it simply isn’t out there any more. Bacon was a habitual destroyer of his own art, and when it came to his early work, he succeeded in getting rid of enough of it to preserve the illusion that he was a mighty artist from the off. The show’s first paintings, dating from 1945 and after, are already dark, twisted, overwrought. But the spiteful monkeys that snarl at you as you enter are only fully convincing in the few square inches occupied by their mouths, which Bacon has turned into a terrifying portcullis of twisted fangs, barring the way to a bottomless abyss. The rest of the paintwork is an unconvincing blur of pessimistic generalisations.

 

Thank heavens these early pictures appear to represent so vividly the seepage of wartime terrors and angsts into the post-war era, because without that excuse their ugliness might be inexcusable. At least the angry monkeys make obvious the most important ambition in Bacon’s early art, which is to insist, in picture after picture, on the interchangeability of animals and humans. Neither of us has been put on earth for a decent reason.

 

The popes who fill the show’s superb second room are as nihilistic as the monkeys, but much more compelling. Based on Velazquez’s great portrait of Innocent X, of which Bacon was to produce no fewer than 50 versions, they are usually understood as some sort of complicated reaction to authority. Bacon’s father was a domineering presence, and the popes are seen as stand-ins for him. On this evidence, however, I favour a less sophisticated reading: the popes are as hopelessly trapped as the apes. The bars and cages that inevitably surround them make it explicit. Their life is no more sacred or meaningful than the life of an earthworm or a baboon. There is no hope. There is no God. There is no plan. Not even for a pope.

 

Although the show is basically chronological, it pauses in a couple of interesting places for a thematic sidestep. The first presents us with a clutch of gory crucifixions, including the Tate’s aforementioned screaming blobs from 1944. Although Bacon’s art is often accused of depicting oodles of violence, it does not. The crucifixions are almost the only displays of blood and gore on offer here. A proselytising atheist, brought up in papist Ireland, Bacon is using every Catholic trick in the book to point out that Christ, too, is just a sack of meat.

 

The 1950s, with the isolated black figures and pared-down colour schemes, is presented here as Bacon’s greatest decade. But I would argue otherwise. The show really sparks into life in the 1960s. A marvellous transitional room sees Bacon trying out various styles and manners as he seeks to move on from the gloomy single figures in a cage that have dominated his art until now

 

His discovery of colour leads to the show’s most significant gear-change. The startling brightness of Bacon’s version of a Van Gogh painting showing Vincent traipsing through the fields outside Arles arrives out of nowhere and seems to be the result of a deliberate change of tack. It’s as dramatic as television’s switchover from black-and-white to colour — the entire show changes key.

 

The best rooms are the ones that follow, and particularly the second of the thematic sidesteps, dedicated to Bacon’s pictures of his tormented lover, George Dyer, who committed suicide in a hotel room in Paris in 1971, the night before Bacon was due to open yet another retrospective at the Grand Palais. Dyer’s timing could not have been more hurtful or more desperate. A set of memorial triptychs produced after the suicide, in which Bacon’s love is darkly entangled with his guilt, provide the show with its finest moments. In the most dramatic of the triptychs, Bacon’s burly lover is shown seated on the lavatory in one panel and vomiting into a sink in the other. In the centre, where the crucifixion usually goes, Dyer lurks in a doorway, haunted by his own bat-shaped shadow. In the absence of any gods, even a life as sordid as this is worthy of a lover’s worship.

 

Much of the recent interest in Bacon has been prompted by discoveries made in the mess of photographs and books that were found in his studio after his death, and a small documentary section deals with some of these pictorial sources and issues with merciful brevity. The show is also excellently concise in its treatment of the late work. Bacon became a slick pedlar of elegant angst in his last decade, and it is sensible to hurry through his repetitions. How astute, for instance, to include only one of the cricket pictures.

 

So, what does it all add up to? How great was Bacon? Not as great as we currently make him out to be, would be my answer. The show is impeccably paced and makes excellent decisions about where to dwell and where to rush. Yet Bacon himself lacked the range that we might fairly expect of a £43m painter. His beginnings were clunky. His thinking was deceptively basic. For a couple of decades, between 1955 and 1975, he was absolutely at the top of his game, a fierce and exciting taker of big pictorial risks. But then he petered out and even grew ghastly. Did he alter the course of global aesthetics, as Picasso and Van Gogh did? Does he really deserve to share a price bracket with them? I don’t think so.

 

Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, SW1, until Jan 4, 2009

 

 

Not to be missed

 

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) Bacon’s first acknowledged masterpiece shudders with unbearable despair.

 

Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) The greatest of the “screaming popes” is a remarkably delicate bit of painting.

Triptych, May-June 1973 Bacon at his best, remembering George Dyer, his dead lover.

 

 


 

The paradox of Francis Bacon

 

 

Bacon was both cruel and incredibly kind, says biographer Michael Peppiatt

 

 

MICHAEL PEPPIATT  |  THE CRITICS: ART  |  CULTURE  |  THE SUNDAY TIMES  |  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

  

How marvellous he’s taking you everywhere and telling you everything,” John Deakin, Soho wit and Francis Bacon’s favourite photographer, said to me in 1963. I had come to London some weeks before in the hope of interviewing Bacon for a student magazine, and Deakin had introduced me to him with muttered misgivings at the bar of the French House. Deakin was visibly delighted we’d hit it off. “Now make sure you get it all down, my dear,” he admonished in high camp tones. “It could be very important one day!”

 

I did get it down, one way or the other. While weaving my way woozily back to a friend’s sofa late at night, or to my digs in Cambridge, I copied out all kinds of half-understood phrases — “shorthand of despair” and “unlocking the valves of sensation” and “homosexual love is both more tragic and more banal”. But I hardly needed to. Having been absorbed with vast quantities of champagne, Bacon’s definitions continued to bubble up in my mind, and I could reel them off, staggering round the room with exaggerated imitations of the Bacon voice and the Bacon gestures. “Well, that’s all there is,” I would repeat with a glistening smile to alarmed friends. “We are born and we die, and in the interval we attempt to give life a meaning through our drives.”

 

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was not merely grappling with Bacon’s pronouncements on art, love and death, I was attempting, above all, to get a measure of the man. It’s rare to meet a genius at any point in one’s life. But to meet one when you’re 20 and know nobody even remotely comparable — in brilliance, compassion and devilry — marks you for ever. I’ve been lucky enough to meet a few remarkable people since, but I am still coming to terms with that initial resounding impact on my life, which began in the bars and clubs of Soho, then continued to crescendo, in London, Tangiers and Paris, for some 30 years until Bacon’s death.

 

What was Bacon really like — behind the myth that grows almost daily about him? I’ve often tried to put it into a nutshell, only to realise that whatever formula I come up with is at best half true. “Whenever he came into a room, any room,” one of my quick answers runs, “you could feel the temperature go up. Suddenly there’d be a new vitality, with people outdoing themselves in talk and laughter and drink and general carrying on.” Bacon put you, and anybody else drawn to him, on their mettle. When you were with him, you were subtly but inexorably obliged to think more penetratingly and express yourself more clearly.

 

You became unusually self-aware, often painfully and disturbingly so. “You’ve ruined my life by making me think about myself!” Bacon’s lover Peter Lacy once shouted, suddenly rounding on him and no doubt meting out the violent punishment Bacon craved. In the end, Lacy could not take that heightened self-awareness, and he drank himself deliberately to death — his end coinciding, as we now know so well, with the opening of Bacon’s first retrospective at the Tate in 1962. Similarly, poor George Dyer, more vulnerable by far and the other great love of Bacon’s life, killed himself with drink and drugs on the eve of the artist’s great triumph as the Grand Palais retrospective of his work opened in Paris in 1971.

 

What Bacon was like really was a man strung perpetually between the extremes of his temperament. He could, literally, be one thing and its opposite. Thus, the painter of doom and gloom would regularly emerge from a drunken gambling spree with thugs in Soho to take tea with upright and uptight collectors, charming them into buying another of his terrifying (and already terrifyingly expensive) pictures. Or he would demolish another painter’s reputation with a few waspish asides, then worry that his guests hadn’t had enough caviar and Louis Roederer Cristal, and hurriedly order more. Or, again, he might abandon himself to the further reaches of a sadomasochistic orgy before hurrying to the bedside of a sick friend with the most delicate and thoughtful of gifts.

 

During our long, involved friendship, I was rarely the recipient of his nastiness. Once, emboldened by a mindless quantity of fine bordeaux, I challenged his interminable put-downs of David Hockney’s work, and he rounded on me like an animal at bay, the hair bristling at the back of his neck. On another occasion, during a dinner with some young artists at La Coupole, in Paris, I dared to differ from one of his repetitive diktats on Van Gogh and received the rough edge of his tongue for my pains. More interestingly, and for me at least incomprehensibly (since he had accepted my marriage without demur), Bacon grew white with fury when I told him, during a dinner at Bibendum, in London, not long before his death, that my first child was about to be born.

 

On the other hand, I was constantly the recipient of his attentiveness and generosity. It was not merely a question of being invited to countless banquets at the best restaurants and grandest hotels — or, on a few memorable occasions, being backed (with sums I myself could not possibly have afforded) to try my luck at roulette and, when I won, being commanded sternly to keep the winnings. Bacon’s largesse permeated our relationship in much more subtle and telling ways. When a close friend of mine had a bad fall and broke her back, the first person to call, offering advice and funds, was Bacon. Having taken on an art magazine that I was trying to relaunch from Paris with little money and less business sense, I was considerably helped by Bacon’s enthusiasm and practical support, which included introducing me to potential backers for the project.

 

Bacon could also be a tower of strength when things went wrong in very personal areas of one’s life. After my father died in the mid-1980s, my whole existence in Paris fell apart. Bacon picked up instinctively on the crisis I was going through and, when we next met, took me on a trip through London that I will never forget. After dinner in the art-deco splendour of Claridge’s, we went gambling and I — as happy in gaming as I’d recently been unhappy in love — had a considerable win. We then swung round to Annabel’s for more champagne and a midnight supper, accompanied by sublime claret. At this point, buoyed up by Bacon’s wit and vitality, my spirits began to revive. But Bacon, who had staged all this to pull me through my despair (as he might have described it), did not stop there. “There are all these girls — why don’t you ask them to dance?” he kept saying to me, until I overcame my shyness and pranced about dementedly on the spangled floor until dawn. No therapy could have worked better. The next day, I woke up giggling (for the first time in months) at the extravagances of the night.

 

However satanic Bacon might look, trussed up in his Nazi-style black leather greatcoat, however venomous his drunken tirades waxed, this instinctive compassion never left him. It was one of his many paradoxes, just as he seemed at times the most feminine of men, intuitive and yielding, and at others the toughest, most daring and dominantly masculine. Similarly, he would interrupt a mammoth drinking bout taking him from pub to club across London to consult his doctor, or top up on some bizarre health food (he took garlic pills addictively) after having consumed the richest dishes on every fancy menu in town.

 

The man who thundered against God and the universe would allow himself to be taken meekly in hand by Valerie, his diminutive minder and nanny figure (“Valerie at the gallery,” as Bacon called her), who told him which appointments he needed to keep — from art-world bigwigs to the electrician. The high roller who squandered fortunes on roulette could also be found going home on the Tube.

 

These contradictions stretched Bacon’s sensibility and kept him in a state of tension that was as palpable in the man as it is in his pictures, radiating waves of intensity. But the greatest paradox he kept to the last. Whoever could have imagined that Bacon — the virulent, lifelong atheist, the painter of screaming popes and bestial couplings — would choose to be cared for by an order of nuns when he became ill? He had gone on record in an interview saying he could conceive of nothing worse than dying among nuns. Yet on his last trip to Madrid, when he knew he was at death’s door, he returned to the Servants of Mary, dying under a crucifix and being cremated to the sounds of Gregorian chants. Of all the enigmas that hover over Bacon’s tumultuous life, this is surely the most hauntingly mysterious.

 

A revised and updated version of Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma is published by Constable at £12.99

 

                                                                                 

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